Dolours Price

Don't Be Afraid, Do Not Be Fooled


Dolours Price • 16 January 2007

I was just thinking, as I do, that this Shinner crowd are holding meetings across the road from me. The Great Southern, airport hotel.

I should be over there with my placard, myself, my anger, my opposition, my sense of sell-out, my Republican beliefs, my loathing of their actions but in a way the heart has been knocked out off me.

I'll get it back, but they have so sickened me to my stomach that I need to put them away from my mind for a breather.

I'm busy with my law course and that helps, although I have been threatened with exclusion from lectures if I don't stop my speeching about the Treaty.

Well. We were left out. Who blinked first? Not Lloyd George.

I recall a statement made by Kieran Nugent that they would have to nail the British prison uniform to his back. How easily will the Provos slip into their British Police uniforms?

Changed people, changed desires, but never a changed Cause. It will live long after they are worms' meat and remembered for their treachery.

Put on the coat of the enemy boys, it has been done before and changed nothing.

Will you never learn?


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Watching the Provos try to metamorphise into "old Fianna Fail" would be laughable if it were not so serious and had it not been so costly to Republicans in lives lost and civilians killed.

We, true Republicans, were brought up to hate Fianna Fail as traitors, despots, killers of our own people and ready to advance with Britain, under her terms, to establish, on this island, two nations. No one was told the great content of this Treaty (a new theory is that Michael Collins had fathered a child to one of his "upper class" friends. I don't know, if it were true then our whole position is based on a F...!).

They are slinking around, holding clandestine meetings (I say this because I have trouble finding their venue more than 24 hours in advance, before I could be ready with my poster to picket them!).

I want to address what is constantly called their "grassroots".

You, many, too many, have paid a heavy price for this dream we had.

You want to believe "the day has come"; who doesn't? I see you on the news sitting, taking in every lying word of your "leadership" and in your trust or lack of confidence in your own strong (stronger than theirs) abilities, you go along with their not very grand words (I cringe at the grammar).

But how do they do it?

They mesmerise, manipulate, intimidate and make it sound so logical and right.

They have that quiet way of putting you down and making you feel foolish if you ask the wrong question. An arrow is put above your head, a question mark beside your name. "This person might think for themselves," bad news for any Authoritian Leadership.

1984, George Orwell, bible to my son. Get the point?

Now, my comrades, how far has your, (once mine), leadership strayed from the original objectives of the Republican Cause?

From here to the moon and back!

Where is our 32 County Republic?

Our Socialist State?

When were the wrongs of a terrible blunder fixed? When did we get back our rightful six counties into an all Ireland establishment?

When did we cease to be the sacrificial lambs that Gerry Adams would wish us to continue to be?

Where is the Republican Agenda? Shaking hands with Blair and Bush?

They are doing very well, the leadership; jobs, prestige,"a life beyond their dreams". What of you, my friends, making ends meet, or maybe a black taxi? Not much for years in gaol — but we did not do it for the comeback, we did it for the belief!

Now my pet hate. Mary Lou Mc Donnald. Fianna Fail until that Damascus-like turn when Bobby Sands died! She realised that within Fianna Fail she would wait 20 years for a go at a seat; in Sinn Fein (even with a crap degree), she could fast track it, on your backs, on my back. Did she throw a stone?

The lady reeks of ambition and we Republicans are well used to torment and torture. She does not sit well with my notion of a Republican.

By the way, friends, we have all earned our degrees many times over, we need feel no inferiority. I am the only law student threatened with expulsion from lectures for giving off about the Treaty! I will never stop and 120 nineteen year olds will learn our Republican history and the foundation of their State.

Have you noticed the "sanatisation" of those who run for election? NO history, even our proud history. Nice, clean boys and girls, too young to have been "sullied" by participation in the war?

Strangely I was tempted to write this today because of Tom Williams and my son's birthday. Eighteen, how dare they?!

They dare if we let them. And that means: Gerry Adams, and the greatest letdown of my life, Gerry Kelly, will you put on the first British Coat, and will you kill me when I resist your mini-state?


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Looking at the Movement today, I need to say to what are called "the grass roots", you are more than grass roots, you are the hreart and soul of this Movement. It is for you to decide.

I am a strong and committed Republican. I followed Gerry Adams, and if he had ordered me to jump into the Lagan then I would, because I believed he believed in the same Republic as me.

Apparently not.

I never got over the "Assembly" at Stormont. My mother's cousin died on his way to blow up Stormont, probably a silly operation, but full of guts and heart and principle.

I abhore Sinn Fein, they have embraced the acceptable; implying that we who fought are not acceptable? How dare you, in your search for political cleansing.

We fought a war with the British Occupying Forces in 1916, 1920, and we continued to fight, ourselves, our former comrades, and we created this two state nation. A no goer, ever, ever. A crazy piece of political hysteria.

Let those of whom are calm enough, find a better way, Sinn Fein are fools at this game. Power is their aim. For us, Irish, a good life within our culture is all that is required. Tiocfaidhh ar paisti.


- the Blanket Journal