What the fuck is the world coming to when four-year-old girls can’t walk to school without being attacked. I can’t even write a decent rant about this, I’m too sickened by it.
The worst thing is not one Unionist politician (as far as I am aware) has stepped forward to condemn the Ardoyne Protestants, instead they’re trying to apportion blame to both sides. Well sorry but whatever grievances they might have (and I am quite willing to concede some of them may be legitimate), there is no fucking excuse for taking it out on children going to school.
Congratulations folks you’re doing a better recruitment job for the Real IRA than anything the Real IRA themselves could do.
To be honest with you, I have never really had a firm understanding of what the issues are in Ireland. Im not really sure what the big fight is about. I do know that people are idiots though. These articles prove that.
ruadh, as soon as I saw the topic name, I knew exactly what you were talking about. I saw this on the news this evening (ITN on PBS, I’m sure no American news covered it) and I was absolutely shocked. I personally have had people harrass and threaten me from behind the safety of a police barricade, and let me tell you, it’s not a picnic. But I knew what I was doing. I was twenty years old, and it was my choice to do what I was doing (probably a bad choice, in retrospect; long story). But these are little kids, it’s the first day of school - which is bad enough already - and here are these adults you don’t even know screaming at you. The clips of small kids clinging to their mom and dad, sobbing hysterically were just pitiful. I guess the protestors have some sort of principle, but there’s a limit, folks. And screaming a small children trying to go to school is way over that limit.
Phlip, what the fight here is about is that Protestants in the area are claiming they have had trouble from the Catholics in the area. Which might be true, I don’t live there, I dunno. But I am damn sure it is not the Catholic schoolchildren giving them trouble. Basically they are trying to make the children take an alternate (longer) route to school (or better yet, go to school somewhere else). Just like in the American South in the 50s, when black people had to enter places through the back door. It’s absolutely disgusting.
And before anyone asks, yes, I would say the same thing if it were Catholics blocking Protestant schools.
For whatever reason, protestants in Ardoyne decided to organise a protest that was bound to create very newspaper friendly photos of small children crying as grown men shouted abuse at them. They’ve then been surprised by an almost universal wave of condemnation of their actions.
I say almost universal, because in defence of these actions some Unionist politicians have claimed that the situation was provoked by attacks and abuse from nationalist activists on the Protestant Glenbryn community.
Even if this were true, they’ve effectively dismissed their cause completely. What’s going to get more sympathy: grown men claiming to have been victimised or photos of children crying as they’re led through a hate filled mob under army protection.
Ruadh, I don’t think wankers is strong enough. Idiotic, hate-filled scum is closer to the mark.
Agreed this is detestable, I knew there were problems but I had missed any reports of actual rock throwing at the kids.
My question is: Why is this an issue now? How did the kids get to school before the holidays?
If they are taking the same route as before, what is the rationale for the Ardoyne protestants protest?
Assuming there is one of course. Bunch of twats :mad:
Sick twits. On Czech TV last night they showed a bottle being deflected off of a police shield held right over a mother and daughter. The close-ups of the children was absolutely frightening- I, tough-guy male, almost cried. Those girls were TERRIFIED. Bring in the National Guard (or the UK equivalent) and beat those assholes.
How much hate does it require for a grown man to make a little girl cry? How do they think its ok? I dont understand. All this because they were born to Catholic parents?
The ignorance is astounding.
Being brough up catholic, and going to Catholic school(picturing angry nuns) is enough abuse, they dont need to heap on more!
The cops should have shot every damn one of them(bottle throwing bastards).
As a parent I dont think I would have sent my kid through that gauntlet, which is probably what they were counting on, but still, I wouldnt subject my kid to potential harm to prove a point.
Something needs to be done over there, this is sad sad sad, and a whole new generation of hate and prejudice is forming in front of our eyes on television.
It started toward the end of the last school term. Community leaders were in talks last week to try to prevent it happening again. As you can see the talks were less than successful.
It isn’t the first time children have been deliberately targeted. Last month in another nationalist area of Belfast a nursery school was fired on by the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist paramilitary (or I should say allegedly by the UDA; as the Northern Minister keeps telling us the UDA are still on ceasefire :rolleyes: )
More of the same at the Ardoyne school today. There was also a pipe bomb explosion near the school (a police officer was injured).
In an earlier thread Twisty made the point that the main stumbling block toward peace in the North isn’t the existence of armed paramilities. It’s the hatred and bigotry which led to the creation of those paramilitaries. Obviously there is still a long long way to go and it will be a miracle if those little girls don’t grow up returning that hatred, which is quite possibly the saddest thing of all.
This thing sort of sums up the problems people like me face when thinking about the Northern Ireland problem.
When I see grown men and women hurling abuse, threats and actual missiles at five-year-olds, my first reaction is to think, “You people want to be part of my country? I don’t want you in my country! You claim to be following my religion? I don’t want you in that either!”
And the concept of a united Ireland seems like a damn good idea… except… what’s the Republic of Ireland ever done to me, that I should foist these australopithecines onto it? And (more seriously), wouldn’t they be just as bad, if not worse, under Irish rule? (At least, while they’re claiming to be British, they have to pretend to respect British law… not that they’re pretending very well at the moment.)
I can see the problem. How I wish I could see the solution…
I was so pissed when I saw that on CNN. Grrrr! Fuckers. Throwing shit at kids… GRRRR!!! By what definition of ‘human’ do these people qualify, again? Remind me?
I’m an Irish-American and everytime I see things like this, an idea starts floating around my mind. First off, the way i understand it, the IRA gets much of its support from sympathetic Irish-Americans(I know this WAS true, please correct me if this is no longer so). So, what if all these supporters instead set up a fund to help Irish Catholics in Ulster relocate to the Republic? I know this is an unpleaseant solution on many levels, that is why i spend so much time wondering if it would work. What issues would this raise? Would many N. Irish Catholics accept this option? What political problems would arise? I recognize that there is the question of “why should they have to move?”, but I see shit like this and it breaks my heart. I would think that I am not the first person to come up with this idea, has it ever been tried? oh and please accept my appologies for the hijack.
I wonder why the parents of these children were deliberately forcing them into such an unpleasant situation ? It’s pretty contemptible to throw bottles at kids on the way to school, but only the most depraved parents would endanger their own children by using them as tools to promote their political agenda. Just who was it that initiated the much bemoaned “loss of childish innocence” here ?
This behavior makes me embarrassed to be a member of the same religion.
But Squink, I don’t get why the parents are at fault for making their kids part of the battle. The kids are just trying to go to their school, for chrissakes. Just have a normal school day at their Catholic school, which unfortunately is located somewhere that requires them to pass through “enemy” territory. That’s forcing them into the battle? What? These kids deserve to go to school and have a normal childhood. You can’t keep them home forever (although I am sure that some of these parents, had they known how it would turn out, would’ve kept them home. Maybe they overestimated the fairness and maturity of the dickwads).
According to some of the news reports there was a convenient alternate route available to the kids which did not involve “passing through enemy territory”. Some kids took this route and were supposedly not harassed. This is not the first time there have been problems getting the kids to school, so the best face the parents can put on it is by claiming stupidity. That explanation sounds pretty unlikely given the media attention lavished on the event. It almost seems as if the network photographers et.al. were given advance warning that a big news event was going to be staged for their benefit. Maybe I’m just being CrankyAsAnOldMan, but it looked like deliberate provocation of an already tense situation to me. There are plenty of dickwads on both sides over there.
-A pox on both their houses.
As far as I can tell, it comes down to the cows being fed the chicken shit, and the chickens being fed the cow shit. Just a whole lot wallowing in a whole of shit by animals to stupid to realize that they are all on the road to slaughter.
