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A Popular Sport
The two boys eat their supper slowly while lying on their stomachs in front of the TV, racing their cars around each other’s plates, lost to the world, as their father studies them, charmed by their innocence, and smiles when they rev their imaginary engines and screech their imaginary brakes. Upstairs, his wife is just finishing bathing their three-year-old daughter, Aine, then she calls down, "Right you two. Clothes off and up here."
"Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….keeeoooooooooooooooooo!"
"Rymmmmmmm, rymmmmmmmmm….urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"
"Right lads, youse are finished your supper. Your mammy’s calling you." Their father lifts their plates. "Throw you clothes there. You can take your cars up to the bath. They can be speedboats."
"Brill!"
"Race you up!"
"Hold it. Are youse not forgetting some thing."
"Yuck, I hate kissing."
"Carry us up, Daddy!"
"I’m an oul lad. I’m not able."
"Do as your told, Daddy!"
He sets the plates on a chair. "Okay. Climb aboard everyone!" Kevin jumps on his back and Sean hangs like a loose apron from his neck as he struggles up the stairs, bent-double, singing, "Hi Ho! Hi Ho! It’s off to work we go…"
As he reaches the turn in the landing, the pipe-bomb comes crashing through the front window and explodes in the middle of the living room, setting everything ablaze, carpet, sofa, curtains, the kids’ clothes, and blows the door off its hinges and across the hall into the banisters. The wife is screaming, Aine goes into hysterics, the wee lads are crying as is the father, whose first thought is to get his family to safety as smoke quickly engulfs his home.
A loyalist spokesperson quoted in last Saturday’s ‘Irish Times’ described the UDA’s pipe-bomb campaign as ‘a popular sport’, allowing the lads to let off a bit of steam. The RUC perpetuates the farce that the attacks are the work of ‘individuals’, despite the fact that five out of the six UDA battalions no longer support the peace process, that most of the pipe-bombs, which are actually grenades, are identical, are professionally manufactured on factory lathes, are distributed probably from a central location, and that the attacks are organised, co-ordinated and widespread.
Yes, it’s all a big mystery.
Years ago, republican allegations that the British were involved in a dirty war and were, in part, directing loyalist terrorism, were dismissed by the British, by Dublin, by the unionists, by the media, and by the paramilitaries themselves. Not so easily are these allegations dismissed today. The Brian Nelson affair, amongst other examples, provides proof that MI5 infiltrated the UDA, armed it, managed its intelligence and through surrogates directed many of its operations against ‘the enemy’ (Sinn Fein councillors, ex-republican prisoners, lawyers) while other sections of the organisation, with the exception of the occasional public relations prosecutions, were allowed to continue the business of terrorising and demoralising the nationalist community.
The British government knows exactly what happened in Dublin and Monaghan, who planted the bombs, who supplied the explosives, knows all about the collusion, has all the documents at its disposal. Many people need to wake up to the truth, to the facts of political life and the brutality of power. Britain is run by an establishment bigger than Tony Blair and he now knows the enormity of the threat posed by the Saville Inquiry, that the accomplice to the Bloody Sunday massacre before or after the event was a former resident of Number Ten.
The message behind the current UDA’s campaign is quite simple: "Nationalists and Republicans, back off from the Belfast Agreement. You have got too many concessions."
Who also thinks that way? The RUC does. According to its Chief Constable large numbers of RUC officers are resigning, and believe that the Police Act goes too far. Anti-Agreement Ulster Unionists and the DUP think that nationalists have been given too much. Pro-Agreement unionists are trying to claw back, would like to drive Sinn Fein out of the executive and - in their dreams - cut a deal with the SDLP, for whom they have the least respect. And last, but not least, the British government does not defend the Belfast Agreement, lacks honesty and courage, and appears prepared to put it in suspension rather than face down the forces of reaction and face up to the horrors of its past, all that Catholic blood on its hands. The truth about the north of Ireland has the potential to shake Britain to its foundations.
So far, nationalists are to be thankful for the fact that the explosive inside these grenades is black powder from shotgun cartridges. If British securocrats get their way the UDA will be ‘stumble across’ real explosives so that the nationalist community can be properly terrorised and the IRA provoked into breaking its cease-fire and retaliating, thus getting the unionists and the British government off the hook.
The nationalist community has made great strides. Many people now appreciate the magnitude of its suffering and oppression, its dignity and stoicism in the face of provocation, the fact that it has compromised and offers the unionist people the hand of friendship, a process of reconciliation where we are partners and equal.
It would be madness, dangerous madness, for the general unionist community, which also suffered terribly in the conflict at our hands, to squander this opportunity because of a sense of grievance or because it has fallen victim yet again to the appeal of sectarian bigots.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison