A Tangled Web

Feeney Watch - 30.07.04



Welcome to my new weekly blog - 'Feeney Watch'. I have decided to devote a regular column on A Tangled Web to rebutting the opinions of a man I regard to be the most insulting, the most spiteful and the most cretinous columnist anywhere in the media circles of Northern Ireland newsprint. A man who has transmogrified from being a councillor in the SDLP to one of the most ardent defenders of militant republicanism.



This week, my response comes as Bigoted Bri (as he will henceforth be known) turns his poison pen to the integrity and remit of the International Monitoring Commission. His annoyance is of stratospheric proportions as he direct odious little projectiles of sarcasm at the IMC because, lo and behold, the commission has not equated - implicitly or explicitly - the lawful forces of the UK State with vile terrorist Mafiosi.



Bigoted Bri views every issue in Ulster through the dichotomous prism of Catholics vs Protestants. He conveniently forgets the role of the province's loyal Catholics in the RUC and the Army throughout the years. To him, the term 'Catholics' conjures up the image of the true Ulster ubermenschen: a tribe forced to live under eternal oppression from the wicked Protestants and the British State. Hence the following balderdash: 'Who lives where the army pollutes the environment with observation posts, helicopters, patrols and so on? Nationalists. Where has most of the violence come from since the Good Friday Agreement? Unionists.'



Let me put the flesh of reality on the bones of Bigoted Bri's tripe. Firstly, army patrols and helicopter flights occur in all parts of the province. The reason South Armagh is so heavily flooded with military paraphernalia is because it houses the biggest concentration of terrorist top brass in Northern Ireland: terrorists who continue to kill and maim civilians; smuggle contraband; refuse to pay their dues to the State (road fund licences and so on). However, it matters not because, in Bri's mind, the IRA are as pure as the driven snow - virginal white (with perhaps more than a hint of blood red).



Secondly, most of the violence since the signing of the BELFAST Agreement (to give it its lawful title) has not come from 'Unionists'. It has come from loyalist paramilitaries who, unlike their IRA counterparts, receive virtually no support from the broad Unionist communities, despite repeated government attempts and measures designed to entice them to do so. Bri is trapped on Planet Nationalist, a world of twisted ideologies where the citizens elevate terrorists and despise law and order. Sorry matey, one day you might find yourself back on Planet Reality: here we make no such mistakes.