(This was written and posted before we received the news of the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, RIP)
Illogic is the new black. Men can now “become” women overnight, even if they have retained their male genitals, though of course the poor dears can do nothing about their male chromosomes, which tragically remain male even in death. A recent appointee to the US Supreme Court unashamedly professed her inability to define what a woman was on the grounds that she was not a biologist, thereby inadvertently admitting that sex is a matter of biology rather than of preference. Fortunately for her, this statement went unnoticed by the thought-police. Likewise, feminists who have never lessened the shrillness of their demands for equality between the genders (as we are now obliged to call the two sexes) nonetheless stayed gallantly silent as the Ukrainian government allowed women of military age to flee their country while legally compelling their male equivalents to stay and fight.
This should not surprise anyone. Generally accepted values no longer depend on any “evidence” for their existence but rely solely on the absolutist vehemence and the loudness with which their supporters proclaim them. This is a characteristic of all totalitarian societies, especially that of craven, modernist Ireland, where almost any post-Christian valued is not merely revered but is voted into the statute book.
And naturally, in this New Ireland, heterosexual marriage only becomes a legal fact once the man has inserted his penis into the woman’s vagina. But the Irish Constitution now insists that the non-consummative marriage between couples of the same sex is equal in law to the consummated marriage between a man and a woman, which without consummation of not legally a marriage.
So, what does “equal” actually mean here?
Simply, that you feel better about yourself, that’s all, but only if your opinions are of the right variety. An Irish teacher of the wrong variety has been imprisoned (ultimately) for refusing to call a boy “they”. Naturally, there has been absolutely no outcry about this, as there was none about the man who was imprisoned and put on the sex-offenders register for feeling the breasts of a naked woman who had chosen to go to bed with him and whom he had already masturbated.
The island of Ireland is now virtually the European pioneer of Political Correctness, wherein factual empiricism is actually seen as a vice. In this intellectual dystopia, the majority of Northern nationalists now apparently believe that the IRA’s quarter-century long terrorist campaign was somehow or other “legitimate”.
But this is the very opposite of what nationalists actually felt during the Troubles, when survey after survey revealed that most of them – being contemporaneous witnesses of republican atrocities – emphatically felt that the violence of the IRA was not justified. A 1978 poll, before the hunger-strikes boosted the republican cause, indicated that 65.8 % of Catholics broadly agreed with the statement that the IRA were basically criminals and murderers, whereas only 8.8% strongly disagreed. In the European elections of 1984, in what might be considered a plebiscite of nationalist voters after the hunger strikes, Sinn Fein’s Danny Morrison still won only 13% of the total vote against John Hume’s 22.1%. This of course was before Hume had been caught in the sexual honeytrap of the kind to which he had long been vulnerable, which was then used not merely to blackmail him into withholding all further condemnations of the IRA, but also to enter the Hume-Adams talks, ultimately leading to the destruction of the SDLP.
However, this disaster was also immeasurably facilitated by the ceaseless governmental appeasement of the Adams’ wolfpack, the deranged certainties of which seem to have exercised a mysterious hold over Dublin, London and Washington. We now know that this republican wolfpack, having been endorsed in the three capitals, was then able to forge an irresistibly alluring mythology about the Troubles.
This was an astonishing achievement. For until recently, virtually no judgment over any period in Irish history was as irrefutable as the assertion that the IRA had launched a futile and morally unacceptable war on the peoples of Ireland and Britain. Those who disputed the IRA’s central responsibility for the Troubles therefore placed themselves in the Roswell category of gullibility.
Yet in the 21st Century, the wolfpack’s Roswell has triumphed. Dupes are now in the majority within Northern Ireland nationalism, and perilously close to being in the majority in the Republic. The island of Ireland is trembling on the edge of a cultural and moral abyss, and much of our media are urging us to leap into the void. Meanwhile, our political classes are too terrified of the electoral magnetism of Sfira myths, as well as being too pre-occupied in protecting their pay, their perks and their pensions, to take a meaningful stand against the totalitarian wolfpack.
Since the defeat in 1945 of Nazism – with which, of course, the IRA was in alliance – Western Europe has not seen anything to compare with the IRA’s atrocious campaign of violence, 1970-2005. In a grotesque misappropriation of the French term, the lie “resistance” is the self-absolving euphemism now being used to describe IRA’s war of aggression.
This began, as it ended, with the deliberate and cold-blooded murder of fellow Irishmen.
In a planned attack on loyalists in the Crumlin Road area in the summer of 1970, gunmen from the newly formed Provisional IRA shot dead three unarmed Protestant men. Some weeks later, two young members of the recently disarmed RUC were blown to smithereens by a boobytrapped car in South Armagh. Soon afterwards, in Ballymurphy in Belfast, the IRA murdered two Catholic men who had defied their ban on card-schools.
Thirty-five years later, a group of IRA men butchered a fellow-republican Robert McCartney in a pub-brawl, even gouging out an eye, before getting IRA cleaners to remove all forensic evidence of their crime.
Those foul atrocities bookended a campaign that directly accounted for 48% of the Troubles’ death-toll, but since many of the other killings were in random loyalist attacks on innocent Catholics in revenge for IRA atrocities, it is impossible to remove the IRA from a far larger if unquantifiable culpability. The IRA knew the price that loyalist paramilitaries would inevitably exact in return for their own atrocities: this was the abominable contract that both warring parties tacitly accepted throughout the Troubles. In a deal made in hell (with some exceptions) paramilitary leaders were generally not targeted by the other side. I cannot exclude the Parachute Regiment from this diabolical symbiosis. The regiment had a vital role in corrupting Northern Ireland society, from their first almost recreational killings of the innocent in Ballymurphy in August 1971 to the similarly recreational killing in 1990 of Karen Reilly, which was celebrated in the Paras’ barracks with a model of a car containing a lolling bloodstained body and the words alongside it: “Vauxhall Astra. Built by robots. Driven by joyriders. Stopped by A Company.”
Nobody was court martialled for this. No career ended. Carry on, sergeant.
Notwithstanding Westminster’s utter stupidity and outright criminality in 1971-72, as well as its inexcusable tolerance of the Paras, by 1973 the British government had not merely made majority rule in Northern Ireland effectively illegal but with the Sunningdale Agreement had also accepted Dublin’s permanent right to have an influential purview over governance of the Province. This was made statutory by the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Yet the IRA campaign nonetheless continued formally into1997 and continued informally into the 21st Century, with fresh arms shipments from Russia and the Balkans long after the Belfast Agreement had brought the IRA into government in Stormont.
So, what did the IRA’s “resistance to British rule” actually consist of? Amongst other things, murdering twenty-one innocent people in Birmingham pubs. Burning a dozen dog-fanciers alive at La Mon. Slaughtering twelve innocent people on a coach crossing England, including Clifford Houghton, his wife Linda and their two children Lee (5) and Robert (2): an entire family exterminated. Blowing Christmas shoppers to pieces outside Harrods in London. Cutting a UDR man’s throat not far from Altnaveigh, the scene of Frank Aiken’s 1922 triumphs (see later). The “disappearing” of seventeen people and the torture and murder of scores of others, including a widowed mother ten children, the oldest being fourteen. The Semtex-slaughter of a boatload of old people and youngsters in Sligo. Machine-gunning eleven Protestant workmen in South Armagh and finishing them off with synchronised headshots from which one man survived with seventeen gunshot wounds. Some of the weapons used in this einsatzkommando butchery were a dozen years later employed to murder two unarmed senior RUC officers returning from a meeting in Dundalk Garda Barracks, which is of course a reminder that the IRA was – whenever it chose – also an enemy of the Dublin government.
For every single one of these deeds, in the absence of a lawful authority, the IRA would have been answerable to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. And while I and others have been repeatedly reciting this litany for over thirty years, Sfira has risen inexorably in official esteem, with its leaders being lionised in Chequers, the White House and Aras an Uachtaráin. It’s as if the modern aversion to scientific reality, what we might call Cognitive Empirical Inversion, had originally been forged in the furnace of illogicality that is the Irish peace process. However, it would be anachronistic to make such a claim, for immunity to evidence has long been a characteristic of extreme Irish nationalism.
In 1912, Kipling wrote a poem, entitled Ulster, much hated by Irish nationalists and liberals alike, about the potential fate of unionists under an Irish nationalist government:
The dark eleventh hour
Draws on and sees us sold
To every evil power
We fought against of old.
Rebellion, rapine hate,
Oppression wrong and greed
Are loosed upon our fate,
By England’s act and deed.
The faith in which we stand,
The laws we made and guard –
Our honour lives and land –
Are given for reward
To Murder done by night
To Treason taught by day,
To folly, sloth and spite,
And we are thrust away.
Put aside your visceral dislike of that poem. Is there a single line in those much-reviled words which was not borne dramatically out by the events from 1916-23? Were they not then vindicated, at great and melancholy length, over the succeeding decades, as the men of 1916 turned into the unapologetic authors of Papist poverty, Romanist decay and cultural harikari within an independent Ireland from which Protestants fled, just as Kipling warned would happen?
For Irish nationalism, certainly in its more virulent, republican form, is not just another statement of coherent identity such as that which unites the Norwegians or Dutch or Latvians, but rather is a deep ethnic intolerance expressed in disingenuously pseudo-enlightenment terms. Encoded within it is a moral sedative that neutralises the taboo on murder while administering a powerful but selective amnesia. Was not the1916 insurrection, despite all that we now know of its many cold-blooded murders, celebrated with an unalloyed giddiness and insensate pride on its centenary in 2016? And were not both modest ceremonies to honour the blameless dead shunned entirely by our political classes?
Similarly, nationalism’s remorselessly selective amnesia means that there is hardly a Catholic child in Belfast today who is unaware of the McMahon murders in 1922, or the role in that slaughter of the RUC police officer DI John Nixon or that he was (for a while anyway) allowed to remain in the police force. But is there a single Catholic child anywhere who knows of the IRA’s roughly simultaneous slaughter of six Protestant men and one woman in Altnaveigh in South Armagh and the burning of all their cottages, plus many others? This atrocity was planned not by some banditti thug who then vanished into the drumlins, but by the IRA leader Frank Aiken who went on to be government minister in succeeding Fianna Fail administrations, respectively for Defence, Finance and finally Foreign Affairs.
How is this not widely known?
Simple. Republicans have repeatedly deployed a fictionalised “history” to create comforting tribal myths and to justify – or even to abolish all memory of – the IRA’s many atrocities. But few historical accounts fulfil that fundamental requirement of republican mythology as thoroughly as does Michael Farrell’s Arming the Protestants of 1983 about the formation of the Northern Ireland state in 1922, which omitted virtually any reference to the IRA’s murderous sectarianism.
So naturally, Farrell – lawyer, historian and former student-activist – did not mention the Altnaveigh massacre, though Nixon is mentioned on twenty-seven pages. Farrell similarly overlooked the IRA’s massacre of Protestants in Cork some weeks before Altnaveigh, which gave Northern Protestants an extremely good reason to arm themselves. But why would he not overlook such inconvenient truths? He had form of a kind, having been the organiser of the crazy and quite catastrophic march through Burntollet in 1969, and a decade later becoming a high-profile supporter of the IRA’s H-Block campaigns as well as a vociferous opponent of any IRA ceasefire.
So what is he doing now?
Why, he is on the Council of State, advising President Higgins on legal and historical matters. So, I wonder: did he have any influence on the President’s deeply divisive decision to boycott the Armagh service commemorating the centenary of the foundation of the Northern Ireland Parliament?
If you don’t already feel the cold fingers of Sfira-ism upon your throat, it’s probably because they’ve already closed on your trachea, you’re running out of oxygen, and you think that the Northern Troubles were caused by the B Specials and the UDR. Sweet dreams, sweetheart, and when you awake, you’ll probably find that Sfira’s many long-term moles – hidden deep in An Garda Siochana, in the media, in academe, in the Army and in the civil service – are finally surfacing and taking their place in the governance of this state.
And that is when our hell well and truly begins…..