The Author – Bart Busschots
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Sep
30
I feel really sorry for Northern Unionists
Filed Under Polemics & Politics on September 30, 2005 at 12:07 am
I read Dave’s post about the historic act of decommissioning by the IRA this week so this stuff was on my mind and when I saw that Hearts and Minds was on this evening on BBC I felt I just had to watch it to get a Northern Irish perspective on all this. What I was made me very sad indeed, Unionists are not being led by competent, driven leaders with a vision of a bright future for the north, the are being followed down a dark alley to despair by their so called leaders who are too busy bickering amongst themselves to notice the momentous things going on around them.
This week the IRA ‘put beyond use’ a ‘massive’ amount of weapons and was witnessed to do so by a retired general of internationally recognized integrity and two priests of exceptionally high standing within Northern Ireland who are near universally accepted as men of extreme integrity. Further more, we have been told that the amount of weapons disposed of was in line with both British and Irish intelligence estimates of how much weaponry the IRA had. I mean this was a serious bit of weapons dumping, it even included anti-aircraft missiles for goodness sake! Just think of how much less weapons there are on this island today than there were this time last week and ask your self, can that be a bad thing?
The one thing that was obvious from watching the Unionist politicians today is that they are not man enough to stand up and say that this is a positive step for the people of Northern Ireland. Instead Paisley and his guriers are slinging mud at General John de Chastelain and at the two priests who witnessed the decommissioning. How very big of them! These people are telling the Unionists what they have claimed to be waiting on for years yet they don’t want to hear it anymore. Their last big excuse for not moving forward is gone. They are frantically scrambling to make that not be the case and to come up with new excuses but all it is doing is showing them up as being too scared of moving forward to take so much as one positive step.
The IRA have swallowed their pride and handed in their guns, maybe it’s about time big Ian swallowed his and said YES for once in his life!
[…] I know some people don’t like it when I get political. However, when you give your blog the tag-line ‘an Irish Voice in the Blog Sphere’ you sometimes have to take time to reflect on events in Ireland, even if they are political. It’s been almost a year and half since I last shared my views on the situation in Northern Ireland on this blog and back then I felt that the Unionists were being let down terribly by their leaders. Since then there has been a lot more movement from the IRA. They have basically ceased to exist and their political wing has now agreed to support law and order in Northern Ireland by backing the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). At the same time the Unionists are refusing to accept a report by the police ombudsman proving what we all knew already, that there was serious corruption within the old Northern Irish Police Force and that they colluded with Unionists. Basically, Unionists continue to live in a revisionist past while the republicans are looking to a brave new future for Northern Ireland. […]