November 9, 2023 - 1:30pm
I’ve been writing about Northern Ireland for 13 years. In that time, it has more than once transformed from a fringe issue into a subject of central importance to affairs at Westminster.
Yet despite having had years to get to grips with the issue, mainland politicians continue to show a woeful ignorance of the Province — a sad fact perfectly illustrated by Suella Braverman’s latest salvo in her battle with the Metropolitan Police. In an article today, she wrote that:
I do not believe that these marches are merely a cry for help for Gaza. They are an assertion of primacy by certain groups — particularly Islamists — of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland.
- Suella Braverman
To whom is she referring? The language around “assertion of primacy” echoes that used by critics of marches by the Orange Order — but those are overwhelmingly peaceful and do not venerate terrorism.
And if that’s what she meant, such comments are even more ill-judged considering that the Government is still trying to coax the Democratic Unionist Party back into government, and reassure unionists about Rishi Sunak’s much-vaunted Windsor Framework.
Meanwhile there is, of course, an ugly strain of republican activism which idolises the IRA and other terrorist groups, often on display during disorder in Ulster. But such events are usually straightforward riots, seldom organised “marches”.
Perhaps she was referring to events such as IRA funerals, which once again seemed to receive differential treatment from the police during lockdown.
That’s a fair argument, and controversy over political pressure from Sinn Fein has since seen the Chief of the PSNI resign. But if that’s what she meant, she ought to have been clearer.
Such comparisons pose awkward questions for a Government minister. It might strike you or I as perfectly natural to compare the IRA and Hamas, two terrorist organisations which deliberately targeted civilians to try and wrest control of territory from so-called “settlers”. Yet politicians in London played a big role, albeit unintentionally, in creating the climate in which this retrospective legitimisation of the IRA, INLA, et al. could take place.
It was John Major and Tony Blair who brought Sinn Fein in from the cold, and successive governments which repeatedly changed the rules — most egregiously with the 2006 St Andrews Agreement — to stack the political deck in their favour.
Even today, Northern Ireland has much laxer rules on foreign donations just so Sinn Fein can raise funds in the United States, and Parliament continues to issue the party a special version of Short Money because it doesn’t undertake the parliamentary work needed for the usual funding.
If anything, therefore, the pro-Palestine demonstrators who so exercise the Home Secretary could be forgiven for taking her comparison as words of encouragement. Cause enough trouble, and special treatment shall be yours!
In fairness to Braverman, she is not the first home secretary to forget that Ulster is a special case. One thinks of Theresa May’s pious opposition to deploying water cannon on “British streets”, despite their regular (if not frequent) use in Belfast and Londonderry.
But Ulster is a special case, and while there are certainly parts of the current arrangement which are deeply unsatisfactory, there’s a reason for that. It isn’t the only part of the United Kingdom where the police are routinely armed for nothing.
If the Home Secretary’s argument is that the most recent demonstrations pose a challenge to how we have until now conducted public-order policing on the mainland, she might have a point. But if so, she does herself and the Government a grave disservice by not knowing how to make it.
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SubscribeA lot of journalists prefer to dissect at granular level the words of Suella Braverman, and carp about her supposed transgressions, rather than focus on what is actually unfolding on our streets.
And yes, these pro Palestinian marches are very reminiscent of IRA funerals and, like them, are intended to intimidate.
Honest and innocent question – why not edit your post rather than reply to it?
Might have just been me but the article’s comparison of the two organisations (Hamas and the IRA) goes a lot further than Mrs Braverman and presents a pretty compelling case for them being equivalent.
This is exactly what I meant when I said about a week ago that comparing the current developments in Gaza & Israel to any other conflict or grafting them onto existing battle lines in unrelated conflicts is a really, REALLY bad plan.
At the time I was thinking of Greta Thunberg’s newfound Gaza fandom (honestly, love – just stick with the environmental activism and sit in the mud outside an oil refinery or something)…but this is also a terrible move on Braverman’s part.
I think she’s right about a number of things, and I find her willingness to plug on in an impossible job under a constant barrage of criticism (and sometimes abuse) admirable.
But she’d do so much better if she didn’t constantly lapse into the Suella-goes-Cruella pantomime dame role.
I agree. Suella like the wiser Kemie is one only very few who dare to challenge the squalid corrupt nostrums and lies of the 30 year Progressive New Order. It is so easy to ignore them with the BBC Newspeak covering much of the hate up. Good to see how those slippery reptilian identitarians Starmer and Khan and their allies in the Blob and Wet Wing of the Fake Tories want her head in tumbril; all slaves and knee bending appeasers. How one wishes she could land all her punches clean hard and true. She always throws more after the bell – i.e when rightly calling for the need for a new UN global asylum/refugee reform, she adds a domestic punch about the failure of progressive multiculturalism! True. But not there! I hope she is agitating with courage and conviction on these issues and not plotting for leadership after the tepid Rishi has gone. But lets at least recognise the validity of her attacks on the Mob Appeasing Met.
I was once told the saying in Ulster as far as parades and murals goes is that “Catholics can’t march, Protestant’s can’t paint’.
I admit, as a Prod, the vastly superior quality of Republican murals versus Loyalist murals was a source of dismay.
Come off it, Henry. The Orange marches are exactly as Suella says, an assertion of primacy. They weren’t always peaceful and are, of course, subject to a high degree of police control over timing and routes. There’s even a Parades Commission, for heaven’s sake. The Met could assert control over the pro-Palestinian marches if it wanted to. It clearly doesn’t want to.
Well, there was definitely trouble at today’s march, just not the kind of trouble she was praying for.
No, the far right, so dear to Braverman’s cold, cold heart, were the ones attacking the police and disrupting the Remembrance Day ceremonies.
Even a gutless worm like Sunak has to get rid of her now.
Surely she was comparing the Palestinian march to Orange Order marches, not IRA ones.
The vast majority of marches in Northern Ireland are Orange, only ‘The Orange’ have an annual Marching Season’. The overwhelming majority of marches that The Parades Commission (An NGO specifically set up to reduce marching related civil disorders) put restrictions on, are Orange/Loyalist marches.
She must have been referring to Orange marches.
The grotesque Braverman is making her pitch for the swivel eyed loon (TM) wing of the Tory party which is pretty much all of them these days.
No doubt Badenoch and a few other crazies (Truss, Bunter?) will follow her path and after the Tories get annihilated next year one of them will lead the party into a decade of irrelevance.
If Braverman is willing to torch everything to be leader of a rump, far right Tory party for a couple of years then the rest of us will sit back and laugh as they become ever more unhinged.
She will never be prime minister.
Israel is at war with Ireland. In the last month, the IDF has repeatedly bombed the Irish Army personnel, as such, who are serving as UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. And Irish nationals remain specifically excluded from the list of those allowed to leave Gaza, the only European nationality to be so treated. Tell yourself that Celtic and Liverpool fans do not know what they are talking about, although people who can lay their hands on a PFLP flag have nothing if not a more than average level of engagement. But American Democrats, and their wannabes from Canberra to Camden, get out of the fact that Israel is at war with Ireland.
Peddling untruths here again. The last Irish soldier killed on peace keeping duties in Lebanon (the first in over 20 years) was murdered by members of Hezbollah in December 2022. Leo Varadkar has been clear that there is no indication Ireland is being penalised for its vocal anti-Israel stance on Gaza, which given the rhetoric deployed by many Irish politicians, shows remarkable Israeli restraint. One of the young people butchered by Hamas on October 7th was Irish. One of their hostages appears to be an Irish-Israeli 8 year old girl. Whether Irish people recognise it or not, Hamas is at war with them, and with all of civilisation.
There may have been no fatalities as yet, but there have certainly been IDF bombings of the Irish Army in Lebanon in the last month. Once might have been a mistake, but these have been repeated.
I am surprised and disappointed by the Irish prime minister’s stance in this conflict.
Is he in the ‘Gays for Gaza’ tribe?
The Irish Republic is known for shooting itself in the foot. De Valera could have had Ulster if he had agreed to support the UK in WW2, and provide air and naval bases to the Brits, but he preferred to spit on Churchill rather than making a great deal.
Somehow I don’t think that deal would’ve been honoured.