| Quote Unquote “There is a time
to resist, to stand up and to confront the enemy by arms if necessary. In
other words, there is a time for war. There is also a time to engage, to
reach out, to put the war behind us all.”
Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA.
Friday, July 29, 2005. The New York Times.
“My second husband [Tom Hayden] was Irish-American. I learned through
those 17 years that there’s a tendency on the part of the Irish to be -
I kind of love it - dark, fatalistic. There’s a darkness, a brooding. There’s
also a lot of laughter and humour, especially when there’s been a few brews
put down. And the Irish love funerals.”
- Jane Fonda, in an interview with Ireland’s Sunday Independent.
“I welcome today’s IRA statement. Hopefully, this statement means we’re
finally nearing the end of this very long process to take guns and criminality
out of politics in Northern Ireland once and for all. I look forward to
the final act of decommissioning, and the verification that paramilitary
activity and criminality have ended, and the all-important restoration of
the Northern Ireland Assembly. Peace and violence cannot co-exist in Northern
Ireland, and all who care about peace and stability look forward to these
final actions.”
-Senator Edward Kennedy on IRA disarmament (Delivered on Senate Floor,
July, 28, 2005).
“A small ‘army’ of civilian workers, almost exclusively Protestant, rely
upon the British military for their income. … In addition, the soldiers
and their families, garrisoned for months at a time, are a captive market
for local traders and businesses, eager to service their demands, and in
some cases reliant upon them.”
The British government’s demilitarization policy has frightened sections
of Northern Ireland’s Protestant community who have grown economically dependant
on the army’s presence. Colm Heatley writing in the Sunday Business Post.
“The daughter of a manager of an Irish bar named Meenehan’s, with a side
entrance marked Ladies’ Only, she grew up in a Washington that was still
a small Southern village with horses and carriages. As a child she saw the
last of the Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and as
the wife of a D.C. police inspector she made friends with her neighbour,
Pop Seymour, the last person alive who saw Lincoln shot at Ford’s Theatre.
(He was five and saw the president slump in his box.) Intensely patriotic,
a politics and history buff, in her life she spanned the crash of the to
the crash of the twin towers, Teddy Roosevelt to W. One of her big thrills
came in 1990 when she went to the White House Christmas party with me and
President Bush gave her a kiss. On the way home, she said to me in a steely
voice, ‘’I don’t ever want you to be mean to that man again.”
Maureen Dowd, writing in on her mother who died in July, 2005 The
New York Times.
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