1. Yes I am sure many would – there is no signifcant consistituency that ever supported the UVF in England, and their prospects of gaiing support would be even lower now after the settlement which has been reached.

2. I know the Irish Republicans / Nationalists tend to blame the English for the actions of the Brits but such a book would be equally relevant for those from other British nations, given that the UVF purported to act for the benefit of Britain (and given that the Scots have more connections with, and intereset in NI than the English).

3. The identity of Ulster Unionists/Prods/Scots-Irish has always been a complex mixture of Britishness and Irishness. I see them as an ethno-national group distinct from Irish Catholisc north and south and with much in common with Scottish Protestants. Different from Finchley yes – but is Finchely the ultimate in Britishness? Quite a few synagogues in Finchley. Newport, Glasgow, St. Ives, Southall and Kilburn are also British but very diferferent.

4. Irish Republicanism was (and to an extent remains) an undemocractic or even anti-democratic movement, obsessed with romantic nationalism and the tactics of terrorism. Its consistuency was/is reactionary, anti Protestant, anti English and Catholic. Not fascism, nor communism but more in common with reactionary totalistarianism than progressive democractic politics of social democracy and democratic socialism.

I mostly share the sentiments that so obviously underpin your comment, but to be fair the majority of British people it’s not so much that Loyalist gangs are cut more slack, it’s that the media in the UK did such a piss-poor job of reporting the conflict that your average Brit thinks UVF is a broadcasting frequency.

The truth is that most Brits couldn’t give a flying toss if NI remains part of the UK or becomes part of a united Ireland. It really was ever thus.

1) Irish citizens, not in the same State as the perps here, are responsible for the (tricolour waving) Real IRA in a way that English people in the same State as the Union Jack waving UVF are not? Why not? Would English people sign a book saying “not in my name” if the UVF started up, and if not why not?
2) Is this the same logic that sees Northern Ireland as British as Finchley but with everybody being Irish when engaged in terrorism, UVF included?
3) What does it mean that we can’t , or shouldnt have, given in to terrorism in Northern Ireland? It would seem we would have to, given that one side wants the State to remain as is, the other side wants the union to disolve. By maintaining the status quo prior to the GFA were we not giving into terrorism since that is what the Loyalist gangs wanted; or were the Loyalist gangs not terrorists, and if not, why not? Did they become “Irish” when engaged in terrorism against Catholics; though acting as British loyalists; while the whole place was still as Britsh As Finchley, and they British subjects all along.

Or were they not terrorists at all? Or were they a better form of terrorist, killing the right people?

What a weird place, the UK part of the Island I live in. As a 26 county nationalist I see neither side as Irish – despite the GFA.

Sort out your own mess.

If Develera wanted to unite the country so badly he could have taken Churchhills offer, and joined the war on the British side.

Ireland would certainly have organised a resistance against the Germans, since the country wanted to be free of any imperialist involvement. As for the which group would be more, or less, likely to be sympathetic to the Germans , it was Northern Ireland which ran a supremacist State at the time, not the Republic ( which had Protestant Presidents within it’s first few decades, and I think we are all waiting for the UK to enter the 18th century and allow a Catholic Head of State).

Northern Ireland would have made Germans feel at home. Remember Hitler saw England as an Ayran power, a Germanic People. His feelings on Ireland are obscure, but probably he felt it – like all small – nations deserved to be trampled on.

Most of this is whatiffery, though. The ( at the time) very real racist and sectarian State of Northern Ireland is contrasted with the hypothetical “fascist” State in IReland, were the Germans to take over. Counter factuals are useless. We have to deal with facts.

I know it may amaze some of the people who troll around here, but the people of Ireland do not need the approval of the English far-left in order to get on with their life. They have made their democratic will perfectly clear and the murders of Saturday night are in no sense democratic, legitimate, romantic or heroic.

In the meantime, if you care about Ireland, democracy, peace and the rule of law, then sign up. The group is entitled the way it is because I thought it was pretty important to make it clear even to everyone that Ireland and the Irish have made their mind up on this issue, but anyone who cares about a shared future in these islands and beyond is more than welcome to stand with us.

These Rebs do not have a vaguely viable mass of hearts and minds, even in the Catholic section of the sectarian devide.

Have you been living in a cave since 1998?

No, it really didn’t. As twisted as some of the uber-nationalist romantic crap they spouted, their ideological outlook and weltanschuuang was different to fascism.

‘armalite and the ballot box’ is a tactic about for countless years. Two examples, the Sans Culottes movement around the commune in 1792-5 and the physical force arm of the Chartist movement. Even the United Irish were committed to a dual strategy. If you can make a case for the united Irish as some proto-form of fascism in any meaningful sense, you are a better man than I or countless historians or political scientists.

Hitler post Beer hall was convinced that military action was completely pointless in the ‘conquest of the state’. If the Reichwehr was not with him, they would quickly crush any uprising. Similarly, he believed without a mass party, that is one remarkably incapable of putschist conspiracy, he could not achieve his ‘transformation’ of german society. Look at some of the work of the Volkpartei thesis, now largely undeniable, to see how large and socially heterodox the Nazi coalition was. The violence of the SA and SS was no uprising, but a carefully reined in effort at increasing socail tensions, or social scission. One thing fascists have been very bad at is vanguardism and violence against the state. They excelled at ’sub-state’ violence, against their political, ideological or racial enemies ‘on the street’. I really don’t like to evoke it, but permature Godwins methinks

And Brownie – picture this scenario. The BNP have 20 per cent of the seats at Westminster and, as representatives of the “white community”, have a veto on policies. (you oppose that word, veto, but Sinn Fein has one). Then imagine a BNP with guns and bombs that had murdered thosuands of its opponents, and had refused to give up a single gun. And now dissident neo-Nazis murder Asians or blacks or Muslims and Nick Griffin gives weasel-worded condemning these murders as ‘attacks on the peace process”. would you accept that scenario?