Hugo

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

I read the article carefully. The prose style has a definite Eilis O'Hanlon (who, whether she's your cup of tea or not, is definitely a gifted writer) aura about it.
This piece is classic E O'H wit:
''It could have been worse. They could have shown a few hours before, when Braveheart was projected onto the side of a gable wall to entertain us all as we ate bowls of stew and channelled our inner William Wallace.''

I am beginning to wonder.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@leeam_dubwest @irish_news 'She's a Nationalist herself'
Could have fooled me.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

The Irish State and the IRA: allegations are not evidence

David Johnstone makes an extraordinary allegation against the Irish State: that it was either an active participant in IRA terrorism during the Troubles or knowingly turned a blind eye to it. Yet the evidence he offers falls considerably short of establishing either proposition.
Nobody seriously disputes that the Provisional IRA used the Republic as a base for some of its operations, that weapons and explosives were obtained south of the Border, or that IRA members sometimes escaped into the Republic after attacks in Northern Ireland. But these are facts about the activities of an illegal paramilitary organisation. They do not, in themselves, establish the complicity of the State within whose territory those activities occurred.
Johnstone’s argument appears to rest on the assumption that because the Irish authorities failed to prevent particular activities, they must have knowingly permitted them. That is a considerable logical leap. A failure of law enforcement, even a serious or repeated failure, is not synonymous with deliberate collusion.
On the "safe haven" claim: The suggestion that the Republic was a permissive sanctuary ignores that the IRA's campaign was also directed against the Irish State. The IRA killed Garda officers, attacked Irish institutions, and posed a direct threat to the Republic's stability . The Irish government believed Sinn Féin and the PIRA sought to destabilise the Republic . This is not the posture of a state "turning a blind eye"—it is the posture of a state under threat.‌
Consider his allegation concerning explosives obtained from the Irish Industrial Explosives factory in Enfield. Even if his claim about the scale of the IRA’s acquisition of gelignite is accurate, what precisely does it prove about the Irish Government? Where is the evidence that ministers, senior civil servants or Garda authorities knew that explosives were being diverted and deliberately facilitated their diversion? Johnstone supplies none in the interview.
On the claim that Dublin "turned a blind eye": Johnstone asserts the Irish State "knew what was happening" regarding explosives from the Enfield factory. The historical record is more complex. The Gardaí and Irish Army actively patrolled the Enfield facility, preventing direct IRA access . The IRA acquired gelignite through theft from quarries, farms, and construction sites across the Republic—a problem of civilian theft, not state complicity . A British explosives expert's 1972 warning that material could be removed does not prove that the Irish State sanctioned or ignored such removals. If the standard is that a state is complicit whenever it fails to prevent all thefts from civilian facilities, then the same logic would indict the British state for every weapon stolen from its own armouries.‌
More importantly, his account conspicuously neglects the Irish State’s sustained campaign against republican paramilitarism.
In May 1972, the Government re-established the Special Criminal Court, dispensing with juries in specified cases involving subversive activity. Later that year, it introduced further legislation strengthening the powers available to the authorities. The Provisional IRA’s chief of staff, Seán Mac Stiofáin, was arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. Republican prisoners were incarcerated in Portlaoise under stringent security arrangements.
There is another particularly inconvenient historical fact which Johnstone entirely overlooks. The Irish Government moved to exclude republican paramilitary propaganda from the airwaves long before the British Government took comparable action.
As early as 1971, Jack Lynch’s Government invoked Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act to prohibit broadcasts calculated to promote the objectives of organisations advocating political violence. In 1976, Conor Cruise O’Brien considerably strengthened these restrictions, explicitly excluding spokespersons for the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin from RTÉ.
These restrictions remained in force until 1994. They were substantially more sweeping than the broadcasting restrictions introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in October 1988, some twelve years after the Irish measures had been strengthened.
Indeed, when announcing the British restrictions in the House of Commons, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd explicitly acknowledged that they followed closely the provisions already operating in the Republic.
Whatever one’s views about the merits of political censorship — and there were entirely legitimate civil-liberties objections to Section 31 — it is difficult to reconcile this sustained governmental determination to deny the IRA and its political representatives access to the national broadcasting service with Johnstone’s portrayal of an Irish State content to turn a blind eye to republican terrorism.
Even more striking is his failure to acknowledge the price paid by members of An Garda Síochána in confronting republican paramilitarism.
Garda Michael Clerkin was killed by an IRA booby-trap bomb in 1976. Garda James Quaid was shot dead by the IRA in 1980. Recruit Garda Gary Sheehan and Irish Army Private Patrick Kelly were shot dead in 1983 while attempting to rescue businessman Don Tidey from his Provisional IRA kidnappers. Detective Garda Frank Hand was murdered by the Provisional IRA in 1984 while escorting a postal delivery. Detective Garda Jerry McCabe was murdered by members of the Provisional IRA at Adare in 1996, while his colleague Ben O’Sullivan was grievously wounded.
Other Gardaí, including John Morley, Henry Byrne and Sergeant Patrick Morrissey, lost their lives confronting the INLA.
These were not hypothetical or token efforts to combat republican terrorism. These were members of the Irish security forces who lost their lives in the course of confronting violent republican organisations.
The proposition that the Irish State was simply providing a congenial sanctuary for republican paramilitaries becomes considerably more difficult to sustain when one considers that its own police officers and soldiers were being murdered by those same organisations.
On collusion: Johnstone's framing implies the Irish State was "arguably an active participant" in terrorism. The Smithwick Tribunal did find collusion between individual members of An Garda Síochána and the IRA in the 1989 killings of RUC officers Breen and Buchanan . That finding is serious and must be acknowledged. But individual misconduct is not state policy. The Smithwick Report itself, and the subsequent Garda response, demonstrated institutional commitment to addressing the findings rather than concealing them . The Irish government has since committed to establishing a new Garda legacy unit and full cooperation with UK-led processes . Contrast this with the documented pattern of British state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries—a pattern that produced multiple official inquiries and findings of systemic failure at the highest levels. Johnstone's asymmetry is telling: he demands accountability from Dublin while defending the British Army's "lawful orders" doctrine.‌‌‌

None of this disproves the existence of individual instances of collusion, nor does it absolve the Irish authorities of responsibility for failures of policing or intelligence. But it does make nonsense of any simplistic suggestion that the Irish Government and the Provisional IRA were essentially operating on the same side.
The historical record is considerably more complicated than Johnstone’s account allows. A serious assessment of the Irish State’s conduct must encompass not only the occasions on which it failed to prevent IRA activity, but also the legislation it enacted, the prosecutions it pursued, the propaganda restrictions it imposed and the lives its security forces lost in combating republican paramilitarism.
These are hardly the actions one would ordinarily associate with a government pursuing a policy of deliberate toleration of IRA.
Johnstone is entitled to demand that the Irish State account for failures and misconduct during the Troubles. Indeed, there is no defensible reason why credible allegations of Garda collusion should escape investigation. But the same principle must apply to allegations concerning British security forces.
Here, his position becomes considerably more problematic.
He objects to renewed investigations into killings by British soldiers, arguing that the passage of time and the circumstances in which soldiers operated make retrospective scrutiny unfair. Yet his own allegations against the Irish authorities concern events of precisely the same historical period.
Why should the passage of fifty years constitute a compelling objection to examining the conduct of British soldiers, but apparently no impediment to making sweeping accusations against the Irish state.
There is no inconsistency in condemning IRA violence, demanding accountability for genuine Garda collusion and insisting upon proper investigation of potentially unlawful killings by British soldiers.
The inconsistency arises when markedly different evidential standards are applied to the two states.
Johnstone’s allegations against the Republic deserve examination, but examination is not the same as acceptance. The historical record establishes that the IRA exploited territory within the Republic and that there were serious instances of misconduct and collusion involving state personnel. It also establishes that successive Irish governments employed substantial coercive powers against republican paramilitaries.
What Johnstone has not demonstrated is that the Irish State, as a matter of governmental policy, actively participated in or deliberately tolerated the IRA’s campaign. That is an extraordinary claim and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Johnstone's interview is not an argument for truth or accountability. It is an argument for closing the file on one side of the conflict while keeping it open on the other. The Irish State has its failures to answer for. But those failures, where documented, have been investigated and acknowledged. The British State's failures remain, in many cases, unresolved. Until that asymmetry is addressed, claims of "tokenism" from Dublin ring hollow.
Johnstone's framing of a state that "turned a blind eye" collapses against the aforementioned facts. The Irish State proscribed the IRA, imprisoned its members, lost its Gardaí to its guns, and silenced its spokesmen on the airwaves long before London did the same.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@ryanpaulwarren That means nationalist parties command about 50% of the vote.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

She abandoned every cause with which she was ever associated -- always an ominous sign.
In terms of where's she is at at the moment you can almost see a balloon over her head:
'I'm on to a good thing here'.
I often wonder if she actually writes her articles and is not just a conduit for somebody else.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@irelandresource @100Northern And banned SF spokespeople from the airwaves -- long before the UK did.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@KingDavid9y Does 'never again' apply to everyone -- or the Jews only?

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@ui_sinead This by the way was in response to criticism by her of MON's appearance on the Late Late Show.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

I took issue with some points made by MC on the recent Brendan O'Connor show. All very tame, temperate, and well within the parameters of civilised debate. This resulted in a prompt blocking. Blocking someone who is threatening or abusive -- fair enough. But just because someone disagrees with you on certain issues! It suggests a certain intellectual and emotional fragility. She also a leading light of the anti-G Road protestor chorus -- one of their main refrains being 'nationalism's intolerance of dissent'. Obviously not a woman to be subjected to the tyranny of consistency.
You could almost see a balloon above her head:
'This guy sounds as if he knows what he's talking about. He could be awkward opposition down the road. I'd better nip this in the bud: where's the block button?'
Here's the post:
“This perhaps could be seen as a balancing out of the Brendan O’Connor show in which you participated where there was a glaring and frustrating lack of anyone batting for the G Road residents. I wanted to get their perspective. I may not necessarily have agreed with it but I wanted to get it. You made a few unsound analyses here by the way: Catherine Connolly is not particularly nationalist — she is an old-fashioned Eamon McCann-type socialist. As if the result of a Southern presidential election is going to shift the Northern political dial one degree. As for the UI implications of the recent Drumcree recurrence: It is pretty obvious to me having watched the general debate that those who are pro-UI are spinning it as favouring their cause; those who are anti are spinning the converse.”

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@dpk714 @ui_sinead Snap

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@ui_sinead If you check out synonyms of 'sanitise' in the Cambridge Dictionary 'cleanse' takes pride of place. There is not much of a conceptual leap from 'cleanse' to 'ethnic cleanse'.
Chilling.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

Deep down Eilis O'Hanlon is actually pro-UI. She just doesn't like certain groups of people that are also pro-UI and enjoys winding them up.
There was an article by Eilis published in the Belfast Telegraph on 20 December 2018.
Headline: Eilis O'Hanlon: Brexit is blamed for raising the unionist bogey of Irish unity. But what if leaving the EU is not that bad? Or... whisper it... what if it's actually a success?The crucial passage reads: “If there was a border poll tomorrow, the chances are that I'd vote in favour of Irish unity.” She goes on to joke that she and her children would lock her English-born husband in a cupboard to prevent him voting the wrong way in such a referendum. The article also argued that a united Ireland was probably inevitable eventually, while cautioning that inevitability does not establish when it will happen or provide a practical policy for governing Northern Ireland.
I'm not holding a brief for her by the way.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

For every posting like this in social media I see at least one along the following lines from the other side:
“With the recent attempt by the OO to
pass a Trojan horse down the Garvaghy Road, and unionism’s baring of its supremacist fangs, even the most moderate of nationalists are now beginning to realise that there is no alternative to a united Ireland.”

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

On what basis do you assert that the Dail as a generality does not care about NI?
Has a southern TD ever openly made this assertion?
The last person to stand on a ‘rejoin the UK’ ticket was Stan Gebler Davies in Cork. He was treated quite benignly as a harmless eccentric. He got about 300 votes.
One of my pet peeves: Southern outliers assuming to speak for the rest of us.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@westpool123 Quite so. What is irritating is when such individuals attempt to speak for me.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@JohnDwayne01 @westpool123 An amazing statement. We must mix in different circles. My mileau by the way is middle class, rugby-playing, and very distant from the border.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@CaptainFalke @westpool123 Not so in the circles I mix in.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@LPerrins What invalidates your general drift (and that of E O’H) is the fact that similar softball treatment is given to both sides — not one at the expense of the other.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@OHanlonEilis I say, let's keep any criticism of E'O'H within the confines of the ad rem rather than the ad feminam.

[Hugo @Hugo85500332]

@JohnMurphy51 I will vote for it notwithstanding my misgivings. The look of stunned betrayal on the faces of northern nationalists in the event of a referendum carrying in the north and being defeated in the south would be more than my could bear.