DUP is beneficiary of daft eejits' ramblings

national | rights, freedoms and repression | other press Thursday August 31, 2006 00:29 by Brian Feeney - Irish News

They couldn't even organise a meeting in a hall

Irish News August 30, 2006 Wednesday - Briefing - The Wednesday Column

DUP is beneficiary of daft eejits' ramblings

Brian Feeney

There was to be a meeting of the Flat Earth Society (Irish republican section) in Toome last night. They were to try to think how to avoid falling off the edge of the world. We were promised a gathering of Real IRA, Continuity IRA, and wait for it, INLA members 'disillusioned with the leadership of Gerry Adams'. So there you are now. You didn't know that Gerry Adams was the leader of the Real IRA, Continuity IRA and INLA.

Interesting nevertheless that they all acknowledge that Adams is the leader of republicanism. Their beef is that they don't like where he's leading the movement. Too bad. They're not in it. So after years of ineffectual bitching about him they've decided to look for 'a way forward for republicanism'.

Brian Feeney takes dim view of non event

In other words they are bereft of ideas. One of these political luminaries told this newspaper that they're agin the Good Friday Agreement. "The agreement is finished anyway." He added: "It's a lame duck." No mate - if it's finished that's a dead duck. He went on: "That is one of the reasons this meeting is happening now. Its time has come." Hard to know how a meeting could happen if its time hadn't come and indeed its time had not come because the meeting was cancelled due to too much interest. All this guy needs is a straight man to say 'boom, boom' and he could scratch a living as a stand-up comedian.

Normally this sort of guff could be dismissed as a silly season story, to fill pages in August when everyone's on holiday and there's no news. In fact it was floated weeks ago when we were told that about 40 IRA and Sinn Fein members in south Derry had defected. Then the Israelis abolished the silly season by spending most of August destroying Lebanon. Now the story is resurrected again in Sunday newspapers.

A "whole IRA brigade" has split from the movement the papers inform us. Seriously? The really active south Derry brigade, average age, what, 45 plus? There's you thinking all that romantic stuff about brigades and battalions went out when northern command was formed 30 years ago and reorganised the IRA into Active Service Units. Of course the point in talking about an 'entire IRA brigade' is to conjure up the prospect of a renewed campaign by experienced IRA members and indeed one headline warned 'IRA split adds to violence worries'.

Leave aside the small technical point that this 'entire brigade' has no guns or explosives, you don't suppose Special Branch and MI5 know the names of any of these dissidents, do you? What sort of daft eejits call a meeting and let it be known members of IRA splinter groups would be present? What a pantomime.

The real question is who does it benefit? The answer is very clear - the DUP. Those newspapers which tried to hype up the story in July and when that failed regurgitated it on Sunday are not known for their close ties to republicanism.

If there's one development the DUP nay-sayers would love it's a new campaign by IRA dissidents called by any name you like. Republican violence is the great bogeyman DUP politicians use to scare their voters. We've just gone through the quietest summer for decades. The only organised violence is loyalist. The DUP have absolutely no excuse to avoid sharing power in the north.

Isn't it therefore a remarkable coincidence that at exactly this point the republican section of the Flat Earth Society emerges to combine with the Flat Earthers in the DUP to try to sustain each other's fantasies? Still, when the republican Flat Earthers finally have their meeting in some hole in the wall they won't even be able to agree to form a party, let alone agree what the party's for. After all, one of their spokesmen doesn't know the difference between a lame duck and a dead duck. Even so, whether dead duck or red herring, they're an essential ingredient for the DUP's pot.

Sunday Tribune's Suzanne Breen splashes great non event on front page, August 27