Are divided and ill-informed unionists up to the challenges that they face?
In January,1986, Athol Books published Brendan Clifford’s highly revealing pamphlet ‘Parliamentary Despotism: John Hume’s Aspiration’.
This document contained eyewitness accounts which predate by more than thirty years Gearoid O’Faolean’s: ‘A Broad Church’.
When I realised the import of the pamphlet’s contents I immediately forwarded them to the leaders of both the Ulster Unionist Party and DUP, James Molyneaux and Ian Paisley.
Among Brendan Clifford’s assertions were the following:
‘The IRA was financed and supported in its initial phase by eminent people in all parties in the Republic.’
‘Respectable citizens of the Republic launched the IRA in 1970.’
Again , the author wrote: ‘I engaged in a number of debates with them; and through those debates I became well acquainted with the elaborate strategy that had been worked out.’
The strategy predicted that: ‘a process would begin which would end with the people who are now unionists being indoctrinated into the nationalist culture.’
Is the government, through unfair and discriminatory funding programmes assisting the republican’s strategic aims?
And are divided and ill-informed unionists up to the challenges they face?
Dr Clifford Smyth, Belfast BT6