Slugger O'Toole

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Mainland Ulsterman has posted 1 times (0 in the last month).

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Mainland Ulsterman has commented 401 times (9 in the last month).

1. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 11 May 2012 at 10:42 am

   Tacapall,
   “I don’t need to rely or read any books into the modus operandi of Loyalist paramilitaries or indeed the RUC I have watched it all my life …”

   We all have our individual experiences that shape our view, but it can only take you so far in understanding the big picture. There is a limit to what one person can experience and some humility is required. After all, 99.99999% of things happen to other people. If you want to get a more rounded understanding, you need to get outside your own experience. In your dismissal of sources like CAIN, there seems to be a privileging of your immediate experience over the experiences of others. This may be understandable given the personal history you describe, but it isn’t any more valid for that. The statistics on the Troubles are so important – and they are much, much better researched and less controversial than you would like to believe – because they are an objective, factual way of reflecting everyone’s experience equally.

   Telling the story of the Troubles through those incidents we feel most strongly about is natural enough. But in reality, it’s not the whole picture. Without things like the Sutton Index of Deaths – or if you can find anything more objectively and thoroughly researched, I’m all ears – we all have a natural tendency to tell narratives that privilege events that mean a lot to us personally, at the expense of other narratives.

   The fact is many other people have suffered similar or worse fates in the Troubles – and many more at the hands of the Republican terrorists you defend than at anyone else’s. The focus by Republicans on security force wrong-doing – which I’ve at no point tried to defend – is galling (1) because of its obvious hypocrisy and (2) because we’re wise by now to the purpose it serves for Republicans – to distract attention from the wider narrative, in which they were the principal perpetrators of the Troubles. I don’t think the selective memory purely manipulative though – they’re not self-aware enough for that – it’s as much or possibly more about trying to convince themselves as it is convincing a wider audience.

   And of course some of the selective memorising isn’t deliberate at all – it’s how the brain is, it isn’t some perfect machine. That’s why we need recorded fact and research and we need to keep returning to it, to keep the natural laziness of our brains in check. There was a fascinating study of 9/11 survivors and their eye-witness accounts of the events, over 10 years. The researchers showed memory, even of the most memorable event possible, doesn’t just fade, it morphs. Witnesses changed their stories dramatically as the years went on. It wasn’t deliberate deception, they were trying their best to describe what happened. So anyway, important to read widely and confer widely I think.

   My point about the moral question – and thanks for engaging with it – is not that the police or government has any special right to take life. The question is a universal human one and applies anywhere. So we can’t say for sure that running informers in the way they did saved lives – but it does seem very strongly that trying to save lives was the reason for this approach. The idea seems eminently sensible to me – to protect people not by just foiling individual terrorist actions, but by also undermining terrorist organisations from within, demoralising and confusing them and reducing their ability to operate freely. It was the duty of the security forces to try to do this, especially as the Troubles moved into its second decade with no sign of Republicans wanting to stop their campaign. The Republican campaign was never going to brought to an end overnight, but there seems little doubt the IRA was in disarray by the end – riddled with informers and no one knowing who else to trust. meanwhile it was starting to dawn on some of them that their campaign was utterly without any prospect of success. So I’d argue the networks of informers have saved lives. Had the campaign still been going, we could have expected an extra 50 people a year to have been killed over the past 10 years, say – so that would be 500 people. These are the calculations security chiefs and political leaders have to make. Who knows if they got it right but they certainly had to try.

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2. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 9 May 2012 at 8:41 am

   Tacapall,
   “trying to excuse the inexcusable” – the shooting of the IRA men was actually found to be legal and most people on here have found nothing wrong in that judgment.
   “scraping the bottom of the barrel for statistics” – really? CAIN? It’s THE source for what happened in the Troubles.
   “the security forces allowed a significant number of those killings to take place” – it would have to be a vast number to alter the overall picture I set out.

   You make the old Republican deliberate mistake of pretending Loyalists have no independent agency – this is frankly a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Loyalism and of how they operated. To Republicans, Loyalist crimes are crimes of the British government and I see you are traipsing along behind that same discredited old faulty analysis. Read Steve Bruce’s work on Loyalists, or indeed just about anyone who has studied them. The fact is, Loyalists wanted to kill for their own reasons and did it anyway. If they could find some bad apples in the police or Army willing to smuggle them a few names or a few guns then so much the better, in their view, but they were doing it anyway. The vast majority of Loyalist crimes were self-generated and had nothing at all to do with rogue members of the security forces. The very low proportion of actual active Republicans they targeted shows how little help they got from the security forces. The general pattern and attitude was “Any taig will do.”

   And you’re still not answering the utilitarian moral question I put to you – which is, is it immoral to save 80 lives by losing 30? It’s a situation no one wants to be in, but that was the choice. You can’t dodge it, as you try to, with simple assertions that anyone getting killed is morally wrong. It is but we’re evaluating a choice between higher and lower amounts of moral wrongs. You can’t just say, “it’s wrong”, it doesn’t start to engage with the issue. When I studied legal philosophy, we spent a lot of time and effort going into the nuances of these kinds of moral choices and suffice to say, a library of literature says this is not the morally clear issue you claim.

   Besides, shouldn’t we blame the terrorists here for producing this awful situation, not the police for being stuck in it?

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3. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 8 May 2012 at 11:05 am

   You’ll also note the security forces’ percentage of killings falling consistently as the Troubles proceeded. The initial engagement of the Army was chaotic and way too many lives were lost as a result. But the subsequent figures show the security forces were about reducing loss of life, not increasing the conflict.

   The argument that they “used” Loyalists as proxies is not born out, either by the high conviction rates for Loyalist killers, or by the much reduced Loyalist killing rate from the mid 70s onwards. It’s not to say there weren’t nasty aberrations, there were, and that is awful and brings shame to the country; but the overall pattern suggests this was a small part of the picture.

   Meanwhile, the Republicans ploughed on regardless. Of course they did – it was their “Armed Struggle”.

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4. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 8 May 2012 at 10:57 am

   Tacapall,
   “There is no moral argument to be debated”

   Haha – that really IS slippery. Do you really honestly think that? Or is it that you’re afraid that if you engage with the reality of the moral arguments, you’ll find (God forbid) that you have show understanding towards the security forces.

   SK,
   CAIN is a brilliant resource and I urge everyone to look at it. As well as the 60 / 30/ 10 proportions of killing, there are many other troubling facts detailed there for those minded to regard the Troubles as some kind of 50/50 “conflict”. Here’s the proportion of killing to being killed for the major protagonists:
   Republicans – 5:1
   Loyalists – 7:1
   Security Force – 1:3

   We should think hard about these figures every time we hear a Republican attempt to paint the security forces as “the bad guys” in the big picture of the Troubles. It’s just untenable.

   Also, an earlier post questioned my (admittedly loose) summary of the Troubles as “mealy-mouthed” (whatever that means) on the basis that somehow Loyalists started it and it only got worse later on. Not quite so. Read Malachi O’Docherty’s The Trouble With Guns for a taking apart of the Republican “self-defence” argument. But also look at the proportions of killing in each phase. Percentages are for killings by Republican / Loyalist / Security Forces:
   Phase 1 – start of the Troubles, 1969-70 – 42 deaths – 48% / 12% / 36%
   Phase 2 – paramilitaries in full swing, 1971-76 – 1,752 deaths – 53% / 33% / 12%
   Phase 3 – IRA’s “Long War” – 1977-90 – 1,249 deaths – 71% / 17% / 10%
   Phase 4 – Tit-for-Tat – 1991-94 – 343 deaths – 48% / 48% / 5%
   Phase 5 – ceasefires to 98 – 1995-8 – 103 deaths – 59% / 36% / 1%

   And the final total for that period was 59% / 29% / 10%.

   Fairly clear from this why Republicans seek to give the appearance that it was some kind of even-handed “conflict”. Or are those figures “mealy-mouthed”?

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5. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 6 May 2012 at 2:19 pm

   Tacapall,
   “Unlike yourself Mainland Ulsterman I don’t agree with using violence or force against any human being”

   Are you sure about that? In real life, police forces have to use force from to time to time to apprehend criminals, surely? If a policeman chases a burglar and catches him, is he not allowed to touch him, or is he limited to verbal commands only? Absurd. Or what about humanitarian interventions to prevent massacres – are they supposed to be totally unarmed?

   I wish it weren’t so, but there’s no way around the need to enforce the law. When it is not enforced, as last summer’s riots in England showed, it’s the weakest and least well off who suffer most. Over here, and speaking as a Labour supporter, law and order is no longer an issue only for the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade – if whom I am certainly not one. The people who benefit most from good law enforcement are people in the most deprived areas.

   You don’t address the point I made about the moral corner that anti-terrorist police find themselves in – that if they show their hand completely, they may blow their informants’ cover and lose the ability to stop future murders. This puts them in an awful position. You assert it’s morally wrong for police to do anything other than blow the mole’s cover after the first incident he brings to them. But you don’t answer the point that says, what if it saved 100 lives by leaving him in place, but cost 20, so 80 lives net gain; and to take out the mole early saved say 30 lives? Is it clearly the right thing to do to save 30 people rather than 80?

   These are horrible calculations, but this is the stuff of both moral philosophy and the real life dilemmas that terrorists place on the shoulders of the poor buggers who put their own lives on the line to save innocent people from those terrorists. Have some sympathy.

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6. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 4 May 2012 at 2:20 pm

   Tacapall,
   An unfair post which missed the point.

   “… in your eyes even their families were involved in whatever activities those who were killed were engaged in”

   Not at all, but the families we’re talking about here were engaged in trying to blame other people for the deaths of their terrorist loved ones on a terrorist mission, while heavily armed. For families who have accepted such deaths I have sympathy. But for those trying to besmirch the reputations of those who had to confront the terrorists and stop them, I have disgust – bereaved or not. I’d say the same of Mohammed Atta’s family if they sought to blame the US for his death. Being a relative of a terrorist does not absolve you of the need to be a decent human being. I notice Anders Breivik’s family disowned him – that’s more what you would hope for.

   As to your second comment – it’s exactly the kind apparent “quest for the truth” which is nothing of the sort. I want every scrap of the truth to be known, every single consequence of the Armed Struggle. It’s our best chance of making sure no one tries to unite Ireland by force again.

   As to your highly partisan account of security force failings, it is riddled with inaccuracies and misleading statement. For a start, your assertion that the security forces armed Loyalists suggests this was some deliberate policy from the top, or something that happened as a matter of course. There is no evidence for that, quite the contrary. To the extent arms did find their way from rogue members of the security forces (many of whom were caught and imprisoned) to Loyalists, it was against the best efforts of the security forces themselves. Blame those responsible, not the mass of decent and brave public servants who were as outraged by it as anyone else.

   Also, your observation that “they stood back for reasons of advantage” shows you share a common misapprehension that anti-terrorist action is necessarily morally grey. It’s much clearer than you allow.

   So you’re running agents within terrorist groups (an absolute necessity) and you know there are planned terrorist actions in the coming weeks. You could disrupt all of them, but if you do, you lose your agent and the ability to disrupt future actions. Now, if you think the terrorism more generally is likely to continue, then your judgment has to be how to disrupt that proportion of activities that will lead to the greatest number of lives overall being saved in the long term.

   This is not an amoral or even morally grey choice, it’s one to which there is a clear, if uncomfortable answer. You have to look to save as many lives as you can, even if it means not saving all for every occasion. That is, you may on occasion have to fail to stop a terrorist action you know about, in order to save more lives in future. It’s tough but it’s a logical working through of the dilemma the terrorists have placed you in and it’s the only humane thing you can do.

   The fact our security forces had to face these kind of awful moral choices is not their fault. They were forced into this position by the need to protect the public against terrorism. And it only looks amoral if you miss the bigger picture. Clearly people who wish the security forces ill will of course not see it that way. But it’s hardly a coincidence that the same people who think terrorism is somehow justifiable also seek to undermine the rights and humanity of those who protect the public from it. So no surprise there.

   This isn’t to say everyone involved in defeating the IRA were saints. However, stopping the murder campaign was of such overwhelming importance that I’m sure you’ll agree, we need to show much sympathy and understanding in considering the security forces’ dilemmas and the tactics the security forces used. And I hope you’ll join me in thanking the security forces for all the lives they saved over the 30 years of the Armed Struggle and indeed in helping bring it to an end.

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7. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 4 May 2012 at 10:21 am

   It does seem Republicans are sadly still trying to grasp at any straw from the Troubles that allows them to think of themselves as somehow “victims” of “the conflict”. The facts are irrelevant really to them, as long as they (1) keep feeding their own community’s view of itself as victims and (2) obscure the bigger picture of the Troubles. That’s what this inquest and so much of Republican “interest in getting to the truth” is really about for them.

   It is manipulative, cynical, dishonest and treats the public who lived through the Troubles like fools. Which is no surprise as they treated us even worse at the time.

   Just to recap for whose who missed what happened: the “conflict” consisted mainly of Republicans attacking and killing a load of people; Loyalists attacking and killing a smaller number of people back; and the security forces trying to stop both of them and ending up killing people too, in smaller numbers still. This basic picture isn’t great for Republicans. The cowardice and myopic selfishness of the terror campaign continues through other means today – but it seems to be still very much a feature.

   Coming to terms with a great wrong is not easy. And I suspect many former terrorists are psychologically very damaged, though they may not like to talk about it. But I hope that slowly they can come to understand and start to accept responsibility publicly. And I think it’s important for the rest of that this starts to happen. I don’t think they do their own psychological recovery or ours any favours when they continue seeking to put blame on others for deaths on IRA terrorist missions.

   Such attempts also undermine trust between the communities – as it suggests Republicans live in a parallel moral universe and hold themselves to different moral standards than they expect of others. This is deeply unfair.

   When standing up for the rights of families to have questions answered, we do need to bear all this in mind too. There is a cost to all of us in keeping this culture of blame avoidance fed.

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8. Comment on “Given these circumstances we believe the soldiers used reasonable force.”
   on 3 May 2012 at 2:56 pm

   Not sure why this verdict as such would be “devastating” for the families; or if it is, whether we should have any sympathy for that kind of reaction. They acknowledged their loved ones were on what is euphemistically called “active service” – to the rest of us, on their way to kill people armed with machine guns – for a terrorist organisation responsible for murders going into 4 figures. Yet they seem to expect the security forces intercepting these heavily armed terrorists to simply arrest them, as if they were errant chefs shoplifting some cheese. Breath-taking really.

   The security forces lost 3 members to terrorists for every one life taken by the security forces; Republican terrorists took 5 lives for every one they lost. Which makes it even more breath-taking.

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9. Comment on Could Rangers make a virtue of their moral and financial crisis?
   on 24 April 2012 at 12:11 pm

   There is this interesting thing in football supporting, isn’t there, about supporting a small / struggling club being more morally worthy than supporting a big one. It’s because, I think, football support is first and foremost about loyalty, which is only tested when your club hits hard times. If you haven’t been through it, you’re not a real fan (As a Utd fan I get a lot of this from people who don’t realise my team got relegated the second season I supported them (73-74) and didn’t come close to winning the title in my first 20 years as a fan.)

   Much to the amusement of my English friends during recent golden years for both clubs, I’m also a Rangers supporter. But I never really enjoyed the glory that much. I didn’t really kick in with Rangers till I about 1979, by which time Celtic were ruling the roost in Scotland, Rangers were in free-fall. I saw myself as backing the underdog both in England and Scotland (and I didn’t even get the Protestant / Catholic thing at that age – my Dad even favoured Celtic).

   Which autobiographical ramble goes to explain why part of me would actually quite like it if the Gers went down a division or two. There’s something exciting and energising about crawling your way back up from disaster. Years of high living (in Scottish football terms – so kind of like haggis with truffle oil) erodes your sense of excitement and edge when the club achieves something. Perhaps for Rangers, there is chance of reconnection and reinvigoration.

   It’s a great opportunity too to reform the club more radically and rebuild it as the club most fans want – that is, one that is proud of its heritage but expresses it positively and has zero tolerance for sectarianism. I do think Rangers and Celtic have more potential than any other institutions in Scotland or NI to change attitudes towards sectarianism. The clubs have been saying the right things for years, but I’ve not seen all the fans taking heed. This period of change for the Gers is an opportunity for the club to really make a new start and tell the more knuckle-dragging of my fellow Bluenoses they need to shape up. In every crisis there is an opportunity.

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10. Comment on Animated Alliance #apni12
    on 21 April 2012 at 10:49 pm

    Tyrone,
    In international law terms though, people of Irish allegiance in NI are a national minority i.e. a people of one nationality living inside another a country. It’s not a pejorative term, it’s perfectly normal and there’s no implied criticism in that, it’s just a statement of fact.

    You miss the point of my beef – it was that aspiring to a united Ireland is of course fine, but making the border an issue here and now isn’t. The GFA of course doesn’t prevent anyone being a nationalist, my point was that it does imply a restraint on how nationalism is pursued and how nationalists treat Northern Ireland as a unit. In the GFA, nationalists expressly recognised the legitimacy of the border and expressly recognised Northern Ireland as both existing for good reasons and being the relevant self-determinative unit (therefore the whole island is not the self-determinative unit). So statements like yours that you see unionists as a national minority in Ireland, for example, are now a bit weird. Even extreme nationalists gave up that position in 1998 (at least that what they signed up to).

    Your point about the IRA half-wits’ idea is irrelevant, because I did in fact go on to explain why it was a bad idea; I didn’t rely on just the fact that it came from everyone’s favourite deludoid dogma-swallowers.

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