[Article]Shinners talk balls

Mercury_Tilt

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Lemming

Mercury_Tilt wrote:

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Merc, you're a clever chap and I'm a bit surprised at this line of suggestion from you. It's quite clear that they're not asking for people to be forced to do anything rather than for the intimidation of witnesses to simply stop so that people can go to the police without fear of getting murdered for it.

As for SF/IRA's own members - I think the point is well made by examining their own words and actions. They preach one thing and do another.

If it had not been IRA mambers involved in the killing... the sisters would have gladly used them to help get "justice"

Neither of us is clairvoyant, so that point is utterly, utterly irrelevant and based on sheer speculation.

BuffyBot

I have said were circumstance different... they would most likely have been happy for IRA help. Based on what I have said above.

Good to see we're not operating on common garden assumptions anymore. I hear the wild ones have much, much more flavour.

Merc, that's nothing but speculation and you know it. In fact, it comes very close to being a generalisation - you're saying that everyone in area X would be quite happy to go along with the IRA, when that isn't always the case. There are always exceptions to the rule.

mycroft

Mercury_Tilt wrote:

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No just coherant and credible, to y'know be taken seriously.

AmenToThat

BuffyBot wrote:

Merc, that's nothing but speculation and you know it. In fact, it comes very close to being a generalisation - you're saying that everyone in area X would be quite happy to go along with the IRA, when that isn't always the case. There are always exceptions to the rule.

I would say that generalisation is what this forum does best so why pick out this specific example?

Lemming

AmenToThat wrote:

I would say that generalisation is what this forum does best so why pick out this specific example?

heh. A comment on a forum being prone to generalisation that is a generalisation in itself.

BuffyBot

I would say that generalisation is what this forum does best so why pick out this specific example

Probably because it's one of the worst I've seen in a long while. And before you get all tender and accuse me of bashing your beloveds, you'll be pleased to know I'm quite liable to examine generalisations from both sides and have done so on many occasions.

AmenToThat

BuffyBot wrote:

Probably because it's one of the worst I've seen in a long while. And before you get all tender and accuse me of bashing your beloveds, you'll be pleased to know I'm quite liable to examine generalisations from both sides and have done so on many occasions.

I was just asking you about why you picked that particular point and you gave your reasoning, fine, no harm done.
However I never actually accused you of anything so please dont be so sensitive and feel like you have to explain yourself to me.

AmenToThat

Lemming wrote:

As opposed to "Up the Ra!! Brits out" or "Britain is a disease and must be eradicated from this island and if you speak english then you are a traitor" eh?

Yeah .... That's never boring now is it? :rolleyes:

Can you point to a thread where I have made these statements or indeed anything like them?

Lemming

AmenToThat wrote:

Can you point to a thread where I have made these statements or indeed anything like them?

No. You did not nor did I ever suggest that *you* did if you re-read my post AmenToThat, but one of your 'brethern' (mrhankey88) did write words very close to that effect in another thread on a related matter. That particular comment was intended to be a general reflection of the mantra and attitude that seems to constantly pour forth from the mouths of republicans, not a direct quotation from yourself addressed to you.

MT

The following is an opinion piece from Daily Ireland by a journalist who has previously been (still is?) sympathetic to the views of the Republican Movement:

Republicans will have to pay price for McCartney

The sisters of Robert McCartney deserve justice and, until they get that justice, there can be no future for the republican movement.

Gerry Adams is walking around like a lost soul in the US precisely because somebody on the Short Strand decided to plunge a knife into the body of Robert McCartney. At stake is the entire future of a huge political movement: the Republican movement.

Unless, and until, the people who killed Robert McCartney realise the damage they have done to the republican movement no progress is possible.

I have spoken to people connected to the republican movement in recent days and they, in turn, have spoken about “looking after your own” – as if one should protect people who carried out a neo-nazi style slaying in a public bar.

This is complete rubbish: the killing of Robert McCartney had nothing to do with politics. It was done because the killers were drunk. And the killers were republicans, and they should face the music for what they have done.

The McCartney sisters are being used by the political establishment in Dublin, London and Washington. So how else would it be?

It is inevitable that in the wake of such a ghastly slaying people would intervervene to take advantage of their plight to pursue Sinn Féin. That does not make the criticisms of Sinn Féin that they voice any less forceful. The criticisms of Sinn Féin are no less valid because they come from a family that has been gravely wronged.

The plain fact of the matter is that the republican movement will have to clean up the mess. There is no other solution. Republicans created this terrible situation and they must sort it out. It is just as terrible as the situation that they created at Warrington, perhaps not quite as terrible as the situation they created on the Shankill Road in the early 1990s, but it must be dealt with nonetheless.

The republican movement is directly responsible for this slaughter and it must take responsibility for dealing with it. There is no alternative. The republican movement created the crime, then tried to hide it and then, later failed to deal with it: it alone must take the rap.

The political damage to the republican movement is huge, but the Sinn Féin movement has shipped a lot of damage in the past, and what really counts is how the situation is handled. There is no percentage in telling the McCartney sisters that they should not dabble in politics: they have every right to dabble in politics, if that is what they decide.

The IRA offer to shoot the killers of Robert McCartney was perhaps naïve, born of another time when such a proposal might have been more acceptable. The plain fact is that most people simply regarded the suggestion as daft. To kill three or four people because of the killing of Robert McCartney would be bizarre. It would completely jeopardise the peace process, something which does not appear to have struck the authors of the IRA
statement.

There has been a deal of lecturing from the United States to the republican movement in recent days. Extraordinary figures including John McCain – a Republican senator – have stepped forward and told the IRA to disband. I do not think that this is at all helpful. The IRA might disband, but hardly on the urgings of a senator from the US who had no great interest in Irish politics before.

Neither would the intervention of Senator Edward Kennedy cut much ice among Irish republicans. Kennedy is not exactly a respected figure: indeed much of the criticism of him in the British media over the years has been fully warranted. And the whole notion that the IRA – after almost 90 years – would wrap itself up at the behest of such a person is almost perverse.
The IRA came close to the point of disbanding just before Christmas. Total decommissioning means the same thing. I believe that many republicans – when they realised what was on the table – were simply scared off by the whole suggestion. They could not live with the idea that they would be going out of business.

That they could have got so far is perhaps a tribute to their commitment to the peace process. It is no small thing that a 90-year-old army would contemplate its own demise in this way. McCain and Kennedy have made the situation immeasurably worse with their comments of last week. Republicans are not stupid: they know when the time has come to take radical steps to deal with the situation.

If the time comes for republicans to fold up their tent, then so be it. They should not do it in response to vainglorious speeches from the United States. They should do it because it makes sense in the context of a modern Ireland which no longer needs paramilitary armies – despite the hugely political nature of the police force.

Damien Kiberd is a writer and broadcaster. A presenter for Newstalk 106 in Dublin, he was previously editor of the Sunday Business Post.

He clearly sees how damaging the movement’s recent attempts to blacken the McCartney’s name have been. I too am amazed that SF don’t see how much damage they’re doing to themselves with this offensive against the sisters. Yet again, this is an example of how a political party or movement can fall spectacularly out of line with the broader public mood by choosing to only discuss issues amongst itself. In doing so, Republicans may have convinced each other that the sisters are nothing but a bunch traitors at worst or useful idiots at best, but don’t they realise how shockingly hypocritical/appalling the rest of Ireland views this attitude as.

As far as the rest of us are concerned, IRA men killed McCartney; the IRA covered for them by destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses out of aiding the police; the IRA then decided it had sole responsibility for policing and justice in this matter; they then proceeded to carry out their own secret kangaroo trial with presumably no recognisable judicial safeguards and then pronounced a punishment – with no right of appeal – that would not only have broken their own ceasefire but of a kind which has long since been rejected by the people of Ireland, namely the death penalty; and they even tried to pressurise the McCartney family into implicating themselves in these further murders by asking them to assent to the executions.

Throughout it all we’ve witnessed Sinn Féin aid and abet this process with seven of their members initially involved and now two election candidates who’ve refused to co-operate with the police. And two potential representatives who must take their future constituents for fools by pulling the ‘we saw nothin’ guv’ line. To top it all Sinn Féin have obfuscated on whether people should aid the police investigation, welcomed as ‘positive’ the IRA’s pronouncement of the death penalty on unidentified suspects after a secretive trial on a par with something out of Pinochet’s Chile and then denounced the police for bungling the investigation for political reasons. This last outburst all the more sanctimonious due to the party playing the whole squalid affair throughout for as much political advantage/damage limitation as possibly. It seems the McCartney's can just wait for their justice.

So, it’s no wonder, in light of all this that the rest of us are left aghast at the movements hypocrisy – with Ogra Sinn Féin to the fore – at laying the blame for a failure of justice at the feet of the murdered man’s heartbroken relatives.

I’m sure I'll not be alone in asking where the fúck do they get the gall?