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Started back to work this week after being without a job for a year and half. On one hand it's nice because I was starting to think I would never find a job again but on the other it's cutting hard into my reading time 😭.

I did finish Say Nothing though and I fucking loved it! I had low expectations for it, I saw a few reviews saying that Keefe didn't talk enough about the violence from the loyalist and yes while he did focus more on the clashes with the British army, he still talked about several loyalist groups as well. I went into it already knowing a decent amount about The Troubles and the different groups involved in the violence so I guess it's possible that it felt like enough info for me vs someone who maybe doesn't know much about it.

I think he actually did a fantastic job of balancing with this book. You get a good understanding of why the provisional IRA became what they were and you are absolutely able to sympathize with their cause and the injustices facing Catholic populations in Northern Ireland during this time period, while also being outraged for the innocent people who got caught in their cross hairs. It was very well done in my personal opinion. I think Brenden Hughes and Dolours Price were such interesting people especially in relation to their feelings about Gerry Adams and their struggles with accepting the peace treaty and their feelings towards what the treaty meant for the things they had done for the cause. I think without context you want to assume that people who have done the things they've done have to be remorseless sociopaths to an extent but they are both so incredibly human. I started the audiobook for Voices From the Grave the day I finished Say Nothing because I just wanted to hear more of Hughes' story.

#say nothing #patrick radden keefe #Voices From the Grave #Ed Moloney #Brenden Hughes #Dolours Price #I do think Gerry Adams might be a sociopath #books and reading #book thoughts #historical non fiction

I am tempted to say that I told you so, and now I have. If this collapse in Belfast takes hold it will be because of a fatal but foreseeable error in the post-Brexit architecture insisted upon by Europe, with the eager support of Dublin and, to a lesser extent, London.

The choice was between two models. One was to regard Northern Ireland as part and parcel of the UK’s non-membership of the EU, in which customs controls would approximate to the political border between North and South. The other was what we ended up with: no customs border on land, but at some mythical, invisible point in the Irish Sea, and the North, a part of an all-island set up.

I needn’t spell out the politics of this to most of my readers. It was a pro-Nationalist solution and everyone could see that, especially the Unionists. But of course it wasn’t sold like that at the time. Instead the Irish government summoned up ghosts from the Troubles and warned that establishing Europe’s Border in Ireland would remind people of partition, provoke republican hardliners and nourish a renaissance of republican violence. Remember Leo Varadkar’s trip to Europe, his briefcase stuffed with scary photographs of the IRA bombing of Newry customs station way back in the 1970’s’.

This is what we could return to, warned the bold Leo, if we re-erect a land border in Ireland. Europe agreed, the Brits went along and we ended up with an arrangement which, because it had been erected at the urging of Irish nationalists, would always be opposed by Unionists.

If that was the real plan, and the name of the game was to stick one into the Unionists, then fine; be honest about it. But in this debate, honesty had been in short supply.

At the core of the Varadkar proposition was a claim that it was the Border that had fueled the Troubles, when all the evidence was that while the Border certainly facilitated conflict, Unionist misbehavior was the real culprit. It is a cliche but true nonetheless: had Unionists reached out, as Captain Terence O’Neill urged them to do, and won the support of their Catholic neighbours way back in the 1960’s, it is very possible the Troubles would never have happened and the Border would hardly have mattered.

In this context the Brexit solution that was chosen has brought Northern Ireland to a different crisis. With the theoretical Border now somewhere in the Irish Sea, the absence of a land border serves to underline Unionists sense of insecurity and has led, inevitably, to yesterday’s resignations at Stormont. Putting Humpty together again will be, to put it mildly, a challenge.

- Ed Moloney

Here: https://thebrokenelbow.com/2022/02/03/i-told-you-so/

As I write, the latest version of the Good Friday Settlement is struggling for breath, half way between death and an existence dependent on

#Ed Moloney #brexit #sea border #Irish sea border

Thanks to some fancy footwork in Brussels and Strasbourg by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Brexit was associated in the international mind with its potential, c/o armed guards at customs posts, to revive republican violence in Northern Ireland and even to re-ignite the Troubles.

To judge by this evocative report by News Letter deputy editor Ben Lowry, the politicians and the media may have misread the story. The real threat to peace, according to Lowry’s report of a Loyalist gathering in Portadown – once memorably described as ‘the citadel of Orangeism’, by the SDLP’s Brid Rodgers – may instead come from militant Unionism.

Ed Moloney (Here: https://thebrokenelbow.com/2019/11/24/as-brexit-nears-are-these-the-real-straws-in-the-wind/)

Thanks to some fancy footwork in Brussels and Strasbourg by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Brexit was associated in the international mind with its

#Ed Moloney

Ed Moloney on Peter King

Moloney wrote in 2005:

“Mr. King and the IRA made the oddest of political couples. While Mr. King was an opponent of legalized abortion, a fiscal conservative, and a prominent supporter of English First - which campaigned against federal funds for bilingual education - the IRA and Sinn Fein are close to supporting abortion rights, have campaigned to give the Irish language official parity with English, and were in a pseudo-Marxist phase when Mr. King made his alliance with them. None of that bothered the IRA's American supporters.

"People like Adams were banned from America, there was censorship in Ireland, and there was no one around who would support armed struggle," a former head of the Manhattan unit of Noraid, John McDonagh, said. "But here you had this guy whose father was an NYPD cop - a politician, a lawyer, and from Queens. We may not have liked his politics, but it was so good to have someone like that, a very credible person who spoke up for us."

As Mr. King became more outspoken in his support for the IRA he was also fashioning his political career. In 1977 he was elected to municipal office in Hempstead, and four years later he became Nassau County comptroller. His breakthrough came in 1985,and for that he could thank IRA supporters in New York.Four years before, 10 IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death on a hunger strike in protest of being denied political status by the British. Week after week during the lengthy fast, tens of thousands of Irish-Americans turned out for noisy Noraid protests - and mainstream politicians, from Mayor Koch to Senator D'Amato - lined up to speak from Noraid platforms.

In the years after the hunger strike, Noraid was a major player in New York's Irish-American politics. That was most evident in the yearly election of grand marshal of the St. Patrick's Day parade, when Noraid sympathizers were chosen each year. In 1985, the group threw its weight behind Mr. King. When he won and led the procession in top hat and tails, before an estimated 2 million spectators, the Irish government boycotted the parade. Efforts to persuade Cardinal O'Connor and the city's political establishment to follow suit failed.

"It was a battle for Irish-American hearts and minds," Mr. Galvin, the Noraid leader, said. Noraid won the battle hands down, due in no small measure to Mr. King's soaring popularity in the Irish community.

"Definitely, being grand marshal helped," Mr. King said. "It gave me an opportunity, a forum for about a month, and the fact that people in the Irish-American community now knew the name King was definitely a big plus." The proof of that came that November, when he was re-elected as Nassau comptroller against a candidate who made the contest a referendum on Mr. King's pro-IRA views. Noraid lobbied heavily for Mr. King, holding fund-raising events and publicizing his campaign in its paper, the Irish People. The following year, Mr. King signaled his wider political ambitions and ran as GOP candidate against Robert Abrams for state attorney general.”

See here: https://thebrokenelbow.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/rep.-king-and-the-ira_-the-end-of-an-extraordinary-affair-copy.pdf

#noraid #Peter King #Irish America #NYC #Ed Moloney

The IRA's violent effort to end British rule against the wishes of the majority Protestant population lasted 25 years. Despite killings by state forces and Protestant terrorist groups who favored retaining Northern Ireland's British links, the IRA emerged as the single most violent group. More than 3,600 civilians, soldiers, and policemen died in the conflict between 1969 and 1994 - the per-capita equivalent death toll in America would be nearly 700,000 - and the IRA was responsible for around half of those killings.

Ed Moloney (Here: https://thebrokenelbow.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/rep.-king-and-the-ira_-the-end-of-an-extraordinary-affair-copy.pdf)

#Ed Moloney #IRA #Noraid #Peter King #NYC

So, there can be no doubt that Sunningdale was a much more powerful deal than the GFA.

Yet in 1974 the Border was as ‘hard’ as any Border can be, yet no-one singled that out as a threat to the Sunningdale Agreement.

It didn’t matter to the Sunningdale agreement what sort of Border was in place. All that mattered was that Unionists and Nationalists agreed to share power according to the terms of the deal.

In that respect the GFA is no different. All that matters is that the DUP and Sinn Fein agree to make the deal work. Whether the Border is hard, soft or middling matters not a whit.

The claim that the backstop at the Irish Border insisted on by the EU in any Brexit deal had the potential to pitch the North back into violence was first made by the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and almost immediately it was accepted unquestioningly by EU member states and even some in the British camp.

I suspect that in his desperation to avoid what could be an economic disaster for the South, Varadkar peddled the hard Border whopper to his EU colleagues and they, eager to embarrass and discomfit the Brits, happily went along.

It helped that it has been more than two decades since the mainstream IRA fired a shot in anger and a whole new generation of journalists and politicians, ignorant of what the Troubles were about, happily accepted Varadkar’s nonsense and so it has taken off and become the accepted wisdom about Brexit.

The failed Sunningdale agreement tells us two things which have passed today’s journalists and politicians by. One is that the nature of the Border played next to no part in its demise; and the second is that the NI problem is not so much defined by the existence of the Border but how society is ordered within its bounds.

So my question is this: Why should the GFA be any different than Sunningdale in this respect?

Go figure.

Ed Moloney

https://thebrokenelbow.com/2019/08/10/heres-the-real-flaw-in-the-brexit-threatens-good-friday-agreement-argument/

I have a question to ask of all those who argue that Brexit undermines the Good Friday Agreement because the GFA is ‘predicated’ on an open

#Ed Moloney #brexit

The Bush White House’s first special advisor to the peace process was former academic and State Dept official Mitchell Reiss who was known for his tough approach to the Provos, at one point curtailing Gerry Adams’ ability to raise funds in the US for Sinn Fein until and unless the IRA decommissioned fully and recognised the PSNI.

But not tough enough for Abrams. When Reiss finally relented and, following Sinn Fein’s acceptance in January 2007 of the new police arrangements, withdrew sanctions against Adams, Abrams got Reiss sacked, apparently telling colleagues that the Sinn Fein leader should never be treated as a normal politician.

Ed Moloney (Here: https://thebrokenelbow.com/2019/02/11/venezuela-trump-hires-the-prince-of-darkness-no-friend-of-the-irish-peace-process/)

Elliot Abrams is one of the darkest figures ever to walk the stage of US foreign policy. As adviser to three presidents – Reagan and the t

#Ed Moloney

Two months before, on the advice and urging of the Stormont prime minister, Brian Faulkner, the British Army had rounded up hundreds of alleged IRA suspects from Nationalist areas of the North with a view to interning them.

Faulkner had assured the British that internment had worked when he was Home Affairs minister in 1956 and it would work again. Internment had killed off the IRA’s Border campaign and it would do the same to the new Provisionals.

He was wrong. The British Army had moved against the IRA before intelligence on the new Provisional organisation was fit for purpose – a strategem credited by the late Brendan Hughes to Gerry Adams in confidential interviews for ‘A Secret History of the IRA’. Adams had advocated an intensification of bombings in the early months of 1971, thereby causing a clamor for action from angry Unionists and an intemperate response from the British.

And the operation was so one-sided, completely ignoring Loyalist violence, that the effect was to alienate almost the entire Catholic population, leading to resignations from public office and withdrawals from public bodies.

The SDLP, Britain’s sole hope of Nationalist moderation, was swept along by the wave of anger and vowed not to engage the British until internment was ended.

Worst of all the violence had not abated, as was evident daily, especially in Belfast where shootings, bombings, killings and attacks on the military and police had escalated alarmingly.

The purpose of the meeting was to agree on the cabinet’s attitude towards Faulkner, who ministers were painfully aware was the only person standing between the Stormont government and the perilous, uncharted waters of direct rule.

Ed Moloney

(Here: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/thebrokenelbow.com/2018/09/24/the-mrf-file-part-five-is-this-botched-mrf-operation-evidence-that-downing-street-endorsed-collusion-with-loyalists/amp/