If Hugo is a satirist then itâs brilliant. Given the murderous activities of the ruc and the british army at the time its hilarious that hugo would mention their professions. Ooh ah up the RUC indeed hugo.
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You donât have to tag me when replying to me, tanno.
I presented you with facts, you just donât like them.
Seems to me that Joe doesnât actually realise that Stephen Traversâ tweet is a skewering of views like his own.
Isnât Joe using it as a political football?
Brolly has been on full tilt for about a week or so now.
Thereâs some lad after posting photos of the Claudy and Dropping Well bomb aftermaths in response to a tweet from Joe. Joe is threatening legal action. Can somebody ladybird this for me?
Joe is a great great man.
Joe more or less revealed that his father killed people in the troubles and Joe himself suffered terrible guilt over it in a brilliant interview with Tommy martin on tv3. Maybe the suggestion is he was involved in one of those bombs they are tweeting him about.
He also more or less said he suffered abuse at the hands of his parents in the same interview
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Heâs one of the best weâve produced
Read the Roll of Honour for Irelandâs bravest men. Murdered in the service of the State by âOoh Ah up the Raâ.
Garda Richard Fallon
Inspector Samuel Donegan
Garda Michael Reynolds
Garda Michael Clerkin
Garda John Morley
Garda Henry Byrne
Garda Seamus Quaid
Garda Patrick Reynolds
Garda Patrick McLoughlin
Garda Gary Sheehan
Garda Frank Hand
Sergeant Paddy Morrissey
Detective Garda Jerry McCabe
Private Patrick Kelly
Chief Prison Officer Brian Stack
All this furore started because a football team stupidly sang a song which glorified murderers. They may not have meant to glorify murderers in the real sense, they may have been doing it absent mindedly, but their words did. But the real issue is the normalisation of the chant in Irish society. In that sense, the football team is irrelevant. Itâs the general culture of accepting it that matters.
I thought Fintan OâTooleâs article was very powerful. It was the simple, unvarnished truth. Simple, unvarnished truths can be very difficult for some people to accept. Simple, unvarnished truths make them deeply uncomfortable, which leads to deflection, whataboutery, attempts to shout down, attempts to drown out with noise, shit attempts at making the whole topic into a joke, shitposting, historically illiterate comparisons to other events, personal attacks against those who speak these simple, unvarnished truths,
Two things stand out in all this. One is the line âtwo wrongs donât make a rightâ. This is a very obvious point that few people seem to get. Just because âtheir sideâ has done very bad things does not mean that the very bad things people claiming to be on âour sideâ did somehow become good. They remain grotesque crimes.
The other is the meaning of words. Chanting âUp The Raâ really does mean âUpâ all the stuff in Fintan OâTooleâs article. Otherwise words have no meaning. If words cease to have meaning, we enter a fake, chroeographed Putinesque world where ânothing is true and everything is possibleâ.
Refusal to confront the culture of Disneyfication of the PIRA is to reject our history, to airbrush, to create a fake, Disneyfied, football team style version. Look around the world and see how many problems are caused by belief in fake history.
Speaking plain, unvarnished truths about what the PIRA was is in no way a rejection of the totality of the history of this island. It is in no way a rejection of a through examination of the deeper reasons they emerged or why people felt they needed to join them. It is an essential part of the examination of the totality of the history of this island.
Examining the totality of history requires honest introspection from all sides. It requires honest listening to all sides. It requires dealing with objective truths. All of that is painful, which is why so many people on either âsideâ stick their fingers in their ears and whistle away to themselves, retreating into the soothing balm of fake history. Fake history means you can never move on, and the bitterness, enmity, injustice and crimes of the past just keep being replayed in different, mutating forms, while the one thing that would genuinely set people free - the truth - the totality of the truth - is butchered.
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Up the ra.
Could it be said that people aged 35 and over might be a bit more touchy about singing âup the RAâ v people younger than that.
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Saying they âmay not have meant to glorify murderersâ is part of the problem though. Accept that they 100pc didnât and deal with the issue of the song and slogan in general.
Similarly fintan could have referenced the reasons why the IRA existed and why all these murderous psychopaths just seemed to live in a small corner of Ireland for 30 odd years and before and after that managed to rein in the murdering. By not doing that and giving any balance or context one side loves him the other side hates him and round we go again.
Everyone just wants to win arguments and be proven to be right and thatâs why the world is fucked.
The Irish rugby team bus once had to do an extra lap of St Stephenâs Green as they were singing the sash and though it would be indiscrete to arrive at the Shelbourne mid chorus.
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If, among the PUL commuity in NI, there was a widespread culture of Disneyfication of Loyalist terrorists and their crimes, and British Army crimes in NI, of songs or chants or other paraphernalia glorifying them, what would the reaction in the CNR community and in the south of Ireland be?
We already know, because such a culture undoubtedly exists, and itâs disgusting, and âour sideâ rightly rails against it.
But by one of the most bizarre pieces of âlogicâ weâve seen over the last week, ie. the statements that âit doesnât mean what you think it meansâ or âthe meaning has changedâ or âit means something different to younger peopleâ, any glorification of Loyalist terrorism or British Army crimes could simply be batted away.
They could say âoh, it doesnât mean what you think it means, it means something different, itâs just our culture, our contemporary cultureâ. But it would mean what we think it means - the glorification of killing Catholics.
Same as they know exactly what chanting Up The Ra means. Some on âour sideâ refuse to know.
So many on either âsideâ donât want to confront their own blind spots. Those in the middle who do, and Iâm confident these people are a majority, are dismissed by the myopic extremists as âtraitors to their own sideâ, or âLundysâ, or âWest Britsâ. All because they object to glorifying murders and murderers.
Itâs just another reason for people to get up on their soap box to suit their own agendas. If you were reprimanding a child for being bold, or a member of staff for inappropriate behaviour or indeed sentencing somone in a court of law - context is everything. It seems for many, when a chance to committ to outrage is available, context goes well and truly out the window.
You have people literally pinning 30 years of IRA violence on a group of young girls, most of whom were probably born well after the fact. Thatâs what Fintan and the outraged are doing.
They talk about education, but itâs education with a stick they want to deal out.
By all means educate, but part of that education will have to be about murder, violence and glorifying it on each and every side and done so in a mature manner⌠The ironing of asking young people to act appropriately while treating them with utter contempt seems to be lost on many of the most outraged.
But most donât give a fuck about changing behaviour, they just want the soap box.
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Accept that they 100 per cent didnât what?
That they 100% didnât mean to glorify murderers, or that they 100% didnât glorify murderers?
I canât put a percentage on the amount they meant or didnât mean to glorify murderers. How many of them sang it? 20 plus? Iâm sure there would be highly varying levels of awareness of the recent history of this island among all those who sung it. The way it usually happens is somebody starts it and others start singing along. Thatâs how groups work. People go along with the momentum. Theyâre in a state of high euphoria. Judgement is not at its best.
Thatâs why the real issue is not the particular incident itself. The particular incident is merely a reflection, a highlighting of a widespread culture. It could have happened anywhere. It just so happened that it happened in a place that was highly visible, and laced with wider meaning, ie. an irish international team in a moment of sporting triumph.
The effect of the individual incident was the glorification of murderers.
But the real problem lies in the culture.
This is very similar to the point John Barnes makes about racism, yet heâs continually and deliberately misunderstood.
The real problem is not the team. It would be ridiculous to say that the team are the real problem. They made a mistake but vilifying them beyond getting the apology they needed to give is not going to solve the problem. The problem is the culture where the team felt chanting Up The Ra was normal. They felt it was normal because the culture of Disneyfication of the PIRA exists in society, and is being increasingly and relentlessly pushed by influential channels, and not confronted.
Fintan OâToole has a finite amount of words to work with in each column. Any columnist has. What do you expect him to do, fit hundreds of years of history into one column, every column?
Trying to disregard objective truths based on personal dislike of somebody is deflection, a coping mechanism.
And of course Sinn Fein going well in the polls is a huge element in the outrage. That song has been sung here there and everywhere for at least 25 years in Ireland and there wasnât a word about it. In hindsight there should have been imho but there wasnât.
You simply canât literally base a states entire official history on violent republicanism, the IRA and glorious revolution in 1916 and 1919-21, grow up seeing our parents and grandparents singing rebel songs, have a national anthem based on fighting, have streets and buildings named after men who ordered people killed in cold blood and not expect there to be some blurring of the lines as to what people find it acceptable to chant or sing when theyâre drunk.
Taking aside the fact that the modern IRA werenât just some cartoon villains who killed people because they were evil and that there was huge historical context of discrimination, ethic cleansing, house burning and state sponsored or ignored violence or murder which people in the south are complicit in by their silence at the time.
A lot of the atrocities carried out by both old and new IRA were absolutely abhorrent, especially the new. Thereâs absolutely no getting away from that but itâs just not as simple as saying they are all bad either. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Saying or singing up the Ra can mean a lot of different things to different people. Obviously if they were singing three cheers for Warrington that would be different.
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What a load of bollocks, straw man nonsense, an utter refusal to deal with the reality of what is being discussed. Copium in defence of lack of argument.
Itâs been obvious for a long time and across a wide range of topics, that in your world nothing is true, nothing has any meaning or should have any meaning, that the real meaning and the real wish to change things for the better, when voiced by people you donât like who tell plain truths and make you shift uncomfortably, is always somehow âcorruptâ. To you anything which displays a shred of real moral integrity is âcorruptâ.
Thatâs the road to nihilism, an entirely choreographed fake world of the type Putin, Dugin, the hard Brexiteers and the Trumpbots exist in.