s-901oao r-hkyrab r-1qd0xha r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0″ dir=”auto” lang=”en”>How hard can it be. #SinnFein #rtept
PETER HITCHENS reports: “Who let the IRA gangsters take over Ireland? We did. Fred Bassett replies: Peter Chickens – are you calling the Irish people who voted in a democratic Republic Gangsters? I think you should look back at your own history and the Flag that is globally called “The Butcher’s Apron”. Why is the Mail going broke in Ireland? Well all you have to do is read the article by the famous Peter Chickens who just plucked himself and you will find the answer.
I’m awaiting apologies from all the smug buffoons who told me that surrendering to the IRA in 1998 was a good thing to do. It brought peace, they said, ignorant of the true long-term price.
As the gruesome Sinn Fein approaches actual state power in Dublin, will these cowards and trimmers finally admit that they took the low road of superficial success, and left the real problem unsolved?
I am reminded (I often am) of an April 1940 cartoon by the great David Low, in which a defenceless Norwegian worker is menaced by a black Nazi tank and a squadron of dive-bombers.
We worry whenever some tiny band of neo-Nazis win a few votes in a backward corner of Germany. But this is as nothing to what is now happening in Dublin. Actual gangsters are now close to the offices of real national power. Masked IRA provisionals are pictured escorting the coffin at the funeral of hunger striker Bobby Sands
Beneath are written the cruel words ‘The Iron Comes Back’, a sneer at Norway’s policy of selling its iron ore to Hitler’s Germany.
Well, on this occasion, the lies have come back. We sold Ireland to gangsters for a few years’ respite. Now we see exactly who we sold it to.
We worry whenever some tiny band of neo-Nazis win a few votes in a backward corner of Germany. But this is as nothing to what is now happening in Dublin. Actual gangsters are now close to the offices of real national power.
I note the BBC, tireless in getting everything wrong, has taken to describing Sinn Fein as ‘Left-wing’.
Well, its supposed leader (we will come to this) Mary Lou McDonald cannot be accurately described as Left-wing. It’s another wing that she stands on.
In August 2003, Ms McDonald stood willingly beside the grisly apostle of violence and convicted IRA bomber Brian Keenan. But that wasn’t all.
I note the BBC, tireless in getting everything wrong, has taken to describing Sinn Fein as ‘Left-wing’. Well, its supposed leader (we will come to this) Mary Lou McDonald, above, cannot be accurately described as Left-wing. It’s another wing that she stands on
Both were there to ‘pay respect’ at the statue of one of the nastiest people who ever lived.
The memorial to Sean Russell in Dublin’s Fairview Park is, as far as I know, the only monument to a Nazi collaborator still standing in democratic Europe.
Russell, the IRA’s Chief of Staff in 1939, travelled on the eve of the Second World War to Nazi Germany to offer his services to Hitler. They gave him the use of a villa in Berlin, and provided him with a car and chauffeur.
He was taken to the Brandenburg military camp to study the latest techniques in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and met Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop.
After the fall of France, Russell urged the Germans to use the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland.
Luckily for the world and for Ireland, Russell died from a burst gastric ulcer in the U-boat (U-65) that Hitler provided to take him back to Ireland. He is a kind of litmus test.
Any decent Irish person shudders at this embarrassing memory of fanaticism beyond all bearing.
Only the real hardliners of pro-violence Republicanism, who hate Britain to the point of lunacy, still defend him.
Well, Ms McDonald, now coated in Euro-gloss, feminism and modern PR, did not have to go there.
The memorial to Sean Russell in Dublin’s Fairview Park is, as far as I know, the only monument to a Nazi collaborator still standing in democratic Europe. Russell, the IRA’s Chief of Staff in 1939, travelled on the eve of the Second World War to Nazi Germany to offer his services to Hitler
She did not have to listen without protest as the grisly Keenan praised the grislier Russell as a man ‘who preferred freedom to slavery’.
But she did, and we can learn a great deal about her and what she stands for from this incident.
Quite how she rose to her position is a mystery.
Her ‘election’ to the leadership of her party was uncontested, and, having met some of Sinn Fein’s leading lights in the USA back in the 1990s, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a heckler on that occasion.
But who actually runs Sinn Fein, which, thanks to the 1998 surrender, is free to raise huge funds in the USA, unlike any other party in the UK?
Well, for that, I refer you to a November 2019 statement by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, reported in the Belfast ‘News Letter’.
The newspaper said that the PSNI saw ‘no change’ from a 2015 government report that concluded Sinn Fein ‘continues to be overseen by the deadliest terror group of the Troubles, which although much reduced in scale and ‘committed to the peace process’, still has ‘specific’ departments and ‘regional command structures’, gathers intelligence, retains weapons and may engage in ‘isolated violence’ including murder’.
They haven’t gone away, you know. In fact, they’ll soon be running the government of a major European country that has until now been a highly creditable law-governed democracy.
And it will be the fault of those who rewarded murder in 1998, and called it peace.
Boris really is turning into Blair
Well now, are any of you beginning to wonder if I wasn’t right about Alexander ‘Boar-iss’ Johnson being the new Blair?
Why, he even has similar problems with his holidays. Where is the rule that says powerful people must have luxury long-haul vacations?
Harold Wilson used to spend his summers on the Isles of Scilly. Harold Macmillan liked a grouse-moor.
Clement Attlee paddled on Welsh beaches. Margaret Thatcher regarded holidays as a form of torture.
I’d prefer any of these to a man who takes his girlfriend to Mustique at the expense of, well, who?
He may say that Winston Churchill was given to grand getaways. But Churchill was the saviour of the nation.
He could do what he liked.
Hitchens is just a Pathetic Bigot says Fred
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Varadkar’s rally comments ‘hysterical overreaction’ – McDonald
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the rallies are “designed to be the next phase in Sinn Féin’s campaign of intimidation and bullying”.
Speaking before the meeting tonight, which was attended by close to 1,000 people, Ms McDonald said: “Mr Varadkar’s comments were over the top and were a demonstration by him and by a political establishment who are desperately reaching for something to stop an unstoppable change in Irish politics.”
Ms McDonald rejected suggestions that the meeting was about whipping up support for Sinn Féin.
She said it was about continuing a conversation, which she began with the electorate during the election.
Ms McDonald said she saw no reason why the conversation with the electorate could not continue after the election and she said the attitude displayed by Mr Varadkar was the very thing which built cynicism in politics.
Earlier, Mr Varadkar said plans by Sinn Féin to hold rallies across the country are “an unwelcome development”.
Mr Varadkar said the rallies are “designed to be the next phase in Sinn Féin’s campaign of intimidation and bullying”.
He added: “I wouldn’t be surprised if their next step is to take to the streets.”
Speaking at an event in Dublin today, Mr Varadkar said: “It shows once again this is not a normal party.”
Sinn Féin is planning five rallies, with the first in Cork toinght and the others in Dublin, Galway, Cavan and Newry.
Sinn Féin’s finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty described Mr Varadkar’s comments as “hysterics”.
Mr Doherty said they were just public meetings and involved elected representatives going out to meet people who voted for them.
He said the difference between them and other political parties was that when the election was over, they did not close the doors of Government Buildings.
He said he very much welcomed that Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin had given “huge publicity” to their meetings.
“The hysterics from Leo and Micheál are just that, nothing but hysterics” and he said they feared change.
Mr Doherty said they were not aware of any orchestrated Sinn Féin member bullying of people online and if there was, they would deal with it.
Mr Doherty also said they were intensifying detailed discussions with other parties and independents this week and they had engaged this morning with the Green Party on detailed policy issues.
Asked about the difference between Sinn Féin and the Green Party on carbon tax, he said they were opposed to the tax because the alternatives were not there. But he said they both were taking the climate agenda very seriously.
Yesterday, Sinn Féin’s deputy leader Michelle O’Neill said the party will set out its stall at the rallies and “people will have an opportunity to come along, those who support us and those who don’t”.
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