ARTICLE:OUTSPOKEN SINGER Morrissey has entered the debate about the Queen's visit by saying the best thing she could do is hand back the "six counties to the Irish people" so that Ireland could be a "nation once again".
The former Smiths singer said the refusal of the UK to do so was “fascism in full flow”.
Morrissey, the son of Irish parents who grew up in Manchester, has a long track record of making inflammatory comments about Ireland. He praised the Brighton bombers who attempted to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and was lauded in An Phoblacht.
In an article to be published in Hot Pressmagazine, he calls the visit a "palace PR campaign to re-invent the Windsors". He also refers to the IRA hunger strikes and says the Queen should have dismissed Margaret Thatcher and intervened to save Bobby Sands's life.
“If the Queen had any human feelings for the Sands family or other hunger strikers then she did not express them,” he writes.
The royal family, he says, are protected from investigations by “ridiculous stories of trivia and wedding dresses and on-again-off-again soap-drama romances”.
Morrissey's republican credentials are well established. The Smiths called one of their albums The Queen is Dead.He struck a more conciliatory note about his dual identity in his 2004 song Irish Blood, English Heart.
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