Atch
26 Jun 2023 #1351
He doesn't know what the UVF are or care about any of these things
You know something Barney, I realise that. I'm just not letting anyone, even a mental case like Novi, off the hook for throwaway comments about the 'the IRA'. Like most Irish people north and south, I'm sick of ignorant twats with their opinions on a subject they know nothing about. Dumb, patronising f@cks like Novi think we have a certain outlook because the government told us to think that way, or we learned it in a history book in school. We lived it, you and I, we're a similar age. Obviously your experience, growing up in the north is far different to mine, but it's a part of all of us. My father's family for generations in the IRB, then the Volunteers, my mother's mother in Cumann na mBan. My grandmother was virulently anti-Treaty. Much as I admire Michael Collins and wish he'd led Ireland, rather than Dev, he should never have signed that treaty. I can't imagine what it was like for the people of the six counties to be abandoned like that.
As a child, one of my earliest memories is staring at the television, absolutely transfixed by Ian Paisley one one of his rants of hatred and bile towards the Irish, and asking my mother 'What's wrong with that man?' I had no idea what he was talking about but I knew there was something not right about him. I remember the Miami Showband massacre, because Fran O'Toole had been on telly not that long before and my mother was talking about 'what a lovely lad' he was and I remember at breakfast - words can't describe the feelings in the house that morning when the adults heard the news and the kids took in the fact that he'd been murdered on the side of the road up in Northern Ireland.
Then the bomb in Talbot Street in 1974. We were sitting down at the table eating the evening meal when we heard the bomb. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what was that?' We lived five miles away.
Bobby Sands in 1981, the terrible atmosphere in the country throughout the deaths of the hunger strikers, the prayers in school every day, the riots in Dublin, they hypocrisy of the British government who wouldn't talk to the hunger strikers but colluded with the loyalist terrorists.
Watching the Orangemen swaggering down the street on the 12th of July, the standoff at Drumcree.
Having a gun pointed at me by a soldier of a foreign army on Irish soil when I travelled up to Belfast to see a friend back in the early 90s.
Having said all that and seen Novi's latest comment about us 'stupid Euros', his inability to distinguish between the difference British and the Irish (he doesn't even know which court in which country sentenced Gary Haggarty) and lumping us all together, I wash my hands of him permanently.
Novi is a disgusting individual and I'm guessing, always has been. Nobody who was once 'nice' becomes so ugly because they're old and depressed. No way. You have to have a really rotten core in the first place. And of course we mustn't forget that he was stupid enough to vote for Ronald Regan. Imagine anyone thinking that a dim witted B move actor was the man to back to lead a country. Tim nice but Dim Ronnie with anorexic, neurotic Nancy pulling his strings.
