2 Irelands together

Why the Republic of Ireland needs a new John Bruton

Posted on Tuesday, 20 February, 2024 by andypollak

With the death earlier this month of former Taoiseach John Bruton, we have lost an important and courageous voice in the Republic of Ireland. We will need a new John Bruton to appear from somewhere: a nationalist leader who will not allow people to forget Sinn Fein’s continuing support for the murderous violence of the Provisional IRA and who goes out of his way to try to understand the concerns of unionism. Bruton bravely went even further: he criticised this country’s near-sacred foundation myth, that the bloodshed of the Easter Rising was justified and necessary for the birth of the independent Irish state. Not even Micheál Martin, another rare Southern politician to regularly remind us of the unacceptability of the IRA’s campaign, has ever gone as far as that (he would immediately lose the Fianna Fail party if he did!).

Interestingly, the unionist Belfast News Letter marked Bruton’s death by reprinting his 2016 anniversary of the Rising speech: ‘The 1916 Rising was not a Just War’.¹ Bruton argued this on a number of grounds. Firstly, he noted that Rising was launched on a platform that left no room for compromise or democratic negotiation. The Irish Republic was proclaimed on the steps of the GPO not in the name of “a living Irish people” but in the name of “God and the dead generations.” But obviously neither God nor the dead generations were there to be consulted. “The rights of the proclaimed Republic were not conditional on consent, but were ‘sovereign and indefeasible’. By definition, the Irish people would thus have no right to compromise the ‘sovereign and indefeasible’ rights of the Nation, which was treated, in the chosen wording of the Proclamation, as something separate from the people.”

It was in the pursuit of this “absolute and unqualified claim” that thousands of people then continued to be killed in the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. Bruton quoted P.S. O’Hegarty, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council at the time of the Rising, in 1924: “We turned the whole thoughts and passion of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We derided the Moral Law and said there was no law but the law of force.”

Bruton noted that for every Irish Volunteer killed in the Rising (including those executed afterwards) three Dublin civilians died as a result of the fighting. “The first casualty to die on Easter Monday was James O’Brien, an unarmed DMP policeman from Limerick, shot in the face at the gate of Dublin Castle. Another early unarmed DMP casualty of the Volunteers was Michael Lahiff, a 28 year old Irish speaker from the West of Ireland, shot in cold blood on St Stephen’s Green. Michael Cavanagh, a Dublin carter who tried to retrieve his cart from a Volunteer barricade, was executed by the Volunteers. These were not ‘Brits’. They were Irishmen. They were the first to die. Their pictures adorn no public building this Easter in Dublin, but they should.”

Bruton asked if the decision to take up arms in 1916 was in accordance with the Catholic Church’s natural ‘Moral Law’ with its emphasis on the ‘just war.’ “It is especially important to ask that question now, because the Irish State has chosen to place such a huge emphasis on implanting the 1916 Rebellion as the supposed foundation event of our democracy in the minds of today’s schoolchildren. Given that one of the purposes of education is to pass on a moral sense to the next generation, it is vitally important that the morality of that decision, to initiate killing and dying in 1916, be examined by, and for, those schoolchildren. That is the responsibility of the Irish State, and if it fails to discharge it, is is failing the next generation.”

Bruton then outlined some ‘just war’ principles to ask ‘Who is entitled to launch a war?’ “Only a competent authority, or popular representatives, has the right to start a war or insurrection….By no stretch of the imagination could that criterion said to have been met before the killing was started on Easter Monday.” “War required a just cause: armed aggression or governmental policies (e.g. genocide) threatening the civilian population”. Bruton pointed out that Ireland was not being attacked in 1916; in fact the Volunteers were allowed by the authorities to drill freely, something that would not be allowed today. The British government’s policies had been in many ways beneficial to Ireland: old age pensions and social insurance, from which Ireland was a net financial beneficiary, had been introduced, and the unjust landlord system had been overturned to a significant extent. “Furthermore, the principle of legislative independence had already been won from the Imperial Parliament in September 1914 by the passage into law, and signature by the King, of the Home Rule Bill.”

“Another criterion for a just war, is that war should be a last resort, not a first recourse. All other methods of redressing grievances ought to have been first exhausted. Given that the principle of Irish legislative independence had already been conceded, in a Bill passed into law only a year and a half previously, it is hard to argue that starting a rebellion in 1916, and the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921, were, either of them, a “last resort”. In fact much of what was being sought had already been conceded, in principle and in law. Home Rule was law and there was no going back on it. For example, Home Rule was accepted even by the Conservatives as a ‘fundamental fact’, the only issue outstanding being that there be no ‘forcible coercion of Ulster’ to go in under it.”

The only open question, said Bruton, was whether Home Rule might apply or not to Antrim, Down, Armagh and Derry (and perhaps to Fermanagh and Tyrone, which had narrow nationalist majorities). “But after all the killing and dying of the 1916 to 1923 period, and the Treaty of 1921, the Free State did not have jurisdiction over those counties…Nor after the ‘armed struggle’ from 1970 to 1998 does this State have such jurisdiction today. Indeed, under the Good Friday Agreement we no longer claim it, and respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to decide their own future in that regard.”

The 1916 rebels knew only too well the fierce opposition of Protestant Ulster even to a Home Rule administration, let alone a republic. “But in what they wrote in their Proclamation, this reality was swept aside, as it if did not matter at all…The wish of Ulster Unionists not to be governed from Dublin, was assumed by the Proclamation’s signatories not to have been a conclusion they had come to freely themselves, but only the result of ‘careful fostering’ by an ‘alien government”.

Bruton expressed his strong belief that “if we ever do have a United Ireland, it will not be achieved by the methods used in 1916.” Canada and Australia had proceeded to full sovereignty “without the suffering and bitterness of war.” He said it was not credible to say that the UK would have denied to a Home Rule Ireland the powers it freely granted to those countries under the 1931 Statute of Westminster. “The suffering of the War of Independence was thus not needed to achieve Dominion Status”, which is what Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and the Irish negotiators got in 1921 (and which had been the policy of the Irish Parliamentary Party, heavily defeated by Sinn Fein, in the 1918 general election).

Why does all this matter 108 years after the event, when what might have happened differently is just a matter of conjecture? It matters because Sinn Fein may be heading the next government in Dublin, and they are fanatically attached to the belief that the Provisional IRA were the rightful inheritors of what they call the ‘physical force’ tradition in Irish nationalism/republicanism, and thus the violence of their late 20th century campaign of killing and bombing was fully justified. For obvious reasons, Sinn Fein are constantly linking that campaign to the War of Independence, with its democratic legitimacy rooted in old Sinn Fein’s victory in the 1918 election, and the central involvement in that guerrilla war of the founders of the two largest constitutional (or ‘slightly constitutional’) parties in the independent state, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

It matters because even the most moderate of unionists trace the violence of the Provisional IRA against their community back to the 20th century’s first upsurge of republican violence in 1916 (and continue to believe that Irish republicans “stabbed Britain in the back” at a time when tens of thousands of Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, were fighting side by side in the First World War). And because all parties in the Republic who claim to want a peaceful ‘new Ireland’ still agree on celebrating that anti-British rebellion, supported by a small minority of Irish people at the time, as their state’s foundational act. In the words of that most liberal and pro-Irish of unionists, former rugby international and reconciliation activist Trevor Ringland: “If you take the ambitions of the violent republican movement a hundred years ago, they certainly weren’t about including those Irish who also feel British as part of the island. The identity they drove at that time was very much an exclusive identity, as opposed to the one promoted by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.”

It matters because the ‘north blindness’ of the 1916 revolutionaries led to successive mistakes which set back the cause of Irish unity: the almost complete absence of the North from the 1922 Dail debates on the Treaty; the development of the Free State along Catholic and Gaelic lines with zero reference to how this would affect partition; the rejection by De Valera of the 1940 offer by Churchill of a British declaration accepting the principle of a united Ireland and a North-South body to work out the practical details in return for the Free State joining the Allies in the war against Nazi Germany (future Unionist prime minister Basil Brooke said that if the choice was between Western civilisation and Irish reunification, he would accept unity); and the idiotic 1949 departure from the Commonwealth, a year before India declared itself a republic and stayed in the Commonwealth. The continuing popularity of Sinn Fein’s simplistic anti-British imperialism in the Republic (particularly among young people), rather than a more nuanced understanding of the historical intermingling of the peoples of these islands, makes me think that more such mistakes are on the way under a Sinn Fein-led government.

I may be a hopeless voice in the wilderness, but I would love to see one of the non-nationalist parties in the Republic – the Greens, Labour or the Social Democrats – having the courage to break with the overwhelming consensus in the South that ‘physical force’ republicanism played a unique and noble role in gaining Irish independence, and with the less overwhelming – but growing – consensus (again, particularly among the young) that the inheritors of that tradition can lead the way to unity. Knowing the ferocious opposition to Sinn Fein by unionists as I do, I believe this is fundamentally mistaken. I would like them to argue that such violent republicanism was always the wrong way to unite the peoples of this island, and to recognise that power-sharing in Northern Ireland along with close cooperation with the Irish Government is the way forward for the foreseeable future: the Good Friday Agreement model, in other words.

In a period of political consolidation and economic growth, I would like to see that party (or parties) adopt a policy of ‘from cooperation to confederation’, recognising that – as the Northern business leader, the late Sir George Quigley, put it – there are in Northern Ireland “two mutually opposed ‘principles of legitimacy’ which are strongly held – one nationalist and one unionist – and that some common ground would have to be found on which the divergent aspirations are transcended in a general consensus….If there is ever a new constitutional configuration for the island, my guess is that the model by far the likeliest to secure consent is the confederal model…On this basis the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies related to the powers to be specifically delegated to confederal level by representatives from North and South.”

I put this argument to a meeting of Social Democrats some years ago, but it was clear from the blank faces that greeted me that it was going nowhere. Perhaps it would be electoral suicide to put such a policy to “republicanism is good” Irish voters, who recent opinion polls have shown are not willing to give up one iota of nationalist iconography (changes to the flag and anthem; re-joining the Commonwealth) in exchange for unity. I suggest that electorate also haven’t given one iota of serious thought to how the party of the Provisional IRA are going to bring about a harmonious ‘new Ireland’ that will include hundreds of thousands of abandoned and alienated unionists.

However, those non-nationalist parties might be surprised by the number of people who would vote for a party which proposed putting some distance between the Republic and the troublesome North, while maintaining a strong all-island framework for partnership and mutual action. Similarly, I believe there will be open-minded unionists who would be attracted to the confederal model as the least worst option as Britain’s commitment to the North declines.

¹ https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/full-version-of-a-2016-speech-by-the-late-john-bruton-the-former-taoiseach-the-1916-easter-rising-was-not-a-just-war/ar-BB1hSuJP

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 7 Comments

Nobody can deny that Michelle O’Neill’s elevation was an historic moment

Posted on Tuesday, 6 February, 2024 by andypollak

Nobody can deny that the installation of Michelle O’Neill as the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland last Saturday was an historic moment. For a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to ensure that NI had an inbuilt unionist majority and thus to exclude it from the newly independent Irish state, to elect not only a nationalist, but an IRA-supporting republican woman as its leader, will be seen by most Northern nationalists as something of a miracle.

O’Neill was smart, gracious and stateswomanlike in her moment of victory. She avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of either Irish unity or a Border Poll in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues. “I will serve everyone equally and be a First Minister for all,” she said. “Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together. We must make power-sharing work because collectively we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”

Not so her party leader, Mary Lou McDonald. A united Ireland, she said, was now “within touching distance.” My doubts about McDonald’s judgement (which I outlined in my last blog) are only confirmed. These are the words of a fantasist, an ultra-nationalist ideologue who doesn’t live in the real world. Does she really believe the long, hard grind – a work of many years, decades even – of persuading enough middle ground people and moderate unionists that unity is the answer to the North’s many problems, can be by-passed? Or was she just intent on goading unionists at their point of maximum sensitivity – kicking them when they had lost the First Minister’s post and their hopes of overturning the Windsor Framework and ending the Irish Sea ‘border’ were down (despite Jeffrey Donaldson’s claims to the contrary)?

Because I am not a working journalist these days, I usually turn to the two sharpest political commentators in Ireland – Pat Leahy of the Irish Times and Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph – for insightful analysis of key events. Leahy wondered what Mary Lou McDonald was up to with her provocative (but clearly considered) statement. Was it just the old republican adage that Northern Ireland can never be anything but a failed state and they were certainly not going to do anything to make it a successful one? Leahy thought not. He preferred the argument that at a time when Sinn Fein’s opinion poll figures are down in the Republic, and the party is on the back foot on issues like immigration, she was trying to reassure her base.

The problem is that Sinn Fein has two bases and thus two often conflicting messages (one aimed at people in the Republic who’ve never voted for them before): “that Sinn Fein will be a massive change in the government of the South, but also that it would not change things that voters like; that the Republic is a basket-case, misruled for 100 years, but that a Sinn Fein government would not change its economic model; that things under Sinn Fein will be simultaneously different and the same; that we will get both change and continuity”. It’s a tricky message to sell, he said.¹

McBride wrote that the deal negotiated by Jeffrey Donaldson with the British government was not what he claimed it to be. It was “better practically for Northern Ireland, and more constitutionally bearable for unionists, than the original Northern Ireland Protocol. If goodwill persists between Brussels and London, and if blind eyes are turned liberally to continued bureaucratic absurdities, then what has happened this week can work, after a fashion…

“But while the Irish Sea border has been softened, it unquestionably remains. For Jeffrey Donaldson to claim he’s swept away the sea border for goods which are staying in Northern Ireland is as palpably absurd as Donald Trump claiming he won the last US Presidential election… Donaldson should try moving a cherry tree from Leeds to Lisburn, or try moving any other commercial item between Birmingham and Ballymena on the same basis as Birmingham to Brighton.” The British government is still planning to “take direct powers at Westminster to direct NI bodies” in relation to checks on goods. And the continuation of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland – “not acceptable”, Donaldson has said in the past – will continue.²

Donaldson showed considerable political courage in facing down his opponents – both in the DUP and to the right of it – to get his deal through. However his party’s base – which largely supported the boycott of Stormont over the Irish Sea ‘border’ – will be uneasy and potentially rebellious if it is seen not to work. Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice and that toxic little agitator, Jamie Bryson, will be working hard to stir up trouble for him.

Last Monday, a few hours before Donaldson faced his party faithful and successfully persuaded them to back his less than perfect deal with Whitehall, I had an interesting conversation with two Belfast businessmen. These were men of moderate views (Alliance and SDLP-inclined respectively), but they were frustrated and angry at what they saw as the DUP – a party which had received a quarter of the vote in the last Assembly election – forcing Northern Ireland into the freezer for the past two years. They were “sick of a minority party holding the whole society to ransom, sick of having to kowtow to the DUP because of their paranoia about the Irish Sea ‘border’ destroying their sense of the Union.”

They were worried that young people – and especially young unionist people – had lost faith in politics as it was conducted in Northern Ireland: “It’s very dangerous, they have no regard for politics or politicians here – they never see politics producing any positive results. If the DUP don’t go along with the social changes they think are important – things like equality, women’s rights and gay rights – they will just leave Northern Ireland. The DUP are going to have to come to terms with the liberal culture of a young, modern society.” One man said it was already happening: he knew at least one young gay member of that deeply conservative party.

In contrast, young nationalists could see that Sinn Fein got things done at constituency level (unlike the DUP) and believed the republican party was committed to equality and fairness. They would chant ‘Ooh, aah, Up the Ra’ at public events to give two fingers to the DUP in particular and the Northern political system in general.

The businessmen echoed Sam McBride in worrying that Northern Ireland’s infrastructure was falling apart: houses not being able to be put on the market because Northern Ireland Water can’t connect them to the mains; offshore wind companies not able to set up because of the sclerotic planning system; and major roads full of potholes (“Look at the dreadful state of the Sydenham by-pass, the road to Belfast City Airport – even in Africa they make sure they have a decent road to the airport”).

One cited the head of the Southern business and employers body IBEC, Danny McCoy, who has been forecasting for some time an island population of 10 million by 2050 (today the island’s population is seven million, with just under two million of these in Northern Ireland). This will be “a new Ireland in which our children will have a good future.” He said the challenge for the North would be to absorb around one million of these people. “By 2050 there might be only 250,000 hard-line ‘traditional’ unionists left. It will be a very different place to Northern Ireland in the last century – if it is still in existence.”

There is no doubt that the plates are shifting in Northern Ireland. Last month I was talking to half a dozen people from broadly unionist backgrounds in Fermanagh, and all but one of them said they were no longer comfortable calling themselves British. The man who still called himself British said he was “a very, very, soft unionist.” However he stressed that he wouldn’t say ‘Yes’ to a united Ireland. “I’d want to know exactly what it is we’re looking at. I’d want to be informed, to be consulted. I wouldn’t want to be driven in at the end of an armalite or even surreptitiously coerced into it.”

We should be careful that we do not listen to young people exclusively (this is a man in his seventies talking!). In an Irish Times interview in December, that wise old owl, former Tánaiste and Irish Labour Party leader Dick Spring, warned that young people had no understanding of the 1969-1998 Troubles, and didn’t give them any thought.

He said it would take “an awful long time, as we see in other war zones, for people to recover from all those tragedies and the loss of loved ones down through the years. It has left a long, long memory bank for people, and people have to dig very deep if they are to overcome that and work with people who are, you know, responsible for, or supporting, that campaign of violence.”³ And that includes Michelle O’Neill.

¹ ‘McDonald and Sinn Fein have tricky message to sell’, Irish Times, 3 February

² ‘Despite the DUP’s Trumpian claims, this deal has embedded the sea border rather than removed it’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 February

3 ’Dick Spring interview: I don’t want to be lecturing young people’, Irish Times, 16 December

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

A glimpse into the strange, secretive party that stands on the brink of power in Ireland

Posted on Monday, 8 January, 2024 by andypollak

Over the Christmas holidays I read The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein, by the former Irish Examiner journalist Aoife Moore. I was looking forward to reading this book enormously, since good books on this “strange, secretive party that stands on the brink of taking power” are few and far between. I thought that somebody like Moore, from a working class nationalist background in Derry, whose family had been “touched by British state violence” (her uncle was killed on Bloody Sunday), and Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, might be the writer to shine a light on its hidden workings and inner secrets.

I was a little disappointed. This is a book of occasional insights rather than major revelations. As a former journalist in Northern Ireland, I found I was familiar with much of the book’s earlier section, running up to Mary Lou McDonald’s emergence as the party’s vice-president, chosen on Gerry Adams’ orders, in 2009. Sinn Fein’s famous deep distrust of the media, and its press office dubbing her “the poisonous snake”, did not help. She does not, for example, throw any new light on how Sinn Fein went from failure in the European and local elections of May 2019 to success in the Dail election nine months later.

But there are interesting things here that we should take note of as Sinn Fein appear to be getting closer and closer to power. The first is Mary Lou McDonald’s judgement of people. I’m sure the party is desperately hoping that voters have short memories when they go to the polls later this year or early in 2025, and that they will have forgotten her misjudgement of Jonathan Dowdall: Sinn Fein Dublin city councillor (briefly), accessory to murder as a close associate of the Hutch criminal gang, kidnapper, torturer and ‘supergrass’. When Dowdall resigned after only four months as a city councillor (and before his criminal involvement was known), McDonald issued a statement in which she praised him as a hard worker and “a very popular and respected member of the community.”

Moore quotes one local Sinn Fein cumann member in McDonald’s home area of Cabra saying she “seriously lacks judgement. She’s not learned from this entire shambles at all. She surrounds herself with people who are subpar. In a constituency like this…that’s a foolish game. Look at Gerry Adams – he had serious heads around him. Mary Lou hasn’t a clue.”

I have doubted McDonald’s judgement for over 20 years. It started in September 2003, when she spoke at a commemoration ceremony for the IRA leader and Nazi collaborator Sean Russell at his statue in Fairview (probably the only public memorial to such a collaborator in Western Europe). Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times: “The bizarre Sean Russell event was presumably a kind of trial – McDonald’s chance to prove that that there was no aspect of the IRA’s history that she would ever disown, even if it involved the Nazis.”¹

The big question for many voters – and particularly older voters who remember the Northern ‘troubles’ – will be: what, if any, is the continuing overlap between Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA? Moore writes at several points about “the grey haired men at the back of the room” at Northern party meetings – former IRA members – who were there in the post-1998 years of electoral politics, but does not make clear whether they are still in attendance. She quotes a close aide of Martin McGuinness saying: “Them people don’t just fucking evaporate. They end up in party positions…I remember decisions being made and being told about decisions – even from a local perspective – that there was no conversation on. It was clearly an army thing. You were told and never questioned it.”

I imagine McDonald will have done her best to make sure that such ‘grey haired men’ have disappeared south of the border. Moore says the influence of former senior IRA figures “has gradually diminished over time, but remains significant.” ‘We don’t sit around talking about politics or legislation”, one senior IRA figure told her, “but we’re consulted and kept in the know for certain things around political strategy.”

The party is famous for its rigid, ‘top down’ – almost Leninist – control of local councillors, activists and members. One woman Ard Comhairle member is quoted as saying: “There is a lot of discipline, you don’t speak out of turn in public.” Moore writes: “Sinn Fein is particularly bad at weeding out local issues and bullying early on. The party’s intensely hierarchical structure makes it hard to complain if the ones you wish to complain about reside higher on the totem pole.” She then outlines a sizeable list of bullying issues, suspensions, expulsions and resignations in Cork, Kildare, Cavan, Westmeath, Wicklow, Galway, and Dublin. Noeleen Reilly from Ballymun, a poll-topper for Dublin City Council in 2014, resigned from the party four years later, alleging “physical assaults, verbal abuse, total isolation, smear campaigns.”

I often wonder if Sinn Fein, sprung from the IRA and still unapologetic defenders of its 30-year campaign of violence, share the values of most Irish people. To judge from the behaviour of Gerry Adams, still a heroic figure to most party members (and, astonishingly, to many otherwise non-political younger people), truth-telling is not one of them. One former IRA man and lifelong Sinn Fein member told Moore that “when he is confronted with any uncomfortable truth, his first instinct is to lie to everybody. That’s part and parcel of politics, but this guy has no qualms at all. And this guy has no conscience about stuff, he’s not troubled by anything.” One Sinn Fein staffer told her: “The thing about Gerry is, he could look his dearest friend in the eye and lie.”

I would say Adams’ whole life, based on his repeated assertion that he was never a member of the IRA, has been a lie. My former colleague, former Irish Times Northern editor Ed Moloney, put that untruth to bed comprehensively in his magisterial 2002 study, A Secret History of the IRA. Moore says he joined D-Company of the Belfast Brigade as an 18-year-old in 1969; it was to become “the most ferocious in the city.” Brendan Hughes, the senior IRA man who who was centrally involved in planning the July 1972 bombings in Belfast that we call Bloody Friday (in which nine people were killed and 130 injured), said before he died in 2008: “Gerry was always the O/C. Even if he was not the O/C in name, Gerry was the man who made the decisions.”

Support for the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ remains mandatory for Sinn Fein members. One senior staff member told Moore: “I remember asking during the meeting if there was a place for people in Sinn Fein who don’t support the armed struggle. Should we not have a situation where young people who join Sinn Fein feel free to say that what happened to Jean McConville was diabolical?…They all just looked at me.”

One of the most revealing and disturbing stories in the book is of a former IRA man and active Sinn Fein member who wanted to apologise in person to the widow of a police officer he had murdered. He initially approached Sinn Fein about this. After consultations with senior party figures, the answer came back: No, not allowed. A senior party member told Moore that the former IRA volunteer may have carried out such a killing, but “it’s not your memory to know, irrespective of how this affects people. The movement has made a decision – there’ll be a story told around this. And it’s not your story.” This man eventually contacted and arranged to meet the widow through a former senior police officer.

I am now resigned to the likelihood that Sinn Fein, formerly the party of the IRA – which between 1971 and 1997 killed nearly five times more people than the British Army, the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment combined – is almost certainly going to be a part (and probably the leading part) of the next Irish government. As somebody over 65, I am now a member of the only age group which opinion polls in the Republic show will not vote for Sinn Fein. As somebody who lived and worked as a journalist and campaign organiser in Belfast during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the atrocities committed by the ‘Provos’ are still a vivid memory.

I simply do not trust this militaristic, ultra-nationalist party to lead us towards some peaceful, harmonious solution to the age-old problem of a divided Ireland. They are the last people on earth able to persuade the unionists to move towards some kind of Irish unity (if they can ever be persuaded). Most unionists see them as unrepentant apologists for the terrorist organisation which murdered their policemen and women, their family members, friends and neighbours. On a lesser note, Moore also details their dubious (if not corrupt) practices while in the Northern Ireland Assembly: referring important ministerial decisions back to shadowy ‘advisors’ in Andersonstown; paying MLAs’ salaries into party-controlled accounts (in order to pay the MLAs a much lower average industrial wage) and claiming MLAs’ expenses with forged signatures.

At the end of his life Brendan Hughes deeply regretted his actions throughout the IRA campaign. “Not one death was worth it,” he said. John Hume used to say the same thing. Do we believe Hughes and Hume or the Sinn Fein leader in the North, Michelle O’Neill, who says there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s campaign of violence? I know whom I believe.

¹ ’The enigma of Mary Lou McDonald’, 15 February 2020

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 4 Comments

A united Ireland is not inevitable – only persuasion can make it happen

Posted on Monday, 18 December, 2023 by andypollak

What is it about passionate nationalists that when they get less than a third of people in favour of their nationalist project, they still insist they are driving on to victory? That was the situation according to the second big Irish Times/Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South(ARINS) poll on Irish unity earlier this month, which showed 51% of those polled in Northern Ireland in favour of remaining in the UK (up 1% from last year) against 30% in favour of joining the Republic (up 3%).¹ [In 2019 Catalan nationalists went so far as to declare independence after 39.5% of registered voters in a low turn-out voted in favour in an unconstitutional referendum].

In Northern Ireland, three-fifths of Catholics said they would vote for Irish unity, while four-fifths of Protestants said they would vote to stay in the UK. There is a far larger proportion of pro-UK Catholics (one in five) than pro-unification Protestants (one in 25). My guess is that an opinion poll at any time in the last 50 years would have come up with similar results, as it would have done in the Republic, where the Irish Times poll found that 64% would vote for unity in a referendum.

None of this stopped the political scientists overseeing the poll, led by Professor Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania (an avowed nationalist), wheeling out the concept of ‘losers’ consent’: extraordinarily, the ‘losers’ in this case are the Northern Protestants who make up the great bulk of the majority who want to stay part of the UK (51% support) and the ‘consent’ is their willingness to acquiesce in an eventual united Ireland (30% support).

The academics made great play of the finding that the proportion of northern Protestants who said they would find Irish unification “almost impossible to accept” had gone down from 32% to 23%. Maybe one reason for this is the mess that Northern Ireland is currently in largely due to the DUP’s 22 month boycott of the Stormont institutions. As that shrewd observer, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy put it, the movement towards support for Irish unity (however slow and marginal) “makes it all the more mind-bogglingly inexplicable that the DUP is not trying to make Northern Ireland work…if Northern Ireland doesn’t work, then wavering middle ground voters are likely to consider other arrangements that might work, potentially including a united Ireland.” If this is the DUP’s strategy, he says, it is “bonkers”.²

He has a good point. Most people – in Northern Ireland as elsewhere – don’t care much about the major constitutional changes that politicians, journalists and academics pore over so endlessly. They want continued peace and prosperity and the chance to get good jobs, live healthy lives and see their children well educated (for these reasons they supported the 1998 Good Friday Agreement). If Northern Ireland as it is now can’t provide those things, they might just begin to consider what for most Northern Protestants has for so long been the great, much-feared unmentionable – Irish unity.

Those politicians, journalists and academics might spend their time better by looking at some of the findings from the 2021 Northern Ireland census. The Belfast social researcher Paul Nolan has written a fascinating article on this which will appear in the near future on the ARINS website.³

Nolan highlights a number of ironies: the first is that “100 years after partition Northern Ireland, created to guarantee a permanent Protestant majority, had ended up with a Catholic population larger than the Protestant one. Added to that, the percentage who self-categorised unequivocally as ‘British Only’ was down to 31.9% – a smaller percentage than the beleaguered Catholic population at the time of partition.”

The rise in the Catholic population in recent years has been gradual, if speeding up slightly in the past decade: 40.3% in 2001; 40.8% in 2011; 42.3% in 2021. In contrast, the fall in the Protestant population has been dramatic: from 53.1% in 2001 to 43.5% in 2021. Nolan speculates that this could be simply because more Protestants are leaving the North (it is difficult to know because there are no figures for population movement within the UK), but stresses that this subject needs more research.

However he does not foresee an imminent Catholic majority: “The expectation that there will be a Catholic majority in any foreseeable future would only be true if there was already a Catholic majority in the age cohorts 0-14 and 15-39 and, as we have seen, although it comes very close (over 48% in both cohorts), it is still not in sight because the upward trajectory has levelled off. Secondly, it cannot be assumed that all Catholics aspire to Irish unity. Census ’21 shows that only 33.3% [of NI people in general] identify as Irish to any degree. Ten percent of Catholics opt for a British identity. Even those who identify as Irish are not necessarily going to vote to exit the devolved arrangement secured in the 1998 Agreement. The benefit of the Agreement to middle-class nationalists has been that it allows them to be culturally Irish while enjoying the benefits of UK citizenship. This has proved to be of durable appeal.”

In terms of national identity, the picture is complicated by the Northern census allowing people to choose combined, or hybrid, identities (British only; Irish only; Northern Irish only; British and Northern Irish; Irish and Northern Irish; British, Irish and Northern Irish; British and Irish; English only/Scottish only/Welsh only, and Other). Nevertheless the picture here for unionists is “pitiless”, says Nolan, with those declaring themselves ‘British only’ falling by eight points from 39.9% in 2011 to 31.9% in 2021, while those self-declaring as ‘Irish only’ rose from 25.3% to 29.1%. Perhaps even more significantly, below the age of 40 the ratios reverse: for example, in the 15-39 age band it is 32.1% ‘Irish Only’ versus 25.6% ‘British Only’.

The most popular identity when combined with another identity is Northern Irish, which features in 31.5% of hybrid identities, not far behind ‘Irish plus’. “The Irish Plus identity has also increased, from 28.4% to 33.3%. While this may be considered a substantial increase, it is still nine percentage points behind the number of people who give their religion as Catholic (42.3%), and far below what the proponents of a border poll had expected. No one could see the Census ’21 results as compelling evidence that the time has now arrived for a Secretary of State to call a border referendum, as required by the Agreement, at a point where ‘it appears likely that a majority of voters in Northern Ireland would back a united Ireland.’ One-third is not a majority in anybody’s book.”

Somewhat surprisingly, 13.5% of the population of Northern Ireland consists of ‘newcomers’ born outside its borders; half of these (124,000) were born outside Great Britain and Ireland, and 57,000 outside the EU. Many of these people also declared themselves ‘Other Religion’ (i.e. not Protestant or Catholic). Nolan finds a heavy leaning among such people towards a British identity.

He highlights another, connected irony: that “while the prospect of a border poll has had a polarising effect, with heightened emotions on both sides, the numerical equilibrium between northern Catholics and Protestants means that the deciding votes in any future poll would be cast by those with least interest in the debate: newcomer communities and those with no religion.”

Nolan concludes: “If there is a lesson in the census for unionism, it is that with support for British identity in decline it must reach beyond its traditional heartlands and galvanise the support from other lineages: specifically, newcomer communities, those with no religion, and those Catholics who self-categorise as British but do not identify with Orange culture. If there is a lesson for nationalism, it is to cease to believe in predestination. Despite what is said by politicians, celebrities and church leaders, a united Ireland is not inevitable. Saying so does not make it so. It can only happen when sufficient numbers of people want it to happen. Both nationalism and unionism need to use persuasion if they want to move beyond the present impasse.”

Persuasion? That’s the really hard part. The most convincing persuaders will decide the issue: nationalists persuading unionists of the merits of unity; unionists persuading nationalists of the merits of the Union. A large part of it will depend on how the rise and rise of the Republic as an economic powerhouse will be sustained (and whether Southerners are prepared to pay more taxes and change their precious symbols for the sake of unity), and how the decline of Britain will be continued or reversed. It’s going to be a longish journey.

PS The most astonishing illustration of social change in Northern Ireland, as mentioned by Nolan, is the estimate by the BBC that last year’s Pride March in Belfast had 60,000 participants, while the 12th July Orange parade in the city two weeks earlier had attracted only 10,000!

¹ Poll findings are in the Irish Times, 2 and 4 December

² ’A dysfunctional North makes a united Ireland seem more attractive’, Irish Times, 16 December

³ ’The Imprint of Finality? Partition and Census Enumeration’

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, the-troubles | Leave a comment

Does Dublin’s anti-immigration riot mark the beginning of the end of Ireland’s image of openness and tolerance?

Posted on Tuesday, 28 November, 2023 by andypollak

Last Thursday morning I sat down to write a blog in which I was aiming to argue that Ireland (the Republic) had been hugely successful in integrating a large number of immigrants over the past 20-25 years, and that this tolerant, multicultural – and economically dynamic – society was one which open-minded Unionists should not be afraid of, and might even (in the fullness of time) consider joining. But early that afternoon a man with a knife attacked and stabbed a group of small children leaving a primary school in Parnell Square in central Dublin, badly wounding a five year-old-girl, and injuring three other people, including two children. It was later revealed that he was an Algerian, a naturalised Irish citizen.

That evening, following several hours of fearmongering by far right extremists on social media, a full-scale riot broke out after groups of people attacked the Garda Siochana in O’Connell Street and Cathal Brugha Street with fireworks, bottles and other projectiles, burned two buses and a tram, and looted shops and hotels in O’Connell Street and surrounding areas. “Seven o’clock, be in town. Everyone bally up, tool up. And any fucking gypo, foreigner, anyone, just kill them. Just fucking kill them. Let’s get this on the news, let’s show the fucking media that we’re not a pushover, that no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country,” said one message on Telegram.

Much of the foreign media, caught by surprise like everyone else by these events, asked whether this could be the beginning of the end of Ireland’s remarkable image of openness to immigration. The Guardian‘s Ireland correspondent, Rory Carroll, wrote: “Among the fumes and shouts and sirens blazed an uncomfortable truth. The Ireland that for so long had seemed to buck Europe’s anti-immigrant trend and offer a ‘thousand welcomes’ to the foreigners who reshaped its economy, society and demography – the Ireland that seemed immune to xenophobia and demagoguery and backlash – was not so different after all.”¹

My half-written blog last week had pointed to 2022 census figures showing that the number of Irish residents born outside the country was now 20% of the population; the equivalent figure in that great melting pot of an immigrant nation, the USA, is 14%. As of last year, over a million people born elsewhere had made their homes in Ireland. Over three quarters of a million people living in Ireland speak a language other than English or Irish in their homes. Living in peace and relative harmony among us were nearly 100,000 people from the Indian sub-continent, 94,000 people from Poland, 42,000 from Romania and 40,000 from Brazil [one can now add over 91,000 Ukrainians], among many others. Three of the heroic people who intervened to disarm the Algerian madman and tend to the injured were a Brazilian motorcycle delivery driver, a Filipino nurse and a teenaged French restaurant worker.

I quoted Fintan O’Toole voicing slightly surprised approval at the census figures: “The settling of such a large influx of people is a great achievement for Irish society. It has been done, mostly, at a low level, in communities and workplaces, in schools and churches, sports clubs and voluntary organisations…Maybe part of the reason society as a whole has behaved so decently is that we are still a migratory people ourselves…The Irish have had a very long training in understanding migrants as human beings in search of a better life. We are those humans.”²

And, of course, Ireland is a big economic success story. That Thursday morning the latest Central Statistics Office data showed that the Irish jobs market continued to surge ahead over the past year. Immigrants played a vital role in this success, filling just over half the 100,000 jobs created. And Irish governments generally can point to dramatic successes in recent years: in the 50 years of EU membership, life expectancy has risen from 71 to 81.5 years; incomes per head have increased fourfold, and the number of people at work has grown from just over one million to more than 2.5 million.

However, amid this new abundance, the government is making public goods (housing, healthcare, transport) seem scarce, leading to widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. A struggle for scarce resources is not, to put it mildly, the best environment for social harmony. Many young people in poor working class areas, like Dublin’s north inner city, are untrained, bored and hopeless: in the words of one youth worker interviewed on RTE, these are “communities left to rot,” with young men looking out from their city flat complexes and seeing “lots of people going places – but they’re going nowhere.”

Unemployment may be at a record low of just over 4%, but many of these jobs are precarious and poorly paid. The housing crisis remains a running sore. There seems to be little official urgency in Dublin to think about what large-scale immigration means for this, the most burning single issue facing the government. Homelessness is at record levels. Government housing plans are based on the expectation of net migration of 220,000 this decade. Three years in and that figure has already been surpassed.

Such instability, topped by last week’s momentary mayhem, is grist to the mill of populist parties. Here in Ireland – thank God – we have no significant far right parties. But we have have Sinn Fein on the left, and like so many of the government’s woes, last Thursday’s events will only benefit them. In countries like the Netherlands – witness the surprise election victory of the far right Freedom Party last week – Italy, Germany, France and Spain, it is the anti-immigrant far right which is benefitting. We are living in frightening times in long peaceful, long stable, long social democratic Western Europe.

As that voice of sanity, Irish Times columnist Cliff Taylor, wrote over the weekend: “There is a sense that younger people have been left behind and the middle ground has not benefited in a world where a lot of the big wins go to corporate profits and the rich. In Ireland young people can get a job, but unless it is in one of the high pay sectors, they will struggle to buy a house or afford to rent. Recent figures from the CSO show that household living standards were 12% higher in 2022 than in 2016, after allowing for inflation. This is a significant rise, but interestingly the vast bulk of the gain was due to households, on average, having more people at work. The living standards of an individual worker rose only slightly, hit by the recent surge in inflation.”

However, Taylor finishes with a warning: “One piece of perspective is needed: Ireland has profited and been shaped by its openness. Growth and economic progress have been driven by trade. And one in four of those at work in Ireland is now a national from another country, according to this week’s figures, without whom the economy and our public services would collapse and we would be a much poorer country. In every sense of the word.”³

P.S. On a separate note, I am glad to see issues like Irish unity, national identity and relations with Britain (and England) being publicly debated these days. However, the standard of debate is often low. I was at two such events in the past month. Last week I attended a panel discussion in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin entitled ‘You can be anything in Ireland now, as long as it’s not English’. I looked forward to a sharp, insightful exchange on anti-Englishness in Ireland. But what was offered was poor stuff. One long-winded English academic (at an Irish university) was so concerned to be politically correct that he confused the audience by using the phrase ‘the North’ to mean two different things: Northern Ireland (perish the thought that he should use its internationally-recognised proper name) and the north of England (where he was from). An Irish academic had never noticed that the Union flag was unique among flags of the world in almost never appearing in public places in the Republic of Ireland. The young chairman, having heard the British ambassador introduce himself as a Scotsman (and later as a working class Catholic Scot), asked him ‘Are you English?’

Last month I was at a Shared Island dialogue event in the Abbey Theatre on ‘accommodating national identities.’ There was a thoughtful opening address from the Tánaiste, Micheál Martin. After that it went downhill. There were academics who failed to address the central issue of how people with two clashing national identities on this island can learn to share it in peace and mutual understanding; token Southern Protestants (I suppose I count as one of those now!), one of them Irish-speaking; a London-Irish playwright and a Church of Ireland minister who had little or nothing to say about the deeply problematic topic of the debate . Apart from nice John Kyle, the former Belfast city councillor, strong unionist voices, as usual, were notable by their absence, although the head of the Orange Order, Rev. Mervyn Gibson, was in the audience. Another missed opportunity.

¹‘Remember who we are: race, riots and the end of the ‘Irish Welcome’, Guardian, 26 November

²‘In Ireland we barely talk about immigration. It’s easy to see why’, Irish Times, 14 November

³ ‘Ireland would be a much poorer country without immigration’, Irish Times, 25 November

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

What have the British ever done for us? Quite a bit, actually

Posted on Wednesday, 1 November, 2023 by andypollak

One of the recurrent themes of these blogs is that if we are going to welcome 900,000 Unionists into a ‘new Ireland’, we are going to have to accept and respect their passionate Britishness. And that is going to be a hard task for a society that fought a war of independence against Britain a hundred years ago, and has adopted a political and popular ethos which has been largely anti-British ever since.

Occasionally that anti-Britishness has softened: notably after particularly horrifying IRA atrocities in Britain in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: for example, after the bombing outside Harrods in London in December 1983, in which six people were killed and 90 injured, Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald told Margaret Thatcher that the two governments now faced a common enemy; and during the peace process period of the 1990s and early 2000s, when excellent inter-governmental relations were built up, started by Albert Reynolds and John Major, and greatly strengthened by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. But following Brexit, and with the rise of Sinn Fein, the undercurrent of anti-Britishness has risen again. One sees it even in the opinions of people who should know better: prominent former diplomats, political scientists and journalists. They should know that any coming together of people on this island into a closer constitutional arrangement also has to involve the British government. They should know that anti-Britishness does nothing for movement towards a careful, harmony-building unity agreement between the British and Irish tribes in Ireland.

One thing we need to do – and it won’t be easy – is to start to recognise that not everything the British have done in Ireland over the past couple of centuries has been bad for this country. I am going to cite examples of three things the British government did that were good for Ireland: in pensions, housing and education.

In 1908 the then Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, introduced legislation to bring in non-contributory pensions for the elderly, funded out of general taxation, making the UK the third country in the world (after Germany and New Zealand) to take such a radical step. The lack of adequate records meant that many Irish people applying for this new pension received the benefit of the doubt. In 1912, of the 942,000 pensioners in the UK, 205,000 were in Ireland, a proportion far greater than the relative populations of the two countries at the time would warrant.

Five years later John Redmond, the head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, told the House of Commons that a wartime increase in the pension to 2s 6d per week was “an extravagance which would not have been indulged in by an Irish Parliament comprised of Irishmen responsible to the country and knowing the country.”¹ Sure enough, when Ireland gained her independence in the early twenties, an Irish government headed by W.T.Cosgrave and Ernest Blythe cut the old-age pension for the same reasons Redmond had outlined.

Then there was housing. While the Irish Civil War was raging, the first of 289 houses were started in Killester Garden Village in north Dublin, one of several estates built for ex-British servicemen in the First World War by the Irish Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust with British government money. This was the largest such estate built; over 2,600 such homes were eventually provided throughout Ireland. When Lloyd George, now Prime Minister, had promised “homes for heroes” at the end of the World War, he could not have envisaged that most of Ireland would be an independent nation by the time they came to be built.

The Killester estate was arranged in ‘garden village’ style so that residents had plenty of open space and large gardens and thus could grow their own food. At an Armistice Day ceremony a year ago, the then Green Lord Mayor of Dublin, Caroline Conroy, said it was “well ahead of its time”, “a perfect blend of nature and city”, and could provide a vision of housing that enhanced mental health during our current housing crisis.² If you are interested in seeing this little gem of urban planning, take the DART to Killester (whose station was built to serve the estate) or look for The Demesne off the Howth Road.

Thirdly, there was education. Áine Hyland, the distinguished former Professor of Education at University College Cork (and co-founder of the Dalkey School Project), wrote to the Irish Times in August, as follows: “The Government decision to provide free schoolbooks to all primary (national) school pupils is very welcome and long overdue.

“It is, however, worth noting that when the national school system was set up in 1831 (almost 200 years ago) every school received a stock of free books. The books were renewed every three years. For a school with an average attendance of 125 pupils, 30 first reading books, 30 second reading books, 15 third reading books, six English grammars and six arithmetic texts were provided. Extra books were available on request. In addition, copybooks, slates, slate pencils, quills and ink were also provided, either free of charge or at a reduced price.”³

I’m going to finish with a quote from the eminent archaeologist, historian and writer, the late Liam de Paor. Speaking to the Irish Association in 1973, he said: “The element of shared experience is enormous; but in the South we have liked to forget about the British parts of our inheritance; in the North we have tried to forget about the Irish parts. Saving the important matter of religion – and this is, of course, a major part of anyone’s culture [although less in 2023 than in 1973, AP] – the cultural traditions of by far the greater part of the present population of this island are not all that different. It is the myths that have differed, and these no longer serve the health of either of our societies…In this whole matter of identity, we should, rather than try to bully one another into accepting the Britishness of Ulster or the Irishness of Ireland, endorse the principle of individual liberty, which is nowhere more important than here, and offer to everyone who lives on this island his or her free choice.”

PS I heard a story recently about two County Armagh men who had taken the midnight train from Portadown to Dublin in April 1916 to join the Easter Rising. If they had been trying to do the same thing today, they would have had to take the last train at 8.39 – more than three hours and twenty minutes earlier than 107 years ago!

¹ Padraig Yeates, A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-18, pp.200, 265

² ‘Dublin village built for WW1 veterans hailed as ‘model’ for urban living a century on’, Irish Times, 13 November 2022

³ ‘Letters to the Editor’, Irish Times, 12 August 2023

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 2 Comments

A half-Jewish Irishman’s view of the war in the Middle East

Posted on Monday, 16 October, 2023 by andypollak

I am an Irishman from a half-Jewish background – the other half is Presbyterian, so I am utterly untypical of people in this republic. However as a person with such unusual antecedents, I feel reluctantly impelled to add my two ha’apence worth to the millions of words on the terrible disaster unfolding in the Middle East. As with so many of these blogs, I am going to borrow unashamedly from journalists and commentators who are much better-informed than me.

My first conclusion is to agree with that fine Irish Times columnist, Justine McCarthy.¹ She writes that two wrongs – the horrific massacre by Hamas of hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel’s equally appalling revenge bombings of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza – do not make a right. “True friends would caution the aggressors in what we used to call the Holy Land that the way to a genocidal cul-de-sac is paved with retaliation,” she says. She quotes a Japanese proverb that, when you are seeking revenge, you should dig two graves – one for yourself.

I know that nothing will be simple in the armoured tunnels and teeming tenements of Gaza, but if the Israelis go beyond an understandable mission to cripple Hamas’s military capacity, and kill thousands of innocent people in the process, they will be only storing up more hatred and anti-semitism and catastrophic violence for the future. If you continually oppress a whole people – as Benjamin Netanyahu’s dreadful governments have done to the Palestinians for so many years – they will fight back with all the means (some of them appalling) at their disposal.

Netanyahu has promised “mighty vengeance” for the Hamas attacks, and most of the Israeli people appear to agree with him. The Israeli government says it is determined that, after ‘Black Saturday’, 7th October, it must wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, and its allies, led by the US, seem to have given it a green light to try. That way surely lies mutually assured destruction and genocide.

As so often in these desperate situations, I turn to the views of brilliant left-wing Jews. The author and climate change activist Naomi Klein writes that callous displays of international indifference to (and even celebration of) Israeli deaths are “a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.²

“For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, anti-semitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.”

So how do we confront the violent ideology of both the Israeli government and Hamas? Klein writes: “For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as anti-semitism by a great many Jews. And anti-semitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.

“What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including anti-semitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love. It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of a left like that.”

One practical (or maybe not so practical) example: it is a great shame that the enfeebled United Nations could not fly in 15-20,000 armed peacekeeping troops (including Irish soldiers) to enforce a humanitarian corridor to allow hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people from Gaza to find temporary refuge in Egypt.

The Guardian columnist, Jonathan Friedland, writes that all the 16 million Jews around the world feel more vulnerable after the Hamas massacres.³ He points to anti-semitic attacks quadrupling in the UK in the days afterwards and pro-Hamas demonstrators in Sydney chanting “Fuck the Jews! Gas the Jews!” He calls those attacks “a pogrom…multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before.”

He goes on: “I suspect there are some progressives who – even unconsciously – hesitate before expressing full sympathy for the murdered young festival-goers and ageing kibbutz peaceniks because they worry that, if they do, that will somehow diminish their support for the Palestinians. That is a mistake.

“Because Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating.

“It isn’t that difficult. You can condemn Hamas and name its actions as evil, even as you support the Palestinians in their quest for a life free of occupation and oppression. And there should still be room in your heart for a Jewish child whose last moments were filled with unimaginable terror – the same terror his grandparents, and their grandparents, thought they had escaped for ever.”

Back at home, I find myself agreeing more with former Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell, a man of the moderate right, than my left-wing friends who are passionate supporters of the righteous cause of Palestinian self-determination and independence. McDowell writes: “If Hamas deserves to be toppled – and it does – how will the reduction of Gaza to stone-age rubble address the long-term security needs of Israel? How will that play across the Islamic world? Who knows how the Saudis and the Gulf states will view the Hamas massacres, or how they will play out if Gaza is razed and many thousands of Palestinians die? Could Israeli-Arab rapprochement survive?⁴

“Europe sat on its hands on the annexation of the West Bank. Those of us in the Seanad who passed the Settlement Goods Bill as a small but important symbolic rejection of the creeping illegal annexation of the West Bank were described by the Israeli government as anti-semitic. Ireland must now shout out loud against total war in Gaza. The only response that will avoid further long-term catastrophe is restraint and adherence to international law. Israel’s right to self-defence must be proportionate, lawful and humane. That response might echo across the generations.”

In a letter on the following page of the Irish Times, my friend Betty Purcell, whom I know as a good and decent left-wing person, says that Ireland must make its voice heard by calling for the dismantling of what she calls the anti-Palestinian “apartheid’ system in Israel. But in her lengthy letter, she has not a single word of condemnation of Hamas’s murder of over a thousand Israeli civilians.

¹ ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, they make a vortex of horror’, Irish Times, 13 October

² ‘In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun’, Guardian, 11 October

³ ‘After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking its lips’, Guardian, 13 October

⁴ ‘Gaza must not be made pay for Hamas atrocities’, Irish Times, 11 October

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world | 2 Comments

A crumbling ‘end of days’ feel in Northern Ireland as infrastructure totters

Posted on Thursday, 28 September, 2023 by andypollak

It’s not very often that this blog plagiarises a column from an Irish daily newspaper. But a truly shocking column by that fine Belfast Telegraph journalist Sam McBride¹ is worth reprinting (almost) in full because it outlines in graphic detail the terrible current state of key parts of agriculture, the environment, electricity, health, education and infrastructure in Northern Ireland these days. And because many readers of this blog are in the Republic, and the Southern media rarely cover these vital areas of life in the North. And because McBride is a journalist with a broadly unionist outlook, what he writes is strikingly honest and truth-telling.

He writes: “There’s an end of days feel to Northern Ireland. It’s not that Irish unity is necessarily looming, but that dramatic elements of what society has taken for granted are breaking down, with limited reason to believe that they’ll be coming back soon. A sort of half-hearted anarchy pervades. There are still laws, police and regulatory bodies. The streets aren’t filled with looters. But so much of what an advanced democratic society takes for granted is crumbling.

A veteran unionist politician recently said to me: ‘The whole place is an absolute mess’….One senior business figure phoned a week ago to lament how so much of Northern Ireland is falling apart. He likened the situation to Libya – there, two warring leaders had fought while their infrastructure collapsed, killing thousands of people when two dams burst. Here, he said that the two sides were expending their energy on tribal disputes while critical infrastructure degrades around them.

The consequences might not come while these politicians and civil servants are in power, but come they surely will. He said that spending on roads had been almost £1 billion short over the last nine years – a false economy because the more roads regress, the more expensive they become to maintain.

The Civil Service isn’t trusted by the Treasury, the Irish Government or business to spend their money, he said, because the scandalous behaviour of ‘cash for ash’ had not been addressed – despite what the head of the Civil Service claims [McBride was the journalist who exposed the full horror of the NI Civil Service’s catastrophic dysfunctionality during the Renewable Heat Incentive fiasco in his superb 2019 book Burned].

“Having sown the wind, we’re now reaping the whirlwind. This day next week [30th September], Northern Ireland enters a critical period of electricity insecurity. Kilroot power station’s coal-fired units shut next Saturday evening, but the gas-fired generators which were meant to replace them are nowhere near ready.

Even when those generators come online some time early next year, they will not replace the lost capacity due to a gaffe by those overseeing the electricity system. There will be a critical gap in generating capacity which means that on calm, cold days when problems develop at other plants there could be blackouts. Yet no one seems terribly exercised by this. There’s scant evidence of it being treated as a crisis.

Twenty miles west, Lough Neagh’s poisoning is clearly visible from space.² It will remain dangerously polluted until 2043 even if the sources of those pollution are slashed – but they’re still growing.

Stormont didn’t just let this happen; it actively facilitated it. The ‘Going for Growth’ strategy overseen by Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, but backed by all five major parties, used public money to subsidise a move from traditional farming methods to industrial factory farms.

That means a dismal life for hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of birds cooped up in soulless buildings. But it also means vast quantities of excrement coming from what might just be a few acres, with nowhere near enough land on which to spread it without polluting watercourses.

Poultry farms increased production by 35% in the six years after 2012 before falling back. The number of pigs has increased by 72% in the last decade. Farms now produce nine million cubic metres of slurry a year – enough to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza almost four times, or to fill more than 800,000 concrete mixer lorries.

Stormont has turned parts of Northern Ireland into a vast toilet so that multinational companies like the Brazilian-owned Moy Park can export mass-produced food. Rather than cracking down on polluters, last year DUP minister Edwin Poots slashed the fines on farmers who repeatedly pollute waterways.

Dr Les Gornall, an expert in slurry, yesterday told the BBC Nolan Show that without intervention Lough Neagh will become “a stinking septic tank that’s 400 square kilometres with no lid on it” from which we can no longer draw drinking water. Before that point, he said it could attract foreign pests like fever-bearing mosquitos.

Lough Neagh is at a tipping point, he warned, and “when you hit these tipping points, nature is unforgiving”. Dr Gornall said “there’s no doubt” that Stormont’s policies have created this crisis. Yet civil servants this week told journalists there’s no evidence that ‘Going for Growth’ had harmed the lough.

40 miles north-west of the lough lies another environmental catastrophe. Mobuoy illegal dump on the outskirts of Londonderry is on such a scale that it can only be compared to dumps run by the Italian mafia.

Stormont’s Department of the Environment was repeatedly warned about an enterprise so vast that many local councils and the PSNI were (they say unwittingly) having their waste dumped there. By the time it was shut a decade ago, 1.6 million tons of waste was in the ground. It’s still there and is polluting the River Faughan which supplies much of Derry’s drinking water.

Ten years later, civil servants are still discussing what to do. A public inquiry into the scandal was blocked by a minister – Edwin Poots.

The DUP also blocked an independent environmental protection agency which would have been outside ministerial control. A very senior civil servant who sat in Executive meetings told me that even within the Civil Service the Department of Agriculture was regarded as a lobby group for farmers, having been ‘captured’ by the industry. The fact that chief vet Robert Huey hounded a conscientious vet out of her job when she found uncomfortable evidence of rules being broken does nothing to dispel that concern.

In 2015, agriculture and environment were bundled into one department in which agriculture would be overwhelmingly dominant. A former minister said that the original name for the department was simply ‘the Department of Agriculture’ and this only changed when Alliance ministers David Ford and Stephen Farry objected. The DUP and Sinn Fein went into a room for a while and returned with a new name – the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).

“That just shows you what the thinking was,” the former minister said. But while the name changed, the substance didn’t. What had been created was farcical: a department of pollution which was also a department to prevent pollution. The conflict of interest was obvious, and not accidental.

It wasn’t the only conflict of interest. NI Water now tells us that the tap water which 40% of Northern Ireland drinks after being taken from Lough Neagh’s polluted waters and treated is safe to drink. But NI Water has a vested interest in us believing that it can ‘safely’ keep flushing 200,000 tons of sewage a year into the lough.

All of this could get dramatically worse. The Secretary of State has set a deliberately sparse Stormont budget, presumably in the belief that the collapse of public services would force the DUP back into Stormont.

NI Water says that this budget means that in a few months’ time it will be releasing even more raw sewage…and sewage will back up into homes and businesses, closing schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile, the police are leaderless and overseen by an inept Policing Board. Even before its dangerous data breach, the PSNI’s budget was plundered to an extent which meant basic policing would be impossible. A toxic culture means staff are trying to get out as soon as they can afford to do so, leaving inexperienced officers who will inevitably make more and more mistakes, thus exacerbating the crisis.

As winter looms, people are needlessly dying in hospitals which are unreformed because of calamitous cowardice by politicians who thought that doing do would cost them votes. Staff are burnt out, strikes have become routine, and medics are leaving for other jurisdictions. Patients able to pay can escape their agony at a price; those who can’t are left to suffer…Now health faces a £470 million shortfall. [On 25th September the Irish Times reported on an Irish Department of Health study which showed that proportionately more than twice as many people in the North were on a waiting list for appointments (inpatient and outpatient) than in the Republic].

“The Department of Education is £382 million short and admits that disabled children will experience ‘major negative impacts.’ The infrastructure budget is £167 million short. Officials there say all streetlights will have to be switched off and salting of the roads will end.

Department by department, there are scores of other unthinkable outcomes. Some cuts in one area will create more spending elsewhere: no longer gritting roads and footpaths will see more people ending up in already overwhelmed hospitals.

For many of us, this is not the Northern Ireland we recognise. The schools our children attend still excel, the roads seem much as they were a decade ago and environmental collapse is not visible where we live. Northern Ireland is still for many of us an amazing place to live and to work. Our cost of living is lower than anywhere else in the UK or Ireland, and so much of life has improved dramatically from our childhood. But the reality of these problems is no less tangible just because we don’t experience them ourselves…

Above all this sits the need to reform Stormont’s bureaucracy. Civil servants could do this themselves relatively easily. A few high-profile sackings or demotions for scandalous behaviour would do more to put the wind up the organisation than any number of reviews, reports or new rules. But the current crop of senior civil servants shows little inclination to do anything beyond talking. We also obviously need a government – and one which is radically better than what we’ve had.

This is not to say that returning to Stormont is easy for the DUP. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. The party – in full knowledge of the consequences – chose to collapse government and promise voters that it would not allow its restoration until the Irish Sea border was demolished…

But for a party which says it cherishes Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, the DUP’s fingers are on a staggering number of the problems which might persuade people to back Irish unity. Northern Ireland’s public services are breaking, and in so doing they’re breaking people. Only those insulated from this reality could believe that this can continue indefinitely without significant political consequences.”

¹ ‘NI’s frightening decay is breaking public services – and breaking people’, Belfast Telegraph, 23 September

² Sam McBride, ‘Lough Neagh has become a scene of Biblical disaster, and Stormont was central to its destruction’, Belfast Telegraph, 9 September

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, The island environment | 3 Comments

Straws in the autumn wind around the Irish unity debate

Posted on Tuesday, 19 September, 2023 by andypollak

There have been some interesting straws in the autumn wind in recent weeks as politicians get ready for the new political term and general elections in both Irish jurisdictions in the near future. Leo Varadkar doesn’t very often talk about Irish unity, but when he does he often says sensible things. He reiterated his belief earlier this month that he expected to see Irish unity in his lifetime (he is 44). More importantly, he stressed that the success of such an existential change would depend on how such a new entity treated its minorities, and that would mean recognising and acknowledging the British identity of around one million Northern Ireland unionists.¹

People in the Republic needed to start thinking more about this, he said. “It’s really important that those people in a united Ireland should feel wanted, should be respected, would want to stay here and would want to throw their weight behind a newly united state in the way southern unionists did, in fact, get behind the Free State and made sure it survived.” My experience is that the vast majority of people in this jurisdiction haven’t even begun to think about how Britishness will be recognised and cherished in any ‘new Ireland’. When I ask them point blank, they tend to respond like the Trinity College Dublin politics students I talked to last year: they felt uneasy about bringing “British colonisers” into a united Ireland.²

One of the major things that will have to change if unionists are to be made to feel at home, is for Sinn Fein not to “triumphalise the horrible deeds” of the Provisional IRA, in Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s words.³ There is little or no chance of that happening if the former political wing of the IRA becomes the new power in the land after the next Dáil election.

However the most interesting comments about this issue came from an entirely different kind of politician. Wallace Thompson was a founding member of the DUP. He is a respected member of the Independent Orange Order (who basically think the Orange Order is too liberal); secretary of the Evangelical Protestant Society (which campaigns against the errors of “the Catholic of Rome”), and an ex-special adviser to former DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds.

This is a man who is rooted in the fundamentalist Protestant heartland of Northern Ireland. Yet he now states his belief that a ‘new Ireland’ is inevitable, that the Union was Britain was perhaps always doomed, and he is willing to consider and discuss with nationalists how Irish unity could come about.⁴

The Belfast Telegraph political columnist Sam McBride, who interviewed Thompson earlier this month, said it was important to clarify that he “is not saying he supports a united Ireland, and for now remains a unionist. But he is open to a ‘new Ireland’ — the more oblique language now preferred by most Irish unity campaigners which is vaguer about exactly what constitutional arrangement it would entail. Most people take the phrase to mean a united Ireland (whether federal, unitary state or some other arrangement) and the ending of British sovereignty in Ireland.”

Wallace Thompson says: “Unionism as a philosophy probably was always in many ways doomed because of Ireland’s nature, the fact that the north was carved off from the south… now you’ve got a position where: Do you partition again? Do you accept that demographic change is such that we have to run to the walls and again shut the gates? Or do we recognise that we can’t keep doing this? We need to recognise that there are fundamental issues that have always been there really – from centuries ago – that we need to now recognise and try to address.”

Thompson has not been afraid of speaking out when other unionists have remained silent. When Martin McGuinness lay dying in 2017, he wrote on Facebook: “It is obvious that Martin McGuinness is seriously ill. There are those rejoicing in this and hoping that he suffers a painful and lingering death. I have been around a long time and I’m under no illusions about Martin McGuinness… however, if we profess to be evangelical Protestants, we need to reflect upon the words of Christ who said…‘Love your enemies’”. McBride points out that “comments like that are rarely heard from unionists – even deeply religious ones.”

Like so many unionists, Thompson felt betrayed – “we were like the unwanted child in the house” – by Boris Johnson’s decision to opt for an Irish Sea trade border. “If anything, my view since then has been [strengthened]. I do wonder at the future of the Union and I think we need to waken up and recognise that. The emperor has no clothes.”

He says that recently at the Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry the consensus was that the DUP should not return to Stormont until the sea border goes. But he goes on: “Those who say ‘don’t go back’ need to set out: How long are we away for – 10 years, 20 years, 50 years… forever? And if that’s the case, what’s the alternative?”

Thompson regards himself as both British and Irish. He is tied to Britain by nostalgia, by a “deep-seated thing in your psyche that you were born and brought up within unionism” – but above all by the religious freedom which he cherishes.

Yet he also says: “I was born an Irishman. And people in my community again say ‘oh no, no, no, we aren’t Irish’ – but we are Irishmen and it’s nonsense to believe we’re not. We need to rediscover some of that Irishness. We’ve washed our hands of it completely. A hundred years ago our forefathers were happy to be Irish and to be seen to be Irish.” Does he fear Irish unity in the way he did as a young man? “No. I think it’s a different animal now,” he says.

He still isn’t entirely convinced that his Protestant faith and Britishness would be safe in a united Ireland and worries about it being “easy to come out with honeyed words but then to abandon pledges. Nationalism as a philosophy has a blind spot about how deeply held some of those things are to us… I would be concerned that we would [in a united Ireland] lose stuff; lose some of the key elements of our identity.”

However, he is prepared to sit down with those planning Irish unity to try to make it a more appealing idea to unionists. “I think we are in an inevitable move towards that – when it comes, I don’t know, but there’s an inevitability in my mind that we are moving towards some form of new Ireland. Hopefully, new and not absorption…but we need to ask the questions and we need to ask for answers and we need to talk to people. That shouldn’t mean then you’re thinking that we’re suddenly going down that road. We might not. We might decide [based on] all the evidence that we don’t want to go down that road. But we’re closing our eyes and pretending there’s no problem. This is the problem with unionism – we’re in denial, constant denial. To talk to these groups that are calling for a new Ireland to me is not an indication of weakness; it’s an indication of strength.”

To me – a very moderate nationalist from a unionist background – Thompson’s voice sounds like an authentic if rarely articulated one. I remember talking to a close associate of Rev Ian Paisley’s nearly 40 years ago who said similar things. Over a late night whisky, male members of my own Northern Irish unionist family have privately said the same thing: unionism’s days are numbered and some kind of future Irish unity is on the way.

But what will that mean for the cosy and all-pervasive Irishness of Southern society, with its continuing undercurrents of anti-Britishness and its probable Sinn Fein-led government in the near future? I listened recently to a clip from a speech at the 2021 Fine Gael Ard Fheis by Lorraine Hall, a young Dun Laoghaire councillor from a Protestant background, which struck a chord with me.

She said that when she was growing up in Cavan in the 1990s, she asked herself at times whether she was fully Irish: “At every stage of my upbringing I was made to feel I was different because of my religious background. I was sent to a separate primary and secondary school, segregated. I attended a different church. I participated in different sports from my peers and celebrated different cultural events. My 1990s self remembers questioning the logic of it all. If the objective in my mind was peace and integration, why were there so many barriers keeping us all apart?” She finished by saying that it was only in recent years, partly as a result of working with Minister Heather Humphreys – another Border Protestant – on the government’s remarkably all-embracing programme to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising, that she began “to really appreciate that you can be Protestant and proudly Irish, that you can be of Ulster Scots heritage and proudly Irish, and you can play so called garrison sports and still be proudly Irish. And it is those who make you feel as though you are lesser Irish – or those who behave as though there is a hierarchy of Irishness – who do not live up to the ideals of our republic.”

“If we really consider ourselves to be a modern, multicultural Ireland, that includes accepting those of us who don’t readily fit into the Gaelic Irish stereotype, and allowing all of us to express our culture, without fear or judgement.” She appealed for “a broader definition of Irishness that is inclusive of all our traditions and backgrounds.”

Councillor Hall’s words should give us pause for thought. I live in Rathmines, a liberal, middle class, multi-cultural suburb of south Dublin where these barriers are far less significant than they were 40 or 50 years ago. However, all but one of the dozen schools in the area are still denominated by religion. Do many children from a Protestant background here play gaelic football or hurling? I have my doubts. On the other hand, nobody would dare in a hundred years to fly a Union flag on Armistice Day in this formerly unionist area.

Are we generous and open-minded enough to admit large numbers of fanatically pro-British (and often anti-Irish) Northern unionists into our comfortable, consensual and proudly Irish society? What are we prepared to offer them in terms of inclusive laws and symbols to make them feel at home here, so that, like the tiny and timid group of Southern Protestants who acquiesced to becoming part of the Irish Free State a century ago, they will – in the Taoiseach’s words – “throw their weight behind a newly united state and make sure it survives?”

¹ ‘Taoiseach says Irish people need to reflect more on how we would accommodate those with a British identity in a united Ireland’. Irish Times, 8 September

² Discussing Irish unity over dinner with Trinity College politics students, 2Irelands2gether, 14 April 2022

³ ‘Martin notes ‘huge incompatibility’ between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein when asked about future coalition’, Irish Times, 11 September

⁴ ‘Unionism was probably always doomed – a ‘new Ireland’ is now inevitable, says DUP founding member’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 September; ‘Wallace Thompson is a remarkable opportunity for Irish unity campaigners – but also a threat’, Belfast Telegraph, 10 September.

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

The IRA’s Christmas present to the Niedermayer family: the murder of their father

Posted on Wednesday, 30 August, 2023 by andypollak

Earlier this month I saw ‘Face Down’, a powerful and heartbreaking documentary by the Dublin film-maker Gerry Gregg about the IRA’s 1973 murder of Thomas Niedermayer, the German manager of an electronics factory on the edge of west Belfast. The script was by David Blake Knox, a former RTE producer who had written a 2019 book about the case. In the words of a senior RUC investigating officer in the film, Niedermayer and the terrible circumstances of his death and its aftermath have been “absolutely, utterly forgotten”.

Niedermayer was an entirely innocent and uninvolved bystander in the Northern Ireland conflict, and he certainly believed he was safe because of that. A former aircraft mechanic, he had come to Belfast in the early 1960s to manage the Grundig factory in Dunmurry, which had created over 1,000 jobs in this unemployment blackspot (it closed after its former manager’s funeral in 1980). He was also the honorary West German consul in the city. He was highly regarded in the Grundig plant by management and workers alike; one worker who spoke to the BBC called it “a model factory” where “Catholics and Protestants can work equally together.”

On the night of 27th December 1973 he was in his home in Andersonstown along with his younger daughter Renate (his wife Ingeborg was in a Belfast hospital receiving treatment for depression). The 15-year-old girl opened the door to two unmasked men who said there had been an accident and some damage to Niedermayer’s car. He went outside to inspect this, but a neighbour saw him being bundled into a car which was driven off at speed. He was never seen alive by his family again. There was no claim of responsibility.

What appeared to have happened was that the German factory manager had been kidnapped by the IRA to be held as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the British government to get the return to a Northern Ireland prison of two IRA bombers in Britain, the sisters Dolours and Marian Price. The Price sisters, from a fiercely republican Belfast family, had been on hunger strike and had been force-fed in Brixton prison in London, where they were demanding that they should be returned to serve their 20 year sentences in the North, where they could claim the ‘Special Category’ status privileges then afforded to IRA prisoners.

The kidnap operation had been planned and organised by Brian Keenan, the IRA’s quartermaster general, described by journalist Ed Moloney in his authoritative A Secret History of the IRA, as having “entered IRA mythology as one of its hardest men, a skilled and ruthless commander who was as determined a revolutionary as existed anywhere in the IRA.” There may also have been a personal grudge involved: Keenan had been a shop steward in the Grundig factory and had been fired by Niedermayer.

However the kidnap went wrong. The German was kept blindfolded, gagged and bound in a house in Andersonstown less than a mile from his home. On the third day, he tried to escape while going to the toilet, and screamed and shouted when he was restrained. Four men held him down and one pistol-whipped him with a Browning revolver until he stopped moving. An autopsy after the discovery of his body revealed two depressed fractures to his skull.

Keenan instructed the kidnap gang to dispose of Niedermayer’s body secretly and the following evening they buried him ‘face down’ in a rubbish dump on parkland in Colin Glen, in the hills on the edge of West Belfast. Meanwhile his wife was issuing anguished appeals for information about his fate and whereabouts. “Please let me know what has happened to my husband,” she begged on television. “Give me peace within myself. No one can appreciate the agony and strain you are putting me and my daughters through.” A few weeks later she asked again: “Please give me some sign to put an end to this dreadful uncertainty…at least give me some information of where his body may be found, so that he can be decently buried and can rest in peace.” But nothing came back. Six months later she issued her “last and final” appeal: “It is terrible living like this and never knowing. I beg these people to let me know – my life has been shattered.”

However not content with such a cruel silence, the IRA (in tandem with British intelligence) went into lie-spreading ‘black propaganda” mode, with the international media as willing dupes. The Times Ireland correspondent informed his readers that he had been personally assured by the “Provisionals in the IRA battalion in Andersonstown” that “they knew nothing about it.” The Irish Press in Dublin carried an interview with an unnamed loyalist paramilitary ‘commander’ claiming his group had killed the German. Blake Knox believes this line had come from British intelligence: MI5, along with a professional fantasist called Colin Wallace who worked for British Army HQ in Lisburn as an ‘information officer’, also blamed loyalists, claiming that Niedermayer was having an affair with the German wife of unionist politician, Bill Craig. The German tabloid Bild carried the same story (and was successfully sued by Craig for it). The respected German current affairs magazine Der Spiegel again claimed “militant Protestants” had kidnapped Niedermayer, and that he had been having numerous adulterous affairs. All lies: anything but the actual truth about who had killed him. The well-known Irish journalist Kevin Myers, who was then a Belfast-based freelance contributor to the Observer (and is a rare journalist willing to publicly admit his mistakes), admitted in the film that journalists had been “useful idiots” for the IRA.

It not until March 1980 – nearly six and a half years after he was kidnapped – that Niedermayer’s body was found in Colin Glen. Tipped off by an IRA informer, a group of very determined and courageous policemen (with Walther automatic handguns under their waterproof jackets), posing as the ‘West Belfast Environmental Action Group’, spent a month clearing tons of stinking rubbish that had been dumped in the park before they uncovered it.

But the story of this tragic family was far from over. Ingeborg Niedermayer had been declared a widow by a German court in 1976. She believed that if she “knew for certain” what had become of her husband, she might feel better. It was the “not knowing”, she said, “that continually nags at my mind and brings on periods of depression and anxiety”. Since the kidnapping, she had only managed to survive “from day to day.”

In June 1990 Ingeborg returned to Ireland and booked into a hotel in the seaside resort of Bray in County Wicklow. A few days later her body was washed up on a beach at the neighbouring resort of Greystones. Within a year, her younger daughter Renate – who had opened the door to the kidnappers – and was then living in South Africa, also killed herself. In 1996 her older daughter Gabrielle, who had emigrated to Australia with her husband and raised two daughters there, also committed suicide. A few years later she was followed by her husband – a family utterly destroyed.

‘Face Down’ follows Niedermayer’s two brave young grand-daughters, Rachel and Tanya, as they try to piece together the tragic story of their family. Has there ever been any statement of admission, let alone apology, from the IRA? Absolutely not. Perhaps the most arresting clip in the film is of the Sinn Fein leader, Mary Lou McDonald, helping to carry Brian Keenan’s tricolour-draped coffin, after he died of cancer in 2008. This is the woman who will almost certainly be our next Taoiseach, representing our peace-loving nation on the international stage.

Brian Keenan is now a great republican hero: Sinn Fein puts on an annual memorial lecture in his honour, as well as a ‘Brian Keenan mountain run’ to celebrate his ‘love of nature’. One can buy an icon of the IRA leader, described in party publications as a ‘Republican Legend’, in four sizes. He was in charge of the IRA’s 1970s bombing campaign in Britain, in which scores of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed; he was found guilty of eight of those murders and sentenced to 18 years in a British jail. The Garda agent and former IRA man Sean O’Callaghan said he had also planned the January 1976 Kingsmill killings in South Armagh, in which 10 innocent Protestant workmen died. He is believed to have planned the assassination of the British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, along with his young assistant, Judith Cooke, in Dublin in July 1976. He was a ruthless and amoral killer and organiser of killings, who was utterly shameless about his multiple murderous activities, boasting shortly before his death that “the IRA changed urban warfare on a world basis. Other armed revolutionary organisations have borrowed the IRA’s tactics.” In fairness, I should add that Keenan was largely instrumental in swinging most of the IRA hard-liners behind the Adams leadership’s ‘Time for Peace’ strategy in the 1990s.

Meanwhile the disinformation goes on. Last year, nearly 50 years after Niedermayer’s death, RTE London correspondent John Kilraine reported that released British state papers showed the British government had refused to pass on to the Niedermayer family what it knew about his fate. He said that talks between the British government and the IRA about releasing the kidnapped man in return for the Price sisters’ return to Northern Ireland “came to a halt when Mr Niedermayer was accidentally killed by the kidnap gang.”² So as usual the fault lay with the dreadful Brits. As it continues to downplay its past connections with the IRA, while simultaneously glorifying that secret army’s sanguinary deeds, Sinn Fein must have been delighted.

‘Face Down’ has been shown throughout August in cinemas in Dublin, Belfast and Galway. Several thousand people will have seen it in that time. If it gives pause to even a few of those people who might be contemplating voting for the party of the Provisional IRA in the upcoming general elections, it will have been worthwhile.

¹ David Blake Knox, The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer, 2019

² ‘British withheld information on Niedermayer kidnapping’ – UK State Papers, RTE, 19 July 2022

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 4 Comments

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