Troubles? We have plenty of our own

BEFORE I left for a new job in Dublin, I had a couple of beers in Glasgow with a friend who had been the head of British military intelligence in Northern Ireland. He sat in the ‘gunfighter’s seat’ – facing the door – as old security training dies hard.

Two days later, I found myself sharing a desk with a man whispered to have been the intelligence officer for the Dublin Brigade of the Provisional IRA.

Provo Army Council statements – always signed ‘P. O’Neill’ – were said to have been his handiwork. He allegedly flew to Colombia with an IRA big-shot on a false passport, the sort of thing that films make light of but which is, in the real world, serious stuff.

Now this is not a piece about my time covering The Troubles.

As a child, I do remember the police arriving at our shorefront house in Stranraer, barely 20 miles from Belfast, advising my mother to open the doors and windows.

A suspicious package, probably Semtex destined for Ulster, had been found in public toilets near the ferry terminal. Her sanguine reaction was: ‘What, again?’

And I remember, too, the excitement of my primary school playing fields being used to land Army Wessex and Gazelle helicopters filled with handy-looking blokes in camouflage smocks.

But I won’t be faking the thousand yard stare, mumbling: ‘You weren’t there, man, you weren’t there…’

THERE are enough of those articles kicking around from superannuated journos desperate to tell you they know more about the ‘Ulsterisation’ of politics than you do as it’s in vogue to liken the divisions convulsing Scottish politics to the squalid war in Northern Ireland.

Suddenly, pro-SNP types are rebellious ‘Shinners’, as Sinn Féin are dismissively called. Meanwhile, No voters are ‘Protestant supremacists’.

It is as ugly as it is wrong. Because what I did gather in Dublin was that being anti-IRA is not the same as being anti-Catholic or anti-Irish.

In the capital and across the Republic, right-thinking people – and that is the vast majority – abhor the men of violence and their political apologists alike. Equally, being pro the Union here has nothing to do with supporting the blood-stained UDA, UVF or backing the agenda of the Orange Order. Yet Scotland’s independence question is being framed in terms of Irish divisions and not just on the wilder fringes of social media.

Column inches in supposedly serious newspapers have been devoted to the idiotic idea that the surge in support for the Scottish Tories is down to too-poor, too-stupid, working-class Scots obeying instructions from the Central Committee of the Grand Lodge.

This is based on little more than an unsubstantiated Tweet claiming Orange Order members have been elected to Scottish councils.

And much of the synthetic outrage about this has come from nationalists who are themselves happy to use language associated with Sinn Féin – ‘our time will come’ and the intimidating ‘tick tock’.

In this poisonous atmosphere, internet mock-ups of Ruth Davidson in Orange Order regalia have a sinister edge beyond the knockabout political japes.

My Army friend was never without a cocked 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistol when he was in Ireland and he kept a flock of geese – the Romans found them excellent guards – in case an assassin with an Armalite arrived in the night. The soldier next to him died in an RPG attack on a border outpost.

There are pictures of my ‘P. O’Neill’ helping the wounded amidst the carnage of terrorist bombs in Dublin in 1974. That’s the bloody reality of ‘Ulsterised’ politics.

Mercifully, our wrangling doesn’t come close and we must not allow a few internet hotheads and columnists posing as edgy provocateurs to drag us down to that level.