state let the provos away with murder

[Wasp]

Irish Independent
Time and again this State let the Provos away with murder
By Kevin Myers


Thursday April 24 2008

Garret FitzGerald -- our former Taoiseach -- recently condemned journalists for not publicly naming Gerry Adams as being a member of the IRA. Excellent! But when he was either Minister for Foreign Affairs, leader of the Opposition or Taoiseach, throughout so many years of the Troubles, he had ample opportunity to name all sorts of people as IRA men, and in the privilege of the Dail. However, he chose not to do so.

'Slab' Murphy, for example, was known to the authorities since 1970 as the most deadly IRA terrorist in the Louth area -- but Dr FitzGerald never named him. One might adjudge such reticence as prudent reluctance to prejudice a forthcoming trial: except, of course, there was no such trial. 'Slab' Murphy was only charged, for the first time in his life, earlier this year.

Now, I do not single out Dr FitzGerald for mention because he was especially negligent or hypocritical or insufficiently forceful in his attitude towards the IRA. I do so because he mentioned the failure of journalists to do our duty in outing prominent members of the IRA.

And he is right. Journalists have their fair share of the moral responsibility for the catastrophe of the Troubles. So too do lawyers, both for their timidity in interpreting the libel laws, for the role of some as sympathetic legal advisers to the IRA, and most of all, as a profession, for their failure to pro-actively defend the rights of the victims of terrorism.

It could have been otherwise. Take the Veronica Guerin murder, when the state, the media and the legal profession moved heaven and earth to ensure the culprits were caught. But the same combined will was never evident in dealing with the IRA, or indeed, with other terrorists.

How was it possible that the government in which Garret FitzGerald was foreign minister did not seek the extradition of the UVF men responsible for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974? An Garda Siochana had the names of nine of them. Was it for fear that if this state successfully brought Northern loyalists to book in the Republic, we should then have to extradite republican terrorists to the North? And of course, this was not what we were prepared to do.

In the round, as a society, we preferred for the IRA campaign to continue, rather than for us to take the necessary measures to quash it. No one can single out any individual or group here. It was a generalised condition. But Garret FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs when the IRA arms vessel the 'Claudia' was captured by the Naval Service in 1973.

The response of the government of the day was contemptibly abject.

"A protest might spur Col Gadafy to provide further supplies," said a Department of Foreign Affairs internal memo. Libyan involvement with the IRA was probably "due to a misunderstanding by Colonel Gadafy of the position in Ireland".

Good. So Dr FitzGerald said nothing. Our ambassador did not confront that Gadafy goon in his den to clear up that misunderstanding. He did not declare that in arming the IRA, he was arming the enemies of the government of Ireland, ones that had already murdered one of Dr FitzGerald's Oireachtas colleagues, Senator Billy Fox.

The result of our do-nothing policy was that Gadafy was to supply another 130 tons of guns and explosives to the IRA in the next 25 years. Another three thousand people died in the course of a campaign largely maintained by Libya. La Mon, Warrenpoint, Mullaghmore, Enniskillen: all done with Gadafy's Semtex. Hmmm. Quite a foreign policy triumph.

Moreover, the government -- in which, may I remind you, Dr FitzGerald was foreign minister -- allowed the gun-smuggling crew of the 'Claudia' to depart, without charge.

The IRA leader, Joe Cahill -- arrested in the course of this seminal arms-smuggling operation -- was later given a mere three years' imprisonment by that risible anti-terrorist instrument, the Special Criminal Court, before which not even a kindergarten infant would quail.

As it happened, he didn't even do that time (a poor heart, the poor dear), was soon released, and returned to his happy life of organising murder and grieving for another two-and-a-half decades.

Two years after the 'Claudia' debacle, and still while Dr FitzGerald was in government, the IRA murdered the British ambassador Christopher Ewart-Biggs and his secretary Judith Cooke, despite garda intelligence that such an attack was likely. It was one of just many atrocities which should have led to the state rolling up the entire apparatus of the IRA.

But no one was ever arrested for this heinous crime against civilisation. However, a garda was later found to have been passing information about the Ewart-Biggs/Cooke murder inquiry to the IRA.

He was charged under the Official Secrets Act and appeared before the Kilmainham District Court, where he admitted supplying numerous confidential documents to the IRA. Having heard his guilty plea, the court let him walk free, under the Probation Act.

And that's one example of how the Republic treated treason and terrorism, at the very time that Garret FitzGerald was in government.

[Wasp]

Collusion seems to be written all over it.

[bearhunter]

Kevin Myers seems to be written all over it. When all the other vestiges of the Troubles finally diusappear, I hope they take this risible gobshite with them. He's should get off his high horse once in a while before it collapses underneath him.

[Wasp]

OK BH but is he lying with what he said?

[bearhunter]

No I don't imagine he is. He's certainly exaggerating for effect as he usually does, but I would imagine many of the substantive points are valid. He's just a complete dick, is all I was saying...:-)

[Jim]

lol if the south was somehow soft on the provos i dread to think of the realities of the brits on the provos.

the south were brutal in finding them. looks like the writings of kevin myers, because the man is a tit with as much credibility as mr.blobby.

[earl]

Myers is going to be up infront of a tribunal soon anyway about lying about the Garda collusion BS he wrote a few years back. He's had that hanging over his head now for a while, and he's getting even more contrary as time goes on.

This fool even stated that we should vote no in the Lisbon treaty because of the influx of immigrants, when the Lisbon treaty has absolutely nothing to do with immigration!! Fuckin' English racist.

[Wasp]

So aprt from BH the rest of you are saying what he states in this article is complete lies??

[Wasp]

Earl how would you describe your description of himbeing an a fucking English racist? Is that in itslef not racist?

[bearhunter]

No Wasp it's a description.

[Wasp]

So if I described a journalist as a fucking Irish racist then that wouldn't be deemed any different from only being a description?

[bearhunter]

You're right, it wouldn't. It would only be racist if you already held a preconceived theory that the Irish are all racist. And I'm sure Earl does not believe for a moment that all English people are racist. Earl is pointing out that in his opinion, Myers is both English and racist, the two not necessarily being the same thing. Otherwise the phrase would have been redundant, like calling someone a fat lardarse or a ginger redhead. If it's the word "fucking" you object to, can I point out that in Ireland (both north and south) it is used so often in conversation as to be classed as punctuation.

[Blue Angel]

AH Kevin Myers, always some grand comedy in his articles - here's some classics - to borrow a phrase, 'It's the way I tell them'

How many girls - and we’re largely talking about teenagers here - consciously embark upon a career of mothering bastards because it seems a good way of getting money and accommodation from the State? Ah. You didn’t like the term bastard? No, I didn’t think you would.
There lies the ruin of Scotland - subsidies. Guaranteed transfers of capital from England have created a political culture of sloth which is now endemic and even personalised. Scottish people are the most obese in Europe, in which regard they resemble the wretched Scottish statelet. Only a minority of Scottish people work for a living - and most of those who have jobs are employed by the state: 577,300. In other words, they are employed by the English to manage themselves. The rest of the Scots are on the dole or pensions, living in state-owned housing estates, sending their children to state-run schools, where the most likely form of personal enterprise they will ever encounter is their local heroin-dealer.

But then again the Sindo is also the paper which published this load of old shite below, I remember reading this when it came out in 1996 :-

Time to get tough on tinker terror ‘culture’

Gardaí believe travellers (sic) are behind 90pc of attacks on the rural elderly. For too long intellectuals have “cherished” the squalid Traveller lifestyle. Instead, we must make these criminals pay, writes Mary Ellen Synon.
Sunday Independent, 28th January 1996.

We now know - some of us have always known – the source of the terror that has overtaken the lives of old people living alone in the country. It is lying on the roadside, living in the fields, sustained, encouraged, indulged by the money of the welfare state and the sanction of the intellectuals. I mean of course the travellers and their "culture".
We know it. But we are not supposed to say it. And yet there it was last week, simple, clear, and on the front page of the Irish Independent - how it got there I do not know: “Garda intelligence gathered over the past couple of months indicates that more than 90pc of the attacks on elderly people in rural areas are being carried out by travellers based mainly in three centres.”
And the week before, this from Kevin Myers, the last thinking journalist on The Irish Times: “A hugely disproportionate amount of the rural crime is by a handful or travellers . . . their deeds are inexplicable and horribly effective - they have generated an atmosphere of terror in rural areas unlike anything 1reland has experienced since the 1920s.”
It could not be otherwise. Little else could come from "cherishing" the caravan slum-life of tinkers.
Though or course it is not country people who “cherish” the tinkers. It is the intellectuals and the politicians. In their pursuit of levelling, these ideologues have manufactured the lie that each man is as good as the next. They point to the sewer that is a travellers' camp and lay: “That is a culture which must be honoured like any other.”
But honour, like stigma, is earned. And a tinker camp earns no honour.
Look at what it is, and what the intellectuals and the politicians say one should honour. It is a life of appetite ungoverned by intellect. It is a life which marauds over private property and disregards public laws. It is a life of money without production, land without cost, damage without compensation, assault without arrest, theft without prosecution, and murder without remorse. It is a life worse than the life of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals.
This tinker ‘culture’ is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of the surprising things about it is that not every individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil.
For the poverty and brutal life of the Travellers’ camps does not force anyone to become a criminal: it simply presents a life in which virtue has no reward and lawlessness is acceptable. Every man in every tinker camp who becomes a criminal - like every man anywhere who becomes a criminal - becomes evil by choice. Crime is volitional.
So consider what ought to be done with these breeding grounds of crime. Simple: stop petting tinkers and start treating them like all other citizens.
When they fail to insure or tax their cars, prosecute them. When they neglect or abuse their children, prose cute them. When they steal, prosecute them. When they murder, prosecute them. If then they are convicted of murder, imprison them for life. For life.
At which point, the intellectual and the politicians who have encouraged this tinker “culture” will say - as they are saying already – “We must not get hysterical about these murders. We do not know what causes these crimes. We must not seek simplistic" (admire for a moment the arrogance with which they used the word, 'simplistic') – “solutions.”
It is now time for citizens to refuse to be intimidated by such bilge from intellectuals. First, citizens are not “hysterical.” They are concerned, and they are right to be. Second, we do know what causes these crimes. Each assault, each murder, is caused by some individual - not “society” not a “peer group” - choosing to go out and seize a victim and rob and murder him for money or pleasure. Third, there is a solution to these crimes, and it is straightforward.
Murder is rarely a first crime. When each of the murderers of recent weeks is caught - and I pray to Nemesis that each will be caught - the Gardaí will find that each has a record of crime. A murderer starts with middling crime and move on to worse. So, politicians must give the Gardaí the means to pursue and prosecute and convict all crimes by all thugs. A man who commits armed robbery must go - with certainty, without exception - to prison for years. On release he must be told that, if he commits another serious crime, he will not be given just the same sentence again; he will be put in prison for life.
Though of course an intellectual will say, "prison does not work." He is lying. Prison does work. We need prisons, better, stronger prisons, lots of them. And we need police and courts with the power (and the will) to put thugs inside forever.
And should the prisons rehabilitate the inmates? Sure, they can try. Training and education ought to be available to those who plan to live straight after their release. But the first lesson in training and education must be this: if you do not obey the law once you are out of prison, you will certainly be back, and for the rest of your life.
For prison is not there to rehabilitate. It is there to retaliate.

[Blue Angel]

although the last article is by mary ellen synon who even the sindo dropped like a hot potato after the flak came back over that article...

[earl]

Apr 29, 2008 18:43:59 GMT Wasp said:

Earl how would you describe your description of himbeing an a fucking English racist? Is that in itslef not racist?

Last time I looked, Kevin Myers was white like me, so no it's not racist. He is a racist as his anti-immigration rants have proven in the past.