The Broken Elbow

Professor Henry Patterson, himself no friend of Sinn Fein or the Provisional IRA, examines the charge that sectarianism fuelled the IRA’s violence, taking Fermanagh and South Tyrone as an example. You can read the full article here, but here is his conclusion:

‘This article revisits the debate, hosted by this journal in the 1990s, on whether the Provisional IRA campaign was sectarian. In the light of current debates about how Northern Ireland deals with its past, it challenges the analysis that emphasises the non-sectarian ideology of republicanism and ignores the effects of IRA violence. It uses research on the IRA campaign in Fermanagh and south Tyrone to argue that the campaign was unavoidably sectarian but rejects current attempts to label it a form of “ethnic cleansing.”’

You can watch the item here……

He complained to me once that Adams refused to give him the time of day, much less discuss his sleeping habits……

Documentary film-maker Nate Lavey and Michael McCanne have combined forces to produce “Foreign Agent”, a six-part history of Irish Northern Aid, aka Noraid, a valuable addition to the uncensored story of the Troubles….enjoy!

Well known for ‘The Israel Lobby‘, his incisive study of Israel’s relationship with the US, co-written with Steven Walt, Mearscheimer takes a hard look at the war in Ukraine. You can watch and listen here…..

I think it is appropriate to re-visit a few pieces I wrote some time ago about the burgeoning crisis over the ‘Hard Border’ controversy, given the escalating conflict between the EC and the British over Boris Johnson’s decision to scrap the European Protocol which created an Irish Border in the middle of the sea separating the two islands.

Here is one piece; and another; and one more. Enjoy…….

The view of an IRA activist who operated on both sides of the Atlantic:

Chile’s new president tells The New Yorker: ’Gabriel Boric, who is thirty-six, campaigned on a revolutionary-sounding slogan: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” Hmm. We’ll see about that……

You can read the article here:

If you can discern any significant difference between the Boris Johnson of drunken, vomit-covered Downing Street lockdown parties and the Boris Johnson of Oxford University’s notorious Bullingdon set, then you need medical help.

Here, from the Guardian is a fascinating look at the loutish excesses of the Bullingdon boys during Johnson’s day. Remember that two of these upper class thugs became British prime ministers and goodness knows how many others slimed their way to the top in other equally exclusive parts of the Establishment.

You can access the story here…..