Thanks IRA, now go away

Well I was going to use this spot to slag Sinn Féin, because, well, because it's fun and because they're a bit more thin skinned than other parties and you feel that somewhere out there, someone will notice. Whereas Fí­anna Fáil delight in the deserved contempt poured upon them by pretty much anyone engaged in any critical thinking as it demonstrates to their satisfaction that they have us all by the balls.

But that would be churlish on a day when we should be thanking Sinn Féin for being the first party to the Irish conflict to demilitarise. Don't get me wrong, the British army have partially demilitarised the situation and the RUC has been disbanded (or renamed...). Sinn Féin / the IRA have not policed the community for the last while and when the loyalist community attacked, urged on by the DUP and the Orange Order, the PSNI did what the RUC would not and took the hits: the blast bombs, the petrol bombs, the gunfire, the bricks. And nobody was burnt out of their houses. This is 40 years of progress from times when the 'police' in NI would stand idly by while an anti-catholic pogrom was going on.

I noticed the resurgence of an issue that died out several years ago: how do we know if this is all the IRA's cache of arms? Let me remind anyone who has forgotten how that question was answered before: as part of the Lockerbie deal the Libyan government gave the inventory of arms sent over to the British government (they were always disappointed by the use it was put to - they gave enough for a war, not harassmentment). That, added to US intelligence, meshed with UK, Irish and, significantly if we take the decommisioning bodies word, the IRA's own quartermaster's report, to such an extent that it is a dead issue. It was dead five years ago and the DUP's attempts to reanimate the corpse are comical. Pick your favourite zombie flick here.

Let me say that if and when the loyalist terrorists want to destroy their weapons it won't be a major issue either - as long as British Army intelligence hand over the details of just what they got them.

Now what are the DUP going to do? Paisley declared deChastelain's mission a 'complete failure'. Let's face it, Paisley's policies have been a complete failure. His supporters take to the streets claiming they are disenfranchised. Well disenfranchised has a meaning: you have no vote. They can vote for Westminster (obviously going to be unsatisfactory - too few of them to really influence the state) and for the NI Assembley. They chose to scupper the assembly and use their influence to deny the people of Northern Ireland a democratic voice. Well done Ian. As a vox pop in Ballymenagh, a town untouched by Ireland's recent economic prosperity, in the grip of gangsters and loyalist terrorists, a heroin hellhole, put it 'he's not seen us far wrong'. How wrong could you be missus? How wrong?

Back to slagging Sinn Féin soon.