A Tangled Web

Gutter Press



Supposing I was a journalist working for a British national newspaper and I had written the following:



'Britain's Asians are, at heart, a group of fanatical bigots who only came to this country to set up their own ghettoised communities and sponge off the welfare state. They have no interest whatsoever in integrating with British society. Their only game is domination.'



I am certain that I would have been rightly condemned for such disgraceful stereotyping and dismissed from my post. You see, here in Britain we have a tolerance of minorities which is exemplary. There are those of us who believe immigration to the UK is out of control, but we would never translate our feelings on immigration into raw bigotry or hatred for ethnic communities. For my part, my only generalisation concerns people who think it is 'cool' to vote for a band of unrepentant terrorists (Sinn Fein voters take note!).



In the Irish Republic they have no such sensitivities. Today's Sunday Business Post proves that point. It has not one, but two articles, which portray Ulster's pro-Union community in such a jaundiced fashion, similar remarks made about blacks or Asians would be appropriately barred. In the first, Sean McCarthy prattles on about the fallacious 'superiority complex' of Northern Unionists, stating that 'the ugly truth is that many of the North's Unionists are bigots, who nurture a dislike of Catholics and would rather have direct rule from Westminster than share power with them.' McCarthy never lets the truth get in the way of good old-fashioned sectarianism. Unionist people, in the main, simply have an aversion to sharing power with apologists for murder and mayhem: nothing more, nothing less.



The second article, which passes for an 'editorial' in this tabloid toilet tissue, states 'a significant number of Unionists are quite simply anti-Catholic bigots. For many, the entire North is like an Orange march - the whole point is to keep the Fenians down.' Now anyone who had actually been to Northern Ireland and travelled through such places as the Malone Road, Culmore and Lawrencetown would know that 'Fenians' are anything but subordinate in the Province. The size and style of houses across Ulster - spanning both communities - would shame much of what passes for private dwellings, either here on the mainland or in the Irish Republic.



We must not forget that this drivel is published in a Sunday newspaper located in a country that is so culturally backwards, its state radio station still insists on playing the Angelus twice a day; and where one of its own celebrity sons (Graham Norton) professed to finding it easier to be gay than Protestant in his youth. If anybody still thinks that Northern Catholics are eternally oppressed, perhaps they would like to look at this submission from Jenny McCartney. Meanwhile, I'll write down my view of the Irish as 'people who are shallow, insincere, two-faced, thick, obsessively religious and who only learned to stop breeding like rabbits over the last 15 years.' There you go you see, racial stereotypes ARE infuriating and insulting after all. Please remember that before spending your hard-earned euros on a copy of the Sunday Business Post. Thank you.