Cost of a United Ireland and the GFA

Would generally have been counter productive; it was in the interests of the British people NOT to have their citizens murdered and their economy destroyed in the economic war the IRA fought ( thousands of explosions, destroying the tourism industry, murdering businessmen from overseas who came to invest for the good of all the community etc ).

Of course there are statistics to back that up. I thought basic information like that would be known to someone like yourself though, who has posted tens of thousands of times about N.I.

Quote "Of the 116 deaths in Co Fermanagh related to the Troubles, over 100 were perpetrated by the IRA, and more than 90% of them remain unsolved to..."

If you google "number of people killed in fermanagh during troubles" it is in the 2nd and 3rd link down. I am just on my phone now and even I can do that. It is in the Newsletter, 24 Jun 2017

I've no issue with the judgement but the assertion that it was directed at Drew Harris is false, he communicated the decision of the CC as he was probably tasked to do..

“The unfairness here is extreme – where the applicant had believed that the murder of his brother would finally be considered in context for the purposes of discovering if there was any evidence of collusion in the murder, that process is now completed and will not be taken up by any other body. The frustration of the HET commitment communicated by the ACC completely undermined the “…primary aim [of the HET] to address as far as possible, all the unresolved concerns that families have”. It has completely undermined the confidence of the families whose concerns are not only still unresolved but compounded by the effects of the decisions taken by the then Chief Constable. It is a matter of very grave concern that almost two decades after the McKerr series of judgments decisions were taken apparently by the Chief Constable to dismantle and abandon the principles adopted and put forward to the CM to achieve art 2 compliance. There is a real risk that this will fuel in the minds of the families the fear that the state has resiled from its public commitments because it is not genuinely committed to addressing the unresolved concerns that the families have of state involvement. In the context of the Glennane series, as I said earlier, the principal unresolved concern of the families is to have identified and addressed the issues and questions regarding the nature, scope and extent of any collusion on the part of state actors in this series of atrocities including whether they could be regarded, as the applicant argued, as part of a ‘state practice’. I consider that whether the legitimate expectation is now enforceable or not its frustration is inconsistent with Article 2, the principles underpinning the ECtHR judgments in the McKerr series and with the Package of Measure.

If a 'Loyalist' can manage to come here and dismantle the vile hierarchical 'frankly disgusting' attitude that prevailed in our Gardai that's fine with me.

I am not in the least surprised. I have known the figures for a long time.

What I don't know is the data you have failed to supply when asked, relating to how Fermanagh compares to the rest of NI in terms of unsolved killings.

I.E. As the article I posted earlier with more extensive data shows, there are ten times the amount of unsolved killings in Fermanagh being investigated by the legacy teams and as you said that doesn't represent the totality.

So is Fermanagh an outlier or not?

Statistics are dangerous things in the wrong hands.

You claimed this about the Legacy team to infer they were being selective in favour of republicans and ignoring republican killings in Fermanagh:

I got no data so I can assume this was another bogus claim.

Shortly after that you were asked for data on the Fermanagh killings, you presented a newspaper article, which while many things, is not data.

I outlined exactly what you needed to provide:

Nobody is shifting goalposts.

If you look at the 'legacy' cases it is most definitely clear. What else could you observe?

I didn't make any claims about the unsolved cases in Fermanagh.

Now, I am not getting into a back and forth on this.

Either you can present comparative data or you can't, which renders your point meaningless in the whole context of the conflict/war.

I knew all about them and the false narrative that it was ethnic cleansing, most of them had connections to the UDR or security forces.

Including the one about a man who lived in a village a few miles away from here. The narrative is he was killed because he was s protestant while the reality was he was warned to stop supplying the military.

Before you infer anything from that, it was still wrong but it wasn’t ethnic cleansing.

As regards legacy investigations, I made NO claims about that bar the observation that one side had gotten more closure than the other.

You made claims there is something unique about Fermanagh without presenting comparative data.

Last time.

I asked first for a link/source to your probably bogus claim that legacy cases were only being conducted on behalf of nationalists.

And I asked for ‘data’ on the Fermanagh deaths that showed it was different to other areas in the context of unsolved cases given that the legacy team was working on 10 times the amount in Fermanagh and even YOU said that was not all the unsolved cases.

wakey wakey, collusion has been proven. Are you related to Blanch152 because both of you could do with learning a bit and doing your research a bit better. He says she says and dodgy media reporting just arent good enough sources.

Glad you are wakening up, collusion was proven -for example - many years ago, when a tribunal found there had been collusion here in the Republic between members of the Gardaí and the IRA, which resulted in the deaths of some RUC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithwick_Tribunal

That is not to tar the entire Gardai: most Gardai were very against the IRA/Republicans, especially as some Gardai were murdered by Republicans etc. At least 23 serving Gardaí have been killed by individuals or groups associated with the Republican paramilitary groups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Garda%C3%AD_killed_in_the_line_of_duty

Hundreds of thousands of security force personnel served in N.I. during the 3 decades of the trouble. Considering so many people suffered ptsd and stress from seeing colleagues blown up, seriously injured, and from being being targets 24/7, it was inevitable there would be a few bad apples there too.

Republicans still committed 60% of the murders and nearly 100% of the thousands of explosions / damage to property (economic war).

The Widgery report uncovered that McGuinness was seen with a machine gun that day, as seen and testified by Fr Daly (later Bishop Daly). Something that did not make Daly popular around Derry for a few years;). Was it not a case there was also collusion between the British Authorities and the PIRA, in having the priest involved in the Claudy bombing moved quietly away, in order to avoid further bloodshed in NI. And you talk about collusion:) Of course there was, as proven by the Smithwick Tribunal. And what about the arms trial?

What do you think about the 23 serving Gardaí who have been killed by individuals or groups associated with the Republican paramilitary groups?

Of course there were some innocent people killed by the security forces of the UK, same as there were innocent people killed by the Irish security services and every government in the world. I would condemn those, as would every right thinking person. However the truth may need be as clear cut as you were led to believe. Remember hundreds of thousands of security force people served in N.I. over the course of the troubles. They were humans. Did some of those hundreds of thousands make mistakes? Yes, of course some did. Did most or even 1% - that is one per cent - of the hundreds of thousands kill a single person, or do anything wrong which led to the death of one person each? The answer has to be no, given the overall death toll. Otherwise the numbers killed would have been far higher.

Interesting Bloody Sunday is mentioned, yet again for the millionth time. Any word on who killed the catholic and protestant policemen in Derry just before Bloody Sunday, leading to increased tensions on Bloody Sunday? Also, according to the link below, "Sinn Fein MP Martin McGuinness admitted he was the IRA gunman who sparked Bloody Sunday with a single shot, according to an informer, the Saville inquiry was told" https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/apr/07/bloodysunday.northernireland

re the cost of a United Ireland - I asked this before and got some kind of buffoonery as a reply, plus I mentioned it in the other thread on a UI - why are we talking about cost before we have even discussed the concept? Where is the logic there? why dont we have a citizen's assembly about it? What is the argument against that idea?

https://www.sinnfein.ie/files/2022/Citizens_Assembly_on_Irish_Unity.pdf

For over a century the official policy of this State, and of its dominant political parties, has been in favour of reunification. It would be absurd to ditch such a long-standing and central policy without a very full exploration of the policy itself and of the policy alternatives.

It would be fair to say that, precisely because of the broad consensus about this policy, the policy itself has not been much discussed or debated, and it remains quite vague. But that, too, argues in favour of some serious research, reflection, examination and discussion.

There are those who think that reunification is impractical, undesirable or both, but those people should be among the keenest to see a full engagement with the policy, since — assuming their good faith, which I do — they must think that getting properly to grips with the policy will need show how impractical or undesirable it is, and will force those who pay lip-service to it to confront reality.

Rationally, both the proponents and the opponents of renunification should want the policy to be explored and fleshed out — the proponents, because the policy can't be implemented until it has been properly formed; and the opponents, because they should expect the exploration and fleshing out of the policy to result in increased opposition to it.

While there are some good point in Sam's post, I think the methodology needs more thought.

Essentially, the approach is to look at various elements of the current payments from Westminster to NI and see how they might be addressed in a reunification situation. But that approach takes the current subvention as a given; it fails to ask why NI needs this subvention, to what extent the need is attributable to partition, and whether ending partition might affect the need for the subvention (positively or negatively). After all the subvention has varied quite a lot from year to year even during partition.

We're just taking a narrow look at government finances here, and even then just at a snapshot - this year's subvention - and treating that as an immutable fact of nature, so to speak.

I think what's needed is a much broader look not at government finances but at NI's overall economy. Tax and spending in NI are both affected by NI's economic performance, so to model whether NI will need the same subvention, a bigger subvention or a smaller subvention after unification you must first of all ask how NI's economy will be affected by reunification. Which may not be easy to model, but the fact that it's difficult doesn't make it any less necessary.