With all the short-term posturing in the US mulling the IRA’s loss of support amongst professional and amateur enablers alike, Quillnews didn’t enjoy St. Patrick’s celebration at all this year. I had an aching lament: why did it take such a brutal spectacle of McCartney’s murder to make ordinarily right minded people stop and consider their own complicity in the continuing gangster activity by this group of posers, killers, thieves and liars who feast on the glory of others from another time and place and who know nothing of how their memories have been hijacked and disgraced.
Quillnews found a simply wonderful rumination on this subject by Gerald Baker in The Times of London (of all places). Money quote: “I have some questions for all these who have now suddenly decided that the Provisionals are a gang of thugs and murderers who must be brought to justice. Why does it take the killing of an Irish Catholic outside a Belfast pub to open your perceptive eyes to the reality of Irish republicanism? Where were you when it was a couple of dozen innocent British — Protestants and Catholics alike — in a Birmingham pub? Why were you not similarly outraged when off-duty soldiers and their families were the targets in Woolwich and Guildford? What exactly were you doing and saying when they tried to wipe out half the British Cabinet as they lay sleeping in their hotel beds? Don’t get me wrong. The murder of Robert McCartney is no less heinous than any of the IRA’s other offences. It is as much a study in murderous infamy as the remarkable response of his heroic sisters is a lesson in courage for all who love peace and justice. But that surely is the point. The McCartney horror is not, as the word now has it on the streets of New York and Boston, some startling revelation of the way these men behave, not some grisly departure from the honourable Irish fight for freedom. It merely confirms what most decent Irish have known about the IRA for years.”
Quillnews’ view: Scripture acknowledges that there a time for war and a time for peace; a time for love and a time for hate. But the year 2005 is not the time for hate and war in Ireland.
Comments