We prefer the other Collins

What do you do if you're an editorial writer at the Daily Telegraph and have spent the summer watching three years of rants about the glorious consequences of George W. Bush and the evil naysaying of the BBC come crashing down around your ears? Simple, you editorialise about something else entirely. Like the oppressed army officers of Northern Ireland. And so it is that this group finds itself elevated to a cause celebre in one of Tuesday's editorials (link requires registration).

The editorial concerns the news that a British Army officer, Tim Collins, who was accused of war crimes in Iraq, has been cleared. Collins became well known in the US because of his widely cited speech on the eve of war. A second investigation into the conduct of his command is ongoing. But for the Telegraph, it's all an opportunity for gloating about whiny Americans (an American having prompted the war crimes complaint) while wallowing in the paper's shameless Unionist tradition. And thus we read:

[Collins] soon found himself the victim of a meretricious accusation by a reserve American officer whose peacetime occupation...was that of a social worker. This kind of reporting on superiors is dignified by the name of 'whistle-blowing''. A more appropriate term is surely "sneaking''. It was one of the few incidents which marred the otherwise felicitous Anglo-American co-operation on the battlefield.

We sincerely hope that future Army promotion boards will have the courage not to be put off from recognising Col Collins's remarkable qualities, not merely for his own sake but also for the sake of the Royal Irish Regiment (RIR), which is headquartered in Ballymena, Co Antrim.

For the Royal Irish are one of the great unifying forces on the island of Ireland. Some 20 per cent of the men in the general service battalion come from south of the border and work without the slightest hint of sectarian rancour with their largely (but by no means exclusively) Protestant brothers-in-arms from Northern Ireland. It has always been a regiment that has cared for its soldiers and it is good to see that Col Collins's superiors have in turn looked after him.

There is some very sneaky spin going on here. First, it is indeed true that the RIR draws soldiers from the Irish Republic. But the numbers run into a few hundred at most. So to bill the RIR as a "great unifying force" is preposterous -- it's more to do with a few young lads who want a bit more opportunity and adventure than they'd get enlisting in the Irish army. If one wants to go down this road of home nation nostalgia, at least mention something that has the scale and trans-sectarian scope to be a plausible example, like the all-Ireland rugby team.

Second, the claim that the RIR always cares for its soldiers -- that's the subject of the 2nd investigation into Collins, and the parents of a soldier who committed suicide while under his command have a different impression.

And then there's the mention of the RIR's HQ in Ballymena. The many Unionist readers of the paper get a nice warm glow with that sentence. We try to think of Ballymena as being famous for an indirect link to another Collins -- the Michael Collins of Irish history, as played by Ballymena native Liam Neeson in that movie. But sadly, Ballymena is more notable as the stomping ground of anti-Catholic bigot, Ian Paisley. A nice little nod and wink from the paper to its core readership.