My apologies first of all to all and sundry for my lamentable absence from this blog. First I had horrendous problems with our internet connection and no sooner had they been fixed that I learned that someone in the British security set up had slapped subpoenas on the two participants in the IRA part of the paramilitary oral history archive I had helped to create at Boston College.
Needless to say this latter event has consumed a great deal of my time recently and because of legal constraints I am unable to say all that I would like to say. Suffice it for now to observe that this is yet another example of lazy policemen trying to live off other people’s work. The offence which they are seemingly interested in happened forty years ago and they showed as little interest in the event just after it happened as they did in the intervening years, despite the plethora of evidence and material to follow up that has been available for at least the last decade – and that doesn’t take into account the secret intelligence which was no doubt available on both sides of the Border.
But it is only now, after they learned of the possible existence of ready-made evidence that the police have chosen to move. If I came away with one conviction about the forces of law and order from all my years watching the police at work in Belfast, it was not that they were corrupt or politically biased, although there was never any shortage of evidence for both, it is that policemen are as work-shy and indolent as it possible to be.
In the meantime this recent item on Boston public television is well worth watching. It can be accessed here.
The Broken Elbow 
hi and hello ed the R.U.C and as they now style themselves PSNI are not only the laziest sods ever they have throughtout the 20th century revelled in being a protestant police force for a protestant people. The B SPECIALS are still alive and well in their midst today. I wonder did you ever come across the case of the Duffin family being massacared by the specials., Mr duffin was the headmaster of st kevins and a TRUE GENTLEMAN his brothers were gunned down in their own homes by the RUC opps sorry the b specials.
All policemen, not just the RUC, are lazy……….
Yes, Desmond, you are perfectly correct. I should have it clear that my experience in Belfast had a wider lesson.
thanks kateyo. i haven’t rally had time yet to read all the wikileaks stuff but what i have seen wasn’t all that surprising – re west belfast it will be interesting to see how this maskey character compares to adams – i once had an editor who always made sure that his successor in any post was always of inferior quality so that in hindsight his own performance always looked so much better – clearly the past is still festering away so it makes sense to deal with it somehow – thankfully not my job to decide
thanks kateyo – i actually saw it at the time
The attempt to censor/intimidate reseachers is disgraceful. Just a question?
Why did you not interview any Official IRA volunteers for the Boston College project?
…and you know for sure that we didn’t?