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SINN FÉIN PRESIDENT Gerry Adams has spoken once more regarding the controversy surrounding a tweet he sent last Sunday evening while watching Quentin Tarantino movie Django Unchained.
Adams had, in his own words, been moved by the struggle of the eponymous civil war-era slave and had posted a tweet intended he says to draw parallels between the character’s struggle and that of the Catholic Irish in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and beyond.
However, he did so by using the ‘n’ word, and has been fighting a media battle on all fronts ever since.
Speaking today to The Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio, Adams admitted that he had made his point “clumsily and inappropriately”, but that he stood by the “political point” he had been trying to make.
Gerry Adams / Twitter
Gerry Adams / Twitter / Twitter
“I had been canvassing (for the MLA elections) in Ballymurphy for an hour and a half. I’m not in Ballymurphy much at present, I was meeting a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time, and this brought back a background of memories of what happened there,” he said.
That evening I was babysitting. I don’t have Netflix myself, so I switched it on and came up with this movie, Django, which is very powerful and very violent. And that is the background to the tweet and the use of the ‘n’ word.
I was trying to make a political point, I was talking about my own community of Ballymurphy, as could be seen when I used the phrase ‘uppity Fenian’.
Adams repeated an apology for his use of the word, saying to do so was “silly and stupid”.
The whole thing was to make a political point, if I had left that word out would the tweet have gotten any attention?
I was paralleling the experiences of the Irish, not just in recent times but through the penal days when the Irish were sold as slaves, through the Cromwellian period.
Mandela
Adams’ comments regarding the Irish being sold as slaves are a reiteration of a claim he made on Sunday saying “50,000 Irish men and women were shipped as slaves to Barbados between 1652 and 1659″.
That claim was subsequently rejected by historian and slavery expert Liam Hogan who told TheJournal.ie that the figure of 50,000 is wrong and that the most credible estimates were 10,000 as indentured servants at most.
“The exploitation and dehumanisation of African people by Europeans in the Americas has no analogy in Irish history and this fact should be respected,” said Hogan.
Today, Adams was questioned about his relationship with Nelson Mandela, for whom he served as pallbearer, and asked whether or not the South African leader would have understood his tweet in the context in which it was used.
“Of course he would understand,” he replied.
He was hugely loyal. He was loyal to us in Sinn Féin because we were part of the anti-apartheid struggle. That’s why he refused to condemn armed struggle.
The Sinn Féin leader acknowledged that he has no issue with “anyone who was genuinely offended” by his tweet.
There are also those who are hostile to me and Sinn Féin who seize upon anything, and that’s my fault because I have given them an excuse.
Adams did admit that given the situation to live through again he would not have sent his infamous tweet.
“I certainly wouldn’t do it again,” he said.
I may have tweeted having seen such a powerful film, but I probably would have tweeted something else.
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What??? You mean 131 didn’t work… Noooooooo!!!
Everyone is waiting for 132s
So less buy the 131′s and more buy the 132′s meaning that, overall, the same amount of cars are bought this year.
Feckin brainless spanners, the gombeens that came up with this. Didnt we all say this would happen.
*sigh*
here is an idea. Scrap VRT car sales go up.
Exactly
Which would reduce our tax base and increase the money we spend on imported goods. If you want to support an industry there are better ones to choose.
Great for people working in car factories …. Which we don’t have … I’d rather see an incentive to maintain old cars ( using labour in Ireland), than send money out buying new cars …
Daft to encourage purchase of new cars and send €6,000,000,000 out of the Irish economy every year.
Dafter to use borrowed money to do it and give the banks 9% interest in the process.
NCT was supposed to prolong the national fleet and prevent wasting money in unnecessary early replacement. Car life longevity is what “smart economies” do: USA 10 yrs avg: Sweden 10.7 yrs avg: Germany 8 yrs avg.
Do the Irish not get it?
€6 bn would create a lot of jobs if spent in the Irish economy instead of “exported”!
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http://www.CarTaxPetition.net
So, fewer people can afford new cars? Well holy jaysus. That’s a surprise!
Just a few things on car sales, As with the UK you should be able to buy a reg for your car making a 99D into a 01C and so on, Motor tax should be scraped and put on fuel with rebates to business users and taxi, haulage etc.. NCT on cars over ten years old should be from the day of the test and not this stupid system of the date of first registration making Jan- April the busiest in the test centres.
Is the VRT not illegal in accordance with EU regulations? So we cannot blame the EU for that one.
Seemingly the mobility allowance was illegal too, they were able to scrap that..
It should be noted that we don’t make cars here. Our attempts to prop up and assist the motor trade in this country is madness. We should be actively discouraging the purchase of new cars as cars are one of Germany’s biggest exports. It is one of the best ways for us PIIGS to strike back at the Germans and encourage them to give us the debt forgiveness we so desperately want.
Do u still have that passat Ciaran….
Oh my god!…and that’s coming from an agnostic. I always refrain from this question but here it goes….Are you fckin stupid?! Kill Irish jobs put of spite is your suggestion?
I do. Second hand mind so the Germans got that money off some other gorp. I did put ‘new cars’ in the comment mind. Wouldn’t have to be long term, just long enough to have the desired effect.
Who is an agnostic and what’s that got to do with the price of bread?
Yes unfortunate side effect but I think most would agree that we are sending enough money towards the German economy…
Once you go black you never go back
black the most popular colour, reflects the mood of a nation..
Goes well with everything?
And it’s slimming ;)
also don’t have to wash it as often..
why no green cars in the emerald isle? is it because they are unlucky?
Most popular colour suits well to the situation on the market…
The property tax and water charges may possibly add to that also. We should be cutting our spending instead of new taxes. This would eliminate the need to “broaden the tax base” as Noonan regularly cites.
Why would I buy a new car? It’s got 4 wheels and drives just like every other car over the last 30 years! It will cost me several g’s, most of it tax and the tax man then rips me a new one every time i fill so I can drive to work to pay his tax bill.
State backed scrappage scheme ?…. anyone? ……. modified first time home buyers grant? …. anyone? ….. guess not. …. government have a short memory. … and very limited imagination or understanding of demand side economics
It is great to see an ignorant idea fall flat on its face.
I think it’s heavily linked to how much people have to spend rather than an extra digit on the number plate. The masses have spoken when it comes to buying new cars, we can’t afford them. Also with engineering and manufacturing so good these days a car will run for years and years without needing to be changed, people know that, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The whole problem was the fascination of the numbers on the reg plate which lead people to think they needed a knew car when in fact they didn’t; wanted yes, needed, no! We are in a time of needs not wants
Volkswagen at No 1 possibly as much to do with VW have its own finance vehicle with attractive interest rates as well as a good product range … As long as banks don’t lend or lend at near credit card rates , then car sales will remain in free fall and VRT receipts reducing in line ….
Personalized number plates would have been a good idea a money spinner and at least those that could afford it would have got some joy from it . . A sort of fun tax for a Change .
good news!
We need to see a whole year’s sales data to determine if the trend in sales of new cars is up or down. The new registration system was brought in to do away with the January spike and spread sales out over the whole year (not because it’s 2013 and superstitious wouldn’t like 13 on their reg plates, as several people have suggested.) Many people will hold off till the 132 reg comes out in July. Sales are down in January and February this year compared to last, but that shortfall should be recouped in the latter part of the year.
Car industry in UK kept 13 plates,the first of which were sold today and they are selling multiples of numbers being sold here without any fuss over superstition etc.
131 and 132 reg plates have nothing to do with superstition. Next year we’ll have 141 and 142 plates, and the year after we’ll have 151 and 152 plates. There are very good reasons for it, just as the UK has a split-year registration system too. When we had one year on the reg plate, sales (and new vehicle registrations) were concentrated in the early part of the year. There is a knock-on effect of this in that most NCTs fall due earlier in the year, leading to a backlog in testing dates.
It just so happened that the new regime started in 2013, and we all assumed that it was a superstitious aversion to the number 13. It’s not. It makes sense to do this.
So they are not attaching the new number plates securely enough ???. They will take some time to catch on, an more and more of them can be seen on the road … Ummm?
You can have any colour you want, as long as it’s black
I love red in a car, my last car was a green scoda octava kept breaking down, maybe it was the colour drives a corolla now cant compare.
have your say