Northern Ireland Water

Anyone who goes to Northern Ireland will know that it is always raining. It seems scarcely credible, therefore, that thousands of people in the Province have been without water for weeks, as Northern Ireland Water failed to supply them.

The people of Northern Ireland deserve a Department of Sanitation which can at least supply the sort of service you might find in Egypt or Nigeria, and should give consideration to this at the next elections.

As to the water company itself it has become a sort of subsidised care home for the worthy but inept. It shuold have been sold off years ago, in which case either the water supply would have been maintained because the regulator would have overseen the investment levels, or the state coffers would be swelling with massive fines imposed on a Utlilities Company.

Resignations, please, beginning with the minister and the chairman of the water company.

The Troubles

Today is The Twelfth, the day Northern Ireland Unionists commemorate the victory by the Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Actually it isn’t really a commemoration at all: it is an excuse to flaunt their manufactured medieval tribalism; a self-justificatory excuse for failure by inventing a ‘cause’ which is different from that of the man in the next street.

Twenty-seven police officers have been injured overnight, three of them shot.

This will come as a surprise to most people. Isn’t Northern Ireland at peace? Didn’t Tony Blair feel ‘the hand of history’ on his shoulder (this was preceded by the statement ‘this is no time for sound bites’)?

The truth is it was a typical Blair deal: high on visibility, high on what he called ‘eye-catching initiatives’, low on practicality. The nationalist price for the deal, troops out and having known terrorists in the government, was so high, and Blair’s trendy courage so dilute, it meant that the unionists were hardly likely to give up their right to these provocative, sneering marches. There were always going to be flare-ups and the police have to carry the can.

Blair's vicar on earth, the late media saint ‘Mo’ Mowlem, was so biased in favour of the nationalist argument that negotiators had to bypass her.

So Northern Ireland is still stuck in 1916, while the rest of the world moves on. And Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and the other self-publicising shysters involved in this botched agreement, continue to bask in the world’s praise.

A more even handed approach might have been that the 12th July be no longer a holiday, that the marches are banned, and that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are investigated for their terrorist activity over a period of thirty years.

Fat chance.

Bloody Sunday

There is an old joke that as a plane lands in Belfast the captain says ‘and for those of you who want to adjust your watches, put them back 200 years.’ For now we are looking at 38 years ago, although the origins of the matter lie further back, and the resentment will last into the future.


The Bloody Sunday enquiry, investigating the deaths of 14 civilians in a riot in 1972, must leave non-British observers in confusion. There was an investigation by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, immediately afterwards which said the soldiers’ behaviour ‘bordered on the reckless’.

Then in 1998 the new Prime Minister Tony Blair instigated a new enquiry, headed by Lord Savile. That enquiry has now been completed. It took 12 years and cost a bit short of £200 million.

The principal finding of the Savile enquiry seems to be that none of the rioters were armed.

But someone was.

In an article in the Daily Mail, General Sir Michael Rose, who as a junior officer was on the scene that day, says

‘It was the IRA who started firing with the Thompson sub-machine gun..

..There was no doubt that the IRA gunmen were firing from their positions on the galleries of the flats opposite..’

Six of one and half a dozen of the other? Not really. The paras were wrong to shoot at unarmed civilians (but right to shoot at armed gunmen) and we simply cannot have our armed forces killing unarmed people without the most rigorous scrutiny of their actions. I find the oft quoted cost of the Enquiry irrelevant; if truth is expensive we still have to have it.

But here I think the matter should end. These were young soldiers, following unwise orders to tear down the barricade and attack the rioters (who were throwing nail bombs by the way). Martin McGuiness, now Deputy Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, has admitted he was No.2 in the IRA in Derry at the time. The Savile Report says he might well have been there, holding that sub-machine gun. In what other area of politics could a man admit to having been a terrorist, responsible for the deaths of innocent people, and not resign? Nowhere but Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is different.

Tony Blair ordered this enquiry because he had been told by the Irish Prime Minister that it was necessary for the Peace Process. Perhaps it was. I hope it has satisfied some grievances, lit up some dark areas. But it should stop there.

Defending our borders

I think most of us feel there are too many laws being passed with too little thought going into them and here is a prime example. The Government seems to have given up on its plan to impose immigration controls on travel between the mainland and Northern Ireland and the Chamnnel Islands.

I am grateful to the following summary from the excellent Samizdata blog:

'You can basically sum up the UK Government's dilemma as either they are going to have to tell Gerry Adams he has to have a British ID card to live in Northern Ireland or tell Ian Paisley he's going to need a passport to travel from Belfast to London.'

Or, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.