Ruth Dudley Edwards: Let’s ignore irritations and instead challenge a distorted anti UK state depiction of past violence

He said that he would run “a free course for young working class loyalists/unionists. I'll supply equipment and they can make whatever short documentary that best conveys their culture/concerns/anxieties.”

I thought the tweet insincere.

I had a dear old friend staying with me in London at the time who lives in rural Cavan so we rarely meet, but something came up about the RUC and we had discovered what a chasm there was between our perceptions of the Troubles. An open-minded person with neither political nor religious affiliations, she’s a classic example of how brilliantly republican propaganda has distorted Northern Ireland’s history.

For my friend, the RUC and UDR were sectarian forces who colluded with Protestant paramilitaries to kill innocent Catholics.

She knew about Bloody Sunday, of course, but not Bloody Friday. And it was news to her that republicans were responsible for almost 59% of Troubles deaths, loyalists 29% and the security forces just 10%.

“Ah, but collusion,” she said, for see had seen Seán Murray’s documentary Unquiet Graves, about the Glenanne gang, which we didn’t have time to unpick. I could not explain convincingly in the few minutes I had that Murray’s father had been brought to justice by RUC, that the film had been based mainly on the testimonies of rogue cop John Weir — seeking revenge on the RUC which had brought him and other loyalist killers to justice — and Paul O’Connor, the director of the Pat Finucane Centre, whom it didn’t mention had recently admitted being an ex-member of the Provisional IRA.

Now she’s gone home I’ll email her the low-down on that programme painstakingly detailed by Shane Paul O’Doherty, repentant IRA bomber, in his November 2021 blog https://irishpeaceprocess.blog/2021/11/01/Seán-murray-unquiet-graves-balanced-filmmaking-or-ira-propaganda/.

Shane’s overall blog is a superb resource for people fed up with republican lies. Don’t miss, for example, the entertaining exposes of Gerry Kelly and other pillars of the establishment.

Seán’s worked up about what he calls “the ongoing abuse of Prof Colin Harvey”, who has been whinging all over the place about the mostly mild criticism he has attracted in his capacity as the most prominent spokesman for Ireland’s Future.

Murray tweeted a fetching photograph of the two of them captioned “Great to meet up with my colleague and good friend @cjhumanrights today at Queens university. Solidarity as always”.

The Prof last week from Brussels proffered a report he co-authored called ‘Making the Case for Irish Unity in the EU’ on the Sinn Fein Youtube channel along with Martina Anderson —one-time enthusiastic wannabe bomber.

A passionate woman, she was in a state of high indignation about her sensitive chum. “Targeted vilification of professor @cjhumanright is so sinister. It is a fascist like attempt to silence the intellectual capacity he brings to the debate on constitutional change & HR A time to manage & not deny change — real leadership is required.”

Murray is on the record as describing the problem of unionists as “a loss of privilege, a loss of supremacy – that’s still embedded in their heads. They still think that they can keep croppies down, they think that they have the God-given right to the Six Counties in Ireland and that Catholics should know their place. There’s still that old sectarian ideology which is hard to break”.

Yet he is affronted that his kind invitation to “loyalists/unionists”, was greeted in one tweet by the message “Beware the Trojan Horse”.

The thoughtful University of Ulster Politics lecturer Cillian McGrattan explained recently in this newspaper how “the nexus of academics, anti-state human rights activists and the UK Research and Innovation Councils” who allocate funds to research into the Troubles “have skewed the debate towards an ahistorical, anti-state and republican position and the disarticulation of the memory of the middle ground of moderate unionists and nationalists who resisted the violence”.

Unionists and loyalists need to ignore distracting irritations like Harvey and Murray and do everything they can to get a campaign going for a review into URICs’ NI funding before the past is captured beyond retrieval.

https://irishpeaceprocess.blog/2021/11/01/Seán-murray-unquiet-graves-balanced-filmmaking-or-ira-propaganda/