First, some thread creep: Fubula, I tried sending you a PM recently,but I've noticed you're logging on as a guest. I've got a pal who's moved to a place about three miles beyond Kilkeel, towards Greencastle. Are you aware of any sessions around Rostrevor, Warrenpoint or even Kilkeel? Maybe you could send a PM, or reply here and corrupt the thread some more.

But back to the subject, and Larry, I'm with you 100 per cent on most human-rights issues, and in fact most social justice issues, if I'm interpreting InOBU correctly. And thanks for the stuff about Turkey. But there's a world of difference between that and the situation in Ireland.

I've been following the plight of the Kurds for years, and it's an international scandal. But Turkey gets away with murder (literally) because it has the second biggest army in NATO, and its army is holding the dreaded muslims in check. The US, which is so quick to bully Chile, Cuba, Somalia, etc, will not do a damn thing about Turkey - while Britain, France, Germany etc can't wait to get Turkey into the European Union.

The Irish case you cited doesn't begin to compare - it just risks devaluing the hunger strike as a weapon.(We've got a hunger striker in England too, by the way - Ian Brady. But he's classed as mentally ill, so that makes it OK to force feed him.)

It's ridiculously emotive to describe any Irish prisoner these days as "incarcerated" - true as it may have been of Kilmainham and the rest in years gone by. Similarly it is unhelpful as well as wildly misleading to describe the present day Northern Ireland as an apartheid statelet, as someone did - just as it would be to describe the southern states that way. (If the term has currency anywhere in the civilised west, it would be in Australia's "deep north" - about which we get to hear very little, here in the UK.) It's always rankled with the Provisionals, that Mandela and the ANC would not embrace their cause, on the grounds that they were fighting a democracy, which NI clearly has been, certainly for 20 years or more, albeit with the massive flaw of a police force that needs wholesale reform.

If we all want to see peaceful co-existence in the six counties, we surely applaud Sorcha's reluctance to send cash in that direction, if there is a chance the cash could go on guns and semtex. Once there is peaceful co-existence, and proper democratic values, what the hell will it matter whether the administration is based in Dublin, Belfast, London or Brussels? I've never understood socialists getting hung up about nationalism. Which reminds me: remember BICO, Larry? Wonder if they outlasted the CPGB?