“they are doing nothing which the Provisionals didn’t do before them and with the same political rationale”

During Martin Mcguinness’s early days as head of the IRA’s Derry Brigade in the early 1970s, he is said to have made the city’s center “look as if it had been bombed from the sky without causing the death of a single civilian”; while a decade later he sat on the IRA’s army council while it approved the bombing of the hotel used by the British Cabinet for 1984 Tory Conference and, two years later, he told delegates at a Sinn Fein conference that the party’s “unapologetic support for the right of Irish people to oppose …in arms the British forces of occupation… is a principle… it will never, never, never change, because the war against British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.” [added emphasis]

However instead of offering an insider’s perspective on the Ulster Bank attack or commenting on the glaring irony of him as First Minister of a Parliament, he once took pride in bringing down; addressing a conference his subordinates once bombed, McGuinness chose to compound the irony by informing journalists that those who attacked Ulster Bank were “Conflict-junkies” and that people in Derry “are horrified that there are still these neanderthals within our society.”

The use of the word ‘junkie’ also directly contradicts his colleague and Sinn Fein’s former director of publicity Danny Morrison who stated in an interview last year that “people do not use violence because they are addicted to it. They use violence because it gives them a voice” and that it is always “the people in power”, not the opressed, who prolong war by refusing to listen.

In the interview Danny Morrison also suggests, when asked about the difference between the stated “chief goal” of the Provisional IRA – a united Ireland – and the current situation, that now people “feel that they’re able to look forward to a united Ireland at some stage in the future” and that “in a sense, the guerillas fought and the guerillas are in government”. 

Neither of which points addressed the question.

And leaves another hanging in the air – what happens when that feeling goes away? 

Now that “the guerillas” are “the people in power”…

As I’ve mentioned previously, if “No one in this small, enclosed biosphere ever told them this project was never going to work in the first place…”

The Ceasefire article, and more particularly the linked videos, also attempt to draw parallels between here and elsewhere.

Which makes me wonder how far the parallels go…

The former EU envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, said the practice was far from unusual.

“Many governments that hope to court influence are paying and providing money to the president’s office in what I would call a slush fund. This has been going on since the very beginning, and the Americans are very much in the vanguard. So I’m not surprised the Iranians are doing it,” he told the BBC.

He added that the payments were symptomatic of the West’s failure to establish a proper government in the country.

“It is in the interest of any Afghan government to be in good relations, with at least one neighbour, if not the two major ones. What bothers me is that the West has failed to establish a kind of government run by rule of law and with an established system that would make it impossible or totally unacceptable to use these means of gaining influence.”