Loyalist weapons and the conflict: More than a can of worms… June 9, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
A key phrase in the Guardian report on the NI police ombudsman’s words:
In a devastating report that is likely to challenge previous official narratives of the nature of the conflict, Dr Michael Maguire, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, said that during this period special branch detectives concealed information about loyalist terrorists from colleagues who were investigating those crimes.
Well, perhaps for some. But it has a value nonetheless, not least for the families of those who were murdered. And the timing of incidents is important too in terms of keeping this in the public mind, Loughinisland in particular happening in 1994.
It certainly makes the following seem almost wilfully blind.
With many in Northern Ireland unable to agree about the true nature of the conflict – or even the language that shouldbe used to describe it – the Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, spoke in a speech earlier this year of a “pernicious counter-narrative” that falsely claims that misconduct by the police and armed forces was rife.
it may not have characterised every aspect of policing and the militarisation of the conflict but it clearly was a more significant feature than some have accepted.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
“OK, there was a lot of it, and it kept happening over quite a long period, and it seems to have gone quite a long way up the hierarchy, but come on – ‘rife’? That’s a big word.”
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Yeah, that’s kind of the line isn’t it from Villiers.
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The RUC SB was almost entirely compromised. Few if any members were not up to their necks in the Dirty War.
In the 80s one of the four RUC ACs were known to be in collusion with loyalists but apparently the state did not know which one. Which is why there was such a long interregnum of declining to promote any of the ACs to the CC position.
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I’d heard similar stuff. It certainly looks desperate. There’s also other aspects in relation to responses once the peace process swung into view in regard to how people responded – whether they took counter-productively negative (or worse) views/approaches having been through and compromised by collusion etc.
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Blair told Ahern that the paper trail on the Finucane coverup goes right to the Thatcher cabinet. Cameron said in 2011 that people involved in the coverup were still working in the building.
As far as I see it, anything that’s put under 75 or 100 year secrecy is done to protect reputations. Given English law now allows one to draw adverse inferences from silence, we should be at liberty to do precisely the same.
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What really sickens me is that a shaky peace had been barely established when the likes of Ruairi Quinn were demanding that SF and the SDLP immediately give “unqualified” support to the RUC. Quinn and his ilk refused to believe that widespread collusion existed .It took years of work to establish a police force with credibility and I would say the job is not complete yet. Also during the Southern tribunal into the killing of RUC men Breen and Buchanan,the fact that a high ranking officer like Breen was up to his neck in collusion via the”Glenanne gang” was never mentioned.Establishment journalists and even Vincent Browne tried to portray them as “gallant officers protecting the community” and rounded hysterically on the likes of Adams and Padraig McLochlainn for suggesting that they were combattants killed in action.
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with the UN report today about the republic of ireland and the collusion report about Northern ireland – it’s clear irish citizens are mal-treated under both governments. Isn’t it time we took matters into our own hands and started work on getting the republic we want?
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