A Tangled Web

Evaluating Feeney-speak



He's back!!! Like a bad penny, Brian Feeney gets another chance to disgorge his weekly literary effluent in typical petty fashion. This week, he bemoans the concentration on a two-dimensional aspect of efforts to resurrect the faltering peace process - namely the focus on Sinn Fein/IRA and the DUP. Considering Feeney's usual one-dimensional bigotry, I'm surprised he can contemplate anything involving two or more components.



For Feeney, however, Brit-bashing proves as irresistible as ever. This week HM Government takes a pounding for what Feeney believes is a minimalistic approach to the implementation of the Belfast Agreement. His journalistic cecity obviously prohibits him from making a comparison between the sovereign powers, which have introduced police reform, a human rights agenda, North-South bodies, and unprecedented equality legislation; and Sinn Fein/IRA, which has (almost) ceased dispatching people en masse, whilst conning the gullible with baby-sized moves on decommissioning.



Let's have a closer look at what else Feeney has to say. I will then offer a brief translation and, naturally, a suitable rebuttal:



1.) 'Today the British and Irish governments meet in a session of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, the mechanism which should, in effect, decide policy for the North, if the Irish government used it properly.'



Translation: 'The Irish Government should have equal say over the running of a part of another country, even though such a move would be contrary to the norms of democracy and the principles of international law.'



Rebuttal: The United Kingdom is the sovereign power in Northern Ireland. Ultimately, its good governance is vested in the Crown. Under the Belfast Agreement, the Irish Government is permitted to put forward views on certain political aspects in the province. Joint authority would, I contend, not only be contrary to European and international law, it would also cause mass instability with consequences no government could contain in the short-term.



2.) 'British proconsular rule is part of the problem here, always has been, always will be.'



Translation: 'Everything is the fault of the Brits. Even when the IRA was using innocent Catholics as human bombs to kill Army personnel, it was all the fault of Perfidious Albion.'



Rebuttal: Er no, Brian. The problem has been terrorist groups who inflicted incalculable misery over three decades. The same terrorist groups who now hold democratic parties to ransom by retaining the vast bulk of their murderous arsenals.



3.) 'Sinn Fein are anxious to participate in policing but aren't going to join policing boards until they get the changes they want.'



Translation: 'If the Government transmogrifies the PSNI from a force pledged to upholding law and order, into a Mafioso militia infiltrated, manipulated and controlled by paramilitary hoods, then the frontsmen of IRA terrorism will endorse them.'



Rebuttal: No police force in any democracy could allow itself to be tainted by terrorist control. Feeney, in arguing that Sinn Fein must be given what they require at the expense of everyone else, is only deepening perceptions of him as Sinn Fein's 'mouth' in the Irish News.



If his articles are representative of the rubbish Irish nationalists are being brain-washed with, it is no wonder they endorse fascism with greater zeal than hitherto.