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A prisão de Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor por suas associações ao escândalo Epstein está repleta de aspectos peculiares, tanto num sentido simbólico quanto num sentido histórico. A prisão foi realizada no dia do 66º aniversário de Andrew, em 19 de fevereiro de 2026, 666 dias depois daquele estranho evento em Londres, em 24 de abril de 2024, no qual um cavalo branco ensanguentado se soltou e cavalgou pelas ruas da cidade. Coincidência? Quem sabe?

A acusação, especificamente, envolve inúmeros relatos e evidências, deduzidos a partir dos e-mails de Epstein e de depoimentos de testemunhas, de que Andrew teria participado, acompanhado e colaborado no abuso sexual de mulheres de diversas idades, inclusive meninas potencialmente pré-púberes, e na tortura, também, de crianças e adolescentes – tortura com conotação ou contornos sexuais. Definitivamente, um comportamento atroz e repulsivo.

Andrew, que não é mais príncipe, duque, conde ou barão, tendo perdido todos os seus títulos e os direitos a eles associados, não obstante segue sendo irmão do Rei Carlos III, atual soberano do Reino Unido.

Se estamos nos referindo a polêmicas envolvendo a família real britânica, porém, a figura de Carlos III nos remete rapidamente à estranha morte da princesa Diana, que por um tempo foi esposa do rei britânico quando ele ainda era o príncipe de Gales.

Diana foi princesa de Gales e esposa do atual Rei Carlos de 1981 até 1996, quando se divorciou dele. Nunca saberemos os motivos reais do divórcio, para além das explicações dadas publicamente, as quais passam, por exemplo, por traições do príncipe, bem como pressões constantes da família real sobre ela. Mas aí então há aqueles que insistem que parte das tensões de Diana com a família real envolve segredos muito mais profundos sobre os quais a princesa teria tido conhecimento, incluindo aí o envolvimento de membros da família real com pedofilia e abuso sexual.

Não temos como ter certeza sobre qualquer coisa desse tipo, mas a amizade de Jimmy Savile com membros da família real britânica é, certamente, desconcertante. Jimmy Savile, falecido em 2011, foi um DJ e personalidade midiática britânica que trabalhava na estatal BBC. Mas ele é mais conhecido como sendo um pervertido aberrante que teria abusado sexualmente de centenas de crianças ao longo de décadas. Muito convenientemente, a mídia britânica esperou o falecimento de Savile para expor os seus “podres”. Quase como se todos já soubessem de tudo…

Savile teria conhecido pessoalmente o rei Carlos, quando ele ainda era príncipe, nos anos 70 do século XX, em eventos de caridade. Mas ele rapidamente teria se tornado surpreendentemente íntimo da família real, atuando como conselheiro em inúmeros temas. Segundo Diana, Carlos à época via Savile quase como um guru, um mentor. Savile chegou a dizer, porém, que ele conhecia a família real britânica há ainda mais tempo, desde os anos 60; tendo sido introduzido nos negócios da família real pelo lorde Louis Mountbatten, ex-governador de Burma…e notório pedófilo com predileção por menininhos.

Savile, porém, não era apenas um “consumidor”, ele era também um “fornecedor”. Pelo menos é o que diz seu sobrinho, Guy Marsden, que afirma que Savile organizava festas orgiásticas nas quais o diferencial era a “oferta” de crianças – meninos e meninas – a membros da elite britânica. O sobrinho de Savile diz crer que a maioria das crianças vinha de orfanatos e abrigos. Isso situa Savile numa função semelhante – ainda que talvez de menor envergadura – a Jeffrey Epstein. Savile, aparentemente, não era tão próximo de Andrew quanto ele era do príncipe de Gales, mas o próprio Andrew, numa entrevista infame realizada em 2019, afirmou ter passado muito mais tempo com Savile do que com Epstein.

Retornando a Louis Mountbatten, o tio-avô do rei Carlos III, além de amigo de Jimmy Savile, recentemente alguns vazamentos de arquivos levaram ao conhecimento público o fato de que ele teria abusado de dezenas, ou mesmo centenas de meninos. Uma parcela dos abusos teria ocorrido na Irlanda do Norte, no lar de crianças de Kincora, em Belfast – local em que o orfanato, aparentemente, servia como “bufê” de crianças para membros da elite política e militar britânica, tudo operado pelo MI5. O orfanato foi fechado em 1980, 1 ano após o lorde Mountbatten ser justiçado pelo IRA.

Não há muitos outros escândalos envolvendo pedofilia em conexão com a família real britânica, mas nem por isso deixa de haver outros escândalos sexuais graves.

Se voltarmos ainda mais no tempo, para o final do século XIX, chegaremos à época dos famosos assassinatos de Whitechapel. Canonicamente, 5 mulheres foram assassinadas, com o mesmo modus operandi, por um homem que tornou-se notório no folclore macabro como “Jack o Estripador”. Ninguém nunca foi preso, nenhum culpado foi descoberto, e as teorias abundam.

Uma das mais notórias, é a teoria que conecta os assassinatos à figura do príncipe Alberto Vítor, Duque de Clarence. Alberto, cuja reputação já foi historicamente afetada pela revelação de que ele frequentava um bordel masculino na rua Cleveland, em Londres, passou a ser considerado, com o passar do tempo, o principal suspeito de ser o notório serial killer. O seu conhecimento de caça seria suficiente para dar conta da parte técnica das mortes. Ademais, recentemente ficou comprovado que ele padecia de sífilis e/ou gonorreia, doenças sexualmente transmissíveis que, se não tratadas, levam à insanidade.

As teorias, em cima dessa hipótese, se bifurcam. Há alguns que alegam que o próprio assassino era o príncipe, acometido de surtos de insanidade que o levavam a retaliar contra prostitutas, vistas talvez, enquanto classe, como responsáveis por seu sofrimento. Outros alegam que os assassinatos, na verdade, teriam sido cometidos a mando da família real com o objetivo de ocultar escândalos sexuais nos quais o príncipe Alberto teria estado envolvido, incluindo um possível casamento secreto com uma plebeia, realizado numa taverna e testemunhado por prostitutas.

Diferentemente dos casos mais recentes, a verdade sobre Jack o Estripador e suas possíveis conexões com a família real britânica dificilmente virão à luz, especialmente por todo o tempo que já passou.

Ainda assim, certamente há algo de podre fluindo nas profundezas do Reino Unido da Grã-Bretanha e Irlanda do Norte.

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The imprisonment of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor for his associations with the Epstein scandal is replete with peculiar aspects, both in a symbolic sense and in a historical sense. The arrest was carried out on the day of Andrew’s 66th birthday, February 19, 2026, 666 days after that strange event in London, on April 24, 2024, in which a bloodied white horse broke free and rode through the city streets. Coincidence? Who knows?

The accusation, specifically, involves numerous reports and evidence, deduced from Epstein’s emails and witness testimonies, that Andrew allegedly participated in, accompanied, and collaborated in the sexual abuse of women of various ages, including potentially prepubescent girls, and in the torture, also, of children and adolescents — torture with a sexual connotation or overtones. Definitely atrocious and repulsive behavior.

Andrew, who is no longer a prince, duke, earl, or baron, having lost all his titles and the rights associated with them, nevertheless remains the brother of King Charles III, the current sovereign of the United Kingdom.

If we are referring to controversies involving the British royal family, however, the figure of Charles III quickly brings us to the strange death of Princess Diana, who was once the wife of the British king when he was still the Prince of Wales.

Diana was Princess of Wales and wife of the current King Charles from 1981 until 1996, when she divorced him. We will never know the real reasons for the divorce, beyond the publicly given explanations, which include, for example, the prince’s infidelities, as well as constant pressure from the royal family on her. But then there are those who insist that part of Diana’s tensions with the royal family involved much deeper secrets that the princess allegedly became aware of, including the involvement of royal family members with pedophilia and sexual abuse.

We cannot be certain about anything of that sort, but Jimmy Savile’s friendship with members of the British royal family is certainly disconcerting. Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011, was a British DJ and media personality who worked for the state-owned BBC. But he is better known as an aberrant pervert who allegedly sexually abused hundreds of children over decades. Very conveniently, the British media waited for Savile’s death to expose his “dirty secrets.” Almost as if everyone already knew everything…

Savile allegedly met King Charles personally, when he was still a prince, in the 1970s, at charity events. But he quickly became surprisingly intimate with the royal family, acting as an advisor on numerous topics. According to Diana, Charles at the time saw Savile almost as a guru, a mentor. Savile even said, however, that he had known the British royal family for even longer, since the 1960s; having been introduced to the royal family’s affairs by Lord Louis Mountbatten, former Governor of Burma… and a notorious pedophile with a predilection for little boys.

Savile, however, was not just a “consumer,” he was also a “supplier.” At least, that’s what his nephew, Guy Marsden, says, claiming that Savile organized orgiastic parties where the unique feature was the “offer” of children — boys and girls — to members of the British elite. Savile’s nephew says he believes most of the children came from orphanages and shelters. This places Savile in a role similar to — albeit perhaps on a smaller scale — Jeffrey Epstein. Savile, apparently, was not as close to Andrew as he was to the Prince of Wales, but Andrew himself, in an infamous 2019 interview, stated that he spent much more time with Savile than with Epstein.

Returning to Louis Mountbatten, the great-uncle of King Charles III, besides being a friend of Jimmy Savile, recent leaks of files have brought to public knowledge the fact that he allegedly abused dozens, or even hundreds, of boys. Some of the abuse allegedly occurred in Northern Ireland, at the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast — a location where the orphanage apparently served as a “buffer” of children for members of the British political and military elite, all operated by MI5. The orphanage was closed in 1980, one year after Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA.

There aren’t many other scandals involving pedophilia in connection with the British royal family, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other serious sexual scandals.

If we go even further back in time, to the end of the 19th century, we arrive at the era of the famous Whitechapel murders. Canonically, five women were murdered, with the same modus operandi, by a man who became notorious in macabre folklore as “Jack the Ripper.” No one was ever arrested, no culprit was discovered, and theories abound.

One of the most notorious is the theory connecting the murders to the figure of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence. Albert, whose reputation was historically affected by the revelation that he frequented a male brothel on Cleveland Street, London, came to be considered, over time, the prime suspect for being the notorious serial killer. His knowledge of hunting would have been sufficient to account for the technical aspect of the deaths. Furthermore, it has recently been proven that he suffered from syphilis and/or gonorrhea, sexually transmitted diseases which, if untreated, lead to insanity.

Theories based on this hypothesis then diverge. There are some who claim that the killer himself was the prince, afflicted with bouts of insanity that led him to retaliate against prostitutes, seen perhaps, as a class, as responsible for his suffering. Others claim that the murders were actually committed at the behest of the royal family in order to cover up sexual scandals in which Prince Albert had been involved, including a possible secret marriage to a commoner, held in a tavern and witnessed by prostitutes.

Unlike more recent cases, the truth about Jack the Ripper and his possible connections to the British royal family is unlikely to come to light, especially given all the time that has passed.

Even so, there is certainly something rotten flowing in the depths of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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While the dying Bobby Tohill, once one of the IRA’s top Belfast assassins prior to the IRA trying to assassinate him a couple of years back, prepares to meet his Maker over the next few days in North Belfast, Tommy Tolan, his one time friend and IRA comrade, comforts him by bringing Holy Communion to his sick bed.

What is noteworthy about that is that Tolan was caught by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in the process of kidnapping Tohill so that the IRA could torture and then kill him. In a remarkable act of forgiveness that would leave even Jesus scratching His head, these two lifelong “friends no matter what” have since metaphorically kissed and made up and Tolan, having previously failed in his mission to kill Tohill, is once again pulling up his sleeves to help his friend cross the Styx to the land beyond. As regards the PSNI, well Tolan, Tohill and their buddies spent the best years of their lives killing 314 or them and injuring a further 9,000 them but that, as they say, is another story from another time

Though that is but one tiny vignette of the old maxim that anyone who thinks they understand the Irish Troubles has not a clue what they are talking about, there is no shortage of other tales and many of them, in the case of Belfast at least, lead right back to Gerry Adams, long regarded as both the head of the IRA and, along with Martin McGuinness, MI6’s main plant within the IRA.

Take, for example, this account of Tohill’s involvement in the IRA’s murder of Joe O’Connor, as well as related IRA murders and their wholesale persecution of the extended Notorantonio family (of which O’Connor was a part) around the time of the Good Friday Agreement, when IRA knuckledragger Bobby Storey warned connected busybodies like former IRA gunman Anthony McIntyre to watch out if they too didn’t want bullets through their heads and that of their families. Sinn Féin and the IRA, who now complain about Irish mothers objecting to child abductions, essentially cleansed, with the full support of the British authorities, Adams’ Ballymurphy stronghold of all dissidents at the point of their guns; the Notorantonios, having had members murdered by Kitson’s Protestant counter gangs, then had more murdered by Kitson’s Catholic counter gangs.

As regards the Notorantonios, Francisco, one of their number, had been murdered by MI6 counter gangs in 1987, supposedly in a case of mistaken identity where Stakeknife, Freddie Scappaticci, had been the intended target. If you wonder why IRA intelligence could not figure out that MI6’s agents had got the wrong Italian, that is because IRA intelligence was controlled by Scappaticci, JJ McGee and other MI6 intelligence double agents like McGuinness, Donaldson and Adams further up the tree. If you have read thus far, all of this macabre Puckoonery. gets curiouser and curiouser.

As regards Storey, the IRA gave him a lavish funeral at the height of the Covid lockdown up the Falls Road and into Milltown Cemetery, even though Tohill had been earlier cremated and his ashes buried in Roselawn on the other side of dreary Belfast town. Giving their knuckledragging hero a huge send off, even as they demanded jailing other lockdown breakers, was just too good a PR opportunity to miss, lockdown and no mortal remains notwithstanding

Although the essential reading that is Ed Moloney‘s excellent TheBrokenElbow blog claims here that “it would be no exaggeration to say that the ability of Gerry Adams to lie and fool so expertly was the peace process’ most valuable asset”, it is essential, seemingly impossible though it is, to depersonalise all this betrayal so that we can better come to terms with its realpolitik. Though Moloney is right to claim there and in his excellent A Secret History of the IRA that they were two of MI6’s main Trojan Horses that allowed them win this “war”, we must go back to the beginning of the Troubles to get our heads around these arrays of enigmas.

Though this post about Jimmy Steele tells us that the early Provisionals were, like Tolan and Tohill, devout and God fearing Rosary bead rattlers, The Secret Army, this (viewable here) MI6 movie on the early Provisional IRA is noteworthy for a myriad of reasons, the chief of which is that MI6, the CIA and Irish military intelligence already had the measure of the Provos by 1970.

If we check the credits, we see Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, pictured here with his Sinn Féin TD printer cartridge hoarding son Aengus, honorably mentioned in this dishonourable film. More to the point was the movie was directed by J Bowyer Bell, who almost certainly was in the pay of MI6, the CIA and Irish military intelligence, a conclusion we can adduce from the fact that the movie was suppressed for all of 50 years until MI6’s BBC were recently ordered to resurrect it.

Although Adams and his surviving cronies would deny that MI6 had them infiltrated (they would say that, wouldn’t they?), the facts are that that 1972 movie implicated Martin McGuinness in serious criminal activity for which he was never jailed and it displayed on a platter the IRA’s Order of Battle to MI6. And that was in 1972, decades before the 1998 Good Friday surrender.

If we leave aside that the movie also shows, in the early 1970s remember, British MPs organising Kitson’s Protestant counter gangs to slaughter Ulster Catholics, we should also recall this was happening when the Irish Secret Service arrested at gun point senior British Embassy official John Wyman in the act of receiving top secret documents from senior Irish policeman Patrick Crinnion. Though Wyman should, of course, have been shot dead on the spot, the bigger picture is that MI6 and the CIA had already infiltrated the Irish security services and, as the mongrel fox saga shows with WEF big wig Peter Sutherland et al, the mainstream Irish political establishment as well.

Having infiltrated Ireland’s establishment, the task then was to also contaminate those outside the tent and, as this prophetic speech from former IRA boss (and Rosary bead rattler) Ruairí Ó Brádaigh shows, Adams, McGuinness and their fellow social climbers with guns were the means to do that. Whereas former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe has written best sellers on the IRA’s betrayal of their H Block hunger strikers (whose anniversaries, for what it is worth, occur at this time of year) and of their Stakeknife collusion, the real betrayal and infiltration took place outside the prison gates, when Adams et al opened Sinn Féin to every MI6, CIA and ASIO agent from Tipperary to Tasmania.

Here, for example, is O’Rawe opining on the evidence on McGuinness and others MI6 processed from The Secret Army movie, on what a gang of self serving hypocrital narcissists Sinn Féin are and what a conundrum Gerry Adams is.

Here is Adams in Kerry’s south west of Ireland praising Martin Ferris, his chief enforcer who “remains the most knowledgeable person on Gaelic games that I know. A hurling and football encyclopedia”. Not only was Ferris a low level thug on the football field but Adams’ own son was an inter county football and hurling player and manager for Antrim which, unlike Ferris’ immediate backyard, has a strong hurling tradition. Whatever about Adams’ son, Ferris missed out on playing with one of the GAA’s greatest ever teams and Adams, in the course of his own meanderings as well as that of his son, would have come across plenty of current and former players and managers in both hurling and football infinitely more knowledgeable than Ferris or his dysfunctional Australian wife who, Adams shamelessly exclaims, was imprisoned by nuns as a youngster.

But bluffing and bluster is Adams’ game. He tweets photos of himself in the bath with plastic ducks. He sells Easter eggs to mockingly commemorate those who died on hunger strike. And he gets his health needs paid for by his CIA benefactors.

Gerry Adams, like the coke smuggling “republican” gangsters of “republican” Kerry, has had a good war and, no doubt he could spin many fine yarns, like this one about his party lamenting the death of their kidnapping victims. He could tell good stories about promising revenge for Loughall, whilst he sold them down the river for the sake of good dental treatment, a couple of plastic ducks and, as one of his sidekicks now puts it, taming Irish democrats who object to CIA colonialism.

Though Gerry Adams is now 75, he will easily outlive Tohill, for whom the end is now as nigh as it gets. And, though Adams, as is his cynical wont, might appear at Tohill’s funeral for the photo op of lifting the coffin, as Tohill has eschewed the IRA’s trappings of black beret, gloves and tricolour, that might not be as photogenic as Adams and his plastic ducks might have wanted.

Whatever about Tohill, Adams, when his time comes, will get the mother of all send offs, just like McGuinness did before him, with Bill Clinton perhaps again leading the festivities and no matter whether, a la Storey, his mortal remains are in attendance or not. And though he will take some seedy stories about his child molesting family to whatever hole they toss him into, that slate can be wiped clean with a good Confiteor, after which “Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints and you my brothers and sisters” will put things right with Jesus and heaven’s other shot callers.

What cannot so easily be put to rights is that Adams and his equally pompous crew have been fully complicit in selling out the Irish people for some Yankee dental treatment, a couple of plastic ducks and the more substantial trappings of collusion Tohill, Toland and countless others with even an ounce of integrity never got to enjoy. Though Adams and his gang can blather about the hunger strikers, about good Republican like Tohill and Toland or about anything else that crosses their mercenary minds, at day’s end, it is their complicity with emasculating radical Ireland, her Rosary bead rattlers and other honest Joes and Janes included, that is the primary secret to the ongoing success of MI6’s Secret Army.

When I first visited Israel in 1976 after spending three years in Northern Ireland working on my second degree, I was struck by the similarities between the situations in the two countries.

It is therefore entirely appropriate that on the same day that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was exploding this week, an inquest in Belfast was reporting on a mass killing by the British Army in Belfast half a century earlier.

This was what became known as the Ballymurphy Massacre which took place between 9 and 11 August 1971, when 10 Catholics were shot and killed in the working-class district of Ballymurphy in west Belfast. The British government and army claimed for years that the dead were IRA gunmen or had been throwing petrol bombs. But the inquest determined this week that all the dead were innocent civilians – and the army’s actions were “unjustified”. Boris Johnson has apologised unreservedly for the killings.

The entire $90 billion a year U.S. intelligence “community” failed to pick up a clue this was going to happen even though the warning signs were staring them in the face:

My foreign editor of the time was not a fool. He was an outstanding success in the job and was a brilliant journalist and administrator, but he had almost no experience of the Middle East. He hit the roof over this “fantasy.” We argued back and forth over it but he was the foreign editor and he had the power.

You should be able to retrieve that article today from the LexisNexis data base. It says that Saddam may just possible take a tiny bite out of the Kuwaiti territories or oil fields to express his displeasure over Kuwaiti oil production policies. That’s all that was allowed to run. Within 48 hours, the Iraqi Army occupied all of Kuwait.

No one else anywhere in the $30 billion a year U.S. intelligence community or any journalist or analyst across the entire Middle East from Israel to Saudi Arabia had made such a prediction. I dined out on this story for many years.

Who was my source for this astonishing inside-track information? Was it the CIA or the Mossad? The Saudis or the Kuwaitis? No. My source was much better than any of them and he couldn’t have been better placed or more reliable. It was Saddam himself. All I had done was study his speeches over the previous month and conclude that he meant exactly what he said.

Why did I get Saddam’s speeches – in which he made no secret of his intentions – right, when the entire foreign policy, journalism and intelligence establishment in Washington got it all wrong?

Because I had an experience almost all of them lacked. I remembered from the days when I was a young crime and terrorism desk editor starting out in Belfast how some of the worst paramilitary terrorists in the Protestant Loyalist and Catholic Nationalist paramilitary groups used to wind themselves up with heavy drinking and talking themselves into murderous rages before going out on killing sprees. One in particular, Captain Lennie Murphy, commander of the West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Volunteer Force, more colloquially but far more accurately popularly known as “The Shankill Butchers.”

Martin Dillon, one of the finest investigative reporters ever to have covered Northern Ireland’s 30-year Troubles from 1968 to 1998, told the full hair-raising story of Murphy and his gang in his classic work “The Shankill Butchers.” (New York, 1989). Murphy was a torturer. He and his colleagues adapted the great Belfast tradition of quality light engineering to make garages and basements suitable for their own enhanced interrogation techniques. Recalling a popular morning television program for young children, the terrorists called these torture chambers “Romper Rooms.”

Senior police officers became all too familiar with these “Romper Rooms.” They always recognized the tell-tale signs in them. The concrete on the floors was recently laid. The floors were always laid at an angle or incline to ensure that the blood from the “interrogation suspects” could flow conveniently downhill to the drains. There was always excellent drainage.

Soundproofing to prevent the screams being heard was of course very simple although also superfluous. So overwhelming was the terror that the torture gangs induced that they knew no one would ever report them.

A long way from Lennie Murphy to Saddam Hussein? Not at all. For I remembered that Saddam was a man of action, not just words. He had been a prominent interrogator – we would say torturer – during the short-lived First Ba’ath Republic of Iraq in 1963, an era I vividly describe in my 2008 book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East.”

In June and July 1990, I read Saddam’s increasingly hair-raising rhetoric against Kuwait as his speeches were recorded and translated in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service publications of the State Department.

Reading those speeches, the memory of Lennie Murphy, so charismatic, so hail-fellow-well-met, so superficially charming in his favorite pubs of the Shankill Road district of West Belfast, came vividly back to me. For Lennie never killed cold. He needed a wind-up. He needed to work himself up into a killing rage.

First, there would be far too much “drink taken,” as the inimitable Royal Ulster Constabulary reports of the day would say, then the conversation would darken, the rage would mount and all the press, casual drinking buddies, groupies and hangers-on would correctly read the signs, stammer their nervous excuses and back out of the bar (It was usually ‘The Brown Bear’) into the damp, sharp and windy Belfast night.

No one would run. No one ever ran in the streets of West Belfast in those years, especially not at night: There were at least half a dozen different armed organizations, not to mention the Northern Irish police and the British Army, who would be tempted to shoot you on sight if you did.

Then, not long later, Lennie and his warrior “band of brothers,” more terrible and prolific in their killings than Jack the Ripper at his imagined worst, would pile into their black old Austin taxi cabs and cruise the streets, looking for anyone plausibly Catholic to kidnap and then “interrogate” for a few hours of horror before dispatching them with a near-decapitating slit across the throat. They were not called “the butchers” for nothing.

Covering stories like that is a long way from the pseudo-intellectual pretensions of the Washington think tanks and media community, with their supposedly-learned discussions of political theories out of Hans Morgenthau and his ilk. But it is a lot closer to the real world.

Lennie Murphy met his well-deserved end on November 16, 1982 at the hands of a Special Action Squad of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Provos. He was given a large paramilitary funeral by the UVF with a guard of honor. A volley of three shots was fired over his coffin and a piper played ‘Abide With Me.’ His tombstone carried the inscription ‘Here Lies a Soldier.’ Death notices in the Belfast Telegraph newspaper paid grieving tributes, including execrable sentimental poetry, to this serial-torture killer of more than 40 entirely innocent people.

It was less than eight years from Lennie Murphy’s timely demise to Saddam’s escalation of rhetoric before the invasion of Iraq. A different world, a different place. But I recognized the parallel.

My original, uncut story predicting Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait never ran in The Washington Times, so I never got a Pulitzer nomination out of it. That didn’t matter. I already had such a nomination, would eventually get two more, and have always been too blunt-spoken about the inanities of what passes for modern American journalism to ever expect to actually win one of the things.

As for the 17 U.S. major intelligence agencies (there are countless smaller ones too) with 100,000 full time employees in the Washington, DC tri-state area alone, their ignorance and incompetence is even greater today.

But I did learn an unforgettable lesson about the universal nature of psychopathic behavioral patterns. And I relearned an old, harsh, cruel lesson from the unforgiving Belfast streets:

When covering and watching the world, it is essential for personal and national survival to try and always think the unthinkable. Because sure as day follows night, somewhere around this vast and dangerous world of ours, there are always able people planning unthinkable things – and certain to do them.

The victory by Ireland’s leftwing Sinn Fein Party in the Republic’s recent election has not only overturned some 90 years of domination by the island’s two center-right parties, it suddenly puts the issue of Irish reunification on the agenda. While the campaign was fought over bread and butter issues like housing, the collapsing health care system, and homelessness, a united Ireland has long been Sinn Fein’s raison d’être. In the aftermath, Party leaders called for a border referendum on the subject.

But nothing is simple in Ireland, most of all, reunification.

For starters, the election’s outcome is enormously complex. Sinn Fein (We Ourselves) did get the largest number of first-choice votes—Ireland has a system of rated voting—but not by much. The center-right parties that have taken turns ruling since 1922—Fine Gael (the Irish Tribe) and Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny)—took 22% and 21% respectively to Sinn Fein’s 24.5%.

Although other progressive parties, like the Greens, also did well, it would be extremely difficult to form a government without one of the two big traditional parties. Fine Gael has ruled out working with Sinn Fein because of its association with the Irish Republican Army, but Fianna Fail is hedging its bets. Party leader Michael Martin was coy in the aftermath of the vote, saying he respected the democratic decision of the Irish people.

But getting from the election’s outcome to actual governance promises to be a difficult process, and one that, in the end, might fail, forcing yet another general election. Sinn Fein will be reluctant to play second fiddle to Fianna Fail—the latter won one more seat than Sinn Fein—since junior partners tend to do badly in follow up elections. Sinn Fein would have won more seats if it had fielded more candidates, but it was reluctant to do so because it had taken a beating in local elections just seven months earlier. The Irish lower house, or Dail, has 180 seats.

If governance looks complex, try reunification.

On the one hand, there are any number of roadblocks to reuniting the Republic and Northern Ireland, many of them historical. On the other hand, there are some very practical reasons for considering such a move. Sorting them out will be the trick.

Northern Ireland— called the Plantation of Ulster by Elizabeth I—was established in 1609 after driving out the two major Irish clans, the O’Neills and the O’Donnels, and seizing 500,000 square acres of prime farm land. Some 20,000 Protestants, many of them Scots, were moved in to replace them.

From the beginning, Ulster was meant to be an ethnic stronghold. Protestants who used native Irish labor had to pay special taxes and eventually even intermarriage with Catholics was discouraged. Protestant farmers got special deals on rent and land improvements—the “Ulster Privilege”—and Catholics were politically and economically marginalized. Hatred between the two communities was actively stoked by extremist Protestant organizations like The Orange Order. The name comes from William of Orange (William III), the Protestant husband of Mary II, queen of England.

This is hardly ancient history. Up until recently, Protestants controlled Northern Ireland through a combination of disenfranchising Catholics and direct repression. In 1972 a peaceful march in Londonderry demanding civil rights was attacked by British paratroopers, who gunned down 24 unarmed people, killing 14 of them. “Bloody Sunday” was the beginning of “The Troubles,” a low-scale civil war that took more than 3600 lives and deeply scarred both communities.

Getting past that history will be no easy task, even though the Good Friday Agreement ended the fighting in 1998 and established the current assembly in Northern Ireland, the Stormont. A recent agreement between the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the largely Catholic Sinn Fein Party has the Stormont up and running after a three-year hiatus.

The practical reasons for re-examining reunification are legion.

During the 2016 Brexit vote, Northern Ireland, like Scotland, voted to stay in the European Union (EU). A majority of Protestants voted to leave, but a strong Catholic vote tipped the scales to “remain.” Northern Ireland gets more than $780 million yearly from the EU to support agriculture and encourage cultural development and intra-community peace.

What was once one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world has been dismantled, and Ulster exports to the Republic are worth $4.4 billion a year. And because the border is open, the North has an outlet for its goods through the Republic. If Ulster follows Britain out of the EU, however, that will change. While there is agreement not to reestablish a “hard” border, Ulster’s imports from Britain will still have to be inspected to make sure they follow EU regulations.

The Protestants were promised by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that there would be no EU inspections, but “promises” and “principles” are two words that don’t easily co-exist with the word “Johnson.” The Prime Minister—no longer dependent on the DUP for votes in the London Parliament—double crossed the DUP and agreed to a EU inspection regime in the Irish Sea.

It is not clear how most of the people in both countries feel about reunification. Exit polls in the south found that most voters would support a referendum on unification.

Polls also show that many Northern Irish would consider it as well, although that sentiment is sharply divided between “unionist” Protestants and “loyalist” Protestants. The former are more concerned with stability than religious sectarianism, and if Brexit has a negative impact on Ulster—the outcome most economists expect—they might be open to the idea.

The “loyalists,” however, will certainly resist, a fact that gives Irish in the Republic pause. The south has gone through a long and painful economic recovery from the crash of 2008 and many are not enthusiastic about suddenly inheriting a bunch of people who don’t want to be there.

Sinn Fein argues that the Good Friday Agreement essentially says that the Irish have a right to choose without reference to Britain, and is pushing for a border referendum. Under the Agreement, however, if the vote to reunite fails, another can’t be taken for seven years.

Sinn Fein did as well as it did—particularly among the young—because of its political program to build 100,000 homes, freeze rents for three years, increase aid to education, house the homeless, improve health care, and tax the wealthy. Those are also issues in the north, where 300,000 people are currently waiting to see a medical specialist. Some15,000 medical workers recently went on strike to protest long hours and poor pay.

At this point, Ulster’s Sinn Fein has seven representatives to the British parliament, but refuses to send them because they would have to swear an oath to the Crown. If Sinn Fein has any hopes of getting enough people in the north to consider reunification, however, it will have to rid itself of such nationalist trappings, and convince the majority of Protestants that their traditions will be respected.

This may be less difficult than it was several years ago, because the Catholic Church in the Republic has gone into deep decline, pummeled by charges of child abuse and the exploitation of unwed mothers. The Catholic Church in the Republic fought hard against initiatives in 2015 and 2018 supporting gay marriage and abortion, and lost badly both times.

If unification is the goal, supporters in the Republic and Ulster will have to be patient, and show that they can deliver a better life for the entire community. That will have less to do with Ireland’s “long sorrow” ancient hatreds than with decent health care, good schools, affordable housing and well-paid jobs. All the Irish can get behind that program.

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog

With Britain having officially exited from the EU that seismic shift has fired up long-held claims for independence in Scotland and for the reunification of Ireland. Scottish nationalists, who want to remain in the EU, have stepped up demands for a referendum on independence from Britain since the general election in December when their party won by a landslide in Scotland.

Now the Irish question has gained powerful impetus from the historic victory of Sinn Fein in the general election this week held in the Republic of Ireland. The party came first in the popular vote, beating the two main establishment parties which have dominated government in Dublin for nearly a century. The two-party status quo has been smashed by Sinn Fein’s electoral breakthrough.

Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Fein, announced that the British government must now prepare for holding a referendum in Ireland on the issue of reunification of the Republic of Ireland with Northern Ireland. The latter has been British-held territory since 1921 when a separatist movement in Ireland failed to gain full territorial independence from Britain’s empire.

Sinn Fein, formerly the political wing of the guerrilla movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is the only party to have an all-Ireland structure. In the British election held in December, Sinn Fein became the leading party in Northern Ireland. Demographic changes over the past century have resulted in nationalists outnumbering unionists who want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

In the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein has now gained the biggest popular vote. It is capitalizing on the electoral results in both jurisdictions of Ireland to push for its long-coveted goal of full independence from Britain to create a united Ireland.

Due to the different electoral system in the Republic of Ireland – a system of proportional representation – there is as yet no party to emerge this week with a clear majority to form a government in Dublin. Sinn Fein won 37 seats out of a total of 160 in the Dublin parliament. The two traditional ruling parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, won 38 and 35 seats respectively. Fianna Fail picked up one more seat than Sinn Fein despite losing the popular vote because of transferred votes from other parties.

Sinn Fein’s success was due to the party tapping widespread popular disgust with the two centrist parties which are wedded to neoliberal economics and austerity. Aching social problems of economic inequality, chronic housing shortages and failing public services propelled voters to back Sinn Fein’s leftwing manifesto for “workers and change”.

The election was a popular rebuke for the two traditional main parties. Both lost significant seats compared with the last election in 2016. Sinn Fein’s gain was also matched by similar gains for a host of other small leftwing parties and independents.

McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, says her party is now aiming to forge a coalition administration with the other small parties to form a “people’s government for change”. If that can be negotiated successfully, that would see McDonald becoming the next prime minister of the Republic of Ireland.

Combined with a Sinn Fein majority in Northern Ireland the political configuration across Ireland now represents a formidable mandate for Irish reunification and independence from Britain.

There would seem to be an unstoppable dynamic of natural justice. Sinn Fein is the oldest political party in Ireland. Formed in 1905, it historically spearheaded the movement for independence when the whole of Ireland was formerly under British colonial rule. In a British general election in 1918, Sinn Fein won over 70 per cent of the vote across the entire island on a platform for independence. London rejected the mandate back then, which resulted in a bloody war of independence and the partitioning of Ireland to produce partial freedom for what became the Republic of Ireland and a British entity known as Northern Ireland.

Neither of the erstwhile two main parties in the Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, ever gave much advocacy to Irish reunification as an aspiration. Their shared political establishment devolved over the decades into parochial politics of cronyism and complacency.

For decades Sinn Fein was damaged politically because of the armed conflict in the North of Ireland between the IRA and British state forces. Many Irish voters were alienated by the association of politics and guns. The British and Irish news media, as well as political establishments, ran intensive campaigns to demonize Sinn Fein as “terrorist sympathizers”. There is still a residual antipathy among the Irish establishment. Even today, the two traditional parties have sniffily said they would not form a coalition government with Sinn Fein, owing its past connection with the IRA.

The conflict in Northern Ireland ended more than two decades ago in 1998 with the signing of a peace agreement, the Good Friday Accord. In that internationally binding accord, the British government committed itself to Irish unity if a majority of the population on the island agreed to it.

Many voters have evidently moved on from the past conflict. The old demonization trick against Sinn Fein has lost its allure. Social and economic issues have come to dominate voter concerns, and the two previous ruling parties are seen to be part of the problem, not the solution.

If Sinn Fein can head up the next government in Dublin, the question of Irish unity will be high on its to-do list. Negotiations to form a new coalition government in Dublin may take several weeks to pan out.

An eventual referendum which takes Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom in addition to the Scottish nationalists clamoring for independence spells the break-up of Britain’s constitutional amalgam of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

A major part of the dissolution dynamic has been British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s desire for Brexit which has unleashed separatist forces within the UK with a vengeance. In which case, it might be said: ought to have been careful what you wished for Boris!

Johnson has won a decisive mandate to “get Brexit done”, at least from London’s perspective. His party now has a substantial parliamentary majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons which will ensure delivery on his promise to execute Britain’s departure from the European Union on January 31. The actual final severance will take another year or two to complete because of negotiations between London and Brussels to definitively hammer out divorce terms. But at least Johnson can claim that he has consummated the final journey to leave the EU on January 31, a journey which began over three years ago when Britons had originally voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

However, crucially, the Conservative government’s mandate for Brexit only applies to England and Wales. It was in these two countries that saw the significant swing of voters from the opposition Labour party to Johnson’s Tories. Thus, in effect, his parliamentary majority stems from voters in England and Wales.

By total contrast, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the other two regions which make up the United Kingdom, the voters resoundingly rejected Johnson’s Brexit plans and voted for parties wanting to remain in the European Union. The outcome is consistent with the 2016 referendum results when Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted against Brexit.

Moreover, the latest election results have reinforced the call for independence in both Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Scottish Nationalists swept the election to enhance their already existing majority. They now control nearly 90 per cent of all seats in Scotland. Party leader Nicola Sturgeon says there is an unquestionable mandate to hold a second referendum for Scottish independence. The previous independence referendum held in 2014 was defeated. But Scottish nationalists claim that popular support for their cause has surged since the Brexit referendum in 2016. The Scots, by and large, do not want to leave the EU. To remain in the EU therefore necessarily means separating from the United Kingdom and its central government in London.

Boris Johnson has so far rejected calls for holding a second Scottish independence referendum. But his position is untenable. Given the parliamentary numbers for separation stacking up in Scotland, he will have to relent. Nationalists there are demanding the holding of another plebiscite as early as next year.

In Northern Ireland, the election outcome is perhaps even more momentous. For the first time ever, nationalist parties have a majority over pro-British unionist parties. Mary Lou MacDonald, the leader of Sinn Fein, the main nationalist party, says that there is now a clear mandate for holding a referendum on the question of Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom. Given the breakthrough nationalist majority in the latest election, that would inevitably lead to a United Ireland, from the northern state joining with the existing southern state, the Republic of Ireland.

Nationalists in Northern Ireland have long-aspired for independence from Britain. Northern Ireland was created in 1921 from an audacious act of gerrymandering by the British government when it partitioned the island of Ireland into an independent southern state (which became the Republic of Ireland) and a small northern state (which became Northern Ireland). The latter remained under Britain’s jurisdiction. The arbitrary, imperialist act of partitioning Ireland was done in order to give the British authorities in London a mandate to rule over a portion of Irish territory because in newly created Northern Ireland the pro-British unionists were in a majority over nationalists. It was British establishment cynicism par excellence.

The present political structure of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is only a century old. (Before that, the UK included all of Irish territory, but London was forced to grant partial Irish independence due to an armed insurrection.)

In any case, nearly a century after the setting up of Northern Ireland the natural demographic changes in its population have now created a majority for nationalists. The outcome of the election on December 12 is an undeniably huge historic event. For the first time ever, the nationalist mandate has overcome the unionist vote. The historic violation by British gerrymandering against Irish nationalist rights to independence and self-determination has finally been reversed in terms of electoral ballot.

When the Northern Ireland peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 to bring an end to nearly 30 years of armed conflict, enshrined in that treaty is the “principle of consent”. The British government is treaty-bound to abide by the electoral mandate of a majority in Northern Ireland wanting a United Ireland.

The threshold for triggering a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving British jurisdiction has now been reached. And nationalist parties are openly demanding that the legislative process to achieve that separation is now implemented.

Jonathan Powell, a seasoned British diplomat who oversaw the negotiations of the Good Friday Agreement, is not one for hyperbole. But in an interview with Matt Frei for Britain’s LBC Radio on December 14, Powell said he expected to see the “collapse of the United Kingdom” within the next decade, if not sooner. He was referring specifically to the electoral results in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Boris Johnson’s seeming victory in the British election is a double-edged sword. He may claim to have a mandate to cut off ties with the European Union. But the results also mean Scotland and Northern Ireland are empowered to now cut off their ties with the rest of Britain. The separation of those two states, leaving behind England and Wales, spells the end of the so-called United Kingdom.

Johnson’s election success is not “unleashing great potential” as he claims. Rather, it is unleashing an existential constitutional crisis for the British establishment.

On 8 May 1987 a Provisional IRA unit of eight men attacked a police station in the village of Loughgall in county Armagh 15 miles from the Irish border. One man drove a digger with a bomb in its bucket towards the building, half of which was destroyed in the explosion. But British forces had been informed of the time and place of the assault and SAS soldiers waiting in ambush opened fire killing all eight Provisionals and a civilian.

A quarter of a century later in county Monaghan just inside the border with the Irish Republic but not far from Loughgall, there was an incident proving that the earlier killings were still a live issue. In the last few days somebody, evidently an opponent of the IRA, used a bulldozer to demolish a substantial memorial to two IRA men, Jim Lynagh and Padraig McKearney, who had died in the SAS ambush.

A statement from the Loughgall Truth and Justice Campaign described the bulldozing of the memorial as a “desecration” and declared that “to do this to any of the Loughgall families is to do this to us all… but our memories and thoughts cannot be erased”.

The episode is significant because it shows the human and divisive reality of the Irish border and why its reappearance at the top of the political agenda is such a threat to long-term peace. The backstop is often discussed in Britain as if it was an issue primarily to do with trade which has been given exaggerated significance by Ireland and the EU in order to sabotage Brexit. Boris Johnson denounces it as being unacceptably “anti-democratic”.

In all cases, there is blindness towards the true reason for the toxicity of the dispute over the 310-mile border which stems from it being the physical embodiment of relations between nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants not just in the border region but in the north as a whole. That is why it has been one of the most fought-over and blood-soaked frontiers in Europe over the last 400 years. The map of the area is dotted with the names of battles ancient and modern. The destruction of the Loughgall monument shows that antagonisms have not moderated and, while some people feel strongly enough to build a memorial to two dead IRA men, others feel strongly enough to destroy it.

The visit of Boris Johnson to Belfast this week reveals once again the mixture of frivolity and ignorance with which the Brexiteers approach Northern Ireland. A new post-Brexit border is supposed to be monitored remotely by yet-to-be discovered technical means. But it should be self-evident that any CCTV or other gadget located on the border in a nationalist/Catholic area will be torn down in a few minutes.

The neutrality of the British government between nationalists and unionists was the foundation of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that ended thirty years of war in Northern Ireland in which two per cent of the population was killed or injured according to historians of the conflict (the same proportion of casualties in Britain as a whole would have meant 100,000 dead).

Careless of this sanguinary record, Johnson’s approach is entirely opportunistic: he will maintain UK neutrality but he expresses an undying commitment to the union. He and the new minister for Northern Ireland had a convivial dinner with the DUP leader Arlene Foster, on whom the Conservatives depend for their majority, before meeting the leaders of other parties. DUP activists make clear in private that they would like a hard Brexit regardless of economic cost because they want to keep as far from the Irish Republic and as close to Britain as possible.

Supporters of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) comfort themselves by saying that the Conservatives kowtowing to the DUP will last only as long as they rely on DUP votes in parliament. This could prove over-optimistic: Johnson leads a hard-right government riding a resurgent wave of English nationalism in which anti-Irish sentiment has always had an integral part.

This does not mean that a shooting war is going to restart any time soon. The unreconciled fragments of the IRA are disorganised and lack popular support. But the building blocks of the GFA are being kicked away one-by-one. The power-sharing executive and Northern Ireland Assembly are suspended and are unlikely to be resurrected.

The DUP understandably prefers to share power with the Conservatives in Westminster than with Sinn Fein in Belfast. Sinn Fein, for its part, does not want to be the junior and largely impotent partner of the DUP in an executive which would be complicit in implementing a no-deal Brexitwhich it opposes.

Sinn Fein can also see a substantial silver lining for its brand of Irish nationalism in the present crisis. Northern Ireland voted 56 to 44 per cent to stay in the EU and, when the Conservatives ignore this and pretend that the DUP’s pro-Brexit stance represents majority opinion in the province, they de-legitimise the union with Britain. This will not necessarily impel pro-Remain unionists to vote for a united Ireland, but it does mean that the significant minority of Catholics/nationalists who previously preferred to stick with the union is fast diminishing.

This will matter because in the not-too-distant future Catholic voters will outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland. The outcome of a border poll will become more incalculable. But even the prospect of one – strongly advocated by Sinn Fein – will be deeply polarising. Brexit has succeeded in putting Irish Partition back at the centre of the political agenda, something that Sinn Fein had failed to do despite decades of effort.

Does this mean that Irish unity is getting closer? This prospect is increasingly if naively raised in the British media. But demographic and diplomatic change will not be sufficient in themselves to transform the political balance of power: the unionists/Protestants could not ultimately maintain their rule in the north despite being the majority. Catholics and nationalists are unlikely to be any more successful against resistance to a united Ireland by a determined Protestant minority.

Possibly Johnson’s gamble on threatening the EU states with a no-deal Brexit will pay off. They have hitherto never believed that Britain would do anything so self-destructive and they might just look to some last-minute deal. But, even if Leo Varadkar did want such an agreement, he would find it difficult to sell to Irish voters, while the EU would be seriously weakened by caving-in to Johnson’s bombast after declaring for so long that it would do no such thing.

Ireland does not relish a confrontation with the UK, but it has little choice but to demand that the EU stick to its commitments and, on the other side of the Atlantic, energise the political influence of the Irish-American diaspora. The Clinton administration was an essential driving force for the GFA. The US speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said that she will block any Anglo-American trade deal if it creates a hard border or the GFA is imperilled.

Winston Churchill famously lamented how quarrels over the Irish border, symbolised by “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone”, had outlasted the cataclysm of the First World War. Brexit has made sure it is still there.

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