No limit to this nauseating Provo hypocrisy

Kevin Myers - June 02 2011

I WAS against the peace process: I was and am and will always remain against it, which is why I do not spell it with capital letters.

I am in favour of peace, but not in favour of conciliating murderers and I believe it is the first duty of any state to impose its lawful monopoly on the use of armed might upon dissident armies within its realm -- by its own armed might, if necessary. One law: one army; one police.

But the Irish Republic chose to ignore these fundamental principles of any democracy and instead tried to deal with an insurgent terrorist force of the Provisional IRA by using various weak-willed adaptations of common law. The consequence was a conflict that lasted longer than both Boer Wars, the Anglo-Irish War and the two world wars combined.

So I bade a fond farewell to Garret FitzGerald last week for his contributions as a thinker: but I was silent about his role as Taoiseach, for which I feel much disdain, not least because although he wrung the Anglo-Irish Agreement from the British (Sunningdale II), he did not in exchange crush the living daylights out of the IRA. Nor did his predecessor, Liam Cosgrave, after Sunningdale I. And by the time of Sunningdale III, namely the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Fein-IRA were in the political driving seat and able to do largely as they pleased.

Throughout the peace process and the gruesome minuet beforehand, no one ever told the Shinners, firmly and unequivocally: "This is how we do things. We do not murder our purely political opponents. We do not break legs. And by the Grace of a Limitlessly Forgiving God and some astoundingly supine terrestrial politicians, if you are ever lucky enough to be admitted into the sunlight of an open and accountable democracy, you will not insult the dead by foisting convicted killers on the institutions of state."

But this didn't happen, with the outcome that someone like Mary McArdle has now been made special adviser to Northern Arts Minister Caral ni Chuilin, or, as Eilis O'Hanlon pointed out in the 'Sunday Independent', just plain old Carol Cullen in her schooldays. That was before she came over all patriotic, and started dabbling in high explosives, when the Xmas Carol became the SemtX Caral. But her current chum, Mary McArdle, went one better, with her involvement with the gang which carried out the cold-blooded murder of 22-year-old Mary Travers during a gun attack on the Travers family as they left Sunday Mass in 1985.

This is how magistrate Tom Travers described his daughter's last moments: "At that time, Mary lay lying on her mum's breast, her gentle heart pouring its pure blood on to a dusty street in Belfast. The murderer's gun, which was pointed at my wife's head, misfired twice. Another gunman shot me six times. As he prepared to fire the first shot, I saw the look of hatred on his face, a face I will never forget."

Judge Travers told of how he and his family had heard the Pope in the Phoenix Park say: "Murder is murder and never let it be called by another name." Referring to the later and quite scandalous Irish Supreme Court objections to the extradition of IRA killers from this Republic, he added: "These people. . . (the judges of Ireland) must in reality have believed that murder could be called by another name."

Quite so.

Mary McArdle -- who was the operationally vital gun courier for the killers and who heard her victim's father repeatedly break down while giving evidence -- was imprisoned for life for her part in this disgusting murder. She smiled and waved at her family at the sentence: clearly, a lovely girl. Her co-accused was acquitted on the grounds that Tom Travers' evidence of identification might have been flawed. So much for the lie that nationalists could not get justice in Northern Irish courts. (For the record, as a mere civil magistrate, Tom Travers was not involved in terrorist trials -- and nor should this make any difference to any but the most demented of Sinn Fein cultists).

AFTER poor Mary Travers' sister Ann spoke on 'Liveline' last week about her distress at hearing that the co-murderer of Mary had been rewarded with a prize appointment in the Stormont Executive, there were the usual sanctimonious cries from Sinn Fein that though the killing was "regrettable", Mary's family should "move on". Better still, there came the accusation that for victims' families to complain now was to put the perpetrators at risk of retaliatory violence.

I know, I know: in SF/IRA martyrology, the victims ALWAYS become the culprits. Why can't patriots be allowed to kill as much as they want and then live in peace and prosperity, just as in the good old 1920s?

So the Shinners still luxuriate in their own selective amnesia, still furiously demanding enquiries into the Monaghan and Dublin bombings and into the murders of Seamus Ludlow and Eddie Fullerton.

And why wouldn't they? Because no one in government, North, South, East or West, ever takes them by the scruff of their self-pitying necks, waves a mailed fist under their nose and tells them to shuck the fut up, or else.

Comment:

Please read this article carefully and then try to explain rationally what the difference is between this act of cold blooded murder allegedly committed by an IRA death squad and the cold blooded murder of civil rights attorney Pat Finucane allegedly committed by a loyalist death squad. Murder is murder, is murder, and in these two cases, there is only one significant difference and that is the political and/or paramilitary affiliation of the perpetrators. Do those affiliations provide any rationalization or justification for committing such heinous crimes? They certainly do not and those who authorize them as well as those who commit them deserve nothing less than to be punished to the full extent of the law.

Jack Meehan, Past National President

Ancient Order of Hibernians in America