I've just remembered an anti-Irish song (well, verse - it's also anti- Welsh, Scots, French and basically anyone "foreign") - Flanders & Swann's song with the chorus "The Englsh, The Englsh, The Englsh are best ....."

But no-one sings that with hatred in their heart and contempt in their voice in the way that Irish Nationalist songs are often sung.

I work in London, and when I think of the IRA, I think of the little girl, waiting in her father's car, who died when the Baltic Exchange bomb went off. I think of the Asian tobacconist who died when the Canary Wharf bomb ripped into his shop. I think of the photographer who died when the building he was in collapsed on top of him in the Bishopsgate bomb explosion.

What had they ever done to offend the Irish, that they should die in their cause? Why should the perpetrators of such evil be released early in the name of the "peace process"?

Who will write a song in their memory? Could one sing it if someone did without provoking the wrath of Irish Republicans?

IRA, UDA, UVF, Provos, "Continuity IRA" - they're not Freedom Fighters, they're murdering thugs, with a religious/political/historical miasma that they try to hide behind.

I condemn them before their God and mine, who will judge them at the last, and whose wrath will not be deflected by weasel words.

Singing songs in support of them does not and cannot help anyone. I'll sing "She Moves through the Fair", "Danny Boy" or even "Wild Rover", but "Dublin in the Green" or "Back Home in Derry" - never!