A Tangled Web

SBP Talks BLST



You can always depend on the Sunday Business Post to provide the biggest laugh on a Sunday morning. The very fact that this newspaper, with its barely-concealed Provo obsequiousness, is allowed to be printed in the Irish Republic at all speaks volumes about the subliminal anti-British continuity in so many facets of that country's culture.



Today, the SBPost predicts the end of the IRA if and when republicans are permitted to have a say over the law and order apparatus of the British State in Northern Ireland. In layman's terms, the SBPost is claiming that once terrorists and murderers are allowed to police, and consequently impose their own martial law in nationalist communities, the raison d'etre of the IRA will end.



Mmmm, let me make my own analogy. A twenty foot Great White Shark has patrolled the shores of a seaside resort in South Australia for thirty five years. Most people in the community wanted to dispatch the shark because it kept killing local bathers. However, the local council advised against it, opining that if the shark was fed sufficient amounts of food it would eventually go away. Unfortunately it did not do so. Eventually, due to the cowardice shown by the political classes in the resort, the shark became so big and powerful that it could not be killed by conventional means. The Mayor then had the idea of only allowing certain bathers to swim in the sea, as their well-being and entitlement to state protection was considerably less than others in the area. Hence the shark was well-fed, the beaches were safer and the Mayor was a contented man. However, his contentment had been bought courtesy of the poor unfortunates who were consumed by the same shark which should have been killed in the first place.



What I am articulating here is the situation as it will develop if terrorist thugs are permitted to don police uniforms. Catholic areas (populated by many people who still loathe and detest Sinn Fein/IRA) will have to be patrolled by individuals for whom nail-studded wooden planks are more efficacious than arrest warrants in curtailing criminal activity. Contrary to the rubbish spouted by Sinn Fein-admiring hacks at the SBP, the police were never used as tools of oppression against the nationalist community (RUC efforts to curtail loyalist terrorism were MORE successful than comparable efforts to prevent IRA atrocities). The IRA will only go out of business if its primary aims are acceded to, or else it is crushed by the forces of democracy. Time will tell if the Government is prepared follow the path of suppression over concession.