"Former IRA commander to meet Queen Elizabeth II" by Jill Lawless | Associated Press, June 23, 2012
LONDON — A once-unthinkable symbol of progress toward peace in Northern Ireland....
Related: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II to make first visit to Ireland
Ireland Fit For a Queen
It was a sign of progress toward peace....
Related: Cutting a Quick One For the Queen
Ireland Welcomes a King
Threats against the royal family have been real, as evidenced by the Provisional IRA’s 1979 assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s 79-year-old uncle. Several small IRA splinter groups still launch gun and bomb attacks in Northern Ireland.
FRU false flags?
But Peter Hain, a former Northern Ireland secretary in the British government, said the meeting “does show in shining terms how everybody is turning their backs on the past of horror and violence and moving toward peace between previously bitter enemies.”
The rulers are exception to the rule right now.
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"Queen, ex-IRA chief face N.Ireland peace milestone" by SHAWN POGATCHNIK Associated Press / June 27, 2012
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) — Queen Elizabeth II prayed together Tuesday with Catholic and Protestant leaders from across Northern Ireland as this long-divided land demonstrated its rising faith in a shared future — and braced for a peacemaking milestone that has been a quarter-century in the making.
The British monarch visited the lakeside town of Enniskillen, scene of one of the Irish Republican Army’s most shocking atrocities, for events symbolizing how far Northern Ireland has come from its darkest days of bloodshed. On Wednesday she’s expected to meet and shake hands with Martin McGuinness, former commander of the dominant Provisional IRA faction, in what many see as the symbolic conclusion to a four-decade conflict.
Their first-ever contact, long avoided by McGuinness’ Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, follows the Provisional IRA’s killing of some 1,775 people since 1970, including the queen’s own cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten — a 1979 assassination that IRA experts say McGuinness himself sanctioned. McGuinness today is the senior Catholic in Northern Ireland’s unity government, an institution forged following the Provisionals’ 2005 decision to renounce violence and disarm.
Yet the political difficulties that McGuinness faces are writ large on the Northern Ireland landscape. Catholics and Protestants alike are suddenly ribbing him, if not to his face, as ‘‘Sir Martin of Londonderry’’ — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his home city, because virtually all Irish nationalists reject that British name and use its native Irish name of Derry. Many Protestant leaders and analysts likewise have asserted, triumphantly, that the peace process has left McGuinness with no choice but to bend the knee to the British monarch.
That's what my print piece gave me.
‘‘If Martin McGuinness is to be the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, he needs to recognize that her majesty is head of state of the United Kingdom,’’ said Jeffrey Donaldson, a lawmaker from the main Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists, which today runs Northern Ireland in an odd but surprisingly stable coalition with Sinn Fein.
‘‘Other than moving into Buckingham Palace and curling up like an old green corgi at the foot of the queen’s bed, I'm not sure how much more Sinn Fein could do to indicate that their war has been lost and the surrender terms penned by the British,’’ said Belfast commentator Alex Kane, a former Protestant political activist.
More troublingly, supporters of small IRA groups that still mount occasional shootings and bombings in Northern Ireland have daubed walls in McGuinness’ home city with slogans denouncing Sinn Fein as ‘‘sellouts.’’
And overnight, the hillside overlooking Sinn Fein’s other principal power base, Catholic west Belfast, was decorated with a massive Irish flag and the slogan ‘‘Erin (Ireland) is our Queen.’’ Protestant militants stormed the hill Tuesday night, vandalized it and assaulted one of the Irish nationalist hard-liners guarding it. Police said the man’s injuries weren’t life-threatening. A police helicopter hovered overhead, using a spotlight to keep tabs on the two rival groups.
Fears that a future IRA might rise out of alienated Catholic districts were nowhere to be heard Tuesday in Enniskillen as the queen arrived in a 10-car motorcade for an ecumenical church service in honor of her 60th anniversary on the throne. Sinn Fein members stayed away from the event.
She and her husband Prince Philip received a standing ovation as she visited the town’s Catholic cathedral, her first visit to a Catholic church in her 20 visits to Northern Ireland as queen. And in the neighboring Protestant cathedral, a veritable who’s who of Northern Ireland religious life and politics gathered to pray for continued peace. Church leaders praised the contribution of Elizabeth, who last year made her first tour of the Republic of Ireland to broad public support. Sinn Fein was heavily criticized for boycotting her visit.
Archbishop Alan Harper, leader of the Anglican-affiliated Church of Ireland, said in his sermon that the queen’s tour of the Irish Republic ‘‘was an occasion of profound significance and deep emotion’’ that signaled an era of genuine peace ‘‘perhaps for the first time ever in the recorded history of this island.’’
The queen greeted some of the thousands of locals who had spent hours standing on the packed, narrow sidewalks of Enniskillen’s Church Street. In a private meeting at a Protestant clergyman’s home, she met survivors of the Provisional IRA’s bomb attack on the town 25 years ago.
The no-warning bomb exploded during an annual ceremony honoring the British dead of both world wars, and its victims were all Protestant civilians: 11 dead and 63 wounded, among them an Enniskillen school principal who never recovered from a coma. Worldwide revulsion over the callousness of the slaughter spurred IRA leaders, particularly McGuinness, to begin sounding out British government and intelligence officials for the terms of an IRA cease-fire.
‘‘Today brings back some terrible memories, to be sure, but above all it shows us that the Enniskillen victims have not been forgotten,’’ said Stephen Gault after meeting the queen. He was wounded in the 1987 blast while his 49-year-old father Sam was killed.
‘‘She’s a total lady. We were nervous, but she made us feel at ease,’’ Gault said of the queen.
Despite the continuing threat from small IRA factions clinging to the aim of forcing Northern Ireland out of the UK, organizers of the queen’s trip announced it weeks in advance, a radical departure from a decades-old policy requiring a media blackout until her arrival. Police in flak jackets did line Church Street but faced not a word of protest or any sign of trouble....
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Related: Queen Elizabeth, ex-IRA leader share historic handshake
"Bloody Sunday review pledged, but funds lacking" by Shawn Pogatchnik | Associated Press, July 06, 2012
DUBLIN — Northern Ireland’s police commander announced Thursday that his force intends to open a criminal investigation into whether British soldiers committed murder during the Bloody Sunday massacre 40 years ago — but lacks the staff and funding necessary and cannot say when it would start.
Related: Britain's $unday Bloody $unday
In 2010, the biggest fact-finding probe in British history determined that the soldiers targeted unarmed civilians....
Related: Ireland Like Iraq
Chief Constable Matt Baggott warned the panel, which is drawn equally from the British Protestant and Irish Catholic sides of Northern Ireland, that diverting 30 detectives to investigate a watershed moment in Northern Ireland’s past would draw needed resources from current law enforcement efforts.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland press office later issued a statement intended to clarify the police commanders’ remarks. It said a criminal investigation into the Bloody Sunday killings would happen. “We can’t confirm at this time exactly when this investigation may start,” it said....
British soldiers killed 309 people in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1996, representing about 8 percent of the 3,700 total deaths from the past four decades of conflict over the area. More than 700 soldiers were killed by Irish Republican Army factions.
British troop strength and installations have been drastically reduced over the past decade and, in 2007, soldiers were formally withdrawn from duty as peacekeepers backing up the police. But a garrison of around 4,000 soldiers remains today in keeping with Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom.
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Related: Tensions rise in N. Ireland on Bloody Sunday inquiry
Also see: Queen's Diamond Jewbilee
Now the newspapers focus on the royals makes sense.
Update:
"Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a polarized corner of Belfast as the most divisive day on Northern Ireland’s calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to break some ground for peacemaking."
Sure looks like it.
And why are they always blaming the Catholics after they were provoked, huh?
