Slugger O'Toole

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1. Comment on “the battle for the heart of Sinn Féin is lost”
   on 19 July 2009 at 11:02 am

   [b]Continued[/b]

   My personal view is that I no longer support unity, and I’m still debating with myself if I ever should have supported it at all. I held the view that there were two traditions but one nation but I now hold the view that there are two nations (and the GFA states that, anyway). Since two nations cannot attain national self-determination in one state, and since there are two nations, I don’t support unity because it cancels the right of national self-determination for the Irish nation but leaves the claim of self-determination for the British nation (BG will continue to exist) intact.

   It is also not possible to have unity outside of British constitutional structures (and I’m more than happy to explain why if you’ve read this far), but even if it was (and it isn’t), the veto would still exist because another nation would still hold it and use it to censor the Irish nation and its culture. In fact, the British government is already doing that in regard to the Irish language since joint sovereignty between the British and Irish government over the national language is held via the Ireland/United Kingdom (North/South) Language Agency which has granted ‘parity of esteem’ between that vital part of Irish culture and identity with a farcical made-up dialect called Ulster-Scots that any dunce you speaks English with an accent can speak and Irish culture is being duly censored/vetoed according to that agenda.

   Finally, to self-determination as stated in the Irish Proclamation of Independence: “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.” The censorship is contrary to that destiny being “unfettered”. It doesn’t matter in effect if it is a another nation or their foreign state that is doing it or if it is self-censorship done without the knowledge or consent of the nation at the behest of either. There can be no veto of any type on the right of a nation to national self-determination.

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2. Comment on “the battle for the heart of Sinn Féin is lost”
   on 19 July 2009 at 11:01 am

   John East Belfast, just to return to the issue of an ‘Irishman’ who doesn’t support the right of his supposed nation to national self-determination but rather supports the ‘right’ of another nation to govern his own nation. Now, without prejudice to how you see it (and you are fully entitled to your own inner constitution), as an Irishman who does support the right of his nation to national self-determination, I would see you as a fifth columnist. No nation has the right to govern another nation. That perverse position is contrary to the cornerstone of international law, which specifically stipulates that all nations have the right to govern themselves (Article 1 of the UN’s ICCPR).

   All states require loyalty to the nation and to the state as a condition of citizenship. British citizens have a common law duty of allegiance to the crown. This is a constitutional requirement of the Irish state: “Fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens.” (Article 9.2). So there is a clear distinction there between the nation and the state – the former is a duty of nationhood and the latter is a political act. What we have then is nationality, nation and state.

   I suspect that you definition of Irish is purely based on the principle of jus soli. But you are neither loyal to the Irish nation nor to the Irish state so your brand of ‘Irishness’ would simply be treasonous to Ireland. You declare yourself Irish but your definition of Irish is synonymous with the definition of British, and your political loyalty is not to Ireland or to the Irish nation but to the United Kingdom and to British people.

   The acceptance of your definition of Irish would usurp the right of the Irish nation to self-determination. Since it is the nation that has the right to national self-determination, your tactic is to declare yourself Irish but to apply a political meaning to it that is the same as British. Therefore, since the Irish nation is British, it must have a state where British people hold the sovereignty in accordance with Article 1 of the UN’s ICCPR – by declaring that what is actually British national self-determination should be regarded as Irish self-determination.

   That is just the shabby trick of the imposter who turns up to claim a legacy from a will. In effect, placing yourself like a cuckoo into another bird’s nest, and claiming what rightfully belongs to another. It is like a group of German settlers in Israel and declaring themselves to be Israelis and then demanding that Israel censors its culture and agrees to live under German sovereignty because that is the actual right to self-determination of Israelis according to how these self-serving Germans would define it (queue Republican Stones).

   You can declare yourself to be a member of any nation you want (it’s very subjective sans nationality), but unless you are a citizen and are loyal to the state and to your nation, your declaration is worthless.

   You asked my view earlier and it’s all set out in the two articles below:

   Article 1 of Bunreacht na hÉireann:
   “The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions.”

   Article 1 of the UN’s ICCPR:
   “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

   Simple, isn’t it? All nations have a right to national self-determination (not all nations have attained that right, however). As you already have a “sovereign territorial entity” (a place called Great Brittan already exists) where your right to national self-determination is available to you, you have no right to deprive another nation of their right to national self-determination. Were you forced to argue your case under the relevant international law, you would lose it. However, you did have the might of the UK to enforce your claim to territory that wasn’t rightfully yours, and you do now have (subsequent to the GFA) the moral authority and the constitutional authority of those who formally renounced their formerly dispute claim to that territory. And that’s where it is at – Northern Ireland is British.

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3. Comment on “the battle for the heart of Sinn Féin is lost”
   on 19 July 2009 at 8:12 am

   “It’s taken her all ten years to discover SF isn’t a socialist party?” – Glencoppagagh

   Well, what should the Shinners saying ‘let us build an agreed Ireland’ and not saying let us build an “Irish Democratic Socialist Republic” mean for someone who supported them for the latter agenda? It should mean, of course, that the Shinners are not promoting what she thought they were promoting. But you are dealing with what is essentially a cult and with a ‘peace process’ wherein rationality is abandoned and duplicity is accepted as a legitimate – and even a desirable way – of achieving goals. Before that, you’d have the SDLP saying that solemn oaths declaring loyalty to Her Majesty were “just an empty formula of words” and then you had the GFA itself where ambiguity allows the Shinners to dress defeat up as victory and allows unionism (which lost majority rule) to do the same – and of course, allows both sides to claim victory on the constitutional issue. That’s just the culture that envelopes Northern Irish politics.

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4. Comment on “the battle for the heart of Sinn Féin is lost”
   on 19 July 2009 at 7:58 am

   John East Belfast, the ‘logic’ in that your post addressed to me above is so deranged that sticking “therefore” in front of your conclusion/question reads like a feeder line to a mildly amusing punchline. I assume you didn’t read my reply to you a few days ago because if you did, you might have a little of the clarity that you lack – or perhaps you did read it and your bizarre punchline was a cathartic response?

   “I am an Irish man with a love and support for the Union.” – John East Belfast

   So, the right of self-determination of Irish people is inseparable from the right of self-determination of British people. In other words, there is no right of self-determination for Irish people. That is a very self-serving argument – if one happens to be a British nationalist.

   The trick in this censorship of the right of the Irish nation to self-determination is to redefine Irish nationalism as support for British sovereignty. In effect, to make the Irish nation stateless.

   Since the state is the sovereign territorial entity by which a nation realises its right to self-determination, a nationalist is anyone who supports the nation-state and thereby supports the right to self-determination of a nation.

   You support a nation controlling its state (you support the British people controlling the British state), so you are a British nationalist, not an Irish nationalist.

   As Article 1 of the UN’s ICCPR expresses it “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” It is not possible for a nation to have self-determination if it does not have a state that it uses to “freely pursue [its] economic, social and cultural development.” It is also not possible for two nations to share one state (it’s like a car with two drivers who want the car to go in different directions) which is why every nation that has attained the right to national self-determination has a nation-state and which is why that is the international law. That is especially not possible when one of those two nations defines itself by not being the other nation.

   “Adams really needs to go if this is the best Irish nationalism has to offer. Almost embarrasing watching him clutching at straws.” – John East Belfast

   Adams is promoting the interests of British nationalism, not Irish nationalism. That is what Her Majesty pays her touts to do. Adams does not support the right of the Irish nation in Northern Ireland to national self-determination, since he has led them to formally renounce that right, downgrading it to the status of an aspiration that is now legitimately subject to the veto of another nation. Nor does he support the Irish nation-state, since he has led the Irish nation in Northern Ireland to formally repudiate the nationalist concept of the nation-state and replace it with a bizarre and utterly unworkable concept of a bi-national state (a state where two nations veto each other).

   Adams usefulness to his paymasters is that his organisation was used by them to claim ownership of Irish nationalism and thereby allow his paymasters to redefine Irish nationalism as being support for British constitutional structures and for British nationalism. Since you can kill the man but not the idea, it was deemed a smarter move to take control of the idea and redefine it so that it promotes your agenda.

   In regard to unity: the aim of Irish nationalism was to extend the Irish nation-state into Northern Ireland and thereby extend the realisation of Irish national self-determination to those who were denied it. That is what unity meant to Irish nationalism.

   By focusing on removing the border as being the end in itself rather than the means to the end, Adams’ paymasters were able to switch the objective without the muppets noticing it. To that end, unity is no longer has an Irish nationalist purpose but rather it has the new purpose of dismantling the Irish nation-state and removing the right of the Irish nation to national self-determination. In other words, rather than Ireland annexing Her Majesty’s dominion of Northern Ireland, Her Majesty’s dominion of Northern Ireland would annex Ireland. Ireland then would not be reunified under Irish sovereignty but under British sovereignty.

   The way the Shinner voters look at it, they’d be better off as 85% of a unified Ireland than they presently are as 45% of Northern Ireland. So they don’t care if that unified Ireland is a replica of Northern Ireland and defeats the Irish nation because they’re motivated by a purely self-serving agenda of “What’s in it for me?”

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5. Comment on “Ideally I’d like to see Mick stoned to death for the crime of blasphemy.”
   on 6 July 2009 at 4:44 am

   Ray, more kids are abused by teachers than by priests, so, according to your logic, education is an evil peadophile cult that should be stopped.

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6. Comment on “Ideally I’d like to see Mick stoned to death for the crime of blasphemy.”
   on 6 July 2009 at 4:42 am

   CW, given that the UK’s blasphemy law was only abolished last year in an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, I wouldn’t overdo the “supposedly civilised western democracy” spiel unless you want to include the UK as a newcomer to that category.

   Going forwards or going backwards? Anti-blasphemy laws are the new black with the UN getting in on the act and the EU declaring that it is supportive of “mechanisms” that would prevent blasphemy such as occured against the prophet Mohammed during the publication of cartoons in a Danish magazine:

   [i]The letter [from Islamists] asks for the European Union’s top decision-makers to “act determinedly to prepare a draft law that forbids every kind of blasphemy, so that all groups in society can leave in peace and harmony”. Such a law would “be completely consistent with the EU’s protection of freedom, human rights and sacredness, and the elimination of all acts that lead to racism and xenophobia,” they said.

   EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana signalled this week that the EU might be supportive of this idea, stating “We are working on some ideas. I cannot be very precise, but we are working on some ideas that maybe it is possible to get through,” according to Reuters. Deutsche Welle quotes Mr Solana’s spokeswoman Cristina Gallach as saying “They want mechanisms to guarantee this is not repeated and we should be able to find it in UN conventions on human rights.”[/i]

   If the EU via the European Court of Justice deems it illegal to criticise the EU, then they would have no problem altering other fundamental rights as it deems expedient. And indeed it will deem it expedient to censor blasphemy against all religions in order to disguise the actual censorship required as being solely censorship of criticism of Islam since by 2050, the EU’s citizens will have a median age of 52 and will therefore be entirely dependent on immigrants from Islamic countries who remain profoundly devout and intolerant of blasphemy against Allah.

   [i]Just last month, the Advocate-General of the institution ludicrously known as the European Court of Justice gave a legal opinion (in case C-274/99) that criticism of the EU, its institutions or its leading figures was akin to blasphemy, and that because laws against blasphemy were acceptable both under the common law of England and the existing European Human Rights Convention, then it followed that punishing someone for allegedly criticising the EU — even if such allegations were never proven nor supported by evidence — was not an infringement of free speech.

   Moreover, the Advocate-General went on to say that the doctrine of the House of Lords in the case of Derbyshire County Council vs Times Newspapers in 1993 — the doctrine that states, and I quote: “It is of the highest public importance that any democratically-elected governmental body, or indeed any governmental body, should be open to uninhibited public criticism” — had no foundation in or relevance for European law.

   The freedom of political expression and the freedom of the press in our country are both going to come under concerted attack from Europe. If one needed any more evidence of that it would be found in the so-called EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, whose Article 51 states that any and all rights must be limited by the competent legislative authority — that is, the EU voting by majority — if it is deemed necessary in the pursuit of “objectives of general interest pursued by the Union”. In other words, any criticism of any policy the EU has decided to adopt can be made unlawful.[/i]

   The UK can delete its blasphemy law because the EU’s ECJ will make it illegal defame all religions in due course and this Court will take precedence under the Lisbon Treaty, whereas the Irish government has to devise some suitable pretext to strip out all of the republican aspects from the constitution that will conflict with the self-amending Lisbon Treaty, particularly the offending requirement that sovereignty resides with the people and not with the State. Given that it already has a committee to ‘review’ the constitution, acting in this way draws the public’s attention to certain outdated provisions of that constitution thereby creating the way and giving cover for the required overhaul.

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7. Comment on Donaldson claimed for movies on parlimentary expenses – Daily Telegraph
   on 5 July 2009 at 11:50 pm

   “whats next? ask MPs to bring their own bogroll? !!”

   To wipe their mouths after they’ve finishing talking sh…?

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8. Comment on Junior’s position is untenable
   on 5 July 2009 at 10:41 pm

   Willis, he asked his source if he could reveal his identity to the public inquiry because that inquiry demanded it. That was the right thing to do. His source said he could not, and Paisley honoured his word to that confidential source that he would not disclose his identity. That again was the right thing to do.

   It is nonsense to claim that Ian Paisley needed to spend a sum equal to his annual salary in order to prolong his political career and that, consequently, this was all an elaborate and clever ruse on his part. If that was absurd enough, it is rendered laughable to go directly from declaring him to be a cunning mastermind to declaring him to be a bungling oaf in regard to his supposed attempts to frustrate the career of John Larkin. Both cannot be true, and it is likely that both are concoctions or spiteful political opponents and of establishment stooges who fear a maverick who cannot be controlled by the British political establishment.

   John Larkin knew full well that the State would not impose a jail sentence on a member of parliament and thereby draw the attention of the international media to a case involving collusion between that State and murder gangs and which would draw support from parliamentarians throughout the world for Mr Paisley on the issue of the confidentiality of whistleblowers. Indeed, Ian Paisley knew full well that a jail sentence, while a risk, was never going to happen. He would suffer a large financial penalty as the price of maintaining a principle and keeping his word. He is not a wealthy man, so while 50k might not sound a lot, it probably will mean that he has to work for two years just to save that amount, so its two years out of his life.

   In NI, who can whistleblowers turn to to expose the wrongdoing of the State? In a State with so much wrongdoing, why are there so few whistleblowers?

   In regard to the Billy Wright inquiry, the Canadian former supreme court judge, Peter Cory, who recommended in 2004 that inquiry be held (along with inquiries into three other cases) has accused the British government of acting to “make a meaningful inquiry impossible” by its use of the Inquiries Act 2005 for the purpose:

   [i]“It seems to me that the proposed new act would make a meaningful inquiry impossible. The minister, the actions of whose ministry was to be reviewed by the public inquiry, would have the authority to thwart the efforts of the inquiry at every step.

   It really creates an intolerable Alice in Wonderland situation. There have been references in the press to an international judicial membership in the inquiry.

   If the new act were to be come law, I would advise all Canadian judges to decline an appointment in light of the impossible situation they would be facing. In fact, I cannot contemplate any self-respecting Canadian judge accepting an appointment to an inquiry constituted under the new proposed act.”[/i]

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9. Comment on Send Mick to Paris!
   on 5 July 2009 at 9:41 pm

   Rory, isn’t it amazing how civil people become with each other when a moderator makes that a condition of posting, enforced by a ban for non-civility? In regard to social intercourse (don’t you dare) between the prod and the taig, the solution to a lack of civility is, therefore, is to place a Slugger-trained moderator at ten metre intervals on every busy street who will interject with a yellow or red card upon detection of raised voices.

   Alternatively, the general improvement in civility between said prod and taig may not be due to the fact that the tiny minority of shits who caused all of the trouble have now been rewarded with political power over those they formerly terrorised and deem that arrangement to be a more agreeable racket than their decommissioned former organised murder gang racket.

   The arrangement you have now is substantially the same as the one that you could have had 35 years ago, and the civility that you have now, you would have had 35 years ago. The only difference being that if you had of accepted that the British government devised in 1973 now as opposed to what the British government devised in 1998, you’d all be in a united Ireland by now, whereas now you never will be since the British government devised a solution the second time around that requires the dismantlement of the Irish nation-state and its replacement with a replica of Northern Ireland as a condition of unity, making you all unionists.

   In regard to Slugger, I’ve been a fan since I first stumbled onto it. I’m not sure what value, if any, debate actually has in NI since the ‘peace process’ is top-down, with the people being directed according to the will of the agencies who hold the sovereignty. The mandarins decide where they want you to be, and then you are led there. In that context, you have the illusion of free political will but your destination is already predetermined (and not by you). And besides, I suspect that the idea that anyone (who actually has any power, i.e. the British mandarins) pays a blind bit of heed to the ramblings of a few cybergeeks and party hacks with too much time on their hands is mere conceit.

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10. Comment on Junior’s position is untenable
    on 5 July 2009 at 5:13 am

    Actually, Ian Paisley Jnr showed true quality in honouring his word to his source that he would not disclose his identity, and in bringing information from a whistleblower into the public domain. He performed that service at considerable risk to himself, facing either a prison sentence or a fine. As it turned out, the State imposed a substantial cost penalty on him (£5,000 plus circa £40,000 to £50,000 in legal costs).

    The State does not want its secret murky world exposed to public scrutiny, and that is why it wanted the identity of the whistleblower and harassed Mr Paisley. Yet these whistleblowers and the members of parliament who listen to them often play a valuable service in holding the State to account for wrongdoing that it seeks to keep hidden from public scrutiny in order to avoid accountability.

    Whatever you think of his politics, there is no doubt that he is a man of his word. And a man who will not be bullied by the State or deterred from performing a service that he believes is in the public interest. There are very few MLAs who have that going for them.

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