This ‘NewsLetter’ article is dated 27th August and is worth a read.
I cannot endorse all that is written for there is no mention of the collusion of the Ecumenical Churches and the Church of Rome in the whole process of ‘sanitising’ the IRA’s terror campaign and in the aiding of the Republican terrorists to escape the castigation due for their crimes.
It is because of this that IRA glorifying Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein sits in Stormont, dictating as a result of the DUP’s greed for power and readiness to enter a ‘power-sharing’ arrangement with the cover-organisation of the IRA!
I personally witnessed that evil deceit at work in the aftermath of the ‘Poppy-Day Massacre’ in Enniskillen in November 1987 (see The Remembrance Day Massacre at Enniskillen).
At that time the four churches, the police and the British Government conspired to hide the true facts of Rome’s assistance of the bombers by her protests against any searching of property under her control before the ‘Remembrance Day’ parade to Enniskillen Cenotaph.
As a result, the IRA were able to conceal a bomb, timed to go off during the remembrance day wreath-laying, in a Roman Catholic church building right beside the Cenotaph.
All told, 12 Protestants were murdered and over 60 seriously injured in the blast.
That wicked scheming by the churches and agencies of the State has yet to be told.
However, there are valuable facts and figures in this article which should be noted.
Sincerely in Christ’s name,
Ivan Foster
It is no wonder that support for the IRA has been growing
For more than 20 years the republican strategy on legacy should have been clear to anyone who follows politics closely.
By Ben Lowry.
‘The NewsLetter’, Saturday, 27th August 2022.
A poll says 70% of nationalists say IRA was justified. But nationalists who lived through it didn’t
It was in the summer of 2001 in the Weston Park talks that Sinn Fein got two huge strides forwards in its bid to retrospectively legitimise IRA terrorism.
A paragraph in the document that emerged from those cross-party negotiations in Saffordshire sought to give an effective amnesty for republican ‘on the runs’ (the parties could not in fact agree to implement it after the talks, but Tony Blair’s government then moved behind the scenes to give the IRA what it wanted via the ‘Letters of Comfort’ scheme for IRA fugitives).
Also in those talks unionists made a key political blunder. They accepted collusion between state and terrorist as a major feature of the Troubles, and so set in motion a process for various inquiries, such as that into the loyalist murder of the solicitor Pat Finucane.
Unionists then sought to balance such inquiries, and the role of UK state elements in such killings, by seeking probes into IRA murders such as that of RUC Superintendents Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan at the border, and the role of Irish state elements in them.
This was a bad move, morally and politically, because while there was some state-linked input into both those aforementioned terrible attacks, the notion of systemic state help for paramilitaries is one that is much more widely pushed and believed by nationalist Ireland.
I say it was a bad move ‘morally’ because it gave succour to the republican lie about the scale of such collusion, which was minimal. Of the 1,100 loyalist murders during the Troubles, their sectarian nature was obvious. Far from having assistance, loyalist paramilitary intelligence was useless, and they often killed Catholics for being Catholic.
Fewer than 50 of the people murdered by loyalists were republican paramilitaries. Yet somersaults are done by the IRA to distort these statistics and divert attention from the fact that 2,100 of the 3,500 Troubles dead were killed by republicans.
Thus the 360 or so people killed by the security forces (the exact number varies in different lists of Troubles fatalities) are then added to the loyalist dead to make the unionist and UK state response to republican terror look more brutal than it was. But such false accounting is still nowhere near enough to disguising the utterly lop-sided nature of the 1968-97 violence. Even if every loyalist killing had state support and every state killing had loyalist intent, still the total such killings is under 1,500 — far below the republican bloodshed tally.
So now the state is even being blamed for IRA killings. Theories are emerging to imply that UK elements were in fact to blame for the Shankill bomb, for Teebane even for the Enniskillen atrocity – claims such as that the security forces deliberately ignored warnings or subtly encouraged attacks.
Such nonsense would be funny it if wasn’t so vile, and if it didn’t reveal a chilling hatred of the police and army, who prevented civil war.
Even now, 20+ years after the republican tactics on legacy became clear, even well informed people of a pro Union outlook, people who should be explaining to the world that the UK’s restrained overall response to sustained terrorism showed what a civilised nation it is, seem not to grasp what is happening or how to respond to it.
Some think that by ignoring it, and talking optimistically about the future instead, it will all fade away. Others think that by honourably admitting past unionists state mistakes republicans will be similarly candid in response.
I think that is wrong. I was not surprised that 70% of nationalists now think the IRA campaign was unavoidable, a far higher percentage than the nationalists who actually lived through those dark days. Soon young people in the political centre will think that too. They have been subject to unrelenting rubbish which turns the truth on its head and depicts the UK as having been a murderous, gangster state.
This anti British lie is pushed, in its own subtle way, by mainstream Irish political figures south of the border, not just by republicans.
Thus people of a non aligned background will begin to believe it too. Unless, that is, there is an effort to grasp simple statistics and start exposing young people to an easy-to-understand counter narrative.
And unless unionism, but above all London, makes clear to the IRA, and their PR helpers, that if they rake over the past it will be an uncomfortable experience for them.