INNOCENCE INNOCENCE CRY INNOCENCE INNOCENCE #JFTC2

 

First of all, I would like to thank everyone sincerely, who worked so hard for the release of Marian Price and Martin Corey both in Ireland and overseas. I am sure you're commitment did make a big difference and we are all happy about the outcome. Well done!

The case of the Craigavon 2, has been dragging on now over several years and Gerry Conlon of the Guildford 4, who is now deceased, was a passionate supporter of their cause. I knew Gerry sufficiently well enough, to know, that these two young men were genuinely innocent, before Gerry would get involved.

However, I was so weary over my lifetime campaigning, in both Ireland and England for innocent Irish political prisoners, that I just needed a break and decided to leave it to a younger generation, to take up their cause. Indeed many like me, are tired and would like to walk away, but the relentless injustices, just seem to never cease with the British in Ireland.

Like the Marian and Martin campaigns and I don't wish to be critical, I am frankly a little surprised by the photography used. I am frankly angry at all those careerist politicians, who rose to power on the backs of the hardship of Ireland's so many political prisoners and they appear to have done so very little, for the cause of all those interned without a proper trial, strip searched and of course, all those innocents who are used as political and policing scapegoats, for an inherently, rotten system.

Innocent young people, in every generation, since the foundation of both scum states in Ireland, have been incarcerated over the last Century and it still goes on into the 21st century. People who would otherwise, be just happy to get on with their everyday lives, are dragged back into it, time after time, year after, generation after generation. What a terrible waste of energy, of the best people, this island has to offer. We are too small as an island to make a difference on our own, in matters like this peacefully, while some of our best, over many generations, have emigrated. We need all of their help and their succeeding generations, as the British Government, seem hell bent, on creating the conditions of injustice, division and keeping them alive, that generates so much anger and bitterness. We need your help to deal with it, in a proactive, rather than reactionary way. Below is an explanation of the matter. Again thank you all so much for your help in the past and please help make this matter as international as possible,because there is massive political censorship, in both Ireland and Britain on these matters and the corporate media carries considerable disinformation on Ireland. 

beir bua! brion

Our Duty To Support The Craigavon Two #JFTC2

By  JULIANICHIM      Twitter Campaign #JFTC2

The illegal and criminal incarceration of the Craigavon Two by the British State is an example of everything that
is wrong with the British occupation in the north of Ireland. While the leadership of SF is currently meeting with
the commander in chief of British death squads and having tea and biscuits, the Craigavon Two are  sitting in a cell in
Maghaberry deprived of all basics rights, the most recent victims of the British Injustice system.

Their case and conviction, based on secret evidence, Diplock Courts,witness tampering and intimidation demonstrates that not much has changed since the signing of the GFA and the injustice of their incarceration is not just a crime against
them but rather an attack on justice and human rights of ALL people in the occupied six counties.

Despite the fact that their appeal has discredited any and all accusations against them, they are still sitting in
jail almost one year after this “awaiting a decision” in other words being continuously punished for their real crime, their politics. Like Price, Corey and many others the British state is trying to break them and break the movement by targeting all who are political but in this they will fail!!!

In J.P. Woottons own words (in a surprise letter that I received) he states(all spelling mistakes are mine):
“While I am confident…we will be back home again to our families and communities, it must be recognize that
this type of injustice is merely a symptom of a cruel and unjust system. Unless this is abolished it will continue
to affect more people. Take for example Gerry Conlon, Who has supported us in our quest for justice, he himself faced a similar outrage many years ago and here it is, happening again. Unless we treat the disease, the symptoms
will always reappear……If one good thing could come from all this I hope is that the real nature of the system
we live under is clearly exposed.”

It is clear to all those who are watching what is occurring under the occupation that the nature of the occupation has not changed, and any who speak out will be brutalised and criminalized and as such all who believe in the ideas of justice and human rights have an obligation to speak out and oppose this miscarriage of justice as well as to hold
the British accountable. I ask people to write to the Craigavon Two as well as contact whatever representative of British Injustice is in your area to demand their freedom now and demand and end to the illegal kidnapping of Irish Republicans by the British state.

For more info on their case please check out
http://www.justiceforthecraigavontwo.com

Those in KKKanada please contact the British Consulate 416 593 1290

Write to the Craigavon Two

Brendan McConville

John Paul Wootton

Maghaberry Prison
Upper Ballinderry Road
Lisburn, Co.Antrim
North of Ireland
Bt28 2Pt


BACKGROUND


On the 9th March 2009 Police Constable Stephen Carroll was shot and killed while responding to an emergency 999 call in the Craigavon area. The following day police arrived at the home of Brendan McConville, a local republican, and placed him under arrest. Later that morning, John Paul Wootton, another republican from the area, was arrested in the Craigavon area and had his vehicle seized.

Both men were taken to Antrim for interrogation where they, along with a number of other individuals, were detained while the vehicle owned by John Paul Wootton was taken to Maydown Barracks in Derry for examination. Some days later police recovered the weapon used in the shooting from the rear garden of a house in the Pinebank housing estate in Craigavon. Around the same time a brown jacket with traces of DNA from Brendan McConville amongst others, and a residue which was claimed might have come from a firearm, was taken from the boot of the vehicle owned by John Paul Wootton.

Based on this finding, and under intense pressure to get results, police focused their attentions on these two men and set about constructing a case against them. The reason the police were under so much pressure was that Constable Carroll was the first police officer to be killed since the Good Friday Agreement. Adding to the pressure was the fact that this shooting took place within days of an attack on Masssereen Barracks where two British soldiers were killed.

It later transpired that the car owned by John Paul Wootton had been subject to covert surveillance at the time of the attack by means of a tracking device which had been hidden either in or on the vehicle by the British Army. This device provided data on the movement of the vehicle around the time of the shooting. It would later come to light that data from this device was wiped while the device was still in the possession of the Army. No one could explain why this had happened. The remainder of the data was used to construct a circumstantial yet arguably weak case against the two men.

Eleven months after the shooting a local man contacted the police in the middle of the night on Valentines night and, under the influence of alcohol, claimed to have seen Brendan McConville close to the area from which the shooting occurred on the night of the shooting. It should be borne in mind that in the eleven months from the shooting to this man’s statement, Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton had been charged with the shooting and their identities were widely broadcast throughout the media.

This man, known only to the court as Witness M, lied continuously under oath while giving evidence. He was adamant that he had no problems with his eyesight and when asked if he had been prescribed glasses he claimed that he did occasionally wear glasses, but only as a fashion item. It was only on day two of his testimony, when confronted with evidence acquired by Brendan McConville’s legal team from an optician in Lurgan where he had previously underwent an eyesight examination, that he conceded that he had been prescribed glasses but this time claimed that they were just for reading. Evidence later given in court would show that in fact Witness M suffered from both astigmatism and short sightedness and could only identify facial features up to half the distance at which he claimed to identify Brendan McConville. At the conclusion of the case the single judge, relying heavily on circumstance and inference, found both men guilty and sentenced them to life in prison. Both men continue to maintain their innocence and with an appeal fast approaching they ask that the facts be made public so that their quest for justice does not develop into another long running saga like that of the Guilford four or the Birmingham six.

News, INNOCENCE, CRY INNOCENCE, #JFTC2, Craigavon Two, Craigavon 2, Ireland, Gerry Conlon, Brendan McConville, John Paul Wooton, Wootton, #BoycottBritish

BREAKING ROYAL BREAD IN IRISH HOLOCAUST DENIAL

 Ireland Long Held in Chains's 

GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER.
By Amelia Blanford Edwards

Give me three grains of corn, Mother,
Only three grains of corn;
It will keep the little life I have
Till the coming of the morn

I am dying of hunger and cold, Mother,
Dying of hunger and cold;
And half the agony of such a death
My lips have never told

It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, Mother,
A wolf that is fierce for blood;
All the livelong day, and the night beside,
Gnawing for lack of food

I dreamed of bread in my sleep, Mother,
And the sight was heaven to see;
I awoke with an eager, famishing lip,
But you had no bread for me

How could I look to you, Mother,
How could I look to you
For bread to give to your starving boy,
When you were starving too?

For I read the famine in your cheek,
And in your eyes so wild,
And I felt it in your bony hand,
As you laid it on your child

The Queen has lands and gold, Mother,
The Queen has lands and gold,
While you are forced to your empty breast
A skeleton babe to hold

A babe that is dying of want, Mother,
As I am dying now,
With a ghastly look in its sunken eye,
And famine upon its brow

There is many a brave heart here, Mother,
Dying of want and cold,
While only across the Channel, Mother,
Are many that roll in gold;

There are rich and proud men there, Mother,
With wondrous wealth to view,
And the bread they fling to their dogs tonight
Would give life to me and you.

What has poor Ireland done, Mother,
What has poor Ireland done,
That the world looks on, and sees us starve,
Perishing one by one?

Do the men of England care not, Mother,
The great men and the high,
For the suffering sons of Erin's Isle,
Whether they live or die?

Come nearer to my side, Mother,
Come nearer to my side,
And hold me fondly, as you held
My father when he died;

Quick, for I cannot see you, Mother,
My breath is almost gone;
Mother! Dear Mother! Ere I die,
Give me three grains of corn.

• Mac Lovin Antoine joder, cuánta tristeza, cuánta miseria, cuánta injusticia!See Translation

  
  
• Paula Brain Sí, la historia de la Gran Hambruna irlandesa fue lo más triste que leí. En verdad no fue hambruna, fue genocidio.Yes, the story of the great Irish famine was the saddest thing I read. In truth it wasn't famine, it was genocide. 

ZEIG HEIL OUR QUEEN ! #BoycottBritish

Ulster loyalism; lost and without a real friend.

A map highlighting the areas subjected to British plantations in Ulster, using modern county boundaries. (Photo credit:Wikipedia)

‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as intractable as ever and politicians would once more have to pay attention to the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’.

Fifty years and another world war later, Ulster remained a needling presence in British political life. At the time of the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of 1974, which helped bring down the cross-community power-sharing executive agreed at Sunningdale in 1973, a peeved Harold Wilson openly denounced Ulster Protestants as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy’. The prime minister’s accusation riled the Protestants, who thought themselves harder-working than their feckless Catholic neighbours, the real spongers in their eyes. Incensed Ulster Unionists began to sport sponges on their lapels.

Are the people of Ulster – as its Protestant champions claim – an integral part of the British nation? Or is Northern Ireland rather, as Irish nationalists insist, a relic of empire, whose close proximity to Great Britain obscures the otherwise bald fact that British colonialism is the ultimate cause of the modern Ulster Question? Both claims are valid, while neither tells the whole story. Certainly, the Northern Irish problem has its roots in a colonial project, the Ulster Plantation of the early 17th century. Yet with the passage of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls off the ferry at Larne, the proliferation of Union Jacks along roads and at roundabouts is alienating. Unintentionally perhaps, the puffed-up hyper-Britons of Ulster exhibit colonial insecurity and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’.

A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s University and the Ormeau Road where the streets, built by a biblically minded Victorian Protestant, are named for Jerusalem, Damascus and Carmel. Originally, Protestants lived here, and later, the area became more mixed, with young lecturers bringing in a dash of counter-culture; but in recent years the Holy Land has become a place of student-dominated multiple-occupancy housing and raucous anti-social behaviour, which tends to culminate in riotous stand-offs with the police on St Patrick’s Day. The authorities would rather not confront the fact that many of the rioting students – ‘culchies’ (yokels) from mid-Ulster – wear Celtic tops or Gaelic Athletic Association shirts, and are asserting an instinctive quasi-sectarian command of what is now their territory. Protestant students prefer to rent accommodation further south in Stranmillis.

In Belfast the urban motorway – something that has done much to blight city life across the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a bleak cordon sanitaire between some of the rival sectarian ghettoes in the west of the city. Moreover, as the security forces were quick to recognise, the limited number of crossing points for vehicles meant that the centre of Belfast could be more effectively secured against disturbances spilling over from the Shankill and Falls Road areas. This estrangement persists, long after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Peace did not bring the ‘peace walls’ tumbling down, or strip away the protective netting which covers tiny back gardens within lobbed-bottle distance of the other community.

Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised microgeographies – of small urban pockets such as Sandy Row or the Short Strand – provide the matter of sectarian conflict, for, as the acerbic historian Joe Lee lamented, Ulster has a ‘dearth of major atheist settlements’.

Geography also presents challenges on a larger scale. The incomer from ‘GB’, as Ulster folk call Great Britain, quickly learns not to call the nearby larger island ‘the mainland’, while apparent synonyms for Northern Ireland – such as ‘Ulster’ or the ‘Six Counties’ or ‘the North of Ireland’ – betray the politics and religion of the speaker. Where, indeed, is Ulster? This seemingly straightforward question opens up a rich seam of history. Ulster is one of the historic provinces of Ireland, and comprises nine counties, six of which – Armagh, Down, Antrim, Londonderry (or Derry), Fermanagh and Tyrone – are today in Northern Ireland, and three – Monaghan, Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed Donegal (then known as Tyrconnell), Londonderry, Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh and Tyrone.

During the Home Rule crisis of the early 20th century, Sir James Craig, the founding father of Northern Ireland, envisaged hiving off the four most strongly Protestant counties – Antrim, Down, Londonderry and Armagh – to form an Ulster statelet. In the event, Fermanagh and Tyrone were added to the new self-governing province of Northern Ireland established under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, but Article XII of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, between the United Kingdom and the Irish Free State, was deliberately vague on the future resolution of the border. In the event, the proposal of the Boundary Commission of 1925 to shave off southern Armagh for the Free State and transfer parts of eastern Donegal to Northern Ireland was much too controversial to implement, or even acknowledge in public.

Certain areas near the border in Armagh became notorious for atrocities more than a century before there even was a border. Uncanny congruences of this sort reinforce the assumption of outsiders that Ulster is a land of memory, where the horrors of an inescapable past forever haunt the present. However, as Sean Connolly notes more precisely in Belfast 400, memory is all too often selective memory, if not ‘historical amnesia’. When 19th-century Belfast became ‘the capital of Irish Unionism’, its citizens conveniently forgot that in the 1790s the city had been ‘the birthplace of a United Irish movement committed to the establishment of an independent Irish republic’. At the centenary of the Rebellion of 1798, the leading officials of the Orange Grand Lodge of Belfast misremembered the largely Presbyterian rising in Ulster as ‘a series of most foul and cowardly murders and massacres of innocent men and women whose only offence was their Protestantism’. James Loughlin notes in his essay in Ulster since 1600, that ‘former Presbyterian rebels’, keen in the early decades of the 19th century to reinvent themselves as loyal Britons, were ‘only too ready to frame the rebellion through the lens of 1641 as a vast Popish conspiracy’. In other words, although Ulster Catholics had been largely quiescent in 1798, the supposed history of the rebellion was cunningly – but convincingly – turned upside down to fit with an existing memory of the Ulster Catholic rising of 1641 (and, to be fair, with the strikingly different pattern of hostilities in other parts of Ireland during 1798).

Moreover, an entrenched rhetoric of civility and barbarity, which dated back to the Ulster Plantation, and beyond, appeared to confirm such perceptions. After the flight to the Continent in 1607 of the harassed Gaelic earls – Hugh O’Neill, Second Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, First Earl of Tyrconnell, along with Cúchonnacht Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh – the Plantation of 1609 was designed to bring civility to these rude parts. The new king, James VI and I, had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such sentiments still persist in the expected quarters. Ian Paisley claimed in the early 1980s that the forebears of the good Protestant folk of Ulster had ‘cut a civilisation out of the bogs and meadows of this country’, while the Gaels ‘were wearing pig-skins and living in caves’. These Yahoo Gaels were not only uncivilised, but so addicted to violence that it had permeated their entire culture. Paisley’s daughter, Rhonda, at one stage a Belfast councillor, complained that the Irish language itself ‘drips with their bloodthirsty saliva’.

Although there was a Scots presence in the north-east of Ireland from the early 17th century, Scots Presbyterian culture wasn’t consolidated there until the arrival of General Robert Munro’s Scots Covenanter army in the 1640s. The Scottish famines of the late 1690s brought a further exodus to Ulster of Scots, particularly from the south-west, the stronghold of Covenanting Presbyterianism. The Scots Covenanters were decidedly not republicans; they preferred to be governed by kings, but owed them a highly conditional allegiance. If the king failed to uphold the community’s Covenant with God, then the people were entitled to take up defensive arms against his malignant rule, and in certain circumstances even to execute divine vengeance on the apostate ruler. It is ultimately from this branch of the Scots Presbyterian tradition that Ulster inherits the peculiarities of loyalism, a commitment to queen and country so anarchic and tenuous as to be downright disloyal.

Loyalism has taken different organisational forms. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was set up in the mid-1960s by a former British soldier called Gusty Spence, as a proactive means of combating the upsurge in IRA activity which, it was expected, would follow the fiftieth anniversary in 1966 of the Easter Rising. The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) emerged in the early 1970s as a form of vigilantism by the Protestant working class against the insurgency of the Provisional IRA (which had split in disgust from the torpid Marxism of the Official IRA in 1969). The UDA used a proxy, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), for its terrorist activities. So self-defence was followed by the unprovoked sectarian killing of Catholics – regardless of whether they had any links with the Provos – and eventually, in some areas at least, by psychopathic gangsterism. Clearly, there is a major cleavage within Ulster Protestantism between Unionism and loyalism, but it’s not easy to trace its course.

Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) once stood on very uncertain terrain between the ‘big house Unionism’ of the old Ulster gentry, from which it recoiled, and a proletarian loyalism it sometimes appeared to court. How was one to interpret Paisley’s night-time rally on a hill in County Antrim in 1981, at which five hundred supporters waved their firearms licences? The Paisleyites’ reckless disregard for the rule of law, for Westminster and for British constitutional norms earned them the contempt of Enoch Powell, a Conservative turned Ulster Unionist, who favoured the full integration of Northern Ireland into the UK. Powell claimed Paisley and his followers were ‘Protestant Sinn Féin’.

The distinction between Unionism and loyalism revolves not only around violence and the nature of Ulster’s commitment to the British state, but also around class – that omnipresent yet largely invisible factor in Northern Irish politics. Loyalism has been an underappreciated expression of working-class consciousness. Andy Tyrie, the supreme commander of the UDA between 1973 and 1988, admitted that challenging the dominance of Unionism was an important part of being a loyalist. Of course, loyalism was an uninhibited demonstration of anti-Republican hostility, but it was also a form of resentment against the middle-class Unionists in their leafy suburbs, who seemed content enough to let their proletarian co-religionists bear the brunt of the internal struggle with the Provos.

Why, an outsider might ask about the situation in Ulster, did the region fail to develop the same class-based politics as the rest of the UK? Northern Ireland seems to be stuck in a conservative limbo, with voters preferring to vote along religious lines without regard to their material interests. But this analysis is oversimplified. Ulster is, in fact, rather left-wing. In one of the most surprising essays in Ulster since 1600, Graham Brownlow calculates that, factoring out coal and iron and steel manufacture, which the province lacks, Northern Ireland was ‘much more strike-prone than the UK average’ between the 1940s and the mid-1980s. UK trade unions enjoy considerable support, in spite of the divided national allegiances of the workforce. Indeed, Northern Ireland has a higher density of trade-union membership – that is, actual membership divided by total potential membership – than other parts of the United Kingdom, including Labour’s heartlands in Wales and Scotland. The Northern Ireland Labour Party, established in 1924, had offered an appealing alternative to ethnic politics, but just as it had emerged as the official opposition in Stormont it was overwhelmed by the onset of the Troubles. Similarly, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) – formed in 1970 out of various groupings, including the Republican Labour Party, and supported by some former members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party – shed its Labourite origins under John Hume’s leadership, but could not present an Irish enough identity to see off the electoral challenge of Sinn Féin. In any case, people in Ulster might wonder whether they needed class-based political parties. Sectarianism had done more to protect the working class in Northern Ireland than a powerless Labour Party had achieved in Britain after 1979. The Troubles helped to keep Thatcherism at bay, so that in 1989 the journalist Ian Aitken could describe the province as ‘the Independent Keynesian Republic of Northern Ireland’.

Here the middle classes flourished during the Troubles, their high-living maintained by a bloated public-sector-cum-security-state. The North Down constituency is a haven of peace and material amplitude, though notorious in cliché for its all too stark social division between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-yachts’. Nothing is as likely to shock the preconceptions of the visitor who comes to view the grim locations of ‘Troubles tourism’ as the sight of Ulster Tatler on newsagents’ shelves. Middle-class life in the province has its own variations. South Belfast has a multicultural bohemian flavour, as obvious in the boutiques of the Lisburn Road as around Queen’s University itself. This is a world captured with deliberately baroque exaggeration in Chris Marsh’s comic novel A Year in the Province (2008), whose humour comes from a pitch-perfect rendering of the cadences and sing-song inverted repetitions of Ulster speech. Ian Sansom’s deadpan novel Ring Road (2004), on the other hand, explores the dour and parochial absurdities of Ulster’s less flashy middle classes in the dormitory towns around Belfast.

While the Troubles did very little to threaten the middle classes, events have recently taken a potentially worrying turn. The recent spasm of unrest was provoked by Belfast City Council’s decision in December to restrict the flying of the Union flag at the City Hall – it had always flown there year-round – to selected dates in the political calendar, such as the Duchess of Cambridge’s birthday. The decision was not just the doing of Sinn Féin, but was supported by the somewhat priggish middle-class do-gooders of Alliance, a political party which has traditionally floated consequence-free above the streetfighting of proletarian Ulster. On this occasion, however, loyalist protesters chose to single out Alliance for facilitating the outrage. The party offices and the homes of prominent Alliance politicians became targets. The riots which have followed have been blamed – rightly – on loyalist recidivism.

There is, however, another unexpected side to loyalism, as Peter Shirlow’s book demonstrates. Whereas middle-class Unionist Ulster was for decades happy enough to say no, time and again, to changes in the government of the province, working-class loyalists – despite their own reputation for intransigence – could not afford to indulge in the same endless rejection. Shirlow distinguishes between the ‘idiocy’ of rejectionist loyalism and an avant-garde of ‘progressive’ or ‘transitional’ loyalism willing to engage with the demands of the Catholic community and to think imaginatively about conflict resolution. Working-class loyalists experimented – long before their snooty Unionist cousins – with a ‘non-sectarian mode of Unionist politics’, which recognised the shared sufferings of working-class Protestants and Catholics alike.

In 1979 the UDA-backed New Ulster Political Research Group published a report called Beyond the Religious Divide, which explored the common ‘Ulster’ identity of the province’s Catholic and Protestant peoples. The UDA also flirted with the idea of an independent Northern Irish republic as an ingenious solution to the underlying cause of the Troubles, namely the rival British and Irish claims of sovereignty. In 1987 the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), which would become a front for the UDA, put out Common Sense, which called for power-sharing and equality across the sectarian divide. The hard men of the UVF also caught the peace and reconciliation bug. In 1984 the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), the political wing of the UVF, proposed a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland, which was too daring for the authorities, and followed it up with an ecumenical document entitled ‘Sharing Responsibility’. Needless to say, not all loyalists were impressed. Transitional loyalists were seen by traditionalists as ‘lundys’ (the Ulster Protestant term for ‘quisling’). Another grouping, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, denounced the PUP as ‘atheistic communists’ determined to impose ‘a socialist ideology over a conservative people’.

This is, of course, to beg the question. Ulster has an ingrained conservatism, to be sure, but also an old-fashioned socialism about which it often seems to be in denial. The future remains uncertain. The dispute about the flag shows how much symbols matter in Northern Ireland, and unfortunately Ulster has just embarked on a ‘decade of centenaries’. Some are uncontentious, such as the four hundredth anniversary of Belfast’s receipt of a royal charter in 1613 and the Titanic centenary of 2012; others are pregnant with menace. The contrasting blood sacrifices of Dublin’s Easter Rising and the Ulster Division’s losses in the Battle of the Somme loom ominously in 2016. And, if we get past them without incident, the centenary of the Protestant statelet itself and the partition of Ireland arrive in 2020-21.

By Colin Kidd.

Winston Churchill wrote: “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.”