Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Gerry Adams on Hard Talk…
On BBC ‘s Hard Talk programme, Stephen Sackur grills Gerry Adams on his party’s performance in the last year… Adams does reasonably well, though Sackur clearly gets under his skin once or twice. I’ve clipped some of the most memorable bits…
He argues strongly that there had always been a pro settlement line of thinking inside the Republican movement. He refers to a speech he made at Bodenstown back in 1977 arguing that his party’s fight with the British was a political problem and that it could not be solved by military means…
To connote the success of the process he described Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as Siamese twins, although I suspect the real point he was driving at was the joint character of the two offices McGuinness is not a Deputy in the usual sense of that term…
Much of the rest of the programme focused on Sinn Fein’s poor showing in the May elections in the Republic… Although interestingly Adams admits that Irish unity is not inevitable, and that his party is engaged on more of a journey: “come back and talk to me in a decade or two and we’ll talk about it then...”
Sackur: “Face reality in Europe you are part of a tiny far left rump block with 7 national communist parties. There are 750 examples of Foreign Direct Investment, growth rates of 5%, some of the lowest taxes in Europe… SF policies do not match the reality of the Celtic Tiger… Ireland has changed unbelievably, SF has not...”
Adams: “SF has. What we have to do is to find a way to communicate our message.”
Sackur: “Do you think that the Irish people find attractive a party that affiliates itself with communist parties across Europe?”
Given the southern electorate’s abandonment of anyone but it’s historically strong parties, it’s an important question. Sackur then went on to quote (16.50 in) my own analysis from the Guardian’s Comment is Free…
Paradoxically for a party founded with the explicit purpose of getting rid of “foreign” political influence on the island, in this election at least, it came across as foreign.
It did not go down well. Although Adams went on, correctly as it happens, to point out that a lot of pundits got the election campaign wrong (including me: just scan this thread at Irishelection.com, in which I rated Adams best performer in the minor debate).
Mick Fealty @ 08:59 AM
With respect Dewi, there are a dozen ways you could drive a project like that, if the Irish left wants political purchase beyond where it is now, it needs to make a wider argument for public investment in such projects.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 07:50 AMI tnink collaboration between these London and Dublin officials is fine if its goal is the public good; it’s diabolical if it protects London and Dublin at the expense of leaving decent folks here at the mercy of the loyalist and republican paramilitary godfathers and other parasites. Sadly, the lack of public scrutiny means there’s little or no accountability.
QUB Institute of Governance has nothing on its website which would inform the Slugger debate.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 10:24 AMNev, you cannot answer my question and your spin that the Dublin govt have executive power in the north is risable.
Mickhall you have directed a reply to CTN about Adams’ not claiming IRA membership- CTN did not make that blog claim and has since departed the scene.
I think you should recalibrate your reply and address it to Nevin- (who made it) just to keep things straight.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 10:25 AM40 Years of Adams have delivered Scappatici, Donaldson, decommmisioning, death and Stormont- what a prize imbecile…
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 10:44 AMhib, how can I answer your question when I don’t have the particular information? You can go for the man if you wish but you’ll be left floundering :)
What else do you need to know about the collaborative work on policy and day-to-day decision making in the realm of non-devolved matters? I’ll do my best to answer. The Spring briefing gives you some insights.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 10:48 AMStop hiding behind semantics playing the victim, I asked you to answer a question and now because cant you are pretending that is unreasonable.
The Spring briefing illustrates nothing other than an earlier claim that the Dublin govt may make recommendations but the brits can choose to do what they wish- big deal they agreed about 1 march.
The point is simple- the north is under british rule and Dublin have no executive power as CTN has already stated.
External recommendations are not executive power and your attempts to hype them as such are transparently daft....
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 10:54 AMI can see that this is going to be as difficult as I thought it could be!!
Here are some pieces of the jig-saw from a range of sources. Imagine there was a loyalist problem in, say, Dungannon a few years back. The SDLP politician wants to sort it out. The politician doesn’t want to go to the police because that makes him a tout; he also fears the request might leak to the loyalists. So the politician contacts Dublin; this may well take the local police chief out of the loop. Dublin passes the request to Belfast and the London and Dublin officials there convene a round table meeting, including a senior officer from police HQ. A decision is mutally agreed and police action follows. I can think of one example where a local decision probably would have had a more favourable outcome than the centrally taken one. Sorry, I can’t be more specific.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 11:25 AMNo wonder so many loyalists have killed each other- probably waiting for the Dublin government/local round table meeting roundabout process to conclude.
Ya’ve a heck of an imagination there Nev!
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 12:27 PMAnd on that note I’m headin of- probably to bed as this blog has bored me stiff…
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 12:35 PMMick Fealty
What ever I might personally feel about Gerry Adams, to suggest his accent makes him sound foreign to his fellow Irish men and women is really not on. Not least because he has been voted one of the most popular politicians in the RoI on a number of occasions in recent years. Different for sure and being so is the joy of accents. But foreign with all the connotations that can be drawn from that word, no.
In truth I find this language tack just a tad hypocritical, for I doubt you would write that a Bengali who has lived in the UK for 40 years plus sounds ‘foreign’, because you would understand where that might lead to.
True in the 2007 election campaign Gerry did not seem to have a full grasp of economic affairs in the south and to pretend he did was a mistake. But take a breath and remember FF, FG, PD and the LP have been within the heart of the southern state, whereas the shinners have not, so if the aforementioned politicos and their media gofers could not outwit Gerry Adams on the economy they would have been dumb boyos indeed.
Remember also SF and the left in general still fish in a comparatively small pond for support and members, they do not have the expertise the other southern parties can call on to take advice etc. This however hopefully given time will be over-come. What Ireland desperately needs is a new left wing think tank that can service the left with progressive papers on such things as taxation, economic growth, immigration, reunification, etc etc.
Of course whilst the common purse is not a bottomless pit it still holds a tidy wedge and if a country like the RoI cannot find a way and the means to provide a 21 century health care system, education, a fairer distribution of the nations wealth and infrastructure then it is a poor show.
After all the Scandinavian countries most of which have similar populations that hover around that of Ireland manage perfectly adequately when doing so. Nor are these countries terrified, unlike some Mick ah,of using taxation to make sure those who are best able to pay tax, pay their fair share.
Finally I’m tempted to do a John McEnroe and say “you cannot be serious Mr Fealty” when you wrote that Mr Adams not being a RoI tax payer went against him with the electorate. I have no idea whether he pays tax in the south but I sincerely doubt this effected how a single person cast their vote. Having said this what undoubtedly did go against Mr Adams and SF was the fact he led a party which was offering itself as a possible future government, yet Mr Adams as Party leader was not putting himself forward for election to public office. Not only was this strategy arrogant and foolish; but it went against the grain of democratic accountability.
For were SF to have gained enough seats to enter into a coalition government, its party leader would not be in parliament to answer for his ministers actions. In truth it reeked of the old IRB which ended up bringing such disaster to the national cause and the Republican Movement.
http://organizedrage.blogspot.com
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 12:58 PMIt’s an interesting process, hib: no accountability and no Unionist input alongside apparent academic ignorance. Some imagination is needed but mostly it’s about asking questions and recording answers of a wide circle of contacts.
PS Are you an SDLP supporter or are you easily DUPed? ;)
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 01:05 PM“Remember also SF and the left in general still fish in a comparatively small pond for support and members, they do not have the expertise the other southern parties can call on to take advice etc. This however hopefully given time will be over-come. What Ireland desperately needs is a new left wing think tank that can service the left with progressive papers on such things as taxation, economic growth, immigration, reunification, etc etc.” - Mick Hall
The days of soapbox ‘man of the people’ politics so loved by student revolutionaries who’ve just read the manifestos of Marx or the novels of Tolstoy are long gone, just as the formerly ‘unwashed’ proletariat is now immaculately groomed and clad from Burberry-capped head to NIKE toe in designer labels. Times keep on a-changin’ - and you either adapt or die.
One of the mandatory adaptations required by modern Ireland is that a political party should have - at the very least - a rudimentary command of the complex economic matters that it is petitioning the public to manage on its behalf. Asking the public to put you into a coalition government when you are devoid of the required knowledge and skills is akin to asking hospital patients to elect an ape to perform surgery on them - and while waiting lists may be long, no-one is quite that desperate in either medicine or economics.
It’s true that people get the governments that they deserve, and if folks were dumb enough to vote utter incompetents into public office, then they would duly deserve to have their economy wrecked by the incompetent clowns they duly elected. Devoid of a set of “progressive papers on such things as taxation, economic growth, immigration, reunification, etc etc”, it is an immoral act to pursue power for its own sake, and it would be criminally irresponsible of the people to elect people who are not only unable to manage economies but who are fully aware of their inabilities and simply don’t care about the damage they do just as long as they get power. The people shouldn’t assume that such moral degenerates want power for a moral purpose - that is to confuse a paradox with an outright contradiction.
In regard to PSF, they can’t be a proper party of the left within a social context where their professed unity agenda ensures that they will only fragment the nationalist community, drawing no support from the unionist community. For that party to proffer a left agenda proper, it would need to be removed from the sectarianism that sustains it. Likewise, they can’t proffer their unity agenda when their facsist left agenda ensures that it will not gain support from those who support unity but not crypto-leftism. While I know that you are a genuine beleiver in socialism, you’ve hitched yourself to a death star there.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 03:32 PMDubliner,
If you took a little more notice and went over what I have written in the past you would know I have not hitched myself to any star and certainly not that of SF. But I will not sit quietly if SF is portrayed by Mick in what I consider to be a nonsensical and unfair manner.
You use the most insulting language to describe SF and its activists; fascist, crypto-leftism, sectarian, etc. I cannot agree with you and before you insult people some of whom have sacrificed much for their believes, you might show more balls if you posted under your own name, you know sticks and stones and all that nonsense.
If you seriously believe there was an opportunity to draw mass Unionist support to Republican socialism in 1969 you must be living in la la land. As with the white working classes in apartheid SA, only the finest and most politically conscious sons and daughters would even consider coming over to equality and socialism and unity. The rest had been indoctrinated by the oppressors ideology.
By the way, having left school at 15 your snide remarks about Marx and Tolstoy do not apply to me, but on reading your middle class insecurity perhaps you could do worse than read these two fine writers, arrogance and ignorance is never an attractive combination in a human being.
Posted by on Oct 03, 2007 @ 06:12 PM“You use the most insulting language to describe SF and its activists; fascist, crypto-leftism, sectarian, etc. I cannot agree with you”
MH, that seems a fairly accurate portrayal of the Provisional Republican Movement and its Loyalist counterparts. The leadership of each has sacrificed foot-soldiers but more significantly ordinary decent folks trying to provide for their families. It would also appear that some leaders were given immunity from prosecution.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 09:39 AM“The leadership of each has sacrificed foot-soldiers but more significantly ordinary decent folks trying to provide for their families. It would also appear that some leaders were given immunity from prosecution”.
Nevin
In some cases sad but very true.
mick
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 09:57 AMIt would also appear that some leaders were given immunity from prosecution.
That wouldnt be the chap who stands in front of the camera every other week and admits that he is the leader of a proscribed organization that is currently involved in organized violence including the shooting of a police officers, is it???
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 11:31 AMLeaders, Sean, not just one. Presumably lots of lesser fry have had similar privileges.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 11:37 AMMick Hall: only the finest and most politically conscious sons and daughters would even consider coming over to equality and socialism and unity.
Equality? Of course.
Socialism? Dream on!
Unity? By leaving the Union?
So I don’t agree with your definition of ‘finest and most politically conscious sons and daughters’, though you could name a few of them and see who agrees.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 02:18 PM“You use the most insulting language to describe SF and its activists; fascist, crypto-leftism, sectarian, etc. I cannot agree with you and before you insult people some of whom have sacrificed much for their believes, you might show more balls if you posted under your own name, you know sticks and stones and all that nonsense.” - Mick Hall
Firstly, if you want to see “more balls,” then I suggest you go look at your favourite porn site. Secondly, you may admire squalid sectarian murderers as you wish, but don’t expect others to share your warped appreciation of that demented ilk.
Now, as it stands, the irony of northern nationalists being led by PSF toward the loony left is that it accentuates that unionists have more in common with modern Ireland than northern nationalists of PSF’s ilk. Unionists are more or less of the same mindset as the southern Irish in regard to free market economics and the importance of encouraging investment, self-sufficiency, entrepreneurs, etc. They’d fit right in here and end up being a hugely successful addition to an enlarged Ireland, readily seizing the business opportunities that would arise from that dynamic, while PSF-spawned nationalists would still be looking for free lunches and subventions, burdened by an irrelevant sense of entitlement, and unable to adjust to new realities. The last thing the south wants is a few hundred thousand loony lefties injected into the body politic. But no-one would object to a group of people who are of the same mindset regarding hard work, opportunity, and pursuit of prosperity. PSF’s workaround for this divergence of northern nationalists from their southern counterparts is to pretend that the north will annex the south, not vice-versa, pretending that southern nationalists will simply vote away the Irish republic in some future referendum and replace it with a quasi-communist state with an English monarch that is to be negotiated by unionist and northern nationalists a la the GFA, and merely rubberstamped by the south. Pure fantasy, of course – but that’s all part of living in a cloud cuckoo land where anything is possible as long as MI5 works its voodoo behind the scenes and the British exchequer picks up the tab, making economic policies no more important a matter than writing begging letters to Alistair Darling.
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 08:51 PM“If you seriously believe there was an opportunity to draw mass Unionist support to Republican socialism in 1969 you must be living in la la land. As with the white working classes in apartheid SA, only the finest and most politically conscious sons and daughters would even consider coming over to equality and socialism and unity. The rest had been indoctrinated by the oppressors ideology.” - Mick Hall
Would the reason that no unionists would “even consider coming over to equality and socialism and unity” have anything at all to do with the fact that PSF/PIRA was randomly murdering men women and children from the unionist community? Do you think maybe, just maybe, the two might be related? The “oppressors” were PSF/PIRA.
You also misunderstood what I said. I said “Republican socialism” was a flawed concept because unionists would not support PSF because of its unity agenda and those who supported the unity agenda would not support PSF because of its socialist agenda. Hence the comment that PSF is “subversive, seeing itself as a vehicle to force an unreconstructed socialist agenda on the south under the guise of a unity agenda, without realising that proffering the socialism as part of the unity agenda will cancel out any prospect of success for either agenda.”
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 09:18 PMDubliner
“you may admire squalid sectarian murderers as you wish”
I can’t speak for Mick Hall. Personally, I find this comment from you grossly hypocritical and laughable.
You may not admire squalid sectarian murderers. However, you constantly try to provide a degree of justification to the “loyalist” sectarian murders by implying that they were defending themselves and/or their community.
When I think of the hundreds of innocent victims and the swaggering arrogance of their UDA/UVF/LVF murderers, your attitude makes me puke.
For myself, I have no time for terrorism from any source. All terrorist murders are equally wrong and should be equally condemned by all right thinking people.
Who are you to lecture anyone when you clearly believe in a hierarchy of victims and try to excuse the sectarian murders carried out by the “loyalists”?
Posted by on Oct 04, 2007 @ 10:56 PM“You may not admire squalid sectarian murderers. However, you constantly try to provide a degree of justification to the “loyalist” sectarian murders by implying that they were defending themselves and/or their community.” - Billy
You don’t provide a single example of the alleged practice to support your claim because it is a complete invention on your part. I assume that you resort to lying because you’re unable to refute the points in the post. Isn’t it a shame, then, that your ad hoc edifice of lies was swept away faster than a sand castle in a tsunami?
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 03:14 AM“while PSF-spawned nationalists would still be looking for free lunches”
Dubliner,
You really amuse me with your twaddle about free lunches, you really are a victim of the 19th century ideas that have infected the first decade of this century. For a start when you have universal taxation [bar the very wealthy that is who seem to have concluded that the way of us ordinary mortals is not for them these days] State support, whether it is for health care, eduction or business grants is hardly free now us it, simply a sensible way to use the nations wealth.
You seem to have little idea how capitalism works, viewing big business as white knights, when in realty the whole capitalist system is based on a ‘free lunch’ and I might add the meal is far to often stolen from another persons table.
Free lunch my arse, you need to study some economics and try to catch up on how the greedy edifice works, I would recommend you start with Marx’s Capital.
You really seem to have no idea just how rotten Ulster Unionism is, by saying this I do not mean the many ordinary people who support it, but the core of Ulster unionism is based on an exploitative and clientist idea, for despite all its chest puffing out as epitomized by Trimble and Paisley, Ulster Unionism can never be its own man/woman.
You throw much bile at the Provos whilst you fail to understand how that organization came into being, it was not because god sprinkled looney dust over the youngsters within the working class nationalist communities of the north, but because of the society that was created in the north by those very same ulster unionists you write so highly of.
In truth your politics appear to me to be based on supporting the man with the biggest baton and the most money.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 10:29 AM“You throw much bile at the Provos whilst you fail to understand how that organization came into being,”
As I understand it, MH, the Provos were the nationalist as distinct from the socialist wing of the militant republican movement. The latter had some grandiose notion that it could unite the working class and smash the conservative (and religious) establishments in Belfast and Dublin. Perhaps it imagined there could be a Cuban-type regime after the revolution. It was hardly surprising that Dublin nimbyism should come to the fore and that the then socialist leadership would have to be removed. The Provos, it appears, turned out to be much more lethal.
Also google with ‘Derry riots’ to see how often the situation degenerates into mob rule when the blood is up. Perhaps our politicos don’t know enough local (and non-partisan) history; those based in London and Dublin have, at least, some excuse.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 10:57 AM“Ya’ve a heck of an imagination there Nev!”
Thanks, hib. Gather together a collection of the jig-saw pieces from a diverse range of contacts and sources and use your imagination to assist further research. The techniques are familiar to genealogists - and to investigative journalists.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 11:03 AM
