Monthly Archives: December 2020

Joe Biden represents everything that is bad about the Democrats. In this searing dissection of the recent inter-party negotiations about a Covid stimulus plan, David Sirota reveals that it was Biden who insisted on cutting the pandemic stimulus check from $1200 to $600, in line with his long held antagonism to other forms of government intervention, such as social security.

You can read Sirota’s piece here and weep.

Thanks to RS for tip

Thanks to CM for the tip

The British government’s decision not to hold a public inquiry into the UDA assassination of Belfast lawyer, Pat Finucane, is hardly a surprise. That, more or less, has been the British stance since the day after his death.

What was surprising was the anger vented publicly by Sinn Fein this time – in contrast to past similar rebuffs.

Sinn Fein have had ample opportunity in the many years since the death of Pat Finucane to put some muscle behind the demand for a full probe but never did, especially when pleasing Sinn Fein, or at least appearing to, was a policy priority of the British Cabinet.

I am thinking in particular of the lengthy, almost unending talks, post-GFA, to set up a power sharing government that could lock the Shinners into constitutional politics.

Sinn Fein could have made a sworn and public inquiry a precondition to signing an overall deal, but never did, not during those interminable negotiations. 

In fact, I am told that the SDLP made more of a fuss about a Finucane inquiry during those talks than SF ever did.

Why was that?

Two possibilities come to mind. One has to do with the internal politics of the IRA at the time, especially the then opposition of the Belfast Brigade to the direction being charted by the Adams’ leadership, a division that was not fully reversed until after the second ceasefire.

In the months before his death. I had started meeting Pat Finucane on a fairly regular basis. We would meet in the Landsowne Court hotel, have a few drinks and talk about the only subject journalists like me, and lawyers like Pat Finucane, were talking about in those days which was: ‘What the fuck is Adams up to?’

What I did not know then, but know now, is that Pat had his own connection to the BB where, doubtless, the same questions were being asked, although perhaps in an angrier tone than our Wednesday evenings in the Lansdowne Court. It would have been clear to the British that the BB was problem.

The other possibility, short of a British intelligence fuck-up – which essentially is what the De Silva report suggested – is that it would not be possible to probe the Finucane killing without considering the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Gerry Adams – and all in public, with witnesses sworn in and obliged to to tell the truth.

The over lapping characteristics of the two events are the fact that the UDA was behind both efforts to kill, that the same UDA intelligence chief, Brian Nelson, was deeply involved in the preparation and planning and lastly, that the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) ran Nelson as one of their agents.

The only difference is that Pat Finucane was killed while Gerry Adams survived. And survived to deliver a defanged IRA into Stormont Buildings.

The rest, as they say, is history.

But we’ll be asking for a long time to come why one man lived and the other did not.

The above photo of James Monaghan, one-time IRA Director of Engineering and a central figure in the alleged 2001 plot by the IRA to train the Columbian FARC guerrillas, and Evelyn Glenholmes, daughter of late Short Strand IRA veteran Dickie Glenholmes, who was at the centre of a dramatic extradition row in 1986 over her alleged involvement in an IRA bombing campaign in London, was taken by undercover Spanish police who were closing in on the military commander of ETA, Javier Arizcuren-Ruiz, known by his codename ‘Kantauri’. He was eventually arrested outside a Paris hotel in March 1999.

The photos were featured in a multi-part television documentary called ‘The Challenge: ETA‘ (hat tip to HM for the pointer) currently screening on Amazon Prime, which traces the story of ETA from its birth through to its own peace process, which was strongly influenced by the Irish version, down to the involvement of Redemptorist priest, Alex Reid.

The Spanish anti-terrorist policeman interviewed for the documentary claims that the meeting was called to discuss an arms deal, which given Monaghan’s then status in the IRA and his subsequent dealings with FARC, sounds about right.

But Irish Times journalist, Paddy Woodworth, who was interviewed for this segment of the film, has a different view: “That they would actually have been trying to sell any weapons in 1999 seems to me very unlikely’, he claimed..

‘The IRA have a huge amount to lose if they are found selling weapons to an armed group in another European Union democracy. It can even be that what they were really meeting for was to transmit a message from Sinn Fein and the IRA leadership, to transmit a message to ETA to end the armed struggle’.

Indeed. And I am the King of the Congo, Paddy. How do you do?

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi gives a calm, reasoned and damning analysis of the background to the British Labour Party’s internal turmoil over alleged anti-semitism on the part of former leader Jeremy Corbyn and others. Perhaps the party’s new leader Sir Keir Starmer might find it interesting viewing……

Better known on the alternative comedy scene in England’s West Country as “‘Silver Sam’, master of the triple entendre, (who) sings hilarious tales of thwarted libidos.”

Thanks to PM for the tip, his performances can be viewed here. Ain’t life strange…….?

US academic and IRA expert, Bob White takes issue with the Sinn Fein claim that Gerry Adams’ acolyte, Jim Gibney was the first to make the suggestion. You can read his version – ‘Bobby Sands, MP: Whose Idea Was It?‘, here. By the way, has anyone thought of asking Bobby Sands family? Surely they would have a view, since he was one of theirs.