I FOUND myself having a daytime, wide-awake nightmare reading “On This Day in 1973: Ted Heath’s ‘agony’ over north’s divisions” (October 23). The buffoonery, empire hubris, condescension, and Big Lie all came back in living colour.
Said Heath: “All I am asking is that they [the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland] try to understand each other and learn how to live with each other.”
What blatant hypocrisy and colonial patronisation. It was England’s historical policy to ensure that their Protestant-proxies would help England keep the Catholics down – for centuries in the whole of Ireland, and later on in Northern Ireland. On December 23 1920, the King-in-Parliament, not the Protestants of Northern Ireland, enacted the “Partition Act” – absolutely engineered to keep the Catholics down, and preserve England’s foothold in Ireland.
(I use the term England because we can hardly blame Wales or Scotland, despite horrible individuals like Lloyd George and Lord Balfour. It has always been about England. The British formal phrase “King in Parliament” (or Monarch in Parliament or Crown in Parliament) is used to describe the British legislature, composed of the Sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons.)
It would be one thing if this had ended in 1973. But the entire world, on May 6 2023, was hit in the face by King Charles’s coronation oath, blatantly vowing, with blithe indifference and imperiousness, to uphold the infamous anti-Catholic 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement explicitly excluding a Catholic from ever being king or queen of England.
Let nobody please try to use the old canard that since the monarch is also Governor of the Church of England, the monarch cannot be Catholic. That’s like saying in court: “Your honor, I had to have that illegal gun to commit the robbery” – using one crime to justify the other crime. Church and state should be separate, and in modern democracies, there should be no established Church.
If the pathology of anti-Catholicism is still enshrined and justified in the British constitution and in the highest laws in England (forming the foundation stone of the royal family), can anyone really expect that extreme Protestants in Northern Ireland will ever have a change of heart, for as long as England controls any part of Ireland?
Fr Sean Mc Manus
President, Irish National Caucus
Capitol Hill, Washington
Strange stance to advocate free election run for Alliance Party
FOLLOWING the IRA ceasefires, the leadership of the republican movement went to considerable efforts to persuade republicans that the movement was simply moving to a new phase of the struggle, one whose focus was to win its objectives through electoral politics.
You may have thought that it would have most difficulty with those republicans considered most resolute, those who had been at the coalface of the struggle up until then, and those who had suffered and sacrificed much including republican prisoners. Take for example former republican prisoner and blanketman Paul Butler, who spent 15 years in prison from his youth. Paul appears to have been one of those that the leadership managed to convince of this new strategy.
Today, 25 years on from the GFA, Paul is advocating that his party, Sinn Féin, should give the Alliance Party a free run to challenge the DUP in Lagan Valley in the next general election. You might ask yourself how this promotes the objective of Irish unity? The Alliance Party, by not taking a position on the constitutional sovereignty of the six counties, has by default accepted the de facto constitutional sovereignty of the six counties exercised by the British Government and hitherto had been outright supporters of it.
What a strange position for a ‘resolute’ republican to take to advocate for republicans to support a pro-British sovereignty party. Maybe Paul will take time to explain to republicans how his proposal promotes
republican objectives?
Seán O’Fiach
Belfast BT11
Israel has some serious questions to answer
ON October 7 Hamas attacked Israel and, according to the government of Israel, at least 1,400 Israelis were killed. Hamas also took up to 200 hostages.
The defence forces of Israel attacked Gaza by bombing and up to 2,500 civilians were killed. The government of Israel then ordered more than 1,000,000 Palestinians to leave their homes in the north and move to the south of Gaza or face the consequences. They then cut off all water, fuel and electricity that power water and sewage plants from the people who were left and continued bombing the area. They were able to do this as since 2007, most of the food,water and medicine has to come through Israel.
My questions to Israel are as follows: if and when this war is ended, as some day I hope will happen, will they allow those million Palestinians back to their homes?
Will they help them rebuild the homes they destroyed?
Or will they allow them back to the rubble that once was were their homes? Or will they allow Jewish settlers to move into the homes owned by the people of Palestine before they were ordered out?
Don’t hold your breath on the first three questions.
Tony Carroll
Newry, Co Down
