Alternative Ulster

Keeping child abuse private has all but destroyed Irish Catholicism, which also uses the language of victimhood and persecution complexes to deflect legitimate questions. But in the case of Irish republicanism, worries about paedophiles feel comically misplaced. Journalists are criticising Adams for failing to protect children when he was at the top of a movement that killed children. They can do so with a straight face because the Good Friday Agreement was meant to have made Sinn Fein and the front organisations for unionist death squads "normal" parties. Politicians and pundits insist we must thank them for not trying to kill us anymore. I would be more grateful if one price of the peace process had not been the propagation of dangerous myths.

The language of "process" suggests that today's settlement flowed from the thousands of murders of the dirty war of 1969 to 1997; that sectarianism produced a reward of sorts. Sinn Fein has a propaganda interest in covering up the blunt fact that the police and army wore down the IRA by riddling it with double agents, but that is no reason for others to go along with the fantasy that the war had a point. Even if it had been a better fighting force, the IRA could never have won because the idea of bombing Ulster into a united Ireland was absurd as well as immoral. For all its constitutional claims to the north and sincere concerns for Catholics, the Republic never wanted to integrate a million Ulster Protestants.

Nick Cohen tells it how it is. Compare and contrast, if you will, the opinion of our own dear Bomber, on the occasion of the British Army's departure from Ulster:

After the butchery the Sunday Bloody Sunday the British swine had no moral authority and only colonial arrogance kept them in the country, one hopes for the mothers and fathers of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq that our dear British friends have learned not to stay where they are not wanted.

No, dear boy: what kept the Army in Ulster was the certain knowledge that, if they were to go, civil war would have followed. Gerry Adams and his merry band of sociopaths would have taken on the equally attractive Unionist mentalists. Eventually the Unionists would have won. The Republic, far from rushing to the aid of its Catholic kinsfolk, would have looked the other way: what Bomber and other lefties who splutter about British Colonialism fail to understand is that PIRA are as much the enemies of Eire as of the British. It would have been like Beirut, without the sunshine.