IRA sentimentality shocks

In response to the British man complaining in the RantLine™ about a Croatian lad wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “IRA Unbeaten Army” [Jan. 19] and the subsequent response in last week’s RantLine™ [Jan. 26], I would like to add that most British people have nothing against the Irish.

The situation in Northern Ireland was one of the tragic outcomes of colonialism, made seemingly intractable by religion. Our forbearers, or at least their governments, left chaos all over the world where there was empire—it so happened that Northern Ireland is in our own back yard, and could not be ignored to the same extent that we did elsewhere. We do, however, have major problems with the IRA and misty-eyed North American sentimentality about them.

I lived in a part of London that was predominantly Irish, and my neighbours with Irish accents were no less Londoners than I. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, bombing was commonplace across the mainland U.K., and it was no more acceptable amongst my Catholic Irish friends than with me. Yes, we do have a problem with the IRA. I have a problem with them blowing up the 171 bus that I used to take my kids into town on; with the 16-year-old girl who was killed in a bomb in the financial district of London while doing some research on a medieval church for a school project; with people being blown to pieces in a pub, just trying to enjoy a pint.

I remember not being able to go home one day because a bomb factory had just been discovered up the street. I remember the regular disruption and inconvenience of the tube being closed because some idiot tourist had left their shopping in a carriage and the bomb squad had to be called in to check it out, not to mention the litter generated by an absence of trash cans in London—they all had to be removed because the IRA kept putting bombs in them.

But this was nothing compared to the terror experienced by people living in Northern Ireland by the violence perpetrated on both sides of the sectarian divide. I used to work with a woman from Belfast and I have never seen anyone more petrified and traumatized as she was on an occasion when someone called in a bomb warning to the place where we worked. The IRA were not a band of heroic freedom fighters. They were a bunch of murderers, financed largely by criminal activity, such as drug dealing, extortion rackets and selling of their military expertise to such organizations as the FARC in Columbia.

So, I was wondering, if the IRA is an undefeated army, why did they surrender? The British government or military did not defeat the IRA, the battle-weary people of Northern Ireland did. Try asking the McCarthy sisters how heroic the IRA is. Or the children of Jean McConville, the Catholic convert and widowed mother of 10, who was executed by the IRA in 1972 for the crime of coming to the aid of a dying soldier shot on her doorstep—whose body wasn’t recovered for over 30 years because they didn’t have the decency to disclose where they’d buried her. Or the people whose lives are made miserable by their gangster activities in their neighbourhoods.

The British powers may have fucked up by occupying Ireland in the first place, but the IRA, the UDF or any other paramilitary bastard with a bag full of semtex and a bucket full of ideology haven’t been improving the lives of the locals either.

So, before people start lionizing the IRA, or any other terrorist organizations who consider it acceptable to target civilians, try living through a time and place when you don’t even feel shocked anymore when you hear that there has been a bombing in a shopping mall. The vast majority of people on both sides of the Irish Sea were appalled at the violence carried out in Northern Ireland, including my in-laws—people born in Ireland, and not people who claim Irishness because they had a great-grandparent emigrate from there. Ireland has a magnificent wealth of culture and history to be proud of. It’s about time people in North America of Irish origin stopped denigrating their heritage by associating it with people who murder, maim and torture others.

» Louise Gardner

Gay Arab injustice

I was glad you published the news item, “Gay Arabs get help” by Irene Casselli [“The Front, Jan. 26]. In the Arab world, there is much more prejudice against openly gay or lesbian people than in the West, and conditions are similar in many other Islamic countries. Did you not hear about how last year two teenage boys in Iran were brutally executed for allegedly having sex with each other—even if it was consensual? How can the global community stand by and ignore this monstrous human rights violation?

Several Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, execute a number of gay men every year. Yet, gays exist in substantial numbers in the Islamic world, just like in other cultures.

Canada must grant asylum to gays escaping death sentences from certain Islamic countries, and granting basic human rights for gays in any country must be part of the international human rights agenda. All the local Arab bigots who shout obscenities at Helem, the gay rights Arab group holding a workshop in Montreal, need to be told to shut up.

In Canada, gays can get married legally. In some Islamic countries they are not even allowed to live. How shall the West bridge this chasm?

» Jeff Falaba

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