The Joe Brolly owns your soul thread

[HBV]

He is an inspiration.

[Bandage]

Not one internet forum free state royalist would set foot in a GAA club in the north and criticise the membership for not supporting the PSNI in 2002. That’s the crux of the matter.

[Tim_Riggins]

@Sidney

His “opinion” isn’t worth a fuck. Serious criminal cases are conducted based on evidence. What have the PSNI done for him in this regard?

Not much, it appears.

Is

@Sidney

His “opinion” isn’t worth a fuck. Serious criminal cases are conducted based on evidence. What have the PSNI done for him in this regard?

Not much, it appears.

He isn’t advocating at a trial, it’s a newspaper article and the opinion of a man.

@Sidney

Your point is that you object to Trump supporters being called out for racism and anti-semitism. Two guesses why you object to that.

We were talking about Anti semitism. You tried to base your point on tens of millions of Americans based on a few tweets. This is a relatively small GGA club where the guy feels ostracized. You are so laughably out of your depth here.

@Sidney

The PSNI’s treatment of Peadar Heffron is a serious matter. This man was a member of that force, and they didn’t warn him that he might be in danger of being under imminent attack when they had intelligence about it. A rather serious matter, I hope you’ll agree.

I agreed it was wrong, and I posted that earlier on in this thread. We both accept that.

@Sidney

You can try to shut down discussion all you want. Shutting down discussion and not dealing with the facts is a hallmark of yours.

How exactly is that? You are the one who comes in screaming racist et al when the facts run away from you. I’m interested to know when I have shut down a discussion?

@Sidney

Deflection away from who? Your words here can only imply two possible things:

i) That I’m trying to absolve the Real IRA of any guilt about the bomb, which you know well is balderdash, as they carried it out, or

ii) That you think I’m trying to deflect from the Creggan GAA club onto the PSNI. What would you think I would be trying to deflect from the club onto the PSNI? In your mind, no doubt, blame for the bomb.

If ii) is the case, that’s a clear association of the club with the bomb by you.

No, they mean you want to deflect away from the club.

1. what the Real IRA did was horrid, I’m not claiming you ever supported that.
2. the PSNI made grave errors in the lead up and aftermath
3. my issue is your defense of the club. The club made mistakes, just like plenty of other organisations in the North who couldn’t move on. The attempts to deflect from that here are based off of whataboutery and thinking that one person’s grievance preempts anothers.

@Sidney

What an utterly ridiculous comparison.

i) Gay people don’t choose to be gay.

ii) Being gay is not a political act.

iii) Gay people didn’t a have a rotten police force which systematically discriminated against straight people for decades.

Peadar Heffron was not thrown out of the club. He left of his own accord. Now, quite possibly the issue could have been handled better within the club. But there was no manual about how to handle the issue because such a situation had never arisen before, and by nature it was a delicate situation. Peadar Heffron appears to have felt and still feels that if he didn’t get 100% support from the club for making a decision which many people within both the club and the wider CNR community could not have supported at that time, that they were “selling him out”. That was a foolish position to take and showed little understanding for why others felt they couldn’t support him.

Any club worth their salt has internal mechanisms to deal with internal issues - whether that is bullying or whatever.

Joining the police was not a political act, joining the police was a choice this man made based on the apparent progress in the north. The main nationalist party did support policing at the time.

The defenders here hide behind 3 things;

1. Let’s post up abhorrent behavior by the RUC back in the day, no wonder they couldn’t trust them. You then hilariously try to claim that Chris Patten’s proposed reforms were not about changing the RUC. That is simply a lie by you, plucking a quote out to deflect away from the reality of the reforms. What SF signed up to was substantively those reforms.
2. The position that people objected to his joining in 2002 was okay because not all the reforms went through. One of the recommendations of Patten was removing Rule 21, which his club’s county rejected. I cannot take people seriously when they claim that it was others blocking reforms when they won’t make a move forward themselves.
3. the wider CNR didn’t trust the new force, so it was okay. The main nationalist party supported policing at this point. Many reforms had gone through. 50/50 recruitment had just been upheld in court. Things were moving on. Do I expect people to be 100% happy with things? No, but AGAIN, this was not 1975. He wasn’t joining the RUC of old. Being treated like that was not on, it was backwards behaviour. Like the DUP today.

[caoimhaoin]

Supporting the PSNI?

Would you disown a fella working in Anglo for ripling off the irish people, leaving good men in unbelievable debt and suicidal?

This is some serious strawman shit now.

[Sidney]

@Tim_Riggins

Is

It really isn’t. As somebody who has claimed in the past to work in the courts, you’d think you’d know this.

@Tim_Riggins

He isn’t advocating at a trial, it’s a newspaper article and the opinion of a man.

Again, evidence-free opinions in a newspaper about who was involved in a bombing aren’t worth a fuck. They’re worth about as much as predictions of who’ll win next year’s All-Ireland.

@Tim_Riggins

I agreed it was wrong, and I posted that earlier on in this thread. We both accept that.

Indeed. The PSNI failed him terribly. Far more terribly than anybody in his club failed him. Which is why it’s very interesting that that wasn’t mentioned in the articles.

@Tim_Riggins

How exactly is that? You are the one who comes in screaming racist et al when the facts run away from you. I’m interested to know when I have shut down a discussion?

You’re shutting down discussion because you’re deeming a very relevant area of discussion to be “deflection” which it isn’t.

Opining that somebody is a racist is somebody calling it as they see it. And there are plenty on this forum.

@Tim_Riggins

No, they mean you want to deflect away from the club.

what the Real IRA did was horrid, I’m not claiming you ever supported that.
the PSNI made grave errors in the lead up and aftermath
my issue is your defense of the club. The club made mistakes, just like plenty of other organisations in the North who couldn’t move on. The attempts to deflect from that here are based off of whataboutery and thinking that one person’s grievance preempts anothers.

The club have been absolutely vilified in these articles. There is no absolutely no attempt on Brolly’s part to acknowledge that the situation was not the black and white, good and bad scenario he paints it as. There is no nuance and no attempt at nuance. It’s just bull in china shop, straight up vilification and shaming.

Exactly what he was railing against a few days before the first article.

@Tim_Riggins

Any club worth their salt has internal mechanisms to deal with internal issues - whether that is bullying or whatever.

In 2017, perhaps, in 2002, I doubt it. And any such mechanisms would likely have proved inadequate to deal with this. This was an entirely new situation for northern clubs to deal with - rightly or wrongly, it was a divisive situation.

Perhaps the club did make mistakes and could have handled things better. But mistakes are mistakes, and do not justify public vilification of both the club and community.

The sad thing is that by going this route, Heffron and Brolly have made it much harder for there to be any sort of reconconciliation between Heffron and his club and community.

@Tim_Riggins

Joining the police was not a political act, joining the police was a choice this man made based on the apparent progress in the north. The main nationalist party did support policing at the time.

In most normal societies, joining the police is not a political act. In a CNR community in any part of the six counties in 2002, joining the new PSNI, rightly or wrongly, was seen as a political act, whether the person joining liked it or not. That’s just the way it was, and was a result of 80 years of the northern statelet being a cold house for Catholics, and decades of the RUC being a rotten, sectarian force.

The first wave of recruits from the CNR community were always going to find things difficult, because people move on from a conflict such as the Troubles at different speeds. Some want to move on quickly, others feel they cannot move on as quickly, a small minority can never move on.

@Tim_Riggins

Let’s post up abhorrent behavior by the RUC back in the day, no wonder they couldn’t trust them. You then hilariously try to claim that Chris Patten’s proposed reforms were not about changing the RUC. That is simply a lie by you, plucking a quote out to deflect away from the reality of the reforms. What SF signed up to was substantively those reforms.

I didn’t say anything like what you claim I said about Chris Patten. I quoted verbatim what Chris Patten said. Chris Patten and the Unionist community may have felt that “transforming” rather than disbanding the RUC was acceptable, a huge amount of the CNR community felt that wasn’t enough, and with justification.

The behaviour of the RUC over many decades is central to why that view existed.

@Tim_Riggins

The position that people objected to his joining in 2002 was okay because not all the reforms went through. One of the recommendations of Patten was removing Rule 21, which his club’s county rejected. I cannot take people seriously when they claim that it was others blocking reforms when they won’t make a move forward themselves.

You’ve already said that not supporting the PSNI in 2002 was a legitimate opinion.

@Tim_Riggins

You do not have to support it

Now you’re saying that some policing reforms in the Patten report weren’t implemented. You’re saying that the Patten report didn’t follow through.

And you think the CNR community should just forget about that?

The GAA abolished Rule 21 and the Antrim County Board accepted that decision even if they didn’t vote for it.

@Tim_Riggins

the wider CNR didn’t trust the new force, so it was okay. The main nationalist party supported policing at this point. Many reforms had gone through. 50/50 recruitment had just been upheld in court. Things were moving on. Do I expect people to be 100% happy with things? No, but AGAIN, this was not 1975. He wasn’t joining the RUC of old. Being treated like that was not on, it was backwards behaviour. Like the DUP today.

Again, Sinn Fein were the main “nationalist” party, (Republicans also being nationalists), having outperformed the SDLP at the 2001 Westminster elections, and they didn’t support the PSNI as of 2002.

As I quoted in the previous passage, you accept it was a legitimate opinion to not support the PSNI in 2002.

Peadar Heffron was completely within his rights to join the PSNI, but he and Joe Brolly are dead wrong to claim or imply that other people did not have the right to hold certain opinions about him doing so.

And ultimately, it was his choice to leave the club.

[caoimhaoin]

@Sidney

And ultimately, it was his choice to leave the club.

Did you actually just write that?

[Sidney]

@caoimhaoin

Did you actually just write that?

Sadly you didn’t have a choice to write this, the rabbit, or, should I say, the sheep working your brain has full control.

[maroonandwhite]

Can’t blame a few of his clubmates for hating him for joining the PSNI. But any right thinking individual should condemn what happened to him, a few on this thread were slow enough to even do that, how many years later. Big difference in being hostile or even skeptical towards a new police force that was a possible reincarnation of something terrible, to keeping mum when someone from your community is nearly killed by cowards. What happened him has understandably embittered him, to beyond reason maybe. Can’t fault him for that.

Why didn’t/don’t catholics join the PSNI en masse, take it over from the inside essentially, it would take a generation but the loyalists would have no more state protection.

[balbec]

Says the man who fucked off to Spain for his wedding

[balbec]

@Bandage probably reads back his posts to himself in a makey uppy Nordie accent before pressing the “reply” button.

[Nembo_Kid]

Because many nationalists would have a serious problem with joining a security force that enforces British law on Irish land. The legacy issues still exist, Sid put up a link yesterday where they were the PSNI were found to have been obstructing justice for the families of victims of the Glenanne gang, a gang which is linked with the murders of 100 innocent nationalists during the trouble. When the PSNI still tries to cover up the crimes and actions of its past then it’s not in anyway appealing to nationalists.

The PSNI may no be longer as reviled as they would have been in nationalists communities but they’re still not respected and for many never will be.

Clearly the man has suffered greatly and that’s down to those who bombed him, there doesn’t seem to much focus there, nor does their seem to be much focus with his employers who failed to provide him with knowledge of an intended attack and botched the subsequent investigation. The RUC were well known for failing to prevent intended attacks they had knowledge of - just look at Omagh for instance.

There was political capital to be made at a time when the majority of the population had voted to reject violence as a means.

[maroonandwhite]

@Nembo_Kid

Because many nationalists would have a serious problem with joining a security force that enforces British law on Irish land. The legacy issues still exist

Yes but would a better long game not be to join it in huge numbers, take over the ranks all the way up and guarantee it’s a truly impartial police service. Is that not what it is (a public service), if nationalists won’t engage with their local police as they consider that colluding with an organ of the british state they are as stuck in their ways as the DUP

[balbec]

a bit like the way the mulliance took over tfk?

[Nembo_Kid]

How can they take it over when membership quotas are in place? There’s too much legacy there for this generation for nationalists to accept the PSNI en masse. It’s a small statelet and the RUC’s brutalitity and harassment against the nationalist communities was frequent and wide, everyone over the age of 25 would probably have seen it or encountered it at some point, everyone under that age will have heard the stories of it.

[maroonandwhite]

That was before my time. Any thread that could outline what happened then?

[maroonandwhite]

The unionists could make the same argument about dealing with IRA members now in government. Either people want to move on, as tough as that is, or they want to keep old fires burning.

[anon7035031]

The Nogra run TFK now pal. It’s gotten to the point where we can have a few members take sabbaticals whole one or two others keep things under control.

[anon7035031]

There’s no point trying to explain anything to these free state cunts mate. They cared more about oppression of blacks in South Africa and later oppression of Palestinians by Israel than they cared about oppression of their own race 50 miles up the road. Some frightful ignorance on display here.

[Nembo_Kid]

The Unionists have only themselves to blame for the IRA. They wanted an Orange state where they felt a sizable minority should be treated as second class citizens, they enforced this with violence and intimidation. The British and Free State Governments stood idly by while they did this.

The IRA were a reactionary force due to the inaction of those who could intervene (The British and Irish Government) against a brutal and sectarian Orange regime. The troubles didn’t start off with a gun, they started off with peaceful demonstrations and marches, this was met with violence by the RUC and loyalist hate mobs and things quickly escalated.

[maroonandwhite]

I don’t disagree with that, but the reaction went beyond a merely defensive action. the unionists have been up there farming that land for hundreds of years. I’m not sure the drive them into the sea mindset is the best way forward.