The IRA, the Catholic Church & Big Lies

Northern nationalism has entered a moral ice-age largely ushered in by Gerry Adams’ strategy.

Lies – Very Big Lies – are the order of the day and all who wish to be northern nationalists must lie and be complicit in lies, even the Catholic church.

The Biggest Lie of All is Gerry’s lie that he was never a member of the IRA – FFS Gerry, you as good as told David Blevins on Sky television that you would come clean at last if you got a promise of immunity – not for you the prison years that were the fate of the lower orders of republicanism – the thousands of IRA volunteers who spent a total of thousands of years in prisons for murders and bombings and for the Big Lie of a United Ireland or Bust.

Gerry, you’re the Prince of West Belfast – private health care in the United States, thousands of dollars a plate dinners in the US, pension from Stormont, a pension from Dáil Éireann – no prison cell for you – how many pensions do you have unlike the average industrial wage earner?

You swan around mired in lies but nobody really cares any more – what does that say about everybody’s moral compass made putrid by you?

Clonard Monastery didn’t get you over the hurdle of lying for a living, but it gave you and your Belfast Brigade IRA leadership a secret HQ in the early 1970s.

Every obedient Sinn Féin member and supporter will look you directly in the eye these days and lie – “Gerry was never a member of the IRA and I believe him.” Pants on fire incendiary devices, but it’s for The Cause – so that makes lies alright then.

Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald and the scores of Gerry-cronies will all lie to your face and brazenly too.

Derry people used to hold that the Bloody Sunday families were sacrosanct and that everyone owed them and The Saville Inquiry the whole truth and nothing but the truth – but not Martin McGuinness – he felt able to lie to the inquiry about leaving the IRA in 1974 – and that was a whopper of a lie that EVERBODY knew to be a lie.

McGuinness also lied about what he was actually doing on Bloody Sunday in Duffy’s bookmakers’ shop with a Thompson machine gun (used the previous Thursday evening to murder two police officers on nearby Creggan Hill) and some other gear, but that lie was for The Cause and nobody related to Bloody Sunday really cared anyway as it turned out – he had the freedom of the city and of Bloody Sunday to tell really big lies.

Nobody cared in wider northern society that Martin was lying about his later IRA membership, about his encyclopaedic knowledge of IRA ‘jobs’ and about his direct lies to victims – about the Claudy bombings, human bomb Patsy Gillespie, census collector and mother Joanne Mathers, Jeffrey Agate, Frankie Hegarty, Patsy Flood and many HUNDREDS of other murders – Marty could tell lies and northern nationalism loved it – ‘More!’ they cried…

Marty wasn’t so successful in the Republic of Ireland during his bid for the presidency, because southern nationalism wouldn’t turn a blind eye to his unrepented IRA murders and lies, not least to those Irish citizens murdered while serving in the Irish police, army or prison service – Jerry McCabe, Brian Stack, Private Paddy Kelly and Trainee Garda Gary Sheehan (the last two murdered while freeing Don Tidey from his kidnappers, for which job Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane faced charges in the Republic – his trial collapsed) and torture victims Tom Oliver and Terence McKeever.

The Catholic church in Northern Ireland has belatedly joined the Pan-Nationalist Civic Shinner Front after spending many years condemning the IRA murder campaign.

You would hardly credit that the Pope ever called for an end to paramilitarism, or that the Irish Bishops condemned the IRA’s exploitation of the hunger strikes.

The Irish Catholic Bishops’ condemnation of the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing and Bishop Cahal Daly’s resounding denunciation of the murders of the two army corporals might as well have never happened.

Archbishop Eamon Martin reveled in being photographed with IRA leader and pro-abortion Sinn Féin activist Martin McGuinness (no pleas on behalf of victims waiting for years for Truth) as did Cardinal Sean Brady [in spite of the fact that McGuinness had called for his resignation over child abuse matters].

The new Bishop of Derry, Belfast diocesan Donal McKeown, astonishingly reversed Bishop Edward Daly’s prohibitions relating to paramilitary honours at IRA funerals.

Fr. Michael Canny – who had at that time effectively taken over the running of the Derry Diocese – had no problem in full clerical garb endorsing Sinn Féin’s and Martin McGuinness’ Free Derry Corner Irish Presidential bid send-off, not a bit bothered about McGuinness’ and Sinn Féin’s support for abortion.

In fact, Fr. Canny went even further – he publicly endorsed a new book about Martin McGuinness pretending that there is no carryover endorsement of Sinn Féin – and retrospectively of the IRA – and announced at a recent memorial for McGuinness that he was sporting new altar vestments bought for him by the McGuinness family.

Didn’t Fr. Canny ever hear of a conflict of interest?

Really? Martin would do all the murders, tortures, bombings, maimings and disappearances again if given the chance?

It only remains for Canny to introduce the cause for Martin’s beatification and canonisation.

Why not go the whole hog and dump the collar and join Sinn Féin?

There is really a need for a separation of church and Sinn Féin/IRA – not least because Sinn Féin opposes Catholic teaching on a number of matters, including abortion and gay marriage – but also because the church in former times stood with the victims of paramilitary violence, not with the perpetrators and their political wing.

You would have to look long to find a photograph of a Spanish Catholic Cardinal endorsing a Basque ETA mass murderer…

Piaras O’Duill was a former member of the 1950s IRA who served a prison sentence. He later joined the religious Franciscan Capuchin Order and became a Catholic priest based in central Dublin.

From the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he became politically involved once more, especially on the H-Block campaign. The church and his order forbade him to wear clerical garb at any political gathering and he obeyed this stricture for years.

Fr. Canny seems to be unaware that his clerical collar should set him apart, particularly from party political influence, while Bishop McKeown appears to be either twiddling his thumbs in denial or else lapping up the new warm relationship with the pro-abortion IRA and Sinn Féin.

So, @McKDonal – IRA victims and their relatives can nowadays attend a Mass celebrated by Fr. Michael Canny sporting Mass vestments donated by IRA mass-murderer Martin McGuinness’ family?

Thus the Catholic church in Northern Ireland gives the nod of approval to both Sinn Féin and to its historic paramilitary partner – the IRA – and thumbs its nose at the many victims of the IRA who haven’t a legacy’s hope in hell of ever getting any truth at all from Gerry and cronies.

Many of the IRA’s murders of Catholic judges and their family members happened at the very doors of Catholic churches after Mass – many victims’ murders were planned and executed from Clonard Monastery’s secret PIRA HQ in the early 1970s, but the Church whose founder said that “the Truth shall set you free” is in fear of the truth of its collusion with IRA murders ever being uncovered.

The years-old Adams’ strategy has managed to poison the Human Rights well with the venom of ‘whataboutery’ – that IRA strategy from the 1980s to disallow any reference whatsoever to the IRA’s atrocious human rights record:

• its hundreds of murders of men, women and children
• its deliberate policy of instituting and practising torture, murder and disappearances of abducted persons, whether women and mothers such as Jean McConville or of its own members, not forgetting abducted RUC and UDR persons
• its enlistment of children into its ranks
• its deliberate targeting of civilians with both bombs and guns
• its deliberate murders of innocent Protestants in its sectarian murder campaign
• its murders of Human Rights Lawyers, Magistrates and Judges

The Pat Finucane Centre is the Black Hole in Northern Ireland’s Human Rights space – it deliberately ignores all of the IRA’s human rights atrocities, has investigated and documented none of them and has sought no information whatsoever from the very many IRA veterans living around its offices.

Its Westend Park HQ in the Bogside was 200 yards from Martin McGuinness’ house in Westland Terrace for many years – nobody ever asked him to call in and give a statement of facts about the HUNDREDS of human rights’ violations – murders and bombings – which occurred on his watch – grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented…

Prominent Pat Finucane Centre personnel such as Paul O’Connor and Anne Cadwallader find their integrity untroubled by this totally sectarian failure to document, record and analyse the IRA’s atrocious human rights’ record and northern nationalism – and the Catholic church – purr in blissful contentment.

Similarly, the toothless Amnesty International has arbitrarily set its face against investigating the IRA’s many thousands of human rights infringements between 1970 and 2015, in particular its institutional practice of torture for many years.

Northern nationalism is hypocritically content to view the British as the source of all human rights violations and the IRA’s 1,700 victims – including the greatest number of Catholic victims, 338 of them – are being disappeared again by ‘whataboutery’ and Sinn Féin lies, allied to Catholic church silence and silent endorsement.

The IRA rejected Pope John Paul II’s call in 1979 to lay down its arms and declared that it had widespread support and that Britain would only withdraw from Northern Ireland if forced to do so:

“force is by far the only means of removing the evil of the British presence in Ireland … we know also that upon victory the Church would have no difficulty in recognising us”.

How right the IRA was – the Catholic church in Northern Ireland is giving Sinn Féin/IRA full recognition now, with honours, regardless of its support for abortion, gay marriage and other issues inimical to its own Catholic teaching.

Bishop Edward Daly’s and Cardinal Cahal Daly’s efforts to thwart paramilitarism have been completely annulled by their nationalist episcopal successors in the new Pan-Nationalist Front.

Not a single call from Northern Ireland’s Catholic church leaders to the IRA’s fully-functioning Army Council to return the earthly remains of kidnapped, tortured, executed and disappeared Catholic soldier, Captain Robert Nairac, for a Christian burial – in spite of the fact that Nairac was a student of the Catholic Benedictine Ampleforth Abbey school and was taught by a monk who later became Cardinal Basil Hume.

Some of the IRA’s bigger lies recorded here.

The IRA’s big lie of ‘the necessary armed struggle’ recorded here.

Sinn Féin and the IRA’s attitude to Human Rights recorded here.

The IRA’s deliberate and institutional practice of torture recorded here.