When in doubt, blame Clinton

While we normally leave the Irish Nationalist oriented blogging to other blogs that do it better, our hackles were raised sufficiently to post ourselves upon reading Michael Barone's column in US News and World Report this week. We'd been on the lookout for this since reading in last week's (Irish) Sunday Independent that Barone had had dinner with Eoghan Harris while in Ireland, and we suspected that Harris's view of Northern Ireland, in which a hatred of the IRA drives out all rational thought, might soon infect a Barone column. We therefore make the following observations:

The column reads like an excuse to bash Bill Clinton. Clinton is invoked several times as the driving force of the Northern Ireland peace process, and yet even by the article's own telling, the peace deal was a consensus reached by NI politicians and the British and Irish governments -- did Bill hold a gun to someone's head and force them to sign?

Second, all his evidence of the failure of the peace process is in fact drawn from a crisis within Unionism, which looks likely to realign with anti-agreement extremist (and anti-Catholic bigot) Ian Paisley becoming the dominant force on the Unionist side, but with most shades of nationalism having enjoyed the taste of devolved power and wanting it back as soon as possible. And, by the way, Barone seems upset that Gerry Adams got a few invitations to the White House. Well, Ian Paisley has good currency there too, via his long-time association with Bush's favourite institute of higher learning, Bob Jones university in South Carolina. [To call Paisley a "Unionist" is inaccurate anyway, since his preferred governance model for Northern Ireland owes more to the separatist Ian Smith Rhodesia model, in which a privileged colonial minority would govern the masses without any pesky interference from the Colonial Office in London.]

Finally, that photo caption (in the print edition). It fails to note that the marcher is carrying a drum with the emblem of a terrorist group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). And it recites the standard explanation of those marches..."Protestants commemorate a battlefield victory over Irish Catholics in 1690." DUDES! Get out your 17th English history books. The issue in this battle was the defence of King James as ruler of Britain and Ireland against an illegitimate usurpation of the throne by his daughter and a Dutch interloper. These marchers are essentially celebrating the fact that the current crowd of royals in Britain are a bunch of in-bred Germans, with the odd bit of Scottish blood thrown in to keep things afloat. And Clinton was supposed to make progress with people who want to celebrate that?