@Brendan O’Brien: equal rights are possible and attainable and non-negotiable.

@Brendan O’Brien: What part of my comment was inaccurate? Or is petty abuse the only form of discussion you are capable of engaging in?

Is ‘forlorn’ a term of abuse now? I’ll make a note of it.

@Brendan O’Brien: I’ll try asking again. How about you discuss the content of my initial post? What part of my comment was inaccurate?

Alternatively, if your debating abilities don’t extend beyond making personal jibes and sarcastic remarks, then go and troll someone else, like a good man.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: The content of your initial post has been discussed ad nauseam. The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

@Brendan O’Brien: You don’t want to discuss what has bee discussed ad nauseum, yet you bring up the Barry McElduff story? Drop the BS. If you are not prepared to reference and debate absolutely any point in my initial post, then don’t bother replying to it.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: Duly noted and filed in the bin.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: as bad as each other

@Gus Sheridan: Who?

@Tír Eoghain Gael: By “unionist grass roots” I assume you mean the UDA/UVF who scuppered the deal when Arlene ran it past them….

@Vigo the Carpathian: And the Orange Order

@Vigo the Carpathian:The DUP have no links to the UDA and the UVF. However intransigent, stubborn or neanderthal they are or have been, they never sunk to the lows of Provisional Sinn Fein / IRA.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: SF and DUP try and keep up

@Gus Sheridan: You are claiming that SF and the DUP are as bad as eachother, yet telling me that I’m the one that needs to keep up??!

Consider the reasons for Stormont’s collapse? Did both parties have a leader who overseen a botched energy scheme costing the taxpayer c. £500,000,000 and then refuse to take responsibility for the mess? Did both parties block marriage equality? Did both sides block a Bill of Rights as agreed 20 years ago in the GFA? Did both sides block minority language legislation as was agreed at St Andrews? Did both parites block legacy funding? The answer to all those questions, is ‘no, that was just the DUP’. So how on earth are they as bad as each other?

Martin McGuinness told the story of how before the Euros in France, he approached the then First Minister Arlene Foster, that a suggestion that they should make a symbolic gesture of going to one of the north’s games and one of the south’s games together. Arlene refused and only went to one of the north’s games. Martin went to one of each. That, Gus, is the difference. SF have bent over backwards to make such gestures. The DUP have not reciprocated. They regard compromise as defeat. ABout time you copped yourself on and dropped the grossly stupid and simplistic “both as bad as eachother” waffle.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: It would have been more of a gesture on McGuinness’ part had he gone to one of the North’s games and one of England’s.

That would have been more equivalent to Foster going to one of the North’s games and one of the Republic’s.

@CrabaRev: Really ? No links? https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2018/03/06/news/dup-briefed-senior-loyalists-on-irish-language-deal-before-collapse-of-talks-1270698/ or http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dup-conservatives-northern-ireland-coalition-ulster-defence-association-paramilitaries-peace-process-a7782631.html?amp

@CrabaRev:
“The DUP have no links to the UDA and the UVF”
Really? You I assume have forgotten about:

- The fact that a large chunk of the UDA’s arms were brought to shore in a shipment shared out with Ulster Resistance – a group co-formed by senior DUP figures Ian Paisley & Peter Robinson.

- The infamous “graduated response” in 2014, when a coalition of unionist politicians, including the DUP leader, took to a stage alongside UDA leaders to announce their resistance to the banning of a loyalist parade?

- The meeting between Arlene Foster with a senior UDA leader during last years election campaign, just 48 hours after his organisation murdered a man in front of his son, last summer? (Yet years the DUP wouldn’t speak to SF because they perceived it as a terrorist group!)

- The fact that the DUP’s Wesley Irvine last year attended a UDA meeting in order to hand out electoral registration forms.

- The fact that the UDA publicly endorsed the DUP last year ““strongly urging” loyalists to vote for them in the General Election. The DUP spent weeks refusing to distance itself from this endorsement.

- That only last month the DUP was contacting figures in the UDA to brief them on the talks.

- The fact that Arlene Foster steadfastly refused to call for the resignation of UDA commander Dee Stit from a Stormont paid role in a Belfast community Group, after he was secretly filmed speaking making threats in his capacity as a UDA ‘commander’.

- The fact that the DUP MLA Christopher Stalford rents his office from the UDA

- The fact that a former DUP Mayor of Ballymoneyu celebrated the recent ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with the tories by tweting a photoshopped image of No. 10 with a UVF flag handing from the front window.

- The fact that Stormont Speaker Robin Newton was exposed in a BBC investigation as being directly involved in UDA leader Dee Stit’s ‘community group’ which was in receipt of public funds. Because he didn’t declare his involvement, he was ble to sit on an Assembly steering group which directed several million pounds to the organisation.

- The fact that the same BBC investigation last year reported a whislteblower from within the UDA state that the group was building an “increasingly close relationship with the DUP”

- The fact that last Feb, the DUP’s West Belfast facebook page attacked the TUV for having a personal vendetta “not only with the DUP but now loyalist paramilitaries”.

Shall I keep going?

@Brendan O’Brien: So Martin McGuinness suggested they both go to one of the north’s and south’s games, but has to go to the south on his own because Arlene wouldn’t go – and it’s McGuinness rather than Foster that you criticise? The mind boggles.

And what do England have to do with it? The idea behind McGuinness’s suggestion of them going to the games of the two Irish teams is because they are the two teams that the divided population here give their loyalties to. It boils down to the fact that McGuinness was prepared to go to a game of a team representing a state he had no allegiance to as a goodwill gesture. The DUP leader could not bring herself to do likewise.

@Tír Eoghain Gael:
You really are grasping at straws. The first example is tenuous to say the least. The others just show that two Unionist organisations, have crossed paths over the last number of years. Every organisation has bad apple’s and I am sure there have been some members of the DUP who been supportive of the UDA. But to say they are linked is untrue and disingenuous.

Provisional Sinn Fein / IRA were the same organisation working a political and terrorist strategy side by side. The terrorist strategy is suspended, for the moment.

There is a huge difference.

@Tír Eoghain Gael: I pointed out that McGuinness was making no worthwhile gesture, as he regarded Ireland as all one thing. If he had no allegiance to Northern Ireland, he had no allegiance to the Republic either. (As we know, the Republican Movement has traditionally seen the two jurisdictions as equally illegitimate, and the IRA ‘Army Council’ as the legitimate government of the whole island.)

@Brendan O’Brien:

“: I pointed out that McGuinness was making no worthwhile gesture, as he regarded Ireland as all one thing.”
Which is precisely why he had no allegiance to the north’s team, which is precisely why it was a goodwill gesture to unionism to attend one of their games with Foster. Meanwhile, Foster refused to make a goodwill gesture of going to a game involving the south with him.

It genuinely says it all that you find the fault with Martin McGuinness in this scenario, rather than with Foster (not to mention even finding a way to shoehorn the “IRA army council” into the debate ffs. Warped.

@CrabaRev: Rather than just making a blanket dismissal of my examples in their entirety, exactly of my examples are you refuting?

@Tír Eoghain Gael: No: McGuinness believed in an all-Ireland polity, so he could logically have supported both teams; Foster believes in partition so logically would support only Northern Ireland in football.

McGuinness helped to run Northern Ireland within the UK for a decade, which seems more of a commitment to acknowledging/accepting its existence than going to a football match would be.

As I said, SF has no more ‘allegiance’ to our 26-county Republic than to NI. It is tied up in doublethink

@Tír Eoghain Gael:
I think that my reply above clearly covers all of your points.

If you have evidence of links between members of the DUP and Loyalist Terrorists, I would advise you to visit your local PSNI station and share that information with them.

@Brendan O’Brien:

Would McGuinness have been perfectly comfortable at one of the north’s games and stading for GSTW? Quite clearly not. It is a team that republicans, no matter your twisted logic, do not tend to support.

Did he, and most nationalist and republicans support the south’s team? Quite evidently yes.

The exact flip side is the case for Arlene Foster and wider Unionism.

Martin McGuinness went beyond his comfort zone to make a gesture of that he understood would be well received within unionism (which was his fundamental reason for doing so). Arlene Foster would not go beyond her comfort zone to make a goodwill gesture that would be well received within nationalism.

Again, it takes a particularly warped mind to see McGuinness as the problem in that.

@CrabaRev:

“I think that my reply above clearly covers all of your points.”
Except that it didn’t specifically address a single one of them.

In your own time.

‘twsted’, ‘warped’, etc.: always with the hyperbole. I’ll leave you to your sad little tribalist wallowings.

@Brendan O’Brien: So I praise a politician for making a gesture towards the unionist community and that makes me a “sad little tribalist”? That sounds like the same sort of warped thinking that in your mind makes Martin McGuinness the villain for making the gesture of goodwill and Foster’s point blank refusal to make a similar gesture seemingly not a problem.

I suspect the reason you are running away is because you are afraid of digging yourself into any deeper into that big hole you’re created.

@Gus Sheridan: I honestly had my back turned to the TV and heard the accent and wondered why Arlene was talking so softly for once.