A Tangled Web

Under the Boardwalk



When did you last check under your floorboards? No, the question is not some paraphrase of the title of WF Yeames' famous painting, it is genuine. You see, I don't really think many people check under their floorboards once in years. I think the last time I did so was 1997 when I had my place rewired. To substantiate my doubts, I asked some colleagues at work if they had ever looked under their floorboards at home. They told me that to do so would involve removing carpets and prizing each board up with an appropriate tool. Like me, it's not something they make a habit of.



My reason for posing the question is a simple one. Yesterday, as you will all know, Gerry Adams apparently located the second of two bugging devices found under the floor at Sinn Fein/IRA property. Yes folks, in the very same week as efforts will be made to put the smug, gut-wrenching, homicidal bastards back into power, their so-called 'President' (or IRA Don if you prefer) pops up to inform the world of supposed bad faith by Perfidious Albion. Coincidence or what!!! As Chris Thornton opines, it might even give them the moral high ground in advance of the discussions at Leeds Castle.



One cannot blame the British State for wanting to spy on a 'party' inextricably linked to the most murderous cult in Western Europe since the Nazis. Spying is a consequence of not playing by the same rules governing the political life of every other party in the United Kingdom. However, I'm surprised Sinn Fein members found the time to locate bugging devices - especially when so much of their time is taken up with little hobbies and interests such as gun-running from America and hob-nobbing with FARC guerillas in Colombia.



For those of us not susceptible to the same weak, pathetic penchant for gullibility as the increasingly amoral cretins who give Sinn Fein their electoral blessing, we know exactly why Adams decided to produce these devices at this time. It will provide a further excuse for the republican movement to defer the end of the Provisionals and their hordes of deadly arsenal. Sinn Fein's objective over the last while has been to convince nationalist Ireland that there was some equivalence between forces of the Crown and insurrectionist terrorism of the type they embodied. This has a three-fold outcome:



1. It convinces nationalist Ireland that decommissioning can be constantly long-fingered on the 'evidence of British bad faith.'



2. It seeks to blur the difference between nationalist interpretations of history and actual historical fact. Nationalism has already achieved a comparable situation with the half-truths and exaggerations surrounding the alleged treatment of the nationalist minority under successive Unionist regimes at Stormont. When someone has the courage to challenge nationalist legend with some home-truths, all hell breaks loose.



3. Attempts will be made by proponents of the nationalist ideal that IRA oblivion should only come in the context of the ending of the presence of Crown forces. Additionally it convinces the poor fools to conjure up wild and inaccurate analogies between the deaths caused by the State and those caused by terrorism. One only has to read the volumous rants of unbridled priggishness by Billy the Pilgrim, in his own unique style of inadequacy, to realise the point.



As David Burnside has said, it is time the forces of democracy incarcerated Sinn Fein members at Leeds Castle and demanded the end of the terror machine whose potency they feed off. Anything less would be a total insult to the victims of Provo handiwork, as well as a complete humiliation of this country.