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Books
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A poem for the day – Launching the Whaler Juan Peron
A Belfast epic, and one of my oldest poems, the opener of my first collection, Grub. The gist of the story was found in Moss & Hume’s Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland and Wolff, Belfast, 1861-1986, which tells how Eva Peron was due to launch a huge whaling vessel in Belfast, built [...] read our review » -
Do Words Matter?: Book Review of Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution – Debating Peace in Northern Ireland
I share many of the concerns of Andy Pollak, whose recent post ‘My Response to the Slugger Begrudgers’ zeroed in on the ‘relentless flow of negativity’ of some Slugger commentators. Pollak’s post was largely concerned with the medium of the blog. Indeed, I think the anonymity of the online world encourages extreme discourse and allows [...] read our review »
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“You can see Newton’s mind at work…”
To add to the open access treasure trove at the Royal Society, Cambridge University Library is putting online some of its collection of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. We have called the first phase of our work on the Cambridge Digital Library the Foundations Project, which runs from mid-2010 to mid-2013 and has been made possible [...] read our review »
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Comment on Nightmare scenario unfolding for Margaret and Fearghal
on 11 April 2010 at 10:05 am
To which I mean that the alleged point of UCUNF was “non sectarian unionism” not non sectarianism that has no opinion on the union.
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Comment on Nightmare scenario unfolding for Margaret and Fearghal
on 11 April 2010 at 10:01 am
@Billy Pilgrim
“It’s rather easier to swallow the suggestion that they’re standing aside because he’s a unionist. And it’s self-evidently the case that this is a demonstration of the principle that any unionist is better than any nationalist.
Which is, of course, par for the course in an inherently sectarian political culture such as we have in NI.”
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But that’s not actually sectarian, if you want to be precise about it.
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Comment on Chris Grayling adopts the Adrian Watson policy position…
on 6 April 2010 at 5:54 pm
Here is someone supporting the right of a B&B owner to decline to serve gay couples who is a gay libertarian.
http://tinyurl.com/yzgwrfa
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Comment on “campaign against me is not really about me at all…”
on 6 April 2010 at 5:36 pm
However let’s put the moralism to one side at the moment and just look at the substance of what I am saying, Adam’s says,
“I am proud of that Army and my association with it. I am not a militarist and I never have been but without the IRA the nationalist people of this state would still be on our knees. We would still be second class citizens. So bear in mind that this relentless campaign against me is not really about me at all. It’s about trying to defeat the struggle.”
This is revisionism. The PIRA, rightly or wrongly (you may say rightly, I wrongly, whatever) was centrally about using force to unite Ireland against the wishes of the majority in NI. Sure the northern state was demonised for this and that treatment of nationalists but that was, to use a criminal court analogy “aggravation”, not the actual crime on the charge sheet. The “crime” was the existence of Northern Ireland. The IRA, for whatever reason, abandoned it’s central justification.
Now perhaps the justification for that is the 1998 referendum in which the people on the island as a whole voted that NI should stay in the UK unless and until it voted otherwise. That is indeed a powerful argument against the present dissidents. However what had changed? Had the people of Ireland as a whole ever supported annexation without consent, or did this just change overnight in 1998?
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Comment on “campaign against me is not really about me at all…”
on 6 April 2010 at 5:21 pm
@Michaelhenry
You support a united India / Pakistan / Bangladesh? A pretty niche opinion.
In any case I would (say) have no problem calling an Indian who supported the annexation of Bangladesh without consent evil too, irrespective of the level of violence they employed or did not employ.
@halfer
The independence of Ireland was no less forced upon the United Kingdom after a pretty atrocious war. But the justice rests on consent, and the people of the south withdrew their consent from British rule just as those in the north withdrew their consent to Dublin rule. You cannot have it both ways.
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Comment on Chris Grayling adopts the Adrian Watson policy position…
on 6 April 2010 at 3:38 pm
@Border Fox
Of course it can. I can place a personals ad in the paper asking for a woman, or even saying “no blacks, no Irish”. Do you think that people who do that deserve to be imprisoned or do people have a right to discriminate in race, nationality and gender in choosing who they date and marry?
Discrimination is no reason per se that something should be criminalised. To argue that is to argue the absurd.
What annoys me is the shrill sanctimonious moralism the antis on this issue spout. It’s like no-one is permitted to have a different opinion than them. That this is all about “prejudice” and all those who uphold a B&B owners free choice are “homophobes”. Loads of people support the B&B owner not because they would, or want to, discriminate against gays but from a libertarian position. For the same reasons that you would probably allow (even racial) discrimination in dating ads. Many would be absolute fine with an exclusively gay B&B. Is that so hard to comprehend?
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Comment on “campaign against me is not really about me at all…”
on 6 April 2010 at 3:06 pm
As here, too much of the moral case against the IRA is given in terms of the immorality of their acts and not the immorality of their cause. Forcing NI into a united Ireland without consent was immoral and Sinn Fein has conceded that fact in practice. That is what they had to concede to bring peace. They didn’t have to concede that murder is wrong.
The Nazis were not in the wrong because they committed individual human rights violations, but because their very raison d’etre was evil (e.g. lebensraum in the east). Such was the case with the PIRA also. However respecting of human rights the PIRA had been they’d have still been in the wrong. They could have pursued a united Ireland without consent as peacefully as Gandhi and they’d still have been evil.
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Comment on ‘Sinn Féin has no influence’
on 5 April 2010 at 1:46 pm
@Davros
They are following the same general line of what the PIRA was always mostly, and most essentially, about. That unionists are settler untermenschen who never had and still don’t have the right to declare self determination like the people on 1916 had the right to do.
The PIRA’s fight was always most centrally a fight for not for equality but for inequality, for the inequality of unionists and nationalists in the areas of national rights and self determination. That unionists, unlike nationalists when they were in the greater UK, have no more right to their own territory and self rule than do the Pakistanis of Bradford. It was always much more about that than a few gerrymandered councils.
At the core, whatever it’s claims of strict non-sectarianism, the PIRA was essentially a “proddy lie down” movement. A few gerrymandered councils and a ratepayer franchise was hardly ever the central motive. Portraying the IRA as the armed wing of the civil rights movement is just factually wrong. They were always, in substance, an anti unionist self determination movement. That’s what they were all about. They wanted unionists outvoted and subjugated as a mere “ethnic minority” at best in a greater Ireland. Ironically the exact opposite of their Basque allies.
That’s your explanation. Fed by Guardian journalists talking about Northern Ireland as “Britain’s last colony” and the like, thereby legitimising that unionists and nationalists do not have equal rights.
The dissident republicans do not need internment or lack of civil rights to justify what they do. The only justification they need, that the IRA ever needed, and that they ever will need, is that somewhere on the island of Ireland, unionists, or some other hypothetical minority, are exercising some form of self determination. Only when any form of unionist self determination ends will they have won, or indeed would the PIRA have won had they stuck to their original purpose.
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Comment on Archbishop Williams speaks clearly this time
on 3 April 2010 at 11:24 pm
“It could be argued that if the Catholic Church is in difficulties, at least it isnt disintegrating like the Anglican Church.”
Disintegration can actually be the best thing to happen to a church, and is probably part of the reason why churchgoing is much more popular stateside than in Europe.
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Comment on Belfast’s ‘Magic Jug’?
on 30 March 2010 at 3:07 am
Good to see recognition of the neolithic inhabitants of western Europe who we all the descendants of (apologies to our more recent arrivals), rather than the Celts, British, Anglo-Saxons or other imperialist cultures.
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