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
Nevin
Whilst you may be correct with the historical chronology, these things are often far simpler than that. The Provos were near to hand and offered the nationalist working class young people the means to hit back at those they considered to be the cause of the multiple injustices inflicted upon them.
Just as today Hizballah and Hamas and to a lesser degree al-Qaeda fill that role elsewhere in the world. It is only much later that we humans intellectualize our political actions.
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 12:17 PM“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.” - Mick Hall
It’s actually quite funny that you classified my point regarding PSF’s crypto-leftism being a function of an abnormal statelet that provides “free lunches and subventions” relegating the matter of formulating the economic policies (which PSF’s president admits is a matter he is ignorant of - and demonstratively so after his RTE party leader’s debate) to be “no more important a matter than writing begging letters to Alistair Darling.” It’s funny because you unwittingly spewed pure twaddle in reply to it above, while mistaking said twaddle for a salient point. I think that’s what is called a PKB (kettle calling the pot black) - except this particular pot has a shiny metal ass a la Bender. ;)
PSF has no understanding of wealth creation because it operates in an abnormal situation where it needs no such understanding in order to operate. Unionists, on the other hand, operate in the same situation but are not “burdened by an irrelevant sense of entitlement” rooted in crypto-leftism, making them “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.” Ergo, “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.”
This is one of the primary reasons that PSF failed in the south. Wealth has to be created down here. We can’t simply rely on the generosity of the British taxpayer to subsidise our society or to finance our political careers, nor MI5 working “its voodoo behind the scenes” to move our political agendas along for us. ;)
“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.” - Mick Hall
Again the point flies over your head like an M16 at a PIRA training camp. Republican socialism could never have been anything other than sectarian socialism, which is an oxymoron to a true socialist. That’s one of the factors that make it crypto-leftism. Another factor is the use of fascist methods of violence to further what is a political agenda. Unionists didn’t form the murder gang known as PIRA that you revere so much: an elite group of sociopathic northern nationalists formed that murder gang with the specific intent of achieving political power within the British state by murdering those who opposed them. The demand being a rather rudimentary one of “do what we say or we’ll keep killing you.” Dress that vulgar pig up as you wish, put lipstick on her and kiss her, but she’s still a pig ;)
Posted by on Oct 05, 2007 @ 08:05 PMThe reason the north is such a subsidized entity has little to do with SF and every thing to do with those Unionists whose resident groupie you appear to have become. The simply fact is the north demands an enormous subsidy from the British exchequer for its very existence. For without this subsidy it would be laid bare for what it is, a foolish sectarian stitch up originally designed to cripple an independent 32 county Republic of Ireland.
When dear old Harold Wilson said the Unionists were a bunch of scroungers he was not only speaking his own mind, but also the majority of the people his party then represented. However he did not have the balls to do what he new was the only logical answer and withdraw.
Posted by on Oct 06, 2007 @ 02:03 PM
