A Tangled Web

Colgan's Bluff



I am the first to admit that most of what is published in the Sunday Business Post relating to matters in Northern Ireland should be taken with a great deal of scepticism. After all, the SBPost is the An Phoblacht of the middle class, republican-inclined Dublin cognoscenti. I fear rounding up every Unionist in Ulster and condemning them to be shot at dawn would be an insufficient measure for the likes of Colgan, McGurk and the other IRA-admiring hacks who work on this rag.



Today, the SBPost's 'Top Story' concerns the hype surrounding the conditions in which IRA Brownshirts will 'permanently' go out of business. Reading between the lines, however, one does come to same conclusion that the IRA will only cease voluntarily when all of their demands are met. As an example, I draw your attention to a photograph I came across in Dean Godson's excellent book, 'Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism'. It is a photograph of a mural in West Belfast exhorting the Government to 'End the Unionist veto' ('ride roughshod over democratic preferences to satisfy our constitutional demands' to put in in simple terms). That was 1994!!! In the ten intervening years, with all the disgusting, wicked concessions granted to the IRA, their apologists and the general dross we all recognise as their 'voters', the terms on which the IRA will voluntarily disband have not changed one iota. The IRA's central demand is: 'give us a united Ireland and we'll go away.'



Sorry, that's just not on the cards. The pro-Union people have not acquiesced in the granting of so-called rights to an Irish minority to see that same minority attempt to destroy the state in which it resides. The choice must be straightforward: 'sacrifice your weapons or the British State will clamp down so hard on terrorism it will make 'Dubya's' crusade look like a picnic.'