Following right along from yesterday's re-outing of Maria Gatland as a senior local Tory, let's meet Gerry McGivern, who died at the ripe old age of 46 in Torquay, England, where he lived the final years of his life. His local Tory club were so sad to have to say goodbye to "Irish Gerry" as they called the lovable bomber and drug dealer that they lowered their club's Union Flag to half mast on the day of his funeral.
Irish Gerry, as we shall call him for the benefit of any Tories who may read this and feel fondness for their late member, was an active member of both the IRA and British Intelligence. Eventually, following the night when he broke into an old woman's house with a baseball bat, the IRA decided to drop his services, and following yet more disputes with them it seems they may have even decided to bump him off.
McGivern then coughed to his British handlers and a deal was done whereby he got the fairly light sentence of six years in prison, and the British agreed to quietly forget about the night when he helped blow a British soldier's legs off.
After his release he moved to Liverpool, and engaged in yet more lovable, roguish activity by flogging heroin to the local druggies. He served three years for that, left prison eventually and moved to Torquay where the Tories welcomed him with open arms as one of their own.
To be fair, and we must be fair even to Tories, Irish Gerry's past was only discovered after his death, so the party has a sort of get-out clause in his case.
The same cannot be said of Maria Gatland, who as Maria McGuire was a pretty senior figure indeed in the Provo's ranks. Not only that, but she wrote a book about her experiences, or rather one was ghost-written for her by a Sunday Times hack named Peter Gilman, who tried his best to make sure that she appeared as a sympathetic character to the book's readers.
I remember reading that book, To Take Arms: A Year in the Provisional IRA, back in the 1970s and thought at the time that there was a brittle, self-absorbed, middle class dilettante who didn't really understand street politics. It came as no surprise to learn that she has become a Tory since it is the natural home of people of her class.
What did surprise me was the way in which the Tories kept her in their fold after she was outed as a senior IRA member in 2008. First they went through the motions of suspending her in December 2008, then she was welcomed back into the fold just a month later in January 2009, and allowed to remain a Tory councillor, whereupon the voters of her leafy ward continued to return her to office at every election right up to the present day.
On one level you can understand why the Tories did that, as Gatland is genuinely one of them. In 2010, Gatland was reported as telling people how excited she was to attend a council meeting where a vote was taken that cost sixty local people their jobs.
Obviously not as excited as she was in her miniskirted heyday when she was plotting with the IRA to blow people up, but she was a fairly decent looker in those days so you can understand how she rose to near the top of the organisation via her willingness to be bedded by its then leader, so excitement came thick and fast. Today she appears as a tired old boot, so getting worked up about putting people on the cobbles is probably about the best she can hope for.
So, we have an ex-IRA man who went drinking with Tories in Torquay, and when he died, they lowered our country's flag in his honour. We also have a former IRA woman who became a Tory councillor and was allowed to remain one even when her past became known.
That the Tories have the brass neck to condemn Jeremy Corbyn for talking to Sinn Fein back in the day and trying to make peace in Northern Ireland just makes their hypocrisy all the more risible
Please remember that when you cast your vote on the 8th June 2017.
Contrast the treatment of Mz Gatland with that of Mz Duncan who was the star turn on the C4 Doc, "Meet the Ukippers" (It's on Youtube if you've missed it). Mz Duncan, a UKIP counillor in Thanet, was expelled arbitrarily from UKIP for telling a TV crew she did not like black people.
ReplyDeleteInitially when the vid was first aired, she had strong support from other Ukippers, many of whom claimed that UKIP was the only party that allowed free speech. When Duncan was expelled by Farage without even being given a hearing. Suddenly, the UKIP "free speech" fanatics lost their voices, and there was not one word about the total lack of natural justice for her.
I do not come here as a defender of Duncan, but to show the massive hypocrisy of the "right". When Ian Paisley (and they don't come much more right wing than him) exposed that the UK Tory gov was holding talks with terrorists, he was himself suspended from the House of Commons. Yet when people like Corbyn and Livingstone do the same, they are seen as "giving succour to terrorists".
At the time, Livinstone made a very valid point: We need to speak to these people to find out how we can stop them killing our citizens. My only criticism of Corbyn and Livingstone is that their intervention may have undermined the talks that were secretly taking place between the Tories and the IRA. But then again, when the public face was, "The British gov does not talk to terrorists", how were they to know?
The idea that they were wrong to speak to the people who politically represented the terrorists has since been discredited because as we have seen, it was talks that finally solved the bulk of the problems.