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Ear to the Ground

Northern Ireland Chooses Peace

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Posted on May 8, 2007

The heads of Northern Ireland’s main Protestant and Catholic political parties have joined together in an historic power-sharing government. Ian Paisley, leader of an anti-Catholic church, and Martin McGuinness, formerly of the IRA, will lead the new government. Both men have spent time in prison for their extremist roles in the conflict.


BBC:

Both Paisley and McGuinness spent time behind bars for their extremist paths and analysts agree that both, in very different ways, have blood on their hands today.

Paisley, a bombastic orator who leads his own virulently anti-Catholic church, was imprisoned in 1969 for leading an illegal demonstration against Catholic marchers demanding equal rights in voting, housing and employment. His strident, stubborn invective fanned the flames of Protestant mob violence and helped to delay by decades today’s historic compromise.

McGuinness, a high school dropout from Londonderry who rose to become the city’s IRA commander, served two short 1970s sentences for IRA membership—and spent many years more on the run while serving in the IRA’s ruling “army council,” the seven-man committee ultimately responsible for killing nearly 1,800 people and maiming thousands more.

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By THOMAS BILLIS, May 8, 2007 at 12:31 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

Why shouldn’t Tony Blair take a victory lap?He and Bill Clinton accomplished a great thing in bringing peace to No Ireland.If we criticize incessantly for failures we must also praise incessantly for success.It is liking giving a dog a treat.That is how you teach our leaders that we prefer peace to war.

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By QuyTran, May 8, 2007 at 11:56 am Link to this comment

For how long ? One month ? One week ?

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By Douglas Chalmers, May 8, 2007 at 9:10 am Link to this comment

There is something that Ian Paisley and Israel’s Ariel Sharon have in common - monstrosity! They are both from some distant primitive past when the largest man on the battlefield was often the winner. The fact that they are the loudest belies that Paisley, at least - and most definitely the very loudest, has never shed a drop of his own blood on the battlefieds of Ireland.


Being responsible for the divisions that break a country and wreck any chance of peace for one part of the population who are, in turn, subjugated by a foreign military or a foreign-funded military, is a pitiful excuse for one’s existence in the human race. It is notable, therefore, that Paisley appears to have finally (almost) relinquished the four-footed roar of the beasts of the wild for a belated position as an honorary human along with the rest of Ireland’s saddened citizens.


Perhaps the motivation was none other than Tony Blair’s desperate need to improve his appearance at home with his own constituency and Ulster and Sinn Fein were only the most convenient means of the day. After all, there are more compelling imperatives appearing over the Westminster horizon and looking to the future as Saudi Arabia’s arms and munitions factory must be one of them.

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