In het Goede Vrijdag-Akkoord (of Akkoord van Belfast), dat een eind maakte aan grootschalige terreur in Noord-Ierland, werd gesteld dat de Britse overheid ten allen tijde onpartijdig zou moeten handelen, als het gaat om bemoeienis met dit in feite illegaal bezette deel van Noord -Ierland.
Onbegrijpelijk dat de ijskoude, inhumane neoliberale regering May nu een verbond aangaat met de protestante DUP, in feite een terreurorganisatie met een politieke tak (waar NB de psychopathische haatzaaier Paisey deel van uitmaakte..)….
The Canary bracht vorige week dinsdag het volgende artikel over deze zaak en gaat m.n. in op een pamflet geschreven door een partijgenoot van May en minister in haar kabinet, Michael Gove. In dit pamflet heeft Gove grote kritiek op het Goede Vrijdag-Akkoord, dat hij als een capitulatie voor de IRA ziet…..
Theresa
May was hoping nobody would see this Northern Ireland document
written by her cabinet minister
JUNE
13TH, 2017 
BEX
SUMNER
Peace
in Northern Ireland depends on the UK government being impartial.
The Good Friday Agreement requires [paywall] it.
But in 2000, one of Theresa May’s own cabinet ministers, Michael
Gove, wrote a 17,000-word pamphlet in which he railed against the
Good Friday Agreement, calling the peace process a “moral
stain”. And
it exposes a grave lack of impartiality in Conservative
ranks.
The
deal
The Conservative
government’s plans to do a deal with Northern Ireland’s
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has caused a public outcry. On 17
June, demonstrators converged on
Downing Street to protest any deal. And political figures from former
UK Prime Minister John Major to recent
Irish Premier Enda Kenny have warned that a deal could put
the peace process at risk.
The
Good Friday Agreement, also
known as the
Belfast Agreement, requires the
UK government to act with “rigorous impartiality on behalf of
all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions”.
An
alliance between the Conservative Party and the DUP could
risk all that. Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said:
“We
told her [May] very directly that she was in breach of the Good
Friday Agreement”
Michael
Gove
But
in 2000, two
years after the
Good Friday Agreement, Michael Gove wrote a pamphlet called The
Price of Peace [pdf] arguing
against it:
“The
Belfast Agreement poses a threat not just to the Britishness of
Northern Ireland but the British way of doing things in law, equality
of opportunity, policing and human rights. In every area it creates
unhappy precedents, likely to divide our society, burden the taxpayer
and bloat the State.
The Belfast Agreement has, at its heart, however, an even greater wickedness… It is a humiliation of
our Army, Police and Parliament. But, worse still, it is a denial of our national integrity, in every sense of the word. Surely, is the Belfast Agreement not the greatest achievement of this Government, but an indelible mark against it?”
“Dangerous
idiocy”
In
2016, journalist and Assistant
Editor of The
Irish Times Fintan
O’Toole summarised Gove’s
argument. Gove, he said:
“utterly despises the 1998 peace deal… Gove characterised the entire peace process as nothing more than a capitulation to the IRA. He insisted that the cause of the Troubles was British lack of firmness in facing down demands for a united Ireland… This is idiocy but, like Gove’s Brexit theorems, dangerous idiocy”
Gove’s
reasons for opposing it? It offered too many rights to too many
people. O’Toole again:
“The
Belfast Agreement was, as he put it, ‘a Trojan horse’ for
democratic reform across the UK. It introduces proportional
representation. Horrifically, ‘it enshrines a vision of human
rights which privileges contending minorities at the expense of the
democratic majority’. Even worse, ‘it offers social and economic
rights’…
Underlying this attack is a sense that it would be better to destroy the peace deal, at whatever cost to the people of Northern Ireland, than to allow this monstrosity to undermine a conservative vision of Britishness”.
Terrorism
Gove
defended his pamphlet as recently as 2016 when he said on
the BBC
Andrew Marr Show:
“One of things I would say now, we now have peace in Northern Ireland, I’m delighted that we do, but the things we did during the negotiations in the way that we handled the IRA, I would not have done… There is a moral question about someone who had been engaged in terrorism should be in office and I found that very difficult to take”
But
as many have pointed
out,
the DUP has its own links to terrorism.
The
ruling class
Gove
is not alone in his views. Conservative MEP Daniel
Hannan put
it much more succinctly, much more recently:
The @duponline are indeed our friends and allies. The IRA weren’t. See the difference?
And, according
to O’Toole,
this partiality goes right to the top:
“Gove’s paper epitomises a much deeper set of attitudes to Northern Ireland among what is now the controlling faction of the British ruling class… [May’s] antipathy is quieter and less explicit, but she is essentially Govian. We know this because her signature political issue has been the scrapping of the UK’s Human Rights Act… And this is a straightforward intention to impugn the Belfast Agreement”.
Peace
in Northern Ireland is, as Major said,
“fragile”. The UK government should be doing everything in its
power to support the peace process. But Gove’s pamphlet shows that
at least one member of the Conservative government does not
support that process. And, with the Conservatives
apparently hell bent on risking long-term peace for
its own short-term gain, the country urgently needs to speak
out.
=============================
Opvallend trouwens dat de DUP na de Brexit, de grenzen met aartsvijand Ierland open wil houden.