QuoteOriginally Posted by Mr A
Thats nonsence, so its the IRA's fault
I suppose he was able to hide the machine gun inside his jacket?
this lad makes similar statement, going on about soldier deaths during the troubles:
former head of british army
sorry if you cant view the clip, i couldn't find his statement in text anywhere
Havin a weekend away is quite frankly,lettin ur team mates down!
Thats nonsence, so its the IRA's fault
I suppose he was able to hide the machine gun inside his jacket?
Why is it nonsense? No one said it was the IRA's fault, in fact the report says it specifically wasn't. But if also says McGuinness was armed(probably).Thats nonsence, so its the IRA's fault
I suppose he was able to hide the machine gun inside his jacket?
Why would he have hid it?
Edit:
n my opinion they were a part (and I made it perfectly clear it was peripheral) of creating the circumstances that lead to what happened. That does not in any way justify the shootings that took place.Thats nonsence, so its the IRA's fault
I suppose he was able to hide the machine gun inside his jacket?
I think his attempts to gain from the findings (and dismiss the bits that don't suit him) are as reprehensible as those that attempt to write them off completely.
#NeverStopNotGivingUp
Might be good idea to actually read the threads
Well it sounds like it................
I have. What's your point? I also read your post and responded with questions which aren't answered in the thread. Mr. A never blamed the IRA for the deaths, despite your insinuationsMight be good idea to actually read the threads
Normally I stay clear but feel that I have to answer.
The IRA or McGuinness were not part of the reason for Bloody Sunday or the events that led to it, even peripheral. It was a Civil Rights/Anti-interment march on the 30th January and after the events of Magilligan beach the previous week the people of Derry came out in their thousands.
The actions of the Para's on Bloody Sunday & subsequent Widgery report killed the Civil Rights movement in the North & provided ample bodies for the IRA for years to come.
Piece by Kevin Myers in the irish Independent.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/co...e-2221842.html
YOU would have to be an idiot, psychopath or militaristic bigot to think that anything other than mass murder occurred on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. But that day was not totally unique: it was merely an extravagant example of what the Parachute Regiment was already doing -- and would continue to do -- in Northern Ireland. And the real crime was not just the killings that Lord Saville has been investigating in his insanely wasteful enquiry, but the tolerance of the Parachute Regiment's conduct by both the British army and successive British governments.
That is the real mystery. Because the IRA had no better friend than the Parachute Regiment; wherever the Paras went, IRA recruitment subsequently rose. The price to be paid for their random and reckless brutality was the lives of other soldiers and the many, many more civilians killed by the IRA. So I want no lectures about Para brutality from those whited sepulchres of Sinn Fein-IRA, whose murders were far more terrible than anything the Parachute Regiment did and some of which I mention here.
These include the Birmingham pub bombings, which left nearly two dozen dead; the 10 Protestant workmen taken off a bus in South Armagh by IRA gunmen and massacred; the 12 Protestants burned alive in an IRA firebomb attack on La Mon House; and the IRA's M62 coach-bombing, in which 10 people, including an entire family -- Linda Houghton (23) her husband, Clifford (23) and their two children Lee, aged five, and Robert (2) -- were murdered.
So. Not a word from you murdering IRA *******s: not a f**king word -- do you understand?
Which still leaves us with the larger issue of why the Parachute Regiment was deployed in Northern Ireland and why its often evil conduct was tolerated as it was. Something like 90pc of clearly unlawful army killings throughout the Troubles were by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment. Both Catholic priests who died in the Troubles were shot by the Paras and were, to my mind, murdered. So too were the dozen or so civilians who were killed alongside them in New Barnsley/Ballymurphy in the shooting gallery that the Paras made of those estates in August 1971 and July 1972.
Other Para killings have totally vanished in the sea of blood that was to inundate Northern Ireland and spread to the Republic and Britain.
I remember -- because I was there -- Paras shooting dead Patrick Magee, an innocent 20-year-old student teacher on the steps of St Comgall's school on the Falls Road as he left teaching practice. The same day, the Paras shot dead one-eyed Patrick Donaghy, aged 86, one of the oldest victims of the troubles.
He was killed as he stood at his window, eight storeys up in Divis Towers. Paras who gave evidence -- entirely unrehearsed, of course -- at his inquest said they had fired at a "gunman" in the window. Of course they did. The coroner -- wise fellow -- told the jury that one-eyed 86-year-old Patrick Donaghy was unlikely to have been "the gunman".
The list is not endless but it is long and, worse, it is inexcusable. And it was not Northern Ireland that did this to the Parachute Regiment but what the Parachute Regiment did to Northern Ireland.
For they had shown comparable murderousness while they were 'policing' the sunset days of the empire in Aden and Cyprus. Moreover, we now know that British Paras massacred captured Egyptian militiamen in Port Said during Suez in 1956.
But the many murders by Paras should not blind us to murders of the security forces.
Five months after Bloody Sunday, Lt John Wilson, Royal Artillery, was leading a foot patrol near Rosslea in Co Fermanagh when a claymore mine blew up, killing a couple of soldiers, both of them 23-year-old fathers of two: Gunners Victor Husband and Brian Robertson.
Everything below the line of Brian's flack jacket was blown away, as was his right arm. Only a one-armed torso, plus head with eyes wide-open, remained. Nearby trees were festooned with body parts. Brian's fellow gunners had to climb up to retrieve these in hessian sacks, all the while fearing they might be shot as they reached for yard of guts and shard of shin.
Victor's body was never found and his coffin was returned to his young widow in Middlesborough, ballasted with sandbags.
No police officer ever questioned Lt Wilson -- later British military attache in Dublin and a close friend of mine -- about the events of that day or what, or whom, he might have seen. These two soldiers of the queen were killed doing their duty to their country and their country thanked them by not even investigating their murders.
Many today recollect the murdered dead of Bloody Sunday -- and rightly so. But let us also remember the many completely uninvestigated killings of the North, represented here by two men whose names have never appeared in a newspaper since their murders that warm summer's day in July 1972: the late Gunner Victor Husband, RA, and the late Gunner Brian Roberston, RA.
Rest In Peace.
As a rule, I wouldn't be a huge Myers fan at all. I find him very pompous.
But I can't disagree with much of what he says, and the central thrust of his argument, that one "bad" action doesn't automatically offset or net off against other equally bad events hits the nail on the head.
Here's a Belfast Telegraph piece on the issue of “whataboutery”.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/op...-14842171.html
Bloody Sunday: there’s no great moral dilemma
By Laurence White
Monday, 14 June 2010
And so it begins. The Saville Inquiry report will not be published until tomorrow afternoon, but a carefully controlled leak hinting that it will find “some” of the killings unlawful has set an agenda.
So, too, has the suggestion that some of the soldiers who opened fire that day in 1972 when 13 marchers were shot dead in Londonderry could be prosecuted. A 14th died later.
What a great distraction that is. Before virtually anyone has had a chance to read the report, the discussion is moving on to what should be the consequences of it.
And that, of course, introduces what Gerry Fitt, all those years ago, referred to as “whataboutery”.
In the sister newspaper of the one which brought us the leak on Saville, yesterday Army commanders were saying that if soldiers are to be prosecuted, then Martin McGuinness and the IRA should also be investigated and prosecuted. It’s the old Northern Ireland argument — maybe I did something wrong, but what about the others who did something wrong too.
The Saville Inquiry through all its tortuous and hugely expensive investigations was simply into the events of what became known as Bloody Sunday. The central question under examination was if paratroopers, without justification, killed people who had been on a civil rights march, albeit one that was banned.
Even the original Whitewash Report conducted by the then Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Widgery showed that four men were shot in the back while running away. There is other evidence that some of those shot dead were standing with their hands in the air at the time.
Those events were so shocking — and the original investigation by Lord Widgery so obviously a cover-up — that a second inquiry was inevitable, no matter how much the British establishment and the Ministry of Defence railed against the idea.
It has been said repeatedly that for an agency of the state, such as the Army, to commit what most reasonable people see as a crime involving mass deaths, cannot be dismissed.
There is no point in saying that the IRA or the UDA or any other terrorist organisation killed far more people and that atrocities such as happened at Omagh, Dublin, Droppin’ Well, La Mon, Enniskillen etc etc were as bad or worse and why was there not an inquiry into them.
Firstly every right thinking person accepts that those atrocities were vile and that anyone involved in causing those outrages should be brought to justice and jailed for a very, very long time. There is no need for inquiries into those events because everyone accepts that terrorists engage in terrorism.
Failure to bring those involved in mass terrorist killings to justice is a failure of the investigating agencies such as the RUC or Gardai. It wasn’t that no-one wanted the perpetrators jailed, they just failed to get the evidence to do it.
Bloody Sunday was completely different. Those who opened fire were legitimately in possession of weapons. They also had to follow rules. They were helping to impose law and order. And they were subject to the law.
The Army know who fired the fatal shots. If people were killed unlawfully then those who committed the crime should be amenable to the law. It is not a terribly complex equation or great moral dilemma.
It is time to stop muddying the waters and accept that crimes were committed on Bloody Sunday. Shamefully those crimes were committed by one of the forces of law and order.
David Adams has a very good piece on this in the Irish Times today: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...272698766.html
#NeverStopNotGivingUp
David Adams, as in ex- UDA!!!!! (albeit a fair article- but interested in your sources!!!)
Mr A's source is the Irish Times.
The piece by David Adams outlines searching challenges for many on the road to reconciliation.
There's a former Provo writes for the Irish News every week up here - occassionally he makes some valid points too.
Personally, I think trying to understand the "other side" a good, healthy, thing.
Others think it best to stay within a myopic bubble.
The Englishmen came over in the year 2005
But little did they know that we'd planned a wee surprise
Sir David scored the winner, and Windsor Park went wild
And this is what we sang...
I find the whole larger debate on Ireland and Northern Ireland here fascinating since there are so many different strands of thought since its not an insular political forum.
People are so quick to point the finger at the PIRA or indeed the Squadies etc as to who was responsible for "murder" and "attrocities" etc etc.
This all the time ignoring the far larger socio-economic context that was Northern Ireland since partition.
The conflict in Northern Ireland effectively grew from Social Descrimination against a minority.
There is little dispute about this by those who have studied the topic in depth, if in doubt I suggest you read Whyte's article on descrimination in Northern Ireland which you will find on the Cain website.
So if we can trace the massive upsurge in military conflict from legitimate social grievencess by a state which descriminated and in many cases brutalised a minority can we blame the likes of the 18 year old PIRA Volunteers and British Squadies who were thrown into this context without their making?
It is a grave mistake to fob off the likes of the PIRA as "murderers" and "criminals" as I have seen some do as by relegating their significane to just criminality you will inevitably ignore the context which helped create this social anomoly.
The blame for the deaths from the PIRA's campaign and for British Squadies actions lies with those who helped create a society engineered around descrimination and injustice and not with those whos political perspective was moulded by the context they lived within.
Genuine question NB what's your opinion on comments by Gregory Campbell? Or more specifically I suppose what he doesn't say.
Good post man, bit obvious but there you go people like to wear rose tinted glasses
Crossmaglen in the late 70s/early 80s - young unemployed men - boredom - etc etc etc. Just the same on all sides as well
Begrudging and mean-spirited. Unhelpful, in a wider context.
I thought the statement and sincere apology made by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said what needed to be said.
By the way, some of you might find this article, written in February past, interesting:
http://www.derryjournal.com/eamonn-m...eys.6055207.jp
Last edited by Not Brazil; 18/06/2010 at 5:12 PM.
The Englishmen came over in the year 2005
But little did they know that we'd planned a wee surprise
Sir David scored the winner, and Windsor Park went wild
And this is what we sang...
your clutching at straws here after a 12 year inquiry costing 0ver 200million ... mc guinness was adjudged to have probably !! been carrying a machine gun ?... the IRA before bloody sunday were struggling for the support of a lot of catholics but after bloody sunday it has been stated these horrible murders of so many innocent people only served as a major recruitment for the IRA In derry and northern ireland and more than likley set them on the road to major terrorism for so many years .. yes the IRA have also been responsible for many murders over the years also .. but people seem to forget that of these people killed on bloody sunday were all innocent civilians with no connection to the IRA who were killed by a professional goverment controlled british army and who then for 30 odd years lied and covered up the truth
" football is a simple game "
OG,
I can understand an aspect of Mr A's argument.
The fact that McGuinnes was front and centre midweek means it is an easy excuse for people to vent at him. Did he have to appear in some many interviews? No. He could have just said "No, look this is a day for the families". But when he opted to appear on all those interviews it would have been remiss of the reporters not to ask him about the allegations made.
But then again, SF don't do subtlety.
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