Sir How heart warming it was to see Billy Wright, King Rat and the DUP MP, the unreverend William McCrea, the Singing Bigot, sharing a platform together in Portadown.
After all the years the UUPs' and the DUP's pompous, arrogant, fundamentalist insistence that no one should ever talk to terrorists, both Trimble (at Drumcree) and now McCrea see, fit to wallow on the coat tails of a militant loyalist.
The DUP usually condemns, loyalist violence it has to, it is in's theory a democratic party. But usually after every condemnation there are the preambles of understanding, of justification and of perpetuation. There is a symbiotic relationship between the DUP and loyalist paramilitaries they feed off each other, illustrated by King Rat and the Singing Bigot politically slow dancing together in Portadown.
The key for the DUP is to prevent a solution (a meaningful one) arising to the problem. Because in their eyes, there really is no problem. Protestants are in a majority, and Protestants are almost exclusively unionist. The police force is over 90 per cents Protestant and the Protestant Orange Order has unswerving political power.
The downside ghettoised, working class Catholics and Protest ants slug it out, killing on average a quite tolerable 85-90 people a year (pre-ceasefire). Not ideal, but hardly statistics which, for instance, the Shining Path or the Tamils would boast about.
This insidious hypocrisy is worse than violence, and potentially more dangerous. Whatever else it is, paramilitary violence is at least honest in its manifestation. It does not claim to be anything other than what it is.
What allows unionism on one hand to cavort with loyalist paramilitaries, and on the other to refuse to talk to republican paramilitaries, is not some Christian, philosophic, democratic notion but a deep rooted, unshakeable loathing of Irishness.
As a footnote, I would like to congratulate America for breaking all the six Mitchell principles in dealing with its Iraqi problem." Yours, etc., Seaview Terrace, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.