No more Bombing in Ireland?

When I was leaving Holland back in 1994 after a miserable summer being exploited in the horticultural industry, my landlady asked “It’s good in Ireland Now?”

I wasn’t quite sure what it was she was referring to exactly, I didn’t think she’d have known that college fees had been abolished back home that summer, for example. Then the pfennig dropped when she said “No More bombing?” in that weird interrogative way that those Dutch have.

It wasn’t that the ceasefire in Northern Ireland didn’t mean that much to me, it was that it didn’t really affect me at any more than it affected her, i.e. not at all. It was something going on in a different country, now, 10 years later it’s still a different country and it will be for another 15 years at least.

Nevertheless I’ve still had to face questions from idiotic Americans (and a few idiotic Europeans as well) about the big war that was going on back in my homeland.

Now that the IRA has finally decommissioned it’s weapons hopefully that won’t happen so much any more.

But though the Irish Examiner helpfully printed a list of all the people that died by violent means in a political context in the course of the last 40 years to put a seal on 40 years of self-hatred among Ireland’s bien-pensants, the thing that’s bothered me most about the IRA is not that they killed 180 people in Britain but that they called themselves the Irish Republican Army.

If they’d called themselves the Northern Ireland Liberation Front, for example, not everyone would think that all Irish people were violent thugs and the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer demonisation everywhere we went.

This isn’t to diminish the suffering of any of their victims, it’s just that the scale of the conflict has been so wildly exaggerated by the all-powerful British media, so much so that movie Sin City the Irish characters were represented as mad pub bombers even though the last time a British pub was bombed by the IRA was 1974, just after the US had stopped saturation bombing Vietnam and Cambodia.

Compared to what some empires suffered after declining and falling, I think the Brits got off quite easy. After the fall of Rome, the city was ransacked so much it took a millennium to recover. In Britain, a few pubs and hotels got bombed.

Yet as Britain is a powerful country with an even more powerful friend in the US, they’ve successfully been able to portray themselves as the victims of modern-day barbarians from across the “Irish” Sea.

How many people around the world know about the Dublin And Monaghan bombings? In one day, a bigger proportion of Ireland’s population was killed by loyalist terrorists with the collusion of the British military than that of Britain’s was killed in the whole 40 years of the troubles. How many know about the millions who died during the famine or were killed by Cromwell?
Not a lot, because those who control the media control perception, which is why so many people in the US still think Sadamm Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It’s why people think that the killing of 100,000 kurds in Iraq was an act of evil while the death of 5 million South East Asians was a tragic mistake.

What’s most ironic of all is that Ireland really is part of a big war by facilitating the US occupation of Iraq by letting their troops fly through Shannon, subsidised by the Irish taxpayer to the tune of €10 million a year.

Meanwhile, Ian Paisley refuses to accept that what has happened has happened. It’s no surprise. Recently I found out that the person who originally decided that the world was 4000 years old was another Ulster Prod. One of George Bush’s fundamentalist friend’s reprimanded journalist Ron Suskind for living in the Reality-based world.

Protestant fundamentalists like Bush and Paisley make their own reality and their own morals by interpreting the Bible whichever way they please and if that means endless conflict in the North, the Middle East or anywhere else well that’s just tough on the rest of us.

At least there’s some encouraging signs that the loyalist community is beginning to implode, as extremists wearing Union Jack t-shirts with the words “Fuck the Pope” tattooed to their foreheads are starting to kill each other. Bring it on, I say, as long as no Catholics or innocent Protestants get killed. Of course, as they act violently they’ll be described as “Irish” in the world’s media.

The good news is that many people, particularly in Eastern Europe see Ireland not as a place of conflict but as a place of prosperity where they can come and make a few bob without the risk of racial violence that exists in the UK.

The News doesn’t seem to have filtered through to the sink estates of East Belfast yet. But then, they don’t live in the reality-based environment.