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thomas davison

Lowering our flag is a shameful surrender to Ulster�s gangsters Under the 'Good Friday' agreement, flying the Union Flag is illegal in Northern Ireland on 348 days of the year
By Peter Hitchens
PUBLISHED: 01:58, 9 December 2012 | UPDATED: 02:14, 9 December 2012

..In a large part of this country, it is against the law to fly the Union Flag from government buildings for 348 days of the year. This has been so since the year 2000. As a special treat, it can be flown for the other 17 days. The rest of the time the flagpole stays bare.

The place where this law operates is Northern Ireland. I wonder how much longer we shall be able to fly our national flag in the rest of the United Kingdom, or even how much longer that flag will exist at all.

I think this is a shocking fact. I am one of the few British journalists who bothered to read the so-called �Good Friday� Agreement under which this country capitulated to the gangsters of the Provisional IRA, under American pressure.

'No surrender': Protestors wave Union Flags in front of Belfast's City Hall earlier this week after the Union flag was removed from the building
I know that we released hundreds of grisly criminals, destroyed our security apparatus and withdrew the Army in return for various unsigned and unenforceable promises from Sinn Fein and the IRA.

But even I did not know that this was one of its effects. Our national flag, you see, might offend someone. That is also the excuse for its recent removal from Belfast City Hall, which has led to so much bitterness and turmoil in that city.

But the reality is this. You haul down your flag when you surrender. And it was a surrender. I was amused to see that Mrs Hillary Clinton, that nasty hard Leftist now aiming for the White House, had her vote-winning visit to Northern Ireland spoiled by the flag riots on Friday.

.How can you have riots and peace? The great pretence, that giving in to organised crime brings peace, was for once exposed. Northern Ireland�s poor and weak have never been so subject to intimidation and gangsterism, and I wonder if I will live to see the (sadly inevitable) day when Irish troops are putting down Orange riots on the Protestant Shankill Road, probably caused by illegal displays of the old Union Flag. Peace, indeed.

The squalid history of this event is a warning we refuse to heed and which is barely known here.
I saw it happen, in Washington DC, astonished by the brusque and scornful treatment of my country by a nation I had foolishly seen as an ally.

I remember one very senior White House official letting slip to me that she thought of Britain as a sort of Serbia, just another place to intervene in, as Syria is now. I have laughed at the phrase �Special Relationship� ever since.

I followed Sinn Fein�s Gerry Adams round the USA, as this coffin-faced apologist for violence and terror was feted and adulated by Americans who would have shrunk from him had he spoken for any other cause but the Irish one.

I annoyed him so much with my inconvenient questions that he publicly said I should be �decommissioned� and � on the one occasion we were ever alone together � showed me his less diplomatic, less humorous side.

What was this about? Mrs Clinton�s husband Bill needed working-class Roman Catholic votes to win the White House, votes his party had lost by backing abortion.

So he discovered the Irish cause, about which he knew little and (I suspect) cared less. He also took a lot of Irish-American campaign money. In 1993, Irish America, which these days means some very big business, tired of waiting for results and demanded action.

And so he acted, and so we were forced to make a shameful peace with the IRA, and haul down our flag over part of our own territory.

By the time the whole thing�s finished, St Patrick�s Cross will have to come out of that flag, and the harp will depart from the Royal Standard.

I think that when countries suffer defeats, they should admit to them and grieve over them, not pretend they have won. That way lie more defeats and more humiliations.

Years ago I worked at Harland and Wolfs shipyard in Belfast and I have seen first hand how the IRA carried on and it worked, we may need to do the same here our targets will be easy to find, they will all have their heads buried in our money troughs.