Speaking at Queen’s University, Belfast yesterday, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Chris Heaton-Harris made this statement, “Martin McGuinness along with Gerry Adams will be remembered for the courage and leadership they showed.”
Can someone stop the world and let me off, please? To my amazement, the people who negotiated the agreement gave this a round of applause. I sat there in disbelief. But this is a revelation of NIO proclaimed by the Northern Ireland secretary.
He made this statement before using his speech to get stuck into the biggest unionist party in Northern Ireland, and ironically the party that kept him in government for three years. He did it all without missing a heartbeat. Isn't it amazing how quickly Tory politicians forget reality?
What is clear from the 25 year Agreement anniversary conference is that a lot of education needs to happen if we are to truly understand the past and bring ourselves to a better future. Only the DUP has been attempting to counter this nonsense.
In any analysis of Northern Ireland the DUP is a significant voice and opinion. Yet to listen to the overwhelming majority of participants and the audience at this three day agreement fest you would think the province was a one dimensional place heading joyously towards a United Ireland. That is not reality and that bubble really needs to burst if nationalists and unionists are to come to terms with the future.
There's no point expecting the UUP to do it. It’s apparent that everything they have supported including Brexit is to be jettisoned. Lord Empey implored Unionists like me to throw away all leverage they have in order to get an Assembly back. As for Doug Beattie, he actually sided with the sentiments expressed by Sinn Fein Leader Mary Lou McDonald all for easy applause. Seriously, how can anyone listen to this drivel - about a United Ireland just around the corner and Gerry Adams an architect of peace - and let it go unchallenged?
Only three DUP representatives were at the conference to fight that corner and to make the case for unionism. We were right not to concede the ground but to do so in the knowledge that a large section of the audience was deaf to reality and only wanted the cosy dreamland of their own predictions.
One genuine nationalist whom I spoke to conceded that if the yellow pages still existed you would need a separate volume for “Architects of the peace process” and he scoffed rightly so at the brass neck of Mary Lou, the current President of Sinn Fein and TD in a foreign jurisdiction who spent the day lecturing Northern Ireland, as if she was mandated to do so, about what lies ahead for the province.
She had the audacity to stand to her feet and take a bow when those who had negotiated the Belfast agreement were asked to stand. It’s not even clear if she was in Sinn Fein in 1997 - in fact she may have been in another party - but what is clear is that she didn’t negotiate a comma in the accord yet had the brass neck to stand there as if she was a part of the process. It did make some realists laugh out loud and called into question her judgement.
She finished her contribution to the conference by telling unionists “she prays” that the DUP wakes up and accepts her reality. The DUP is very much awake! The one positive about Mary Lou is the more she speaks the more she puts the backs up of hard and soft unionists. She is a colossal turn off so keep speaking up Mary!
Gerry (I was never in the IRA) Adams has never held ministerial office in Northern Ireland; he passed that responsibility to other members of his party. Yet the British Secretary of State found space in his speech to congratulate him. Is this what the Conservative and Unionist Party believes is good policy? Is this how the government rewards Unionists? It was an appalling comment and completely uncalled for.
Some security analysts have suggested that the only reason the IRA moved to a peace process was because they were so riddled with MI5 informants that they could no longer carry out their terror campaign. MI5 agency’s reached right to the top of Their infiltration placing no one, and I mean no one, in the organisation above suspicion of being a paid informer.
The head of the nutting squad, the team of assassins who shot informers, was himself a paid agent of MI5 receiving £80,000 per year for his information. Gerry Adams Chief of Staff Dennis Donaldson too was a British agent. Both now have taken much of their secrets to the grave.
Adams is believed to be responsible for the strategy of atrocities that marked the beginning of the IRA bombing campaign. Actions such as Oxford Street bus depot bombing in Belfast, the city centre economic indiscriminate bombing campaign and the massacre at La Mon Hotel.
Whilst the former IRA commander fired the first shots on Bloody Sunday, he refused to give evidence, and he took the truth of what happened to victims to the grave along with the names of the perpetrators. Adams will most certainly do the same thing. Yet Chris Heaton-Harris says he proclaims them as courageous and honours them as great leaders. Really Mr Heaton-Harris are you actually a Unionist? How sick and perverse is that sentiment by Heaton-Harris?
What a slap in the face to every victim of the IRA, who have been denied the truth and denied justice by Adams and and the rest of Sinn Fein/IRA. Perhaps Mr Heaton-Harris would like to sit in a room with replays of just exactly what the IRA’s courage and leadership entailed, he can watch the death and destruction that they caused and then he can talk to the families of victims and survivors. He could take a moment and speak with the relatives of the. 200 unsolved police officer murders. He could perhaps contemplate with the families of the 500 people murdered along Northern Ireland's border, the same border he won’t defend against the EU. He really should know better.
Only three members of the DUP contributed to the conference. They were met with hostility and even the BBC asked one why they were there as if the DUP must be written out of the history of the province. But we rightly claimed our space, put forward our message and took the bricks of an audience who claimed to believe in reconciliation but can’t reconcile themselves to a different perspective. That’s not reconciliation at all. That’s just denial.
The reality is that 25 years on from the Belfast agreement the position of the ‘No’ campaign amongst Unionists now has predominance for the very reasons that the gush and drivel poured upon republicanism has made ordinary unionists who just want to get on with life sick.
Victims of years of terror, who went the extra mile to secure peace and sacrifice are frankly fed up that this has become a one way street and an attempt to make the place a cold house for the unionist community. The special rights and privileges inserted in the agreement to protect and support the then nationalist minority are now being threatened with removal in case a Protestant minority in the future would dare to claim those rights and protections for themselves. We are told that the agreement is to be reformed to aid and abet further nationalist advance whilst protections to support unionism are to be denied.
This conference may serve to be a wake up call for some but it certainly is clear that instead of securing and making the place more stable it will serve to unsettle and drive people into their tribal camps. Anyone with any nouse at all will recognise the damage done to reconciliation and the opportunity of moving forward into a period of stability by such one sided optimism. Instead, this has served to polarise people.
The coming local government elections, usually a non event, will provide an opportunity for Unionists to galvanise behind the DUP and send a message that the institutions will not be back any time soon until unionist grievances are taken seriously and concessions made to them.
This is the time for unionism to get its act together. To stop the salami slicing of its mandate to vanity choices and to unite and be one large bulwark to once again declare its strength and purpose. Those within unionism who can only see the narrow ground of infighting and sending “internal messages” of chastisement that they are super prods and no one else measures up are doing unionism the greatest of all disservice. The consequences of such vanity will hasten the end of the union.
Sleeping giants awaken yourself from this slumber. Unionism can be conciliatory it can be contagious but now it must be United and clear!