Profile for Harry Flashman
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Harry Flashman has commented 1,269 times (48 in the last month).
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Books
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Sunday Supplement
It being Sunday, we’ve all got time to consider and ponder things at greater length than during the working week, yes? If it’s good enough for the Sunday papers, it’s good enough for this guest blogger. So here’s the review section… Actually, it’s my introduction to a book published last year, Goin’ Down Slow: selected [...] read our review » -
“Unionism Decayed 1997-2007″ by David Vance: book review
I initially wrote this when the book was first published three years ago; whilst certain elements of it now sound dated, its basic premise that the period of 1997-2007 was a period of irreversible decay for Northern Irish Unionism can still be argued as a valid opinion. My own feeling is that it did indeed [...] read our review » -
Ian O’Riordan’s Miles to Run: An invitation to madness?
Ireland is in the middle of a boom – a running boom. Chances are, even if you have never run a step yourself (apart from some painful P.E. classes many moons ago), someone you know has taken up running over the last little while. Road races in Northern Ireland and in the Republic have seen [...] read our review »
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Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
on 20 May 2012 at 12:40 pm
The SDLP and Alliance Party were absolutely peaceful parties, the Official Unionist party was also non-violent.
Molyneaux was not the leader of the party when he was interviewed about the IRA ceasefire in which he stated the view that was quite commonly held at the time that he suspected there was some form of background negotiating behind the ceasefire, if so many people felt the loyalists would react badly.
To state an analysis of a situation is not to endorse that situation or support it.
As to the much quoted, by loyalist paramilitaries, of support from mainstream unionist politicians, they have frequently been challenged to name those politicians (many of whom would now be dead) and to back up their claims.
Oddly they have signally failed to do so.
A middle class unionist voting official unionist was voting for a non-violent political policy. To claim otherwise is to libel an entire community.
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Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
on 20 May 2012 at 4:02 am
Tapacall you’re not seriously suggesting that only a few middle class people were killed in the Troubles are you?
Hundreds of middle class people were murdered in every bit as brutal and shocking a way as working class people were, they also had their businesses bombed and robbed, they also had their homes taken over and their cars stolen while their families were held terrified at gunpoint and countless other horrors inflicted on them in exactly the same way as working class people did.
Guess who was doing all this killing, hijacking, robbing, bombing, rioting? I’ll give you a clue, it wasn’t Derek and Marjorie from the golf club, it was your working class heroes who were doing it.
The working classes, no I’ll retract that as few of them had real paying employment, the underclasses were responsible for 95% of the horror in Northern Ireland, it was the genuine working classes and the middle classes who just about pulled the place back from the brink of all out sectarian civil war.
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Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
on 18 May 2012 at 4:11 am
the real world
No, the middle classes didn’t live in the real world.
It wasn’t real when they were standing in their shop windows in the middle of the night sweeping the glass on to the street and checking to see what remained of their stock so that they and their employees might have a livelihood in the morning.
The doctors who rushed into hospital emergency rooms, often from those hellish golf courses, on a Saturday afternoon to try and put together the bits and pieces of eviscerated housewives and wee’ans whose arms and legs were being brought in in plastic bags, weren’t real were they?
This bullshit that the only “real” people were the working class mobs who were burning down their streets and murdering their neighbours has had a long enough airing.
I suppose the middle class people who tried to keep the businesses open, who ran the schools and hospitals, who tried to maintain some form of functioning local government, who worked in cross-community groups, who voted overwhelmingly for peaceful, non-violent political parties, who set up the integrated schools, who just tried to maintain some semblance of a normal society for their families while surrounded by savage lunatics determined to bring the whole lot crashing down in flames weren’t “real” enough.
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Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
on 17 May 2012 at 3:48 pm
Comrade I’m not denying that there may well be sectarianism among the middle classes but what I am saying that it is no way near as malevolent as that which exists in working class, as Mick says actually much less mixed, areas.
Generally, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it wasn’t hordes of Pringle sweater and M&S chino-wearing people called Marjorie and Derek who led the mobs of violent hoods that caused all the aggro over the past half century.
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Comment on “I do apologise for anyone who misunderstood the way I was using the metaphor…”
on 17 May 2012 at 3:29 am
It’s an important observation, made by both junior ministers, that extreme sectarianism thrives in these classes, just a much as in their kerbstone-painting counterparts.
This is a common argument and was often evinced by the late David Dunseath, the unfortunate fact is that it simply isn’t true.
There may well be sectarianism among middle class people, there may well be homophobia, racism and dislike of tinned salmon for all I know but to equate this quiet, rarely discussed and usually politely kept under wraps prejudices with the sort of lowlifes who go out and paint kerbstones and thereby deliberately intimidate their neighbours is simply absurd.
People’s private opinions are a matter for themselves. It’s fine to be racist or homophobic or sectarian or anything else provided you have the decency and good manners to keep it to yourself and not harm the wellbeing of others, when you fail to do so that’s when the problem starts.
Trust me in this, the problems of Northern Ireland were not caused by people making off colour remarks over their third G&T at the nineteenth hole.
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Comment on Would the legalisation of cannibis help reduce the drug problem in Derry (and elsewhere)?
on 17 May 2012 at 3:17 am
My how things have changed, when i was in NTT and PNG from 82-86 betel nut was the drug of choice everywhere but Bali.
In fairness Carl things might not have changed that much, the lovely people of NTT and PNG are hardly comparable to the “sophisticates” of the Jakarta party scene.
he tells Spacey that the Govt / Army had ” grown ” it and that’s why it’s two grand instead 200 bucks for that ” Mexican shit ” .
Was this not based in actual case history where the Canadian government decided to build a pharmaceutical plant to produce “medical marijuana”? They spent millions to produce foul stuff that no one would even take for free while eighteen year olds in their basements were turning out the real McCoy with no financial assistance whatsoever.
A massive argument in favour of private enterprise over state intervention if ever there was one.
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Comment on Would the legalisation of cannibis help reduce the drug problem in Derry (and elsewhere)?
on 16 May 2012 at 12:40 pm
Probably all controlled by the same cartels Mark, I didn’t realise the generals were partial to the stuff.
Shabu-shabu is definitely the party drug of choice for the hip and happening scene in Jakarta (as you can imagine from my terminology I wouldn’t include myself) and the party scene is huge in the Big Durian.
Recently we’ve had a spate of airline pilots being busted with the stuff and given the already chronic nature of the Indonesian air transport system that is not something to take lightly.
To a certain extent it confirms that people will simply opt for the recreational drug of choice, booze is expensive and often hard to come by in Indonesia, where there isn’t a great tradition of drinking anyway, but ecstasy and shabu-shabu can be got in any club with no bother.
Drunkenness is very much frowned on while getting speeded up isn’t regarded as that much of a deal.
Funny old world.
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Comment on Would the legalisation of cannibis help reduce the drug problem in Derry (and elsewhere)?
on 16 May 2012 at 3:13 am
The army killed about 2500 people in about 3 years and most of them were yaba ( speed ) dealers but the problem with yaba is some say that a neighbouring country is producing the tablet and then smuggling it into Thailand .
Mark would that neighbour be a big archipelago to the south where they call it ‘shabu-shabu’?
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Comment on “I don’t think this generation is any different than the last…”
on 15 May 2012 at 2:52 am
When did McCann adopt the Gary Glitter look? What happened to the afro?
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Comment on Community silence starting to break over abuse in Lancashire?
on 14 May 2012 at 2:52 am
It’s the last few lines of that poem that always give me the heebie-jeebies when I read them.
“The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
He knew of which he spoke did old Willie.
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