digamma.net - notes

As part of the right-wing blogosphere’s collective hysteria over Spain’s election, John Derbyshire wrote today (the bolding is mine):

There has only been one instance in recent years of a War on Terror being fought to any kind of conclusion, and that was the war between Britain and the Irish terrorists. That war ended, or at any rate quiesced, with a near-total surrender on the part of the British. Irish terrorist capos are now ensconced in ministerial positions in London and Ireland, on salaries paid for by British taxpayers….. They control large areas of Northern Ireland (and some in the Irish Republic, too) where police simply will not go.

(Full disclosure: my family is Irish and Catholic, but I have no sympathy whatsoever with Irish terrorism. It’s really sad that Rage Against the Machine gave a shout out to Bobby Sands in the liner notes of their first CD.)

I’ve been to Belfast, and I can confirm a certain degree of lawlessness in ghettoes there. But in the Republic? From my unscientific perception, nobody in the Republic has any time for the IRA or any of its splinter groups. I was in Dublin right after the Omagh bombing in 1998 and in New Jersey on September 11th 2001, and (again, anecdotally) the sense of collective devastation seemed stronger in Ireland.

So where is this IRA ghetto in the Republic? I knew that two people responsible for the Omagh bombing were living in Dundalk near some family friends at the time, but that wasn’t a ghetto, it was a rural estate. So I wrote to Derbyshire:

Um, where in the Republic? Surely you don’t mean Dundalk?

To which Derbyshire responded:

Surely not!

“Even the dogs in the street know….”

Is mise le meas,

JD

So I Googled for “dogs in the street know” and Dundalk. (British and Irish libel law makes finding news articles about accused criminals a real pain, by the way.) Derbyshire WAS talking about the McKevitts. There’s just one problem - they were arrested three years ago. I replied:

If the police “simply will not go” into terrorist-controlled sections of Dundalk, who arrested Michael and Bernadette Sands McKevitt? The reason they went free for so long was for lack of usable evidence, which makes them much more legally analogous to “untouchable” mobsters in New York than to thugs in the lawless ghettoes of Belfast.

To which the D-man replied:

I shall publish a grovelling retraction… later.

JD

It’s hard to tell if he’s serious or not, but I’ll keep an eye on the Corner. Background on Derbyshire and Ireland is below…..

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Derbyshire is the writer who once approvingly quoted a friend who watched a St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York and sighed “The things you see when you don’t have a gun.” He’s also responsible for this paragraph:

Coogan grew up in the privileged, corrupt nomenklatura of the Irish Free State, the people who took over southern Ireland after the British left in 1922, and who soon reduced the place to such a condition of hopelessness and squalor that anyone — anyone but their precious selves, I mean — whose ambitions rose any higher than (to recycle a phrase of my own that I am rather pleased with) “sitting around a peat fire discussing the Council of Trent in Gaelic,” had no choice but to emigrate.

Yikes. Derbyshire is best-known online for what he calls “some opinions that aren’t very respectable — on race, for example, and homosexuality". To say the least. These views were the inspiration for Andrew Sullivan’s Derbyshire Award.