Interesting Larry. It certainly forms the basis of a whole new discussion! I'm afraid I'm not as restrained as Wolfgang though - I'll steam right in, and damn the torpedoes! :-) Flame city, here we come...

For good or ill, John Major was the leader of the British Parliament, and Gerry Adams was the leader of the IRA. As leaders, each had, not the right, but the _obligation_ to do what he believed was best for the ppl he represented. The result was a peace process, however shaky it may be, and however much the parties mistrust each other.

Bernadette McAlesky's point is quite simply stated - it was better for the IRA to be shooting loyalists and soldiers to keep power than for the civilians they claimed to be representing to be accorded the power to make their own decisions in the ballot box. "Winners" and "losers" is irrelevant - everyone's lost, every side has suffered. Mrs. McAlesky's funnel was not created by the British government, but by the ppl of NI who didn't want any more bombs or shooting, who wanted the soldiers out, who wanted peace. Once ppl have experienced peace, why should they choose to go back to violence? And if the ppl want peace, the leaders can't afford to head back to war, otherwise they'll cease to be leaders PDQ!

How constitutional politics can be a failure, I really don't know. She calls voters "ignorant", "stupid" and "insulting", whilst saying that she's supporting the ppl on the ground. Erm, if the majority vote against you, surely that's the ppl on the ground saying that more ppl are against you than for you? The implication is that she knows what's good for them better than they do, regardless of whether they've told her they don't want what she wants. Fine for handling your 5-year-old children, but not much cop for adults.

On the "rule imposed from above" end, NI will have its own parliament to make its own decisions, the same way parts of the UK like IOM and Jersey do, with more powers than the fairly weedy parliaments for Wales and Scotland. I'm sorry if she thinks she shouldn't be a part of the UK bcos she's Catholic, but there's plenty of Catholics here too, and they're not fighting to become part of France. If NI wishes to secede from the UK, then it'd need to vote to do it, to establish that it's the will of the pppl on the ground. An armed group saying "We want out, and we're representing the ppl on the ground, and we'll shoot you if you disagree with us, and we'll shoot the ppl on the ground if they don't follow us" isn't good.

As for her view of Eire, I'm amazed. She wants a unified Ireland, but says that you can't trust the Irish ppl or the Irish politicians! If the Irish don't want NI in Eire, what's she proposing to do? Bomb Dublin until they let her in?! The mind boggles.

The British CANNOT run NI very easily. The Army's expensive, the police are expensive, the fire brigade are expensive, clean-up operations after bombs are expensive. But most expensive of all is unemployment. Where foreign companies or English companies or Irish companies would normally be investing in manufacturing, no-one's willing to touch NI. Workers get shot or beaten up. The IRA and/or Loyalists demand protection money, and burns places down if they don't pay. Stuff gets torched or blown up anyway, regardless: witness a coach operator last week whose company was trying to show off the beauty of NI to foreign visitors, when all his coaches got torched - what kind of example is that? So unemployment is at amazingly high levels in the North, while the South is finding plenty of foreign investment in IT and electronics.

Larry, she's certainly interesting, and she certainly has very strong views. I can't blame her for her implacable opposition to the British government - if the Army had been complicit in the shooting of myself and my spouse, I can't honestly say what I'd have done. Ian Paisley also has strong views, only he sees the whole scenario as a "Papist plot" instead of a plot by the British government. Both have such strong views that no amount of argument will change their viewpoint. But in between, there's the rest of the world, who'd like the chance to hear both sides of the story and make up our own minds.

I'd agree perfectly with Charles Parnell's words. But equally, no-one has the right to tell a nation, "You're marching in the wrong direction."

Grab.