The destruction in Dublin of the statue of the arch-traitor and Third Reich stooge Sean Russell was wrong.
You cannot have self-appointed censors rewriting the architecture and monuments of Dublin according to their own political agenda. Not merely does municipal anarchy lie that way, but so too does defeat. Does the little group of socialists responsible for vandalising the statue of that Nazi goon really believe it is more powerful than the gangsters of Sinn Féin-IRA?
Of course, this statue should have been removed long ago, as a matter of policy, by the Government and Dublin Corporation. It is a grotesque insult to the memory of the millions who perished at the hands of the Third Reich that a monument to a willing servant of its vile projects was even erected, never mind allowed to remain. But nonetheless the lefties should have left their hacksaws at home.
For vandalism is the Shinner pitch playing to Shinner rules. It's what they do, and do best, for they don't even know wrong from right - not least because our supine, appeasing Government never tells them. When they break the law, as they repeatedly do, they're never rebuked, and invitations to the Taoiseach's office don't dry up. They're not even publicly condemned by the Minister for Justice, who - incredibly - last month felt able to report on the absence of IRA activity in the Republic.
That's right. No doubt the Indonesian Minister for the Marine was announcing around the same time that tsunamis are a thing of the past.
I have written about this until I am sick, sore and tired of doing so, and if anything is proof that the sword is mightier than the pen, it is the utter failure of critics of the peace process to reduce even slightly the way that governments in Dublin and London fawn over, pamper and pet a still-armed Sinn Féin-IRA, no matter their crimes. The biggest bank robbery in history could now be added to their vast list of post-ceasefire offences. From the toadies of the Northern Ireland Office, silence; the same from our own wretched Government. What explanation today from that ridiculous figure, the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Lord Orde of DisOrder, whose most recent act of grisly propitiation was the gelding of the Special Branch? But in its own way worst of all was the failure of all our political parties last year to hound into extinction the European Election campaign of Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald. For in September of 2003, beside that very statue, she gave an encomium to the memory of Sean Russell. The idea of a eulogist to a Nazi fellow-traveller representing the people of Ireland in the European Parliament is too grotesque for words. Everything possible should have been done to prevent this. Instead, so far as I can see, no mention whatever of her panegyric to a friend of the Final Solution was made by her electoral opponents.
Why? Is it because our political parties don't like embarrassing Sinn Féin? Is it because they're all so anxious to keep Sinn Féin inside the peace process that any reference to its disgusting beliefs and its criminal behaviour is considered to be bad form? The political classes of both Ireland and Britain have thus gathered around the inane and abject consensus that nothing must be done to ruffle Sinn Féin feathers. That Sinn Féin was in formal alliance with the Nazis is now conveniently forgotten - and for the most part, certainly will be over the coming year's odious celebrations of the party's centenary. But as Mary Lou McDonald revealed in 2003, Sinn Féin-IRA doesn't really regret that alliance with the Jew-burning beasts of Nazi Germany. It was just another phase in the struggle. No other considerations but the narrow tribal preoccupations of a perverse Catholic nationalism may be allowed to trouble its putrescent mind. Nothing else but partition counts.
The millions who vanished in the camps of the Third Reich, or were slain by the methodical executioners of the Einstzkommandos; the satanic terror and darkness that reached from the Urals to Norway's Arctic floes and to the warm waters of the Aegean: all these count as nothing compared with the wretched Border.
Sean Russell was one architect of that diseased preoccupation. He contacted German intelligence in February 1939, days after Hitler had publicly promised that in the event of war, the Jews of Europe would be exterminated. This speech was not secret: it was broadcast live across Germany, and was reported in detail on the front page of this newspaper.
Russell cemented his relationship with the Nazis during a visit to Berlin in May 1940, as France, the Low Countries and most of Scandinavia were vanishing from the ranks of the free. He later boarded a U-boat for Ireland, with the purpose of turning Ireland into a Nazi protectorate, but happily died before he could do so. The vile Shinner wretch was buried at sea.
Do Irish MEPs point out Mary Lou McDonald to their fellows from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Greece and tell them of the encomium she uttered about a loyal servant of Hitler's Reich? Probably not. Perhaps they are cut from the same appeasing cloth as the Government and much of the media. Or perhaps they are too patriotic to tell our fellow Europeans the ghastly truth about the creature the electorate of Dublin has put in their midst. And do you know, I almost see their point.
It is too shaming for words.