This & That: Take 13

The Price of Peace

Recently Dublin was the stage for a rally in support of Marian Price, currently interned by the British government in the face of protests from an ineffectual nationalist component of the Northern executive. She has been in custody for over 500 days, held without trail and on the basis of information considered so sensitive she is not allowed to access it and accordingly make a defence in a court of law, even a British one where law has frequently proven little more than an invitation to break it. 

This highly classified information seemingly had no value prior to her holding a bit of paper in a Derry cemetery. How it is supposed to have transformed the risk she poses we are left to guess. The British police, had they really possessed sensitive information, seem not have thought it worth the paper she was waving when they failed to do anything about it prior to the cemetery incident.  What happened in a Derry graveyard is simply an excuse for holding her, not a reason. 

If the price of peace is Irish citizens being interned by the British state without trial, then it illuminates even further just how miniscule the achievements of the Provisional IRA campaign have been. No one died marching through Derry so that the British state could have the right to intern.


                                                                    The Prince of Peace

Strangely enough the man Marian Price has openly stated sent her on the bombing mission to London, in 1973 for which she is currently being held in prison almost 40 years later, is the current TD for Louth, Sinn Fein boss Gerry Adams. 

The former IRA leader has since moved on with his life, even if others continue to serve life for the activity he directed. The extent to which he has moved on can be found in his praise for the Garda response to the Real IRA funeral of Alan Ryan. For decades Fine Gael, the unionists and the British government was telling him this was exactly how republican funerals should be handled. 

If this is how Mr Adams feels about IRA funerals perhaps he could explain his presence at so many or how he came to be central to organising resistance to the British state during what was termed ‘the battle of the funerals’ in the North. Mr Adams was at many IRA funerals including that of Bobby Sands, where masked and armed IRA members staged full blown military displays including the discharging of firearms in public places. In fact his brother was shot and injured by British Army at one such funeral and later imprisoned, accused of being a member of the firing party. 

Legitimacy like treason is just a matter of dates.

Demanding Dublin Apologises

Peter Robinson has called on the Irish government to apologise for kick starting the Provisional IRA. Listening to the North’s first minister you would think the Provos were a Dublin based phenomenon launched from the wealthy pockets of Fianna Fail businessmen and not from the ashes of burnt out working class homes in the backstreets of Belfast. It is a unionist attempt to shift culpability for the conflict south and allow those with responsibility for the North, unionism and the British state, to evade blame. 

Moreover, we know for certain that Micheal Martin was never a member of the Provisional IRA while Robinson’s deputy was the organisation’s chief of staff for almost 5 years. Will he be demanding an apology from the Derry Catholic?

In any event the DUP leader need merely hold his wish. It is only a matter of time before the Provisional leadership apologies for launching itself while denying that it was ever part of what it launched.

Posted in: A Little of This A Little of That