North & South

murphaph

Hydroquinone wrote:

I don't know if I agree with that.
I reckon there are a lot of republican and a lot of loyalist people on this board. I also think there are a lot of middly people, and these are the ones who get the most flak - from the big old republicans AND the big old loyalists.

All the "Well, if you don't agree with this specific point I'm making you must be one of THEM, you scummy person" crap gets really boring after a while.

Anyone attempting a middle ground or a bit of live and let live gets the the ever living you know what kicked out of them.

I agree in the main with the above but I don't think there are too many Loyalists on here at all tbh. Plenty of Nationalists and centre ground folk, and plenty of folk who couldn't give a toss about northerners abusing each other, but I wouldn't say too many Loyalists really, maybe a few unionists.

The northerners have made their bed now and opted for silly polarised political parties. I pity the few moderates who have to live with the rest of the rabble in Northern Ireland.

BuffyBot

very pro unionist forum

Time for the tin-foil hats, I suspect. It's many things, but to say that this forum is pro-anyone is a bit misleading. Pretty much everything gets questioned.

rsynnott

BuffyBot wrote:

Time for the tin-foil hats, I suspect. It's many things, but to say that this forum is pro-anyone is a bit misleading. Pretty much everything gets questioned.

Which is, of course, precisely as it should be.

tomMK1

oscarBravo wrote:

My rather obvious point is that the attitude you get from the police is almost invariably a reflection of the attitude you display towards them.

To risk repeating myself, as I made a similar reply to a similar remark in a different thread, but I have never foudn the RUC/PSNI to reflect the attitude I'd display to them. I would be polite and courious and their reaction would depend on what kind of RUC officers they were. Some arent that bad, but many I found to be a tad sectarian. Plus dont ask how they know a persons religion as they have a million ways of finding out.

Generally though, I have to disagree with that one point OscarBravo keeps making.

MrPudding

tomMK1 wrote:

Plus dont ask how they know a persons religion as they have a million ways of finding out.

How many of these "millions" of way would they be able to employ on a stranger that has just walked up to them in the street? Do they make you wear armbands or something?

MrP

tomMK1

Ive no idea. Where i come from though the PSNI are aware of areas for a start, plus theres your way of talking, expression etc, plus you'll normally find theres a part-time reservist living in your area who makes it his business to know who everyone is and what their religion is.

Are you trying to tell me that these things dont happen? because if you are then you're wasting your time. Many people have been harrassed by the RUC/PSNI and I doubt if they all were mindless thugs looking for trouble ....

murphaph

tomMK1 wrote:

Ive no idea. Where i come from though the PSNI are aware of areas for a start, plus theres your way of talking, expression etc, plus you'll normally find theres a part-time reservist living in your area who makes it his business to know who everyone is and what their religion is.

What's ypur experience with the police like when you're outside your own home area, for example when you're in a different town or city in Nothern Ireland in a central shopping area with no sectarian divide?

tomMK1

What's ypur experience with the police like when you're outside your own home area, for example when you're in a different town or city in Nothern Ireland in a central shopping area with no sectarian divide?

OUtside the local area it wouldnt be as bad at all. The only time i used to get hassle in a different area was years ago if the army stopped me and found out my name was 'Cormac' ..... then they'd just take ages to finish up whatever it was they were asking and make me wait for ages until they'd let me go on my business again.

Police harrassment would defintely be a localised thing though.

oscarBravo

Flex wrote:

C'mon, quit goin on about how bad the police were!!! Can't ya see that oscarBravo has destroyed your claims of 30 years of oppression and discrimination by explaining how his friend got directions when he got lost in a cul-de-sac or the time he got away without a traffic ticket!!

Funnily enough, I didn't set out to destroy anything. The impression being created was that the police in NI harass Catholics. I questioned this rather absurd proposition, and it seems the position now is that some police harass some Catholics - not necessarily because they're Catholic - under certain circumstances.

Don't know about you, but to me that's a completely different thing.

Flex wrote:

And who the hell do ya think ya were protesting anyway?!?!?!? LOL. Sheesh :rolleyes:

I don't remember suggesting that people shouldn't protest. I'm surprised that anyone would be naive enough to believe that an avowedly anti-police Republican tourist getting verbally abused by those same police is some kind of earth-shattering shock.

Flex wrote:

Yeah, but in fairness this is just a very pro unionist forum. People seem to choose to ignore Irish history prior to the 60's and 70's and beyond.

I'm way more interested in Irish history as it continues to unfold in the coming years. Nothing that anyone here or elsewhere says or does will change what happened in the last 30, 100 or 800 years, but every one of us is capable of having a positive influence on the future.

Or a negative influence, of course. That's the choice we all face.

tomMK1

oscarBravo wrote:

Funnily enough, I didn't set out to destroy anything. The impression being created was that the police in NI harass Catholics. I questioned this rather absurd proposition, and it seems the position now is that some police harass some Catholics - not necessarily because they're Catholic - under certain circumstances.

Don't know about you, but to me that's a completely different thing. I don't remember suggesting that people shouldn't protest. I'm surprised that anyone would be naive enough to believe that an avowedly anti-police Republican tourist getting verbally abused by those same police is some kind of earth-shattering shock.

following your general gist and train of thought, people who get harrassed by police in the north seem to deserve it or something.

I can tell you this though, I wont be wasting my breath 'debating' with you any further since its an absolute waste of time.

ps - replace 'some' with 'quite a lot' and you might be getting a bit nearer the truth

Zombrex

Flex wrote:

Yeah, but in fairness this is just a very pro unionist forum. People seem to choose to ignore Irish history prior to the 60's and 70's and beyond.

All I get from this forum is that most people are anti-IRA (as am I, bunch of terrorist thugs) and most people don't believe all the shamrock tinted glasses view of N.I put forward by the likes of Sinn Fein and the die-hard Republican movement. Which is a good thing, cause it is not a true reflection of N.I

Doesn't mean people are "very pro unionist", in fact the idea that to not support/believe the propaganda of N.I Republicanism must mean you are in fact "pro unionist" is ridiculous and an obvious tactic of said propaganda ("If you ain't with us you must be against us" type of stuff).

oscarBravo

tomMK1 wrote:

following your general gist and train of thought, people who get harrassed by police in the north seem to deserve it or something.

You're not following very well. I try to avoid absolute positions, because they're rarely accurate and tend to lead to entrenched positions.

I don't think that anyone "deserves" police harassment. I do suspect that some of the so-called "harassment" that goes on is the result of mutual antagonism; a suspicion that's only reinforced by FTA69's contributions to this forum.

tomMK1 wrote:

I can tell you this though, I wont be wasting my breath 'debating' with you any further since its an absolute waste of time.

Why is it a waste? Because I won't just shut up and agree with you?

tomMK1 wrote:

ps - replace 'some' with 'quite a lot' and you might be getting a bit nearer the truth

Just how long is that piece of string, anyway? I can't quantify the level of police harassment of Catholics, and it seems you can't either. I suspect it's less than you'd like us to believe it is, and the fact that I know of Catholics who lived, worked and traveled extensively in the North for years without ever encountering harassment reinforces that suspicion.

Zombrex

tomMK1 wrote:

following your general gist and train of thought, people who get harrassed by police in the north seem to deserve it or something.

I think the point he is making is that any police force has bad police who pick on people they believe are "trouble makers". What people have failed to do is show that this is still (don't want to get into a debate about if it ever was) systematic in N.I,that the police target people for being Catholic, instead of say simply looking like a scum bag or a thug. A few of the lads I know at work say they get stopped all the time in Dublin cause they dress, in my opinion, a bit scum baggish (gold chain, track suit etc .. they didn't put it quite like that obviously ) They are nice lads never been involved with crime or anything AFAIK. They, I would imagine, are both Catholic.

Now if they got stopped in N.I would you assume automatically that it is because they are Catholic? I am not saying them being stopped is right (it isn't) but I am saying just because Catholics are stopped in N.I by aggressive police doesn't mean they are being stopped because they are Catholic. Nearly 50% of the pop are Catholic.

Or put another way, are there a lot of middle-class, or upper-class Catholics who complain about harrashment from the PSNI?

If you want to show a link show that far far more Catholics are stopped than Protestants.

I was told of a 60 yr old woman visiting from Australia last year.
She was in the post office here locally and her bag(similar to a tesco long life bag only made of wool) fell from her and all its contents on the floor.
She gathered it all up and bought her stamps and posted her cards.

The Gardaí were at her sisters house where she was staying that night arrested her for the theft of someones wallet(inadvertently gathered in the pile) and locked her up in the cell without as much as a glass of water.
It all went as far as court.
The judge threw out the case when he viewed the security video and maintained the Gardaí shouldnt have given an obviously innocent 60yr old woman such a hard time.

When she was leaving the court with her sister, she was tapped on the shoulder by the guard and he said... we know you stole it by the way, ye act as a team dont ye...

Now theres an incident from the Gardaí-should we have a new force based on that? nope but I'm sure there are other examples as there are the world over.

A nice ombudsmans office like Nual O' Loans would be good though.

Wheely

murphaph wrote:

I think I may have been misunderstood. When I say real soldier, I don't mean someone who happens to be in a uniform. I mean a fighter who risks his or her own life in their pursuit of their enemy. The original poster compared these children to collateral damage in a conventional war. This is patently ridiculous-leaving bombs in civilian shopping areas is an attempt to murder civilians. They weren't caught in the crossfire in Warrington-they were the targets!

So your saying then that collateral damage in a "conventional war" is excusable. WHat about where collateral damage, a phrase that I detest, overlaps with, say a war crime. What is collateral damage? What, for that matter is a conventional war? Say that WW2 was a conventional war, and the untied States a conventional army, nad Harry Truman a conventional commander in chief-therfore the 2 bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and nagasaki, killing a total of 130,000 people, would be collateral damage right? Or would that make the states amry, or a least the pilot of the enola gay, who was on direct oreders from his commander in chief, "gutless, spineless scum" cos while im sure it was so long ago and we all like to believe that this these MASSIVE CITIES were "military targerts" im sure there was quite a few civilians, children, and ENTIRE SHOPPING AREAS wiped out that day in Japan! I just think all this talk of legitmacy in war is a load of crap....phrases like "enemy combatants" and "collateral damage" are just nonsensical phrases created to make sense out of something that makes none. War is murders whichever way yo0u cut it.

murphaph

Wheely wrote:

So your saying then that collateral damage in a "conventional war" is excusable. WHat about where collateral damage, a phrase that I detest, overlaps with, say a war crime. What is collateral damage? What, for that matter is a conventional war? Say that WW2 was a conventional war, and the untied States a conventional army, nad Harry Truman a conventional commander in chief-therfore the 2 bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and nagasaki, killing a total of 130,000 people, would be collateral damage right? Or would that make the states amry, or a least the pilot of the enola gay, who was on direct oreders from his commander in chief, "gutless, spineless scum" cos while im sure it was so long ago and we all like to believe that this these MASSIVE CITIES were "military targerts" im sure there was quite a few civilians, children, and ENTIRE SHOPPING AREAS wiped out that day in Japan! I just think all this talk of legitmacy in war is a load of crap....phrases like "enemy combatants" and "collateral damage" are just nonsensical phrases created to make sense out of something that makes none. War is murders whichever way yo0u cut it.

I am merely stating that the kids the IRA have killed were targetted by the IRA, they weren't killed indirectly in an attack on some other military target. That is in marked contrast to a soldier who goes head to head with another soldier on the field of battle. War involves killing, but it is sometimes entirely justified. Would you rather the second world war had continued until the Nazi death camps had eliminated all traces of 'non-aryan' blood in Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond? Of course not-the allies had to go to war with Germany. War is not pretty, but in this world which is not a beautiful utopian society we live in, deal with it.

Boggle

Back to it being a RA thread... BRILLIANT!!

Can ye ever discuss the north without descending into a pro/anti RA debate?? The question the original poster asked (before the pages of drivel about the RA that I had neither the time nor the inclination to read) was whether the Island will ever be a single state again. Personally, I don't see it happening either as what it will eventually boil down to (after the sectariansism sorts itself out) the question: Under whose rule will they be better off? or Which govt will better represent me? ... Dunno about you, but I'd vote the bloody labour party in here right now if it meant an end to the shambles of a country we currently live in.

Disagree? Look at the state of our roads/healthcare/public services/dilution of rights/inability to buy a house/corruption... I know they're not all much better over there and I disagree with him on the war but at least their govt seems interested in doing something about their problems. Bertie likes swimming pools.
And don't bother quoting our economic "success" - it'll be back to bite us soon enough!

Wheely

murphaph wrote:

War involves killing, but it is sometimes entirely justified. Would you rather the second world war had continued until the Nazi death camps had eliminated all traces of 'non-aryan' blood in Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond? Of course not-the allies had to go to war with Germany. War is not pretty, but in this world which is not a beautiful utopian society we live in, deal with it.

I know war involves killing, and it may be sometimes entirely justified and im under no illusion that we live in a beautiful utopian society but i have to point out that while i feel iv given you many many examples of the ugliness and futility of war, that is in " marked contrast" with you who has given me none of its "glory" or "honour". Also while i mentioned ww2 i refered to the US-Japan conflict, not the allied-German, the latter being fought for noble enough reasons (hitler was a nazi thug, hell-bent on conquest), and the former being fought over greedy little men eyeing up islands in the pacific,a slightly less noble motive. Also the war in Europe was over and the death camps exposed by the time Truman dropped the TWO atomic bombs on Japan...at the same time this is a North-South thread and I think were getting off the topic a little bit.

tomMK1

oscarBravo wrote:

You're not following very well. I try to avoid absolute positions, because they're rarely accurate and tend to lead to entrenched positions.

I don't think that anyone "deserves" police harassment. I do suspect that some of the so-called "harassment" that goes on is the result of mutual antagonism; a suspicion that's only reinforced by FTA69's contributions to this forum. Why is it a waste? Because I won't just shut up and agree with you? Just how long is that piece of string, anyway? I can't quantify the level of police harassment of Catholics, and it seems you can't either. I suspect it's less than you'd like us to believe it is, and the fact that I know of Catholics who lived, worked and traveled extensively in the North for years without ever encountering harassment reinforces that suspicion.

I know of catholics who havent been effected by living in the north, and I know catholics who have. Your assumption that because you personally dont know too many who have been harrassed, doesnt mean it doesnt happen, and it doesnt mean those that are harrassed ask for it. you 'suspect it's less than you'd like us to believe it is" - why is that? Because YOU havent witnessed it much?

tomMK1

Wicknight wrote:

I think the point he is making is that any police force has bad police who pick on people they believe are "trouble makers". What people have failed to do is show that this is still (don't want to get into a debate about if it ever was) systematic in N.I,that the police target people for being Catholic, instead of say simply looking like a scum bag or a thug. A few of the lads I know at work say they get stopped all the time in Dublin cause they dress, in my opinion, a bit scum baggish (gold chain, track suit etc .. they didn't put it quite like that obviously ) They are nice lads never been involved with crime or anything AFAIK. They, I would imagine, are both Catholic.

Now if they got stopped in N.I would you assume automatically that it is because they are Catholic? I am not saying them being stopped is right (it isn't) but I am saying just because Catholics are stopped in N.I by aggressive police doesn't mean they are being stopped because they are Catholic. Nearly 50% of the pop are Catholic.

Or put another way, are there a lot of middle-class, or upper-class Catholics who complain about harrashment from the PSNI?

If you want to show a link show that far far more Catholics are stopped than Protestants.

Where in the world would you get a link like that? I suppose, I could make up a page, whack it up on the web, pretend its from someone important and provide a link, but whats the point in that?

I havent a clue why people get harrassed, but I know i was harrassed due to my religion - mainly because I had never been iun trouble with the RUC, wasnt a scumbag, nor gave them whatever reasons oscarbravo thinks people give the RUC in order to get harrassed.

I do know that I would get stopped at 5 minute intervails for about 40 mins, each time being asked the same questions. I also know that that has been happening in Omagh recently (with in the last 10 months anyway) and its only been happening to catholics so draw your own conclusions from that. Personally Im not going to debate this with anyone as its a tad bit pointless

murphaph

tomMK1 wrote:

....its [police repeatedly stopping and questioning people without reason] only been happening to catholics so draw your own conclusions from that

You have no way of knowing that this only happens to Catholics, if indeed it happens at all.

tomMK1

in the circumstances of people being stopped and harrassed, i dont remember any non-catholics reporting it. there was a lot of news about it in the ulster herald a few months back.

" if indeed it happens at all." - No, sure these things dont happen. all those silly northerners make these things up.

tomMK1

just like the priest who was being harassed by orange parade promoters a few weeks back, but sure that obviously didnt happen either.

murphaph

tomMK1 wrote:

in the circumstances of people being stopped and harrassed, i dont remember any non-catholics reporting it.

I take it they don't report it to you. That doesn't mean they don't report it.

The recent alledged harrassment and assault of a group of young protestants in the Waterside area of (Londodn)Derry which only made the news because a neighbour happened to record part of the alledged assault on a video camera, just goes to highlight that none of the big parties make waves when young protestants are harrassed by the police. The reasons are obvious;

1)What benefit is it to SF to highlight that the PSNI aren't sectarian at all, that they harrass catholic & protestant youth alike.

2)What beneft is it to unionist parties to highlight the instruments of state as being in any way suspect, giving ammunition to those who would seek to have Northern Ireland leave that state.

All in all young protestants seem to have nobody to stick up for them so it is then just accepted that nobody ever gives them any hassle.

tomMK1

thats very sad.

not.

murphaph

tomMK1 wrote:

thats very sad.

not.

....and here lies all of Northern Ireland's problems in one post. It's a sh!thole full of hatred and because of attitudes like your's, it always will be.

murphaph

murphaph wrote:

....and here lies all of Northern Ireland's problems in one post. It's a sh!thole full of hatred and because of attitudes like your's, it always will be.

Murphaph you could have asked tomMK1 to explain his comment(pre empting further reasonable discussion) before rushing in with that sort of post.
If I see any more of that I will have to sanction you.

murphaph

Earthman wrote:

Murphaph you could have asked tomMK1 to explain his comment(pre empting further reasonable discussion) before rushing in with that sort of post.
If I see any more of that I will have to sanction you.

Fair enough Earthman, won't happen again.

TomMK1, could you explain why you don't care about police harrassment of young protestants, indeed you seem to believe it to be a good thing?

tomMK1

i completely do care - its just out of the protestant people I know who live in tyrone, none of them have ever been harrassed, nor have any people I know ever really heard much about unionists being singled out for harrassment, so whilst I dont disagree with you, i doubt theres half or a quarter as many unionists (its not a relgious thing, but a political one) get that kind of treatment compared to nationalists. things have changed right enough in the recent years, as loyalism turned against the security forces (say in comparision to the mid 80s), but have they have changed that much? I honestly doubt it.

i have to ask though, how come you dont believe many nationalists get harrassment, but have no trouble believing unionists get harrased by the PSNI?

murphaph

tomMK1 wrote:

i completely do care

That doesn't tally wih your response to my comment of;

murphaph wrote:

All in all young protestants seem to have nobody to stick up for them so it is then just accepted that nobody ever gives them any hassle.

Which was;

tomMK1 wrote:

thats very sad. not

tomMK1 wrote:

i have to ask though, how come you dont believe many nationalists get harrassment, but have no trouble believing unionists get harrased by the PSNI?

I believe that police harrassment in both communities does go on, however I believe it is limited and wouldn't differ greatly from the level of Garda harrassment down south, also limited.

If you believe 3 times as many catholics are harrassed by the PSNI as protestants then surely the best thing is to increase the number of catholics in the force, so presumably you favour more catholics joining up.