WAIT. Wasn’t Gavin Robinson supposed to be a nice guy?
Big, cuddly, smiley, soft-spoken Gavin. The kind of person who’d cut your grass when you were away in Benidorm for a week. The kind of person who’d shake his head and tell you to stop when you said something spiteful about someone.
Wasn’t he supposed to be the Accidental Leader? A bloke who ended up at the head of the Nasty Mob because the really nasty ones were tearing nasty lumps out of each other?
How badly did Squinter get that wrong? How badly did nationalist and republican Ireland get that wrong?
His tweet in the wake of the acquittal of Soldier F last week was, on the face of it, standard unionist stuff:
I welcome todays (sic) common sense judgement. Soldier F trial has been a painful and protracted process. There needs to be a better way of dealing with the legacy of the past and to ensure no rewriting of it.
No specific mention of the families of the Bloody Sunday dead, but that’s okay. Loyal Ulster is not renowned for its empathy and if you want you can take the ‘painful and protracted process’ remark as encompassing everyone involved in the bloody, sorry saga.
But then Gav went and whacked in the Parachute Regiment badge, which he knows as well as the rest of us is triggering to the people of a city for whom the word ‘triggering’ has a particular resonance.
Jamie Bryson loved it so much he did it too. Carla Lockhart was similarly moved to put up the image. Neither of these could ever be considered to have been with Gav in the ‘Dead-On Really’ wing of unionism. Both of them, in fact, would be widely considered to be leading lights in the ‘Boy I Miss the ’50s’ unionist tendency.
Who knows if Gavin knew what he was doing? Who knows if he knew that his time at the head of the DUP – however long it lasts – will be defined by the Para badge every bit as much as Arlene Foster’s is defined by a crocodile.
Socialist Ireland just didn't see that Nazi coming
AONTÚ’S got a problem with blacks and Jews. Or at least, its youth wing, Aontú Ógra, has.
The party has fired the leader of its CBeebies branch and five other young members after they were found to have posted racist and anti-semitic content on ‘private’ WhatsApp groups.
For that small minority of readers who may not know what a private WhatsApp group is, it’s a collection of people with a common interest talking to each other on a bespoke social media platform; and WhatsApp is private in the same way that a pub or a library is private.
In case you’re thinking that the anti-semitic bit was born out of a misguided concern for the people of Gaza, let Squinter put you right: the Jews were accused on the site of being behind what Der Aontú Jugende see as Ireland’s biggest problem – immigration.
And of course it’s not just “stupid c**t Jew Dubs” who are replacing the whites in Ireland, “n***er” Dubs coming here from their “third world slum shit-infested country” are equally worthy of our indignation, say the nippers.
Squinter thinks of Aontú as Sacred Heart Socialists since it’s a party that peeled away from the socialist Sinn Féin over a male conviction that women’s bodies are nothing to do with women. But given their grá for 1950s Catholic dogma, their panting admiration for Maria Steen’s year’s-wages handbag and now the juniors communing intimately with their inner Tommy Robinsons, it’s perhaps time to dispense with the socialist bit.
Or is it?
Sure wasn’t Adolf Hitler’s party the Nazional Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party? And isn’t it time someone put the Nazi back in socialist?
A NEW CHILL FACTOR
SQUINTER lit the fire for the first time this week. He resolved to do so as he was driving home and the outside temperature gauge in the car beeped at 5 degrees.
Stopping for a pack of beer in the local Spar (yep, still 0.0; third Christmas coming up), he decided that a bit of extra help might be needed to get a good blaze going and so he wandered into the aisle where they keep the Fairy Liquid, the Marigolds and the clothes pegs.
£2.95.
For a firelog.
Three quid.
For a firelog.
Three binoinkers just to light your fire. Three squid just to get the thing started. Three malambos before your logs and coal even catch fire.
And it wasn’t his local shop ripping its customers off, for the price ‘£2.95’ was printed on the item. In other words, every Spar in the North from Derry to Downpatrick was charging people three smackers.
Squinter can’t give you an exact date, but it’s not that long ago since he paid 70p for a firelog. And he hastens to add that it wasn’t a Fortnum and Mason firelog. It wasn’t a Fabergé firelog. It was yer bog-standard eight-inch piece of compressed sawdust with a soupçon of binding agent and a suggestion of paraffin.
Combined ingredients cost: 8p.
Manufacturing cost: 12p.
Profit margin: Yer havin’ a giraffe.
Squinter hasn’t been hit this hard by a price rise since he recently went to buy extra virgin olive oil in Tesco and found that it’s the same price today as Glenfiddich Single Malt 1st Edition was during Covid.
Anyway. Squinter decided that paying three quid to light a fire was more than the memory of his dear oul’ ma could be expected to deal with and so he bought a small bag of sticks. For £1.95.
18 of them.
Well… 17 and a few broken bits.
Kids get welcome school trip
LOYAL Ulster has taken a charabanc to Israel.
Waving delightedly and excitedly to their families, the kids from the all-boys No Surrender Memorial Primary School piled on the bus for Tel Aviv, their little suitcases with their little swimming togs and their little PJs packed away in the hold.
The trip was paid for by concerned people from the Israeli Embassy in London, who thought a week under a Biblical sun would ease the trauma of having to look every day at dual language street signs and O’Neill’s half-zips.
Several fun days out were organised and the kids particularly enjoyed the visit to Jerusalem Zoo, where the little tikes looked on in open-mouthed wonder as Palestinians growled at them from behind the walls and the wire.
On an educational trip to Northern Israel children from the Province heard how the bad men from the United Nations insisted on calling it Syria. They learned some fascinating facts about the Israeli language, Hebrew. For instance, the popular greeting ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ translates into English as ‘American Charity Case’ and there are 134 different words in the rich and colourful Hebrew language to describe dead babies.
An unfortunate incident occurred at a history expo in Haifa when one of the Belfast children asked a guide why all the people he had met were white. It was explained to him that Jesus is white in all the books and movies. He was given an ‘I Asked a Great Question Today’ sticker and put on an RAF flight back to Aldergrove.
But the highlight of the trip was when the children met other children in Israeli schools to share stories and experiences. A similar trip to Gaza to visit Palestinian schoolchildren was called off at the last minute because of difficulties over temporary visas, schedule clashes, transportation challenges and the impossibility of finding a school still standing.
