A Tangled Web

A Bottomless Goodie Bag



Today's Northern Ireland Newsletter has a remarkable story detailing a proposed sequence of events involving 'a series of concessions to Sinn Fein.......' What, more concessions!!? I would have thought that, short of publicly flogging and eviscerating every Unionist in Ulster, there was nothing more HM Government could possible give! What are these concessions to be traded for? Yes, of course, a mere 'undertaking by the IRA to make a transparent act of decommissioning.'



The article adds nothing to what has gone before. Two governments will allow themselves to be beholden to fascist militias and their pseudo-political apologists; a vast range of concessions will be bestowed upon those who least deserve it; democratic principles will be further bastardised and contorted; and the Unionist people will be the ones cast aside in this little vignette of perfidy. And all for no extra commitments from the men of terror to decommission and disband their illegal network of insurgency.



If the Northern Ireland peace process had been about creating political stability and engendering a rapprochement between divided peoples, it would have been branded an unmitigated failure. However, in its real objective, it has been an unqualified success. For the genesis of the peace process lay in keeping Irish republicanism sweet at almost any cost. It mattered not about the feelings of terrorist victims, or about the compromising of governmental integrity. All that guided the 'peace process' was the objective by the British State of keeping IRA bombs away from the capital.



That said, democracy in its purest sense cannot co-exist with political terrorism. It looks increasingly likely that the power-hungry souls of the DUP have not comprehended this essential tenet of democratic politics. They would do themselves justice if they read the following quote from the great Conservative leader, Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury:



'buying off the barbarians was a fatal vice, for the failure of a state to assert its sovereignty and act according to its rights takes the heart out of defence, dissolves cohesion, and splits up an organised society into a mob of struggling interests.'



I doubt if anyone could find a more fitting quote to illustrate the consequential course of events since the signing of the Belfast Agreement.