Slugger O'Toole

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Latest comments from David Lindsay (see all)

David Lindsay has commented 22 times (0 in the last month).

1. Comment on Ulster Unionists set to vote No tomorrow (and world does not fall apart)…
   on 9 March 2010 at 7:02 am

   FitzJamesHorse, what is “quaint” about it? It is a fact, which as much as anything else condemned what were then huge numbers of people from the 26 Counties living in Great Britain to a foreign status which they had never sought and about which they had never been asked. It was largely the work of a man accurately described by George VI as “scarcely an Irishman at all”, to the extent that he was only still alive because he was an American.

   The Labour Party voted against it. That is a fact, too. As is Attlee’s and Bevin’s enactment of legislation which in fact gave the last word on the constitutional question to the Stormont Parliament, although as a means of embodying the principle of consent, the first ever acknowledgement of such. A negligible number of Labour MPs voted against that Act at a time when a very large number were electorally dependent on Irish Catholics. There was no local political retaliation worth speaking of, if at all.

   Moderate Unionist, “the current arrangements” are those in the Saint Andrews Agreement. When has there ever been a referendum on that? And we all know why not.

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2. Comment on Ulster Unionists set to vote No tomorrow (and world does not fall apart)…
   on 9 March 2010 at 6:31 am

   The UUP seems to be filling the void left by the DUP, as the Unionist critic of the undemocratically enforced coalition in which it might participate, but has little clout. One would rather see the UUP than, say, the TUV fulfilling this very necessary role.

   The Parliamentary Labour Party voted against the partition of the United Kingdom. The Attlee Government’s was the first ever acceptance of the principle of consent with regard to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. The Wilson Government deployed British troops to protect Northern Ireland’s grateful Catholics precisely as British subjects. The Callaghan Government administered Northern Ireland exactly as if it were any other part of the United Kingdom. Indeed, two UUP MPs voted to save the Callaghan Government (both the fact that they did so and the reason why are important) when both Irish Nationalists abstained.

   The last integrationist MP to date elected specifically as such was the Labour-minded Robert McCartney, now a full-time campaigner for the grammar schools, another grand Old Labour cause against Thatcher. The British State is of continuing importance in protecting Northern Ireland’s Catholic interest against Protestant domination, whether under devolution pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement, or within such federal Irish structures as may ever be acceptable to a Dublin Establishment at once profoundly unconcerned about Northern Ireland’s Catholics and profoundly influenced by the theory of two nations with an equal right to self-determination.

   And the Welfare State, workers? rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries, often with the word “British” in their names, were historically successful in creating communities of interest between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

   Perhaps the UUP needs to be reminded of these and other facts? It certainly needs to keep them in mind. And its new opposition to the shameful carve-up of Northern Ireland between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a fully armed Marxist guerrilla organisation represents a welcome break with David Cameron, who is as opposed to the Welfare State, workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries as he is to grammar schools, to traditional moral and social values, to meaningful Commonwealth ties, or to a realistic foreign policy, among so very many other things.

   Cameron is, however, fully signed up to that shameful carve-up of Northern Ireland. And he has welcomed with open arms the erstwhile UUP Leader who brought it about, and who is now not merely a Signatory to, but a Trustee of, the Henry Jackson Society.

   Oh, yes, a very welcome break indeed.

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3. Comment on “even to an atheist it was clear this was third-rate religious programming”
   on 23 February 2010 at 5:10 am

   “I’m not a pacifist,” Gerry Adams informed the shocked viewing public, who might have been fooled into believing that the 1970s hokum – the Gospels not being eye-witness accounts and all that sort of thing – peddled by those whom Channel Four had conveniently lined up for him to interview was somehow objective, uncontested, or even terribly respectable these days.

   Adams maintained that he remained in the Catholic Church in Ireland despite all the scandals. Well, bully for him. At least the goings on that he presumably had in mind, and which need to be seen in the context of almost everyone in the Irish Republic’s education by the Church (have they all turned out like that?), involved breaches of the rules of the organisation in question, the Catholic Church. Whereas Adams’s activities were precisely the purposes for which his organisation existed. And in view of his covering up for his brother, would an Irish priest with that sort of record be allowed on air?

   All this, and we have not even begun to discuss the role of Channel Four in promoting sexual relations between men and teenage boys.

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4. Comment on The Conservatives should stop messing before they do damage
   on 14 February 2010 at 7:40 am

   Keep telling yourself these things, Erasmus, and you might even start to believe them. Hardly anyone in Britain would pick at least the most public faces of Unionism. But we are stuck with them (although see below). In the Republic, they did get to pick whether they still wanted even a nominal interest in Northern Nationalism. And, by a colossal majority, they gave their answer.

   For one thing, although there are many others, Northern Nationalists are far too seriously Catholic for them these days, far too much like those far too seriously Catholic people with Irish great-grandparents in England, Scotland and Wales, who are therefore welcome to them. And far too interested in the language, some of them. Let the English damn well pay for all of that carry on.

   Donegal and Tyrone? One third of the population of the Republic now lives in and around Dublin, to which Tyrone is even more alien than Donegal, and that is saying something.

   Where is there now “an aspiration to Irish unity” in the Republic’s Constitution? The 1999 vote there cannot mean anything other than a “repudiation” of any such “aspiration”. The story, if there was one, was that that was not a story, that no one was remotely surprised. All the concentration was on Unionism in the North, and whether it would spit on its luck by saying No to a permanent veto on something that was never going to be a serious prospect anyway.

   There is still a case for the continued existence of explicitly Nationalist and Unionist parties in an Assembly with such powers as may be left once direct rule has been reimposed, as looks more and more likely, with the Robinson affair far from dead, with the Uncle Gerry affair likewise, and with the people to whom Northern Ireland has been handed over therefore looking like an appalling collection all round.

   But such parties should be confined to the Assembly, disapplying or otherwise Westminster legislation and holding visiting Ministers to account. Elections to Westminster and to proper local councils, such as are taken for granted everywhere else, must be conducted, by law, by parties such as it is taken for granted will contest them everywhere else. Those parties will re-emerge in, and in consequence of, the coming hung Parliament.

   Get over the South. They have long, long since got over you.

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5. Comment on The Conservatives should stop messing before they do damage
   on 14 February 2010 at 6:54 am

   alan56, if any Irish Government has ever really been in favour of Irish unity, then they have all had very strange ways of showing it, even in the early years, never mind in recent decades. They know perfectly well, and indeed share the strong popular sentiment, that the incorporation of a minority one million strong is simply inconceivable on the part of their state.

   Less often mentioned, but at least as important, is the impossibility of assimilating Northern Nationalists, who are about as typically Irish as the Orange Order is typically British, i.e., not at all. They would be like the people three, four or five generations removed from Britain who came “home” during the decolonisation period, only to find that Britain was not at all what they had expected. Except that they would be far more numerous, and far more concentrated geographically. Who wants that? Certainly not anyone in the Republic. So they have renounced all claim. They have washed their hands.

   If the SDLP is Labour’s “sister party”, then, again, this has been shown in some very funny ways over the years, and continues to be so. Most spectacularly, it was the abstention of the SDLP’s founder that brought down the Callaghan Government. But the continued existence of the SDLP is a marvel of the age, although only as the most striking example of how the GFA keeps parties in existence long after anyone very much at all has stopped voting for them, just because the system cannot otherwise function.

   FitzJamesHorse, what happened in 1922 was, in point of fact, the partition of the United Kingdom, the only state then in existence in the territory in question. As much as anything else, it left huge numbers of people from the South in Great Britain suddenly living in a different country, when they themselves had merely moved from one part of the United Kingdom to another, and when no one had asked them if they had wanted that situation to change. The declaration of the Republic brought that to a head, with legislation having to be enacted to prevent the disenfranchisement of that enormous body of people.

   Had the whole of Ireland remained in the United Kingdom, then there would never have been abortion, among other things, in these Islands. As it is, only the existence of Northern Ireland can still prevent abortion in the Republic, if anything now can. While there are two jurisdictions in Ireland, it will probably never be legalised in one but not the other, which might just about mean that it will never be legalised in either. But the Republic is the weak link here, a country in which ferocious secularism is now the elite cultural and political norm.

   Catholic schools, for example, are likewise far safer in Northern Ireland, as in the United Kingdom generally, than in what the Republic has now become. The danger in Northern Ireland comes from Sinn Fein, with its use of the Irish language to build a network of schools in competition with those of the Church (a thoroughly cynical approach, in view of Sinn Fein’s general attitude towards the language in practice), and with its banishment of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their historic role in schools as the prelude to its banishment of the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland.

   As for self-determination, it has happened. It happened in 1999, when, most strikingly, the electorate in the Republifc repudiated by an enormous majority any claim to Northern Ireland, with Nationalists in the North also voting almost unanimously in favour of the scheme of which that renunciation was the cornerstone, along with the principle that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland could never be altered without the approval of two communities one of which was and is defined specifically and solely by the witholding of any such approval. Sinn Fein campaigned for a Yes vote and has been by far its biggest beneficiary.

   Self-determination has happened, and has happened specifically against a 32-County Republic, clearly an horrific prospect to the voters of the 26 Counties. I assume that you voted Yes. If you did, then you voted to make any change to the status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom impossible for ever, since those who have to say Yes now explictly include those defined by saying No, regardless of how few of them there may ever come to be.

   Mandatory coalition, however, is democratically monstrous. Where else would it be tolerated? Imagine the reaction on the streets of London or Dublin, or any other city in the free world, if people were told that, by law, all parties would henceforth be in government all the time, so that none of them would ever be asking any questions. Can we even imagine it? The whole prospect is rightly unimagineable.

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6. Comment on Are Sinn Féin supporting an Ghaeilge?
   on 14 February 2010 at 5:13 am

   John Redwood was rightly castigated for refusing to sign letters in Welsh, a telling example of how Powellite Thatcherites are not, since the part-Welsh Powell could speak, read and write Welsh in both its modern and medieval forms, holding that, of all his many languages, only Welsh rivalled the fearsome complexity of Russian.

   Well, fast forward from the last days of John Major to the present day, when none of Sinn Fein’s five Ministers at Stormont will answer letters in Irish. Read that sentence over again. In this, they are true to Irish Nationalism’s long tradition of hostility to the language. By all accounts, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness can barely speak it, for all their ostentation.

   Perhaps responsibility for such matters would be better in the hands of an Anglo-Irish aristocrat or a Protestant clergyman, heir to the traditions that kept Irish alive? Sitting at Westminster. Not least since there would be at Westminster none of the scorn that Irish clearly experiences at the hands of any Stormont Executive including Sinn Fein.

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7. Comment on The Conservatives should stop messing before they do damage
   on 14 February 2010 at 4:50 am

   Owen Patterson’s coming out against the eye-wateringly anti-democratic enforced coalition that blights Northern Ireland is a clear indication, as clear as a certain act of absenteeism in recent days, of the thinking of his new allies in the UUP.

   He and they should therefore propose that direct rule to be reintroduced, accompanied by an Act applying all Westminster legislation to Northern Ireland unless, within a suitably brief time, it is specifically disapplied by a suitably weighted majority, perhaps sixty per cent, of the Assembly. That would keep out the likes of abortion, which would never have been introduced anywhere in the United Kingdom if the Kingdom had not been partitioned in 1922, but which would exist throughout these Islands if Sinn Féin had its way.

   That Act would also provide for the proper local government that exists over here, and also for a ban on any party’s contesting Assembly Elections if it also contests those to Westminster, Strasbourg and the municipal authorities. Those can then be left to the normal parties that will re-emerge in and from the coming hung Parliament, while parties reflecting the old Unionist-Nationalist divide could continue to function, even of necessity, in and for Stormont only. There, and there alone, would that still be the point. As, indeed, it would be.

   Why should opposition to enforced coalition be left to the TUV, which does not know its own community’s history on questions such as the Irish language, a failing that it shares with Sinn Féin? The tolerance level towards Irish is like the tolerance level towards the Loyal Order marches, also simply a feature of Irish life in general and of Northern Irish life in particular, whether or not one happens to like it. In either case, such tolerance is an invaluable barometer. As, more negatively, is any degree of insistence in either case.

   Anyway, this week’s Question Time was as surely a set-up as when Nick Griffin was on. Indeed, even more so. Nick Griffin is one of his party’s two MEPs. The TUV has no MEP, no MPs, no MLAs, and a handful of Councillors. Jim Allister was only brought on, before a noticeably student-heavy audience, so that he could be lynched.

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8. Comment on Mililband accused of trying to cover up top judges’ searing criticism of MI5 over torture
   on 11 February 2010 at 6:34 am

   Remember when the President of the United States was said to be above both the law and the Constitution? It seems from the reaction to the Binyam Mohamed story in predictable quarters that, not the actual President of the United States, but whoever they think ought to be, still is above both the law and the Constitution, not merely of the United States, but of every country on earth, including this one.

   Twice this week, so far, there have been major defeats in court for those who have dusted down old anti-liberty proposals from the Michael Howard years and before, and who have then tried to terrify us all into accepting them by noisily “foiling” non-existent plots to release ricin in London, to blow up Manchester United, and so on. As the events over Christmas were far from the first to illustrate, even such Islamic terrorists as we do face are isolated, short of funds, and not really any good at it, anyway.

   And they have nothing, nor have they ever had anything, to do with either Afghanistan or Iraq. Or, for that matter, Iran.

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9. Comment on “An Irish language strategy rather than an act..”
   on 2 February 2010 at 6:56 am

   DerTer, school-level teaching in Irish at that time would have been by whom, and to what purpose? But no, the English and the Prods are always to blame for everything. The fact that the Irish voluntarily stopped speaking Irish, and that it was Anglo-Irish gentry and Protestant clergy who more than anyone stopped it from dying out altogether, must never be mentioned. (It was high-born Francophone priests who saved Flemish, too – this sort of thing is quite common.)

   Dewi doesn’t know when to stop. All right, then, have it your way. They don’t speak Welsh in North Wales, but they all do in Pembrokeshire. I’ve heard it all now! The devolution vote cut both English-speaking and Welsh-speaking Wales in half, and you know it. Moreover, however they might have voted (if they voted at all) in 1999, people in the very Welsh-speaking north-western corner of Wales are probably now the most disillusioned of all with devolution. And that is saying quite something. You know that, too.

   1999 was also the year when the Irish Republic cheerfully renounced any claim to Northern Ireland, with Sinn Fein campaigning for a vote in favour of that renunciation; they have been on the British public payroll ever since, even to the extent of having houses in London at that expense. Like Commonwealth countries loosening their ties to the Crown, or like British Overseas Territories becoming independent, so any loosening or dissolution of the United Kingdom is now an idea belonging to a bygone age. A recent bygone age. But a bygone age all the same. Those who wanted to go, have gone. Those who, to whatever extent, are still here, are, to that extent, here for ever.

   They include the overwhelming majority of speakers of the Celtic languages. No change there. And Irish, like serious Catholicism, is now doing far better within the Union than it manages in the Republic these days. Irish-speakers and serious Catholics of the Six Counties, take heart that the voters of the Republic don’t want you, but the United Kingdom still does, and has a much more advanced social democracy into the bargain.

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10. Comment on “An Irish language strategy rather than an act..”
    on 2 February 2010 at 12:34 am

    socaire, I’ve never met him. It’s just that his name has come up in little bits of research that I have done. Clerical enthusiasts in many fields are of course very much a feature on both sides of the Irish Sea, both sides of the Channel and both sides of the Atlantic.

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