Correspondence
a Williams College work crew bulldozed last summer was actually one of modern sculptress Alice Aycock's early works. Miss Aycock created the masterpiece nearly a decade ago while she was one of...
...Given that Tone, a Presbyterian, was almost surely of British ancestry, it would be as possible for them to do that if they were indeed racialists as it would have been for the Nazis to revere an eighteenth-century German Jew as the founder of their movement, and hold solemn annual celebrations in his honor...
...The cost to the British taxpayer of running Ulster--apart from the military expendituremis some s billion...
...In nine-county Ulster, the Unionists commanded but 265,111 votes, compared with a combined national total of 177,557...
...I know, because I am Irish-American myself and grew up with them...
...9 . . [I]t is a clear fact that the Provisionals have emerged from the election with, for the first time, a solid political base...
...and that the local Catholic community of the 1980s is more and more turning to its revolutionary wing: the revolutionary nationalists of the Provisional Irish Republican Army...
...In a class action suit filed on behalf of adoptees in San Francisco, California, Mr...
...The bottom line," she declared, "is that Anna Marie is now the daughter I always wanted, the focal point of my life...
...province is close to s billion...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 47...
...Clark's daughter was serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for knocking off banks, and the poor thing languished in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville...
...For its part, the present Sinn Fein regards the eighteenth-century Irish patriot Wolfe Tone as the ultimate founder of their movement, and stages an annual commemoration, attended by thousands, at his grave...
...Does anyone really think that even the Irish are clever enough to outsmart the whole American government...
...If these indignant letter writers had any real familiarity with Anglo-Irish affairs, they would know that the Irish government and public opinion are shifting on the basic issue of unification...
...Over 90 percent of the sixcounty Northern Ireland civil servants were Protestant . . . . The memoirs of Sir Harold Wilson (from 1964 to 1970, and from 1974 to 1976, the U.K...
...Greer's flat statement that Irish Northern Aid (Noraid) sends arms to the IRA is, in plain "Errglish," a blatant liel For the past twelve years, every investigative agency of the U.S...
...Nor were such sentiments confined to 1918...
...Bureau of Prisons, alleging that it would be highly irregular to send such a comely prisoner to a male hoosegow where she might suffer a life of moral compromise...
...A lawyer for Miss Mostyn filed a $3.25 million lawsuit against the U.S...
...hat even within the six occupied northeastern counties a local Catholic majority's emergence has been blocked only through gross THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 45 overseas government discrimination to "export" the native majority...
...That Catholic community was split as never before between its constitutional and its revolutionary wings, and the constitutional side--represented by the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP)--was seen to be losing its force to the revolutionary nationalists of the Provisional Irish Republican Army...
...They are on the historical record, along with others like the IRA's alliance with the Nazis during World War II...
...Even there he shoots badly...
...Miss Aycock created the masterpiece nearly a decade ago while she was one of the college's artists-in-residence and a constant candidate for many innovative Oxydol commercials...
...Yuri V. Andropov remained in the hands of his quacks...
...I ' m looking forward to sitting in a church pew someday and watching her walk down the aisle . . . . Normalcy in her life, that's all I want for her...
...Today Provisional Sinn Fein has no electoral support of any weight in the Republic of Ireland, and very little in Ulster, where their wretched ward-sized successes have generally rested on a split or intimidated vote...
...Farrell's belief, Ulster is not economically excluded from the United Kingdom...
...it represents the old tradition of nationhood reasserting the inalienable right of the Irish Nation to sovereign independence, reaffirming the determination of the Irish people to achieve it, and guaranteeing within the Independent Nation equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens...
...The heart of his case is a hash of half-truths: Even during the period after World War I, in the last election before partition, the extreme Republicans secured only a minority of the vote...
...In the age group 25 to 29, 31.7 percent of Roman Catholic males but only 19.3 percent of other denomination males left...
...Contrary to Mr...
...It is only by the operation of selective pressures, mainly economic, that the proportion of Catholics in the population as a whole has been kept relatively stable...
...Farrell) racist propaganda really know what they are paying for...
...Since the war, it has shown a tendency to rise slowly, as follows: 1911 34.4070 1926 33.5070 1937 33.507o 1951 34.4070 1961 34.9070 By 1971 the Catholic proportion overall had slipped to 31.4 percent, yet in mid-1981 the Catholic birthrate remained higher than the Protestant...
...moreover, the parliamentary Nationalists of the United Irish League also retained six seats, four of them due to prior agreement that Sinn Fein would withdraw from their constituencies...
...The 1918 British General Election Manifesto of the Standing Committee of Sinn Fein (as passed by the Dublin Castle Censor) provided: Sinn Fein stands for the nation...
...The statement about separation from the mainstream is debatable, at best...
...Known as Dr...
...Female emigration shows relatively similar percentages, although both are somewhat lower than males...
...There is no question of these terrorists being fascist "at heart...
...In the six northeastern counties, their local majority was 255,819 to 116,888...
...I will stress again that the policy of the Provos and the INLA as summarized in my piece is no figment of British propaganda...
...It should be recalled that persons of other denominations outnumber Catholics about two to one, so the Catholic emigration on this basis is quite high...
...Meanwhile, the Associated P r e s s reported that "Protestants elected 47 members who are pledged never to share power with Catholics and whose aim is to force London to hand back control of the province to the Protestant majority...
...Northern Ireland must be governed in a manner acceptable to both its communities, and compatible with the principles of civil and human rights observed by the Western democracies...
...The minute they do, you can be sure they will close Noraid down tight...
...Their money goes to buy things like the grenade that killed a southern Irish soldier and police cadet on the 16th of December and the car bomb that slaughtered and mutilated Christmas shoppers at Harrods a day later...
...Clark looks at Miss Mostyn and sees a daughter...
...How then does he explain that in the last election, Sinn Fein candidates received more than 42 percent of the popular vote among the nationalist people...
...Perhaps the most important news story of 1983 is that delusion spreads...
...The Provos and the INLA are electoral nonentities in the South...
...Sinn Fein won 47 percent of the Irish popular vote when the percentage of voters itself was 73 percent, 27 percent abstaining...
...Maybe they even wrote it...
...Farrell claims, a matter of debate...
...The authorities censored Sinn Fein manifestoes...
...In the same years in the age group of 20 to 24, 28.6 percent of Roman Catholic males, but only 9.5 percent of other denomination males left...
...The British were not intimidated by this...
...The only broad popular support for the provisional IRA, Sinn Fein, and the INLA [Irish National Liberation Army] is not Irish but American [Greer's emphasis...
...Every Republican paper had been suppressed...
...Neutral observers believe the Sinn Fein percentage will be far higher in the next election...
...Wall that he does not believe Noraid ships arms to the Provisional IRA...
...I doubt that ordinary Americans who contribute to Noraid's campaign of bigotry, lies, phony history, and (pace Mr...
...You snicker, but have we not been taught that all is relative...
...Like a conjurer waving his fingers to distract attention from the card up his sleeve, Professor Swan tries to obscure my central point by aiming a smokescreen at those I made in passing...
...And Cambridge law professor Christopher McCrudden, in a 1982 study,,warned that without a major change in British government fair employment policies, Catholics will continue to suffer discrimination "for many generations into the future...
...He accuses the Republicans then and now of being fascist at heart...
...On top of that there is a military budget of about s million...
...To cite only two examp|es of many, the British government's own stepchild, the Northern Ireland Fair Employment Agen_9 cy, found in a 1980 study that employment disparities between Catholics and Protestants not only persist but will probably widen (Economist, February 26, 1980...
...It was disclosed during 1967 that of 106 public service positions paying over s yearly, only three were held by Catholics...
...Finally, from Britain comes word that controversial Dr...
...The Economist elaborated: Almost the entire Catholic voting population of Northern Ireland--37070 of the electorate--supported candidates committed to playing no part in the new assembly...
...I would suspect that he has already received his compensation from Her Royal Highness's Information Service...
...and Republicans have always specifically included Anglo- and Scots-descended Protestants in their counting of the Irish people, which would hardly be possible if they were operating on racial presumptions...
...They have never enjoyed majority voting support in either part of Ireland and do not now...
...That about fascism is preposterous...
...The IRA has been involved in a struggle against one of the biggest armies in the world for years...
...I ' m so happ y , " enthused Mrs...
...Martin Bradford has asked $100 million from the makers of Cabbage Patch dolls, arguing that the repulsive things ridicule and humiliate adopted persons...
...But election figures and demographic data demonstrate that the principle of majority rule has mandated an independent, united Ireland...
...The bottom line is that the economic burden of Ulster would seriously destabilize a United Ireland-a principal ground for Provo and INLA eagerness to achieve unification...
...Do you think a Mr...
...Obstacles remained, for Mrs...
...It prevents progress and change...
...For your own sake, I hope you weren't foolish enough to pay Mr...
...The extent of the danger which has been, and still is, apprehended by the Protestant population to their "ascendancy" in this respect is shown by the fact that at any given moment the number of Catholic children of school-going age is nearly half that of the total of such children (and in 1969, according to [1963-1969 Prime Minister of Northern Ireland] Captain [Terence] O'Neill, the proportion of Catholic children was 51 percent...
...and the mind conjures up all that he meant to us...
...President Reagan accepted full responsibility for the lax security that allowed the terrorist bombing of Marine headquarters in Beirut, and Mr...
...Greet at least thrice refers to Northern Ireland's Republican "cabals" without recognizing that peaceful majority rule has been deliberately prevented by the British...
...Evil Eye by wowsers, he was convicted recently of entering into illicit sex with maidens who under the influence of drugs signed their genital privacy away in contracts...
...4.5 percent for males of other denomination...
...Sir Harold openly boasts that the employment situation in Northern I r e l a n d has been manipulated economically on a massive scale by London, and that this produces antiseptically characterized "single religious community" employees who keep their neighbors out of work . . . . 3. The Election Figures: 1982...
...As explained by L. de Paor's book, Divided Ulster: The fear of being out-bred has ever been present, and the Unionists have been able to call on the Protestant employers and workers alike to exert economic pressure to drive Catholics out of the area...
...Today in the Republic, that repudiation is near-absolute...
...But after the large-scale Protestant assaults on Catholic areas of Belfast in August 1969 when 300 to 500 homes were burned, traditionalists in the IRA reasserted themselves.[New York Times, September 1, 1976] Thehard evidence demonstrates that the democratic principle of majority rule has mandated an independent, united Ireland...
...Neither that nor the rhetoric and statistics in these letters can alter the brute facts of the matter...
...It is expressed in actions like the machinegunning of Sunday worshipers in a small country church in County Armagh last November...
...Take his assertion that the Sinn Fein "has no backing in the north...
...government (the FBI, Treasury, Customs, etc...
...Greer distinguishes between "the mainstream of popular Irish nationalism" and the Irish Republican movement, in various incarnations, that wants and wanted "to sever all ties with the British crown...
...This suits the Provos and INLA, giving maximum scope for them to spread their venom throughout the whole of Ireland...
...Of 105 candidates returned for Ireland, 73 were Sinn Feiners and only 26 were Unionists...
...These things are not, as Mr...
...Judge Judge looks out on his courtroom and sees Mrs...
...For earlier times, one may argue as I do from the popular vote of 1918 (Republicans lost the popular vote, polling 485,105 against a Unionist and Nationalist total of 557,435), or from the number of parliamentary seats like Mr...
...He was a genius, a prophetic lyricist who walked with us as our Bermuda shorts gave way to cutoff Levis and there gathered in Time's secret chambers all the wonders that this metamorphosis was to bequeath to us--no, to compel really...
...Bitter folk memories die hard...
...The whole thing was such an obvious propaganda ploy...
...But in refusing to come to grips with the basic issues of economic and political exclusion, the British have allowed Northern Iceland's deep wounds to fester interminably, and have ensured the continuance of civil strife and violence...
...On the 1861 funeral of Terence McManus, exiled for life for planning rebellion in 1848, Chauvire notes: A vast crowd followed the procession to Glasnevin and thus showed where the heart of Ireland lay...
...RET The I.R.A...
...All Irish newspapers were under censorship...
...Herb Greer's piece of crude propaganda ("The Boys of the I.R.A.," The American Spectator, November 1983...
...His williwaw of statistics actually supports what I said about Provo dependence on a split vote...
...Ye gads, some of us are inconsolable...
...Provisional Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Socialist Party (political wing of the INLA) boast in public and published statements of their intention to destroy the present system of government in Ireland--not just Ulster--and to supplant it with a dictatorial one-party "socialist" (i.e., left-wing fascist) state in the style, as I say, of Cuba and Nicaragua...
...George Steven Swan Associate Professor The Delaware Law School Wilmington, Delaware Herb Greet is identified, in the November American Spectator, as "an American playwright and writer living in Europe...
...This was achieved by a hastily organized campaign conducted under constant harassment by the British occupation forces...
...Some 48 of Sinn Fein's candidates were held in jail...
...Herb Greer wrote that article or do you think it was written by a British civil servant specializing in smearing Her Majesty's supposed enemies...
...The victorious Adams--a former Provisional IRA commander who spent two years on the run from British security forces--declared: "Obviously the IRA has support...
...French historian Roger Chauvire comments that the Irish Republican ideal went back to the 1798 rebellion " o r , more briefly, was the same as America's" (Chauvire, A Short History of Ireland, p. 122...
...Shortly thereafter the remaining Beach Boys released the statement, "We are saddened by the sudden death of Dennis Wilson...
...The polling booths were watched by both the military and the police...
...This, ultimately, is against the interests of not only the people of Northern Ireland, but, in the one correct observation Greer makes, of Europe and the Western Alliance...
...Whatever pretense the British may make of looking down their noses at Ian Paisley and his ilk, if he and other Loyalists turn against them, they will have lost their hold in Ireland...
...The Catholic Northern Ireland absolute majority is indeed always imminent but never arrives due to differential emigration...
...Anyone familiar with British tactics in this area could see what was going on...
...There is no need to repeat the facts I gave...
...How will Our Generation face the long train of morrows strung before us with so many of our sages now kaput...
...Yet it was Harland workers who more than any had denied their fellow Ulstermen the right to work...
...Saddened...
...But did the IRA not launch the post-1969 current cycle of terrorism...
...He seems to have missed the report of the New York trial in which Martin Flannery of Noraid admitted such shipments, escaping conviction with the plea that the CIA approved them...
...The nationalist minority in the six northeastern counties (one-third) hence greatly surpassed the Unionist minority in Ireland overall (one-fifth...
...He condemns the Irish rebels' "implacable drive to domination" and warns against the "Irish-American Bund" and Irish-Americans' "German-style blood-and-soil rhetoric...
...Happy New Year...
...As explained during 1971 in the Review of Politics: [T]he total percentage of emigration from Northern Ireland from 1951 to 1961 was 10.1 percent for Roman Catholic males...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 5) allowed to arrive...
...The form of government has changed, lessening the usefulness of a monolithic Loyalist political party in the fashion of the pre-1972 Unionist party...
...What I did was to supply a bit of historical background and show that this was not mere abuse...
...Fair's fair, you know...
...Their political character is a matter of open commitment...
...Clark as a mother...
...On the other hand he was cleared of having assaulted his wife with a plate of coleslaw, much to the relief of the United Kingdom's vegetarians of whom there are many...
...Sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth...
...And the linchpin of the "Protestant Ascendancy," economic control maintained through pervasive discrimination, therefore remains unperturbed...
...But hold...
...There are good reasons for this besides Northern Protestant stubbornness and the continuing strong hold of the Catholic Church on the Republic's politics...
...TAS, November 1983) in just one page of print makes emotion-laden references to America's "professional shamrockers" with their "racist version of Anglo-Irish history," and to the Provisional Sinn Fein's "killer clones...
...And the IRA emphatically did not initiate the current wave of sectarian violence...
...While the article is loaded with gross errors, misinterpretations, and outright falsehoods, I shall zero in on only two of them...
...I am fascinated to hear from Mr...
...Officials knew not where to place her...
...This undoubtedly is one of the chief functions served by the recurring sectarian riots and pogroms in Belfast: driving Catholics out, whenever the pressure of their numbers was felt, has been a feature of these...
...On December 28 Dennis Wilson, drummer and songwriter for the Beach Boys, passed away under tragic circumstances: twelve feet of the Pacific Ocean that he knew and loved so well...
...But the doctrine of Irish Republicanism, at all points in history, has been national, not racial...
...Brian Harris will be barred from that country's General Optical Council...
...In case we do not all know which Germans he means, he also mentions the "British statesman whose name was Neville Chamberlain" who dealt with, well, "Hitler...
...For instance, the Easter Proclamation by the leaders of the 1916 rebellion states: The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens.., cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past...
...Sinn Fein had fielded just twelve candidates for the Assembly, but elected five...
...Of the Irish total of 1,526,910 votes, the Unionists could amass but 315,394--about 20 percent...
...Believing that the time has arrived when Ireland's voice for the principle of untrammelled self-determination should be heard above every interest of party or class, Sinn Fein will oppose at the Polls every individual candidate who does not accept this principle...
...It remains curiously unstressed not just in Britain but everywhere that Ulster is reported that the real constituency of Irish terrorist groups is foreign...
...And so he is gone...
...Emigrants tend to be young people...
...and Irish Nationalism I am really surprised to see The American Spectator, which prides itself on its somewhat cynical realism, taken in by Mr...
...Sinn Fein, with 47 percent of ballots cast, won 70 percent of the seats...
...1. The Election Figures: 1918...
...The Liberal brethren look at the same economic indicators, that so reassure me and they see hunger and misery...
...Conclusion...
...The normal subvention for a U.K...
...Yet Miss Mostyn's new mother remained sanguine...
...But it is time to put away that vicious, destructive bitterness and the nineteenth-century illusions which go with it, and step at last into the cold light of today's real world--where the socalled freedom fighters can be seen for the murderous would-be tyrants that they are...
...when Harrods opened on the following Monday, queues were waiting to go in...
...This revolted most Nationalists in the Catholic community of Ulster...
...None of the killing and maiming helps toward any new or different arrangement in Ulster...
...By 1972 it could be demonstrated that Northern Ireland's Catholics constitute an absolute majority constantly impending but never (continued on page 45) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 5 San Francisco Chronicle, Judge Judge's courtroom became a scene of jubilation: " I ' m a mother...
...indeed, after their defeat, perhaps because of it, the Irish people looked on the Fenians with gratitude and tenderness and held them in honor with constant fidelity...
...Britain's failure to do so, today and over the entire course of its history there, makes clear that the only hope for the future is in some new, and fundamentally different, arrangement...
...Joseph P. Wall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The British (dis) Information Service really put one over on you this time...
...The 1918 election made a poor case for exclusion of the six counties from a united, independent Ireland . . . . 2. The Permanently Impending Catholic Majority...
...His article on Irish nationalism and the IRA makes it clear that his talents in those fields would be better applied in rewriting his own articles and plays than in rewriting Irish history...
...that even inside the six counties of British-ruled Northern Ireland a local Roman Catholic actual majority's emergence has been barred only via gross governmental discrimination...
...I wish I could say the same for the Americans whom I have accurately described as the IrishAmerican Bund...
...Clark...
...To date, they have failed to do so...
...But with the region under the direct control of a British government to which they have never assented, the nationalists there are almost as completely removed from having any effective say in the running of their own country as they ever were...
...Vice President Garry Adams of Sinn Fein during October 1982 proved the first elected member of the new, Britishsponsored Northern Ireland Assembly...
...At approximately the 1969 revitalization of the current strife, the Northern Ireland government in Belfast and the various local authorities were perhaps the biggest employers in the region, and these invariably hired Protestants...
...has been working desperately to obtain evidence to this effect...
...It was not I but the foreign minister of the Irish Republic who applied the term "blatantly fascist" to these Provisional IRA and INLA...
...Farrell...
...Further, Greer claims that the days of the Protestant Ascendancy in Northern Ireland are gone...
...The Economist of London, the most prestigious news magazine in the world, in its issue of October 30, 1982, found that the 64,000 Northern Ireland Assembly votes for Provisional Sinn Fein derived generally from Catholics who never before had voted...
...Joseph Michael Farrell Burgettstown, Pennsylvania Herb Greer replies: Let me come straight to the point 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 which all these letters avoid...
...If Americans want to help the Ulster Irish, the best thing they can do is to stop contributing to the tear-washed fanatics who sponsor terrorism-especially Noraid, which at this moment stands in contempt of court for refusing to register as a foreign agent of the Provisional IRA...
...Walter Long Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Herb Greer's "The Boys of the I.R.A...
...In the 1918 parliamentary election, which led to the 1919-1921 guerilla war against Britain, Sinn Fein won every seat outside of the present boundaries of Northern Ireland...
...The reasons are easy enough to divine...
...I'm disappointed that you were dumb enough to let yourself be used by a foreign government intent on planting a story in the American media...
...On finance, we had provided s million for the Harland and Wolff shipyard, "where the employment is almost 100 percent from a single religious community...
...Why don't you at least give Noraid a chance to reply...
...for Roman Catholic females, 8.8 percent m females of other denomination, 3.0 percent...
...Prime Minister) recall with approval his television address on May 28, 1974: My own speech the following day was concerned with two main points, one, to emphasize the argument about the vast assistance given by Westminster to help unemployment in the Province, and two, to open up a debate about the future...
...As for theories of a Celtic pseudorace, Greer may be able to find an Irish Republican here and there who spoke in those terms, as he would find rather more fatuous Englishmen, and some few Americans, who based various social and political doctrines on ideas about an equally mythical AngloSaxon race...
...Wilson gone...
...Efforts to downplay the popular mandate this represented are reminiscent of attempts to portray Ronald Reagan as a minority president...
...the complete electoral machinery--and the Post Office--were controlled by the British...
...Greer for this claptrap...
...Later Noraid defendants on the same charge were not so fortunate...
...The fact remains that hard-core Republicans were repudiated not just by the popular vote, but by the citizens of the Irish Free State in the civil war which followed independence...
...they arrested its director of elections...
...and that this local Catholic community of the 1980s increasingly has turned toward the Provisional Irish Republican Army...
...What impels differential emigration impeding arrival of the ever-impending Catholic majority...
...The coalition in Britain won two-thirds of the seats in the British House of Commons with but 47.6 percent of the popular vote, in an election in which 41 percent of the electorate failed to vote...
...The IRA played no ostensible role in the start of the present Northern Ireland troubles, in 1968 and 1969...
...It is no good snarling at me like a drunken Irish washerwoman, "Agh, yer a liar...
...He died diving for junk from a friend's yacht that was moored unpretentiously at a slip in Marina del Rey...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
