They've got the guns, and, um, that's it

It seems the peace process in the north has finally broken down and the level of recrimation here is so strong that I'm forced to concede that whoever it was that said that the Irish are a very fair-minded race because we never speak well of each other may on some level have had some sort of valid point.

The scaremongering on the RTE news last night was so bad that I thought my house had blown away and landed in Kansas.

True, when people who've made their collective name killing and maiming people warn the rest of us not to underestimate the gravity of the situation that could be interpreted as some sort of threat but it really ought to be the people over on the other side of the Irish sea shitting themselves.

Thing is, they've also got the fear of Islamic terrorism to worry about and this must be a very confusing development. Hopefully the British nanny state will come in and take care of the situation by having green alerts when they're supposed to fearing the IRA and sort of orangey, mosque-coloured alerts when the danger is percieved to come from muslims.

You may think that I'm being facetious but I'd really be upset if the IRA started bombing England again, not because the number of casualties have ever been that high, but because there's always a section within their society that's so willing to exploit anti-Irish sentiment, and far from having gone away, they're in rude health, (and isn't "rude" the appropriate word) though it seems with BNP, Ukip and whatever Kilroy-Silk's new party is called, they're just as vulnerable to fragmentation as extremists over here.

Meanwhile the politicians here are falling over themselves deciding who to blame.

I blame Micheal McDowell. If it wasn't for his insistence that the IRA give up all sorts of crime, there might be no prospect of the IRA going back to war. It may be that this is part of a cunning plan to outsource crime abroad as the level of crime has way escalated since the peace process began but my feeling is that he's let his vicious, class-based hatred of the IRA get in the way of his political judgment.

History may remember his insistence last December that the IRA give up all sorts of crime as well as all their guns as the last chance ever for peace in the country being thrown away.

He's never asked that the US stop starting illegal wars in Iraq before they are allowed use our air bases again.

He's never asked the British goverment give up their massive nuclear and conventional arsenals, with which they could bomb Ireland back into the stone age if they wanted. This danger is hardly a negligible one. After all, the British do have a history of attacking Ireland, murdering, starving and enslaving the people, a more recent history of bombing anyone that doesn't like George Bush as much as their own government; and they are the race that invented the phrase :"My country, right or wrong."

If George Bush and his junta of neo-cons get it into their swivel-eyed heads that Eye-ur-land poses some sort of terrorist threat, he just has to go down to the butchers and get a bone to feed Tone and next thing we could be facing sanctions followed by saturation bombing and then Halliburton taking control of our massive natural gas fields.

You may think I'm being facetious again, that the British govemment acknowledge the existence of the Irish Free State, even if many of it's citizens don't, and that they let us have our own legitimate army. I must say that's it's absolutely spifffing of them to let a sovereign independent state have it's own army, especially when there's no posibility of any war between the Republic of Ireland and the UK.

Or is there? I have to say that I'm deeply concerned with Tony Blair's loyalty to George Bush and what the consequences are for the future of Europe, and Ireland in particular. In 1984, the "British Isles" have become united with the United States to form Atalntica, which is in a permanent state of war with Eurasia. There are those who might say that this was just a work of fiction set in an imagainary future which has already become the past. But so many of it's predictions are coming true, with the United States facing a future of perpetual fear and foreign wars fought in the name of a freedom that is more imagined than real.

Meanwhile, while hostility to other European nations seems to be as strong as it's ever been in the UK, the population is more supportive of the so-called war on terror than any other European nation. It's largely because the British feel a sort of ethnic affinity with Americans, though more people in the US are of German descent.

Throw in the fact that in the 70's, a middle-aged Donald Rumsfeld was trying to convince the world that the IRA were being backed up by the Soviet Union (No Shit!) and the notion of the UK severing itself from Europe, allying itself to the US and then launching an attack on the Republic of Ireland doesn't seem quite so outlandish.

Things I once thought unbelievable in my lifetime have come to p-a-a-a-a-s, which is why predicting the future is such a treacherous business. After the first world war people thought the horrors that they'd witnessed were so awful that there'd never be another war. But they didn't count on the obstinate agressiveness of the Germans. So maybe we should be a little more aware that the British have a bit of a history of attacking nations that they percieve to be a threat.

On the other hand, there's probably no point in dwelling on it because there's precious little we can actually do about the fact that they have such a massive army, whereas there is something they can do about the much less substantial but far more immediate threat that they percieve themselves to face.

When looked at it from that perspective, the IRA's obstinacy might not seem quite so obtuse. I don't claim to know their mindset, but it must seem frustrating that the British can get away with the criminal theft of Iraq when they can't even rob a bank.

I can't defend Mitchell McLoughlin's statement that the murder of Jean McConville wasn't a crime. It was a morally heinous act by any standards.

Except by the standards of the Bush admistration that we implicitly support. According to them, if you give comfort to terrorists, you're a terrorist yourself, and the only way to deal with terrorists is to kill them. The British Army were a state terror group at that time. For me, it was a crime, but it's a crime the US and British have commited 100,000 times in the last few years.

They've gotten away with it, as they've gotten away with demonisind Irish people throughout the world because between them they represent the world's only hyperpower. There are those, like McDowell, who think that they enjoy this power beacuse they're better than us and that we should therefore cower before it.

I'm not among them.

For a slightly different perspective on similar issues, see here