They're All "Nutters"

By on


When political Unionism was in-fighting and contesting the Maze peace centre, parades and flags the rest of Northern Ireland stood back in a state of non-comprehension. Yes the past is gruesome but the young people are looking forward. The in-fighters called themselves "nutters" when the reality all along is that it's political Unionism and loyalism who 'reall "nutters". Here's why.

The young people of Northern Ireland are among the ablest, brightest and best in the world. Their kind is what has made Northern Ireland what it really is, an ambitious, tolerant, cosmopolitan country.

Look at the 2013 A-level results, Northern Ireland students performed the best of the home nations. The same can be said of the GCSE students.

In Northern Ireland this summer – while jackboots and fanatics were spilling their sectarian bile on the streets and “chipping away” at our good name for the world to see – just short of 33,000 young people sat A-Level exams. That represents 59% of young adults of A-Level age in the north of Ireland, all of whom have made a conscientious, considered and calculated decision to further and better themselves.

Of these 33,000 young people over 10,000 achieved an A or A* grade. The total pass rate was 98.2%. 176,000 pupils sat GCSE exams. Of that age-group, 28% attained an A grade, 77% an A to C grade.

Class of 2013 secured a performance that is historically-typical of Northern Ireland’s young people. If we look back over the last decade, we can see that we have a huge demographic in the hundreds of thousands who are incredibly ambitious and well-educated. This is saying the obvious. But this needs to be said, and said very, very clearly.

For this is the silent, majority demographic who have elevated themselves above the maddening, tear-your-eyes-from-your-sockets tribal politics. An internationalist demographic that is indicative of the normal Northern Ireland.

With that said, we now need to ask: What are the Class of 2013 working towards?

These Young adults have invested time and effort into their future with a very clear purpose in mind. They want to cash-out on their investment. They want an end result. They want a secure and successful future.

But here’s the problem: To build a secure and stable future you need to have strong foundations. A stable, functioning government, a forward looking legislature, effective checks and balances, a strong, outward looking economy, a civil and open society, participatory democracy and a sound social contract.

Northern Ireland doesn’t have any of this. The Class of 2013 faces this inheritance of dysfunction and sectarianism, both political and economic. What we have is a lumbering Stormont legislature, a sectarian satanic mill full of “nutters”, and indulged fringe communities, outwardly racist, rogue and nationally chauvinist.

The link between the two is explicit. Political parties have exported practice and policy to power-play thugs, fanatics and dysfunctionals. Sacrificing good government and by effect, sacrificing the functional and most capable in society.

And because of this misery much of the recent A-Level optimism is misplaced. The hard reality of Stormont and community dysfunction means that, long-term, the Class of 2013 has little opportunity to cash out on their investment and make a future in Northern Ireland.

And this is the tragedy and tyranny of Northern Ireland’s barbaric, sectarian politics. Many of our 33,000 A-Levels students will now be leaving the country for mainland Britain, Europe, Australia or America, never to return – just as thousands before them have done so. Others will opt to study locally but will be forced to leave as economic migrants. Others tired from the tedium if sectarian politics will leave.

Just consider this comment left on a Guardian editorial on the Maze, made by a student of Queen’s University Belfast. This is the story despair and desperation we hear and see time, after time, after time – our best brightest leaving en masse.
“I’m a student at Queen’s [University Belfast]. When I’m finished with my degree I’m probably going to get the hell out of Northern Ireland. I’m sick of the same old sectarian bullshit arguments peddled over and over again.”


Slugger blogger David McCann spelt it out here:
"Northern Ireland greatest challenge is the loss of the best of our next generation…"
And as Stephen Nolan asked:
"Are the life opportunities of a young Catholic or Protestant not more important than whether a parade gets up a road?"
Yes it's all about economic opportunities. To save our young people it's not the flegs or the parades or the Maze - it's the economy, stupid!

As Theresa Villiers said:
"It's hard to see how Northern Ireland can reach it's full economic potential while sectarian division continues to spill out on to the streets with disgraceful scenes of rioting and violence." 
To end this haemorrhaging and cleansing of talent, young people need to face down Northern Ireland’s satanic legislative mill of managed sectarianism and the shower of conspiratorial fanatics that smash up our good name.

Who serves or speaks for the internationalist Hannah Nelson generation? We need something different. We need real economic opportunity. A system that will give an economic end-result to Northern Ireland’s best and brightest. For that to happen we must demand change to the status quo of “Newtonian” politics. As Liam Clarke said, we need a statesman or woman who can bring about a massive shift.

We need new thinking, away from the “idée fixe” of sectional politics and separatist identities. As Brian Rowan said, “we need thinkers to set us free and to save the next generation from our bitterness.” A “going to moon” idea as Eamonn Mallie put it.

But I pose it that we do have the ideas: The young people have shown how to do it. They are truly internationalist, non-contentious, non-aligned people confident in their layered, shared and overlapping identities. They’re the inheritors of the Rosa Luxemburg philosophy that looks beyond strict, set and septic nationalistic notions of identity. And this internationalism is the province-wide consensus, shared by the ambitious and outward-looking Catholic and Protestant young people.

Madness is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Our politicians are “nutters” if they think that their same old ideas can give a solution to our problem. The time has come to say that those who created this problem cannot fix it.

Alex Kane and Justine McCarthy have said it too. Only the young people can deliver a functional society because “their (Adams, Robinson et al.) personal baggage is becoming the biggest obstacle on the path to peace.”

Young people need to fight for real economic opportunity, for a shared society and for functioning government. But what happened on the streets this summer is more than just about jobs and economic opportunity, this has become a civilisation question – ‘Northern Ireland is in big trouble.’

And when civilisation meets barbarism either could win; but as Brian Rowan said, “To that question, there [can only be] one answer.”


[Written by Brian John Spencer and originally published on Eamonnmallie.com]
2 comments
Labels: , , ,

Northern Ireland's Shame - Not In Our Name

By on


Remember loyalists smashed up the city centre? Here's a critical reflection on that event. Northern Ireland is a diverse, tolerant and cosmopolitan country. The modern generation - ambitious, well-educated, internationalist and outward looking - have made it this way. But we in Northern Ireland are not truly free. Like James Joyce said 100 years ago, history is the nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

No matter what bone fide efforts are done to better Northern Ireland, the stability and fortune of the province is forever tied to and dependent on the mood of delinquent extremists. Chinless throwbacks always ready to restart the religious wars of the 17th Century that ravaged Europe but still linger here; always ready to plunge us back into chaos; always ready to shame our name.

A jackboot lunatic class who keep the young and ambitious hostage and prisoner to a totalitarian anarchism, fuelled by no more than base ignorance and mindless idealism.

Yes, young people in Northern Ireland aren't truly free. Religiosity and violence has retarded our education system, segregated communities and minds into green and orange, and viciously retarded the economy.

To paraphrase Epictetus the Greek philosopher, only the educated and those with a good job are truly free. Many of the most capable and the most intelligent cannot get a job in Northern Ireland. I despair for them and shed even more despair for the less-capable, less well educated. For they are not truly free. Just as the young, educated middle classes in the Maghreb states, Eastern Europe and Asia are subjugated by autocratic dictators, so it is that the young, educated, middle-class in Northern Ireland are subjugated by "barbaric sectarian leaders" and the feral communities that they play-out to.

2013-08-11-BrianJohnSpencerIanPaisleyNorthernIreland.jpg

But there's an important difference here: The educated middle classes around the world are standing up and saying no. Just read Andrew Sullivan here and Francis Fukuyama here. It's happening: a global middle class uprising. It's real. Except in Northern Ireland it's not. We, the middle class in Northern Ireland, are a stoic, accepting, over-tolerant, fatalistic lot, devoid of critical faculties.

Ready to put-up and shut-up as opposed to stand-up and put-out. But this silence and inactivity can't go on: Delinquent loyalists and republicans cannot be left to shame and defame Northern Ireland. Their shame is Absolutely NOT to be done in my name.

I want to make a few points on how the moderate, ambitious, cosmopolitan classes can push back against the reactionary throwback politicians and street thugs that continually soil the good name of Northern Ireland.

My first point. People in Northern Ireland are well known and reputed for their enduring cynicism and skepticism. A particular condition to the people of Northern Ireland. We pride ourselves on our modesty, our civil tongue and reticence. But Northern Ireland young people need to rid themselves of this tired, old cloak of endless cynicism and skepticism.

This congenital tendency for cynicism is deeply tied down by the traditional Northern Ireland culture that has said "step in line, know your place". But nowadays we live in a changed world: One where opportunities and resources abound. And so we must change our minds to the new world; we must believe we can do anything, anytime and at any age. Mark Zuckerberg didn't need a degree, internship, masters, PhD or apprenticeship to create a multi-million if not billion dollar company in his bedroom.

We can't rely our educators and universities to properly prepare use for the job market for as the Harvard Business Review said, 'Our Future Workforce Is Stuck in a Pattern of Mediocrity.' Young people need to start thinking for themselves, use their initiative and realise they can achieve anything. As Thomas L. Friedman said in the New York Times: 'Need a Job? Invent It'.

We must combat and resist the status quo and the associated tragedy of cynicism; for the cynicism buttresses and reinforces the prison walls that the delinquent classes have erected for functional society in Northern Ireland. As Selwyn Duke said in the American Thinker: "What the cynic mistakes for the walls of his fortress are really the boundaries of his prison."

My second point. We need to look again at what's happening across the Muslim world and the changes bedding down in that land. In the Muslim world the traditional split has been between Sunnis and Shi'ites, a deadly warfare going back 13 centuries.

But alongside this traditional split has emerged the modern societal split: One between theocracy and modernism. Explaining what has and is happening, James Lewis said in the American Thinker:
"Modernism comes up for every Muslim who can turn on the television or surf the web. It is spreading because science and technology are spreading, and secretly, it is undermining the Dark Ages of the Muslim priesthood. People named Mohammed are being indoctrinated in ancient madrassahs against the modern world, but they are also beginning to do first-rate science, and those two belief systems are not compatible. The modern world is now invading even the most medieval minds."

The quote above applies perfectly to the backward looking people and communities of Northern Ireland. Young people all across Northern Ireland are being indoctrinated with haunting bigotry against the modern world. Watch the video below, of young children all in the single-digit age bracket spouting naked bigotry and sectarian cliches which can only have been heard from parents and older family members.


In the face of this we need to spread enlightenment ideals and help to invade and broaden their minds and horizons. We can see how well the broadening of minds has serviced the Muslim world already. It can be done here too.

My third point. We need to study and emulate the anti-communists who liberated Czechslovakia under the banner of the Charter 77 movement. A movement spearheaded by Václav Havel who tore down the lunacy and absurdity of the communist dictatorship without lifting an arm; but through dissent expressed through satire, poetry, irony and humor.

This peaceful dissident campaign can be typified by the W. H. Auden poem, 'The Ogre' which captures both the horror as well as the inherent weakness of that system:

'The ogre does what ogres can, 
Deeds quite impossible for any man,  
But one prize is beyond his reach:  
The ogre can never master speech.

About a subjugated plain, 
Among the suffering and the slain, 
The ogre stalks with hands on hips, 
While drivel gushes from his lips.'


We need the same publicly minded and spirited citizens that coalesced under the Charter 77 movement. The same brave and responsible citizens of Czechoslovakia that showed the naked and corrupt power structure.

We too in Northern Ireland need freedom from the ever present tyranny of loyalist and republican ogres who impose a way of life that is totally unacceptable to functional 21st Century life.

To conclude. What we saw of Northern Ireland on televisions across the world was the doings of the backward forces of pre-history. These people do not represent majority Northern Ireland. These people represent the worst in society. Yet they do it time after time after time after time. The same stupid, narrow, shortsighted minority fighting their stupid but vicious, venal and venomous turf war.

It will never end if we let them behave like this. So we must stand-up, put-out and battle for tolerance, just as other subjugated, non-free young people are doing the world over.


[This was written by Brian John Spencer and originally published on The Huffington Post UK]
4 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

They're Not British, They're Brutish

By on

On December 3 2012, vulgar and violent forces appropriated the Union flag and turned it from an icon of Britishness, into a symbol of illiterate, drink-sodden brutishness. 

Since then, civilised Northern Ireland has stood back in a state of silent bewilderment. The swamp of suspicion, superstition, non-think and non-speak has been breath-taking; The Niagara of sentimentality, solipsism and self-pity mind-boggling. 
In the face of the barbarism and nonsense-speak, civil society dare not criticise. The cult of respectability abides. "The brave [not so] new orthodoxy of whatever you say, say nothing" as Brian Walker called it, must be held. But civilised Northern Ireland needs to wake up and push back against the cult of violence and misinformation. And below is an outline of why you should and why you'd be right to do so. 
Firstly, for those soft-bellied multiculturalists scared to say anything, here's why the Twaddle camp and associated protests are a nonsense. The political philosopher Edmund Burke was a pointed critic of the French Revolution, an event he characterised as mindless anarchy. For him, legitimate freedom was the freedom to do positive practical acts in society. It was not the liberty to enjoy freedom abstractly, obstructively or destructively. For Edmund Burke, the doctrine of abstract rights as advocated by French revolutionaries was folly. 
Is marching and protesting wherever you want, whenever you want, for whatever reason you want constructive? Is the associated and farcical civil rights movement fighting for a non-cause, costing thousands of pounds a day to police, constructive? 
Secondly, for the ever-indulgent middle-highbrows scared of expressing an opinion, here's why the marching debate is a farce. The freedom of association and of public procession is not an absolute right. Those who want to enjoy civil rights must discharge certain responsibilities. Elementary duties like civil behaviour, respect and inclusivity. The enjoyment of the right to procession also requires people to meet and accommodate the rights of other peoples.  
As Ian Coulter of the CBI asked, "Where are the rights for the people trying to trade and build businesses?" 
But evidently these people claim a special, exclusive and absolute right, and they claim it at the point of force and by violence. It's very much like hardline Muslims; think of the Muhammed cartoon, offend them and feel their wrath. This is exceptionally solipsistic and must be resisted. 
Thirdly, to those who think the 12th of July has degenerated into a festival of drink-yer-f**king brains out, you'd be right. I'm saying the unsaid and so it needs said. So here it is: much of the parading isn't culture, for it’s neither open or tolerant, nor is it inclusive - not even for tourists and moderate unionists. This demands a serious critique. And here's the third party authority for my offensive observations.
The Belfast City Centre Management Report made a number of striking, but hardly surprising, observations on the state of the 12th:
One: "Visit Belfast received complaints from tourists who talked of "an intimidatory atmosphere" and "louts roaming around drunk"."
Two: "The condition of the public realm after the parades also remains a key issue."
Three: "50% of businesses reported an unfriendly family atmosphere and several cited rising tensions as being a turnoff for some consumers."
Four, a non-native resident commented on these findings:
"As someone who has lived here for quite a long time now, I can confirm that 12th July is absent a positive atmosphere. It's militaristic, nasty, sometimes vulgar, and not much fun." 
In The Irish Times, Eamon McCann recalled the anecdote of the Protestant who called the Orange Order a "bunch of bigots quite undeserving of respect."
Fourthly, for those who think that loyalists represent everything that Britain stands against, you'd be right. For those who think that the dysfunction reaches top office, you'd also be right. Newton Emerson said that "it falls to unionist leaders to explain that the world has changed but not ended." But where Martin McGuinness calls out dissident republicans as "traitors to Ireland", people like deputy Lord Mayor Christopher Stalford and Junior Minister Jonathan bell prop up the brutality.
Unionism needs to do a McGuinness and reproach the boondocks and call them out for what they are: traitors to Britain. But if they cant do it they must take responsibility for not calling to book the jackboots on the ground. Otherwise political unionism will stand as apologists for thuggery and the real traitors to Britain. 
Fifthly, if people think the campaign of self-pity, misinformation and exaggeration is sickening you'd be right. If we look at the facts, the situation and events have been grossly pulled and stretched out of proportions. 
As Newton Emerson recently noted in The Sunday Times, unionist parades outnumber republican parades by fifteen to one. We also know that 550 parades were held on the 12th. Of those, only minor restrictions were made. To then say that civil rights have been curtailed is both grotesque and absurd.  
To conclude. When you try to run communities on isolation, suspicion and a rejection of modernity, everything grinds to a halt.
When that happens, the failed community isn't going to blame the failure on itself. No. They'll say it's the neglect of others and a conspiracy against their culture. Then they’ll want to project violence and brutalism outward. But we can't be indifferent about that. We can't be indifferent about rogue communities and rogue ideas and rogue concepts. 
All the burbling and babbling of police brutality and civil rights oppression is abject nonsense and an offence to modernity and the people who've brought us here. Loyalism is not the product of unemployment, but the creators of it. Loyalists are not the suppressed but the suppressors of modernity. 
They hold us, the whole of normal Northern Ireland, hostage. Yet we don't say anything. We are in a fight with fanatics and you had better get used to it. As Alex Kane said, Northern Ireland is in big trouble. Our collective welfare is being attacked and undermined by a fanatical movement. You either stand up and show the nonsense for what it is, or you capitulate to the enemies of modernity and let all the good that has come to the north of Ireland unravel. 

9 comments
Labels: , , , ,