Isn’t it great they can celebrate their culture in peace in Catholic Spain.
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Imagine being stuck beside those fuckers on the plane over… but then again, Benidorm is a cess pit anyhow, so anyone with half a brain wouldn’t be going there…
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We can’t really laugh at that lady down here when you think about it .
Insert FG/FF
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SOMETHING strange is happening. Although Netflix continues to make inroads into viewing habits – posing more threats to the traditional landscape of British broadcasting – does it necessarily follow that public service television is being undermined?
When it comes to Netflix, most viewers cheerily talk about binge viewing, while industry professionals worry about streaming services drawing young viewers away from the conventional habits of television. There is a third question, one that is rarely posed by broadcasters – is Netflix challenging or reinforcing the time-honoured role of public service broadcasting?
This week, I found time to watch a documentary on the Miami Showband massacre, a film that has been on my watch-list for weeks now. I came away wondering why this riveting story has not been told by Channel 4 or the BBC .
In July 1975, three members of popular Irish dancehall group The Miami Showband were stopped at a fake army checkpoint as they travelled home to Dublin from a live show in Banbridge, County Down.
A gang of armed men from the UVF paramilitaries stopped their van, searched it and took down their names. Unseen by the band, two of the UVF gunmen planted a camouflaged bomb in the rear of their Volkswagen mini-van.
The faulty timer was set to explode after the band crossed the border back into the Republic, tricking people into assuming they were cross-border terrorists. But the bomb exploded prematurely, killing the two UVF men. Panicked by the explosion, the remaining members of the UVF unit began shooting at the band.
Two members of the Miami Showband survived the night: bass guitarist Stephen Travers – who had been shot by a dum-dum bullet – and Des McAlea, both of whom pretended to be dead in the fields beyond the rogue checkpoint. The UVF gang who shot the three dead band members was led by Robert “The Jackal” Jackson, the worst mass murderer in the grisly history of the Troubles, suspected of killing up to 50 Catholics.
Significantly, the false checkpoint operation was led by an officer with a cut-glass British accent, who oversaw the stop-and-search.
The Netflix documentary recounts the story through the eyes of Travers, whose dogged search for the truth exposes British Government collusion in the murders.
The officer at the scene was the notorious Captain Robert Nairac, a member of the 14th Intelligence Division of the British Army and a cavalier double-agent whose handlers reached to the very top of the British secret service. Nairac was executed by the IRA two years later.
One reason there has been such a poverty of output about the Troubles in Northern Ireland is that it’s a subject that uniquely spooks network broadcasters.
This is partly for commercial reasons. There is a settled belief within the minds of London broadcasters that the Troubles don’t rate. The rationale is fairly crude. The most valuable and populous areas of British broadcasting for both advertisers and licence fee revenues are the home counties, the south of England and the Midlands.
The ingrained attitude there was that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were a turn-off, confusing, complex and blood-curdling. It was an attitude that was not restricted to the south either. It spread throughout the UK and most drearily into the mindset of commissioning editors. I cannot count the number of times I’ve witnessed great films about the Troubles die an instant death in commissioning meetings in London.
Another reason is the anxiety that followed The Death On The Rock documentary in 1988, when Thames Television broadcast the recounting of an SAS operation on Gibraltar which killed three IRA operatives. The Conservative government of the time tried to ban the film, delay its transmission and undermine it in the press, but it went on to win a Bafta and became something of a symbol of broadcasting freedoms.
Reaction to the transmission of Death On The Rock was divided even within the television industry. Thames Television subsequently lost its ITV franchise to Carlton in a ‘‘silent bidding auction’’ but many still believe that a government vendetta lay behind the decision and the whole bitter dispute left broadcasters touchy and nervous about covering controversial incidents in recent Irish history.
A broadcast “ban” and voice restriction brought in by Tory home secretary Douglas Hurd prevented Sinn Fein politicians appearing on the airwaves as themselves, an intervention loved by voice-over artists, including the actor Stephen Rea who often voiced for Gerry Adams and was later nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Crying Game.
The outcome of these now fading histories is that films such as Netflix’s ReMastered: The Miami Showband Massacre are thin on the ground.
Of course, there have been landmark films about the Troubles. There was a 1993 Yorkshire Television broadcast called Hidden Hand, a documentary about the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings of 1974, and BBC journalist Peter Taylor of Panorama has dedicated the large part of his career to unearthing stories about the paramilitaries. But these are the exception, not the rule.
An element of national shame still casts a shadow over broadcasting decisions and Britain is not alone. Dutch broadcasters have commissioned preciously few films about the failures of the Dutch UN forces in preventing the genocide at Srebrenica and to this day Belgian broadcasters shy away from King Leopold’s “hidden holocaust” and the colonial atrocities meted out in the Congo.
You’re some cunt to acquiesce … No matter what’s posted up on this site, on every topic, you’ll roll over and ask us to think of the children.
You’re the type of cunt who takes it up the arse from the missus with a strap on.
So despite your interest in strap ons and sodomy you don’t disagree with my point .
That clip reminds me of a report PrimeTime did before the 2011 General Election which stuck in my mind. It was from Carrick On Shannon and featured the views of two young women out rowing on the river.
One of them spoke earnestly of how the young people of Ireland had been let down by politicians, how towns like Carrick On Shannon were being decimated by emigration and austerity and most of all, she spoke of the need for change. “We need change”.
When asked who she was going to vote for, she replied something like “my friends will probably crucify me for this, but…I’m goin’ to vote Fianna Fail”.
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Did you make a point?
Some shower of wankers in this
This a good article from The Spectator. copy & pasted it as it’s behind a paywall
SPECTATOR
The case for prosecuting Bloody Sunday ‘Soldier F’
The soldiers of 1 Para weren’t just unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars
It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in the room with them to watch their evidence at Lord Saville’s inquiry. And while Lionel Shriver is right that the sight of terrorists benefiting from an immunity denied to our soldiers is grotesque, there are competing qualms. Not only because British soldiers should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. But because, having watched all of the Bloody Sunday shooters testify, I can say with certainty that they include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars.
As one soldier after another appeared before Lord Saville, it became clear that the soldiers of 1 Para were intent on spurning this last effort to get to the truth of what happened that day. Almost without exception they stonewalled, sticking to the testimony they had given in 1972, repeating claims that had been repeatedly disproven and, when in difficulty, pleading forgetfulness. Not a plausible forgetfulness, but a highly selective, implausible type. Their evidence was evasive, frustrating and self-damning.
The Saville inquiry had promised immunity from further legal action to all witnesses who told the truth about their actions on the day. In that quiet inquiry room, one and a half decades ago, the soldiers of 1 Para might have come clean and admitted what they had done before sinking back into anonymity and retirement. Instead they stuck to their lies.
For example, on the day itself, four soldiers — E, F, G and H — moved as a brick into one of the more concealed areas of the Bogside. By their own evidence they were responsible for at least half of the deaths that day. By the time of the Saville inquiry, soldiers E and G were dead, but F and H were not, were called and clearly reluctantly appeared. H was the soldier who had fired the most number of shots that day, including 19 he said he fired at a single window that did not shatter. But it was soldier F — who fired 13 rounds on the day — whose performance in 1972 and 2003 was most disturbing. It always seemed to me that if anyone was deserving of prosecution, then it was him.
F started lying from the moment the shooting stopped. Like every other soldier who had fired, F was immediately asked to give the Royal Military Police (RMP) his justification for, and direction of, each shot. So in the early hours of 31 January 1972 F pointed on a map to a number of positions where he claimed to have fired at gunmen and nail-bombers. At no stage did he admit to firing at the rubble barricade where Michael Kelly had fallen, shot side-on in the abdomen. Yet while F was speaking to the RMP, at the nearby hospital a 7.62mm calibre bullet was being dug out of the spine of Michael Kelly’s body.
In the weeks that followed the rifles of the soldiers who had fired were sent to a Belfast laboratory for testing. Realising that unmentioned shots would be traced to his gun, F chose to radically alter his story.
So at Lord Widgery’s inquiry, several weeks after the day, F decided to recall firing at a ‘bomber’ at the rubble barricade. There was no bomber at the barricade. But the bullet that had lodged in Kelly’s body was indeed shown to have come from F’s rifle. And so at that earliest stage of the search for the truth, F’s first lie — and first murder — was exposed. And nothing happened. F stayed in the army and periodically received promotion.
Under questioning in 2003, the short and stocky F — then in late middle age — was reduced to monosyllabic answers, generally of either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He claimed to remember almost nothing of the day, despite it being his first visit to Londonderry and — by his own admission — the most shots he had fired on any deployment up to that date. Under devastating questioning, F was shown to have killed at least four people that day. One of them was Patrick Doherty, shot through a buttock as he was crawling away. One more killing which soldier F had ‘forgotten’ about when first questioned by the RMP.
Then, while Doherty lay crying in agony, a 41-year-old man called Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats to try to get help for the dying man. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, including an officer from another regiment stationed on the city walls, soldier F — positioned on the other side of the road — got down on one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. No one who saw the mortuary photos of the exit wound in McGuigan’s face will forget what just that one bullet of soldier F’s did.
Unusually, F’s first name is in the public domain. It is ‘Dave’. It is public because a number of witnesses heard it shouted. One wounded civilian lying on the ground heard the brick of four soldiers calling to each other. ‘I’ve got another one’ shouted one. And then, ‘We’re pulling out, Dave.’
In 1972 Dave — F — committed perjury in front of Lord Chief Justice Widgery. He perjured himself again before Lord Saville in 2003. Perhaps on that disastrous day in 1972 he thought he was teaching the citizens of Londonderry some kind of lesson. Or perhaps — under what he presumed to be suitable cover — he just seized an opportunity to kill with impunity on British streets. It is true that few people are comfortable with retired soldiers being prosecuted. But if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?
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Are you drawing BMB’s attention to the article or saying that BMB and I are the same poster?
Drawing attention, mate … he was asking after it a while back.
1981 - IRA hunger striker Bobby Sandswins a seat in the British parliament in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election
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Good report on the RTÉ news on this. Amazing to think there were British tanks on Irish streets so recently.
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I used live in the Creggan, plenty of tanks,Saracens still on the streets well after the hunger strike