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UK crimes in Northern Irish memory there to remain

Thu Jun 28, 2012 7:10AM GMT
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The British Queen’s visit to Northern Ireland has been billed by media as a giant step toward peace but the general atmosphere of the meeting in the context of the history of the British-Irish conflict raises serious questions about such speculations.


Queen Elizabeth shook the hands of deputy Northern Irish first minister and former IRA commander Martin McGuinness but the rifts were there with the Queen refusing to apologize for the past atrocities of her governments in Ireland and later in Northern Ireland and the former London arch-foe refusing to greet Elizabeth in English.

The hand-shake had a long history of terrorism in Northern Ireland behind it and came 14 years after the Good Friday peace deal ended decades of violence that claimed at least 3,500 lives including Queen’s cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was killed in 1979 in an IRA bombing.

However, the history proves IRA was far from the terrorist organization British media tend to portray with the Queen’s hand-shake, while she refused to apologize for Britain’s killing of thousands of Northern Irish civilians in return for her cousin’s death, was far from enough to persuade the Irish to forget the past.

As a Chicago Tribune report dated January 10, 1989 when the Irish Troubles were ebbing away, shows, Queen Elizabeth needed to apologize as British crimes during the Irish troubles as the occupying force in Northern Ireland dwarf the violence by IRA, which claimed to be fighting for an independent republic, even if the violence has claimed Lord Mountbatten’s life.

“IRA`s 37.2 percent rate of civilian kills is excellent compared with the 81 percent by combined British forces,” the article read.

“Thus, terrorism is overwhelmingly a British policy rather than an Irish one. The total of civilians killed by combined Irish forces is 484, while the total of civilians killed by combined British forces is 716,” it added.

Britain carved out the nine counties of the Northern Ireland from Irish Republic back in the 1920’s despite the local population voting by an absolute majority of 82 percent to remain Irish using “immediate and total war” threats to attain its objective.

The Queen may have hoped for reconciliation with Northern Irish officials through a hand-shake and a glaringly Irish green dress.

But McGuinness’s insistence on using Irish when talking to the monarch and his refusal to address her with official titles was symptomatic of the cold shoulder the Northern Irish would give the Queen.

A more revealing signal was the Irish flag put up on a mountain overlooking Belfast in protest to the Queen’s visit.

McGuinness did say afterwards that “It went good, it went really well” yet he made sure to add he is “still a republican” and opposed to the British rule of Northern Ireland.