Added (2011-04-05, 9:54 PM)
---------------------------------------------
That’s the one with Harrison Ford and Sean Bean. Didn’t show them up to badly, made them look very professional, if not a pack of murderers. That is exactly it, half the plastic paddies in America who support the IRA are brought on stories from their grandfathers knee, and propaganda and we all know how the Irish like to spin a good yarn.

I think the reason that film never made it, was probably because it showed the Republicans up in a bad light, and back in the early 80’s that just couldn’t do, when the big bad Brits were seen as prime-evil, especially at that time with all the Blanket protests, before leading on to the hunger strikes in 81.

Added (2011-04-05, 10:05 PM)
---------------------------------------------
Title: The Outsider
Country of Origin: Holland ?
Year of Production: 1979
Running Time: 128 mins
Director: Tony Luraschi
Producer: Philippe Modave
Screenplay/Script: Tony Luraschi (based on the novel 'The Heritage of Michael Flaherty' by Colin Leinster)
Cast: Craig Wasson (Michael Flaherty), Sterling Hayden (Seamus Flaherty), Patricia Quinn (Siobhan), Niall O'Brien (Emmet Donovan), T.P. McKenna (John Russell), Ray McAnally (Mac Whirter), Niall Toibin (Farmer), Frank Grimes (Tony Coyle), Elizabeth Begley (Mrs. Cochran), Bosco Hogan (Finbar Donovan).
Location: Dublin and Detroit USA
Production Company: Cinematic Arts B V; Paramount Pictures
Abstract: The conflict between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Army in Northern Ireland provides the backdrop for this drama set in the early 1970s. Michael Flaherty (Craig Wasson) is an American of Irish descent who, after returning home from a tour of duty in Vietnam, is deciding what to do with his life. Since his childhood, Michael's grandfather Seamus (Sterling Hayden) has told him of his glorious younger days in Ireland, when he fought against the British with the IRA. Michael decides to go to Belfast to help the fight to end British rule, but he soon finds out that he's not welcomed by many of the locals. He's considered more important as a symbol than as a soldier or an activist - so much so that the IRA plans to have him killed in a way that can be blamed on British forces in order to help elicit financial support from wealthy Americans.
[The Outsider was withdrawn from the 1980 London Film Festival on the pretext that it was not technically up to standard.]

Now we know why this film never mader it to the big screens!

''Above the building a Union Jack dangled in the still air. Bastards.Irish soil,not English. Emmett turned and spat.''

Emmetts wrong on both assertions. Its not Irish and its not English. Ullish and British more like.

Pat another character (or it may be the author) is more definitive '' tapping his pencil on the map at the spot where Emmett now lay waiting,a hill that straddled the border between the Republic of Ireland and British-ruled Ulster''

Another part touches on republicans in the BA.

''Pat always makes his bed'' he said ''Its a hangover from the British Army.'' ''Was Pat in the British Army?'' ''He was, He'll probably tell you about it,'' said Emmett.

And so he does.

''What about you,Pat? How long have you been in the IRA ? ''Oh since the fifties. My family have always been Republican,of course and I joined when I was seventeen. I wanted to start shooting British soldiers right away,but instead of that my first orders were to join the British Army.'' ''Why was that?''

''Oh they wanted to know where the British Army kept things in England,what the security was on armouries and that sort of thing. I was with the East Anglicans,which is funny because they're up north right now.'' ''Id just found my feet when the campaign was called off and there I was stuck in the army. Took me six months to get out,too''

Just a book of fiction I know but I think it does contain a semblance of how things would operate within the ira. The old granda in America had the young lad brain-washed with stories of his days of murdering policemen etc. He presented it as a glorious thing to be doing.

While its sad to see what happened to Constable Kerr, its being going on for decades. Hes not the first Catholic policeman to be murdered in the name of oul oireland.

Today the Irish republicans with all their murder,torture and maiming are just at the same stage as Scots and Welsh nationalists. So maybe they like what they do. Its in their 'make-up' in their character,in their genes to hurt,murder and maim?

To say Michael Collins was a peacemaker is humbug: He was a cold-blooded killer

[Published: Friday 24, August 2007 - 11:05]

By Kevin Myers

Michael Collins, stamp-collector; Michael Collins, composer of string quartets; Michael Collins, basket-weaver; Michael Collins, pacifist; Michael Collins, lace-maker; Michael Collins, teetotal Buddhist monk; Michael Collins, flower-arranger.
At this time of year we're used to an entire gallery of ludicrously fictional Michael Collins being mellifluously wafted out of the Bael na mBlath clay by some Irish voice or other, so I suppose there's no reason why some tame Englishman like Lord David Puttnam shouldn't have been invited to add to the heap of poppycock about the most fictionalised man in Irish history.

And naturally, he didn't disappoint, labelling Michael Collins "an icon for peace and reconciliation" and an example of " how people ought to behave in the service of their country".

Well, as it happens, at the time of his death, this "icon of peace and reconciliation" had already started a war against the Northern state, which, in the Treaty of the previous year, he had already agreed should come into existence.

And with what did he equip the IRA units he unleashed on the North?

Why, the very guns supplied by the British for the self-defence of the new Free State Army, which he had given his word of honour would not be allowed to be used against the Northern state. To " refresh" your memories - which probably have been misinformed by a criminally delinquent educational system, and by a general social consensus which prefers the annual farrago of falsehoods of the flowery meadow to the truth of the school of hard fact - let me remind you of the truth about Michael Collins.

It was he who, with his murders of the men of the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, introduced the concept of a campaign of assassination in support of a political cause: in doing so, he injected a toxin into Irish life that has never left it.

Bad as this was in southern Ireland, it had perfectly catastrophic consequences in the North.

After he organised the murder of DI Swanzy in Lisburn, massive rioting followed there and in Belfast, in which 22 people were killed, and almost all Catholic businesses in Lisburn destroyed.

The murderous chaos moved the Northern authorities to enrol a special constabulary, the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), to restore order.

Contrary to republican myth ever since, this was not intended to be all-Protestant.

Some Catholics joined, but after one of their number, Special Constable McCullough was shot by the IRA, most left.

Collins's attitude to Northern unionists was perhaps best exemplified by events in February 1922, when he authorised the kidnap of 100 Northern Protestants by cross-border IRA gangs.

The raiders actually managed to abduct just 42 men from their homes, and these men were kept as hostages in IRA hide-outs in the Free State, incredibly, with the assent of Michael Collins, the leader of the Provisional Government.

Collins then authorised an intensified assault on the USC.

A train containing mostly unarmed special constables en route for Enniskillen was ambushed at Clones and four constables killed, with a dozen others captured.

The consequences were entirely predictable: riots in Belfast in which over 30 people, most of them Catholic, were killed.

That, however, did not slake Collins's appetite for blood, for he then ordered a further systematic assault on USC members.

Between March 10 and June 1922, and on Collins's general orders, 38 Northern police officers were killed.

Some of them - such Samuel Laird and George Chittick of Trillick, Co Tyrone - were assassinated in their homes. Two others, Sergeant Patrick Joseph Early, a Catholic from Roscommon, and his colleague, Special Constable James Harper, were calculatedly lured to their deaths in south Armagh by IRA men wearing uniforms taken from the Clones captives.

In Garrison, Co Fermanagh, Special Constable James Plumb was killed in an ambush and his body seized.

What followed had nothing to do with Collins's orders, but it is a salutary reminder of the consequences of a generalised authorisation to commit murder. Kiltyclogher IRA men lined up to beat the body into an unrecognisable pulp with rifle butts.

The return of Constable Plumb's shattered cadaver to his home off the Albertbridge Road in Belfast must have done wonders for community relations.

Now admittedly, Collins was now no longer in control of the Northern IRA, but he had equipped and formally unleashed it, with catastrophic consequences for all concerned. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the cult of murder, which Collins had done so much to promote, was now reaching its diseased apogee.

In Galway, two middle-aged RIC sergeants, Tobias Gibbons, from Mayo, and John Gilmartin, from Leitrim, who were gravely ill patients in St Brigid's Hospital, were shot dead in their sick-beds by the IRA.

The campaign against the Northern Ireland security forces was ended, not by Collins's orders, but effectively by the Civil War, which divided the Northern IRA.

So to call Collins an "icon for peace and reconciliation" is not just idiotic, but is to indulge in the depraved rhetoric of Irish republicanism.

This invariably sees "who" as "whom": perpetrators are victims, and unrepentant, jovial killers like Collins are peacemakers: thus the annual Bael na mBlath blather.

But there are a lot of times Unionist politicans could articulate about these matters. But for whatever reason they don't. Maybe they haven't got the words. Chichester-Clark was in America and had a TV debate with Bernadette Devlin. She tore him to shreds. Made him look small and a fool. Thought to myself and this is our Prime Minister!

Conor-Cruise O Brien said when they decided to open the air waves again to the shinners that no matter who the interviewers were the shinners would be able to handle them because they sincerely,wholeheartedly believed in their cause. Whereas to these interviewers it was just a job

Thos who advocated the opening of the air waves said that the shinners would be shown up by these skilled interviewers. But of course we know that didn't happen. They got nowhere with them. I wondered at how well McGuinness,Kelly 'O Dowd, and the rest came on speaking as they did. These were people who (as far as i know) didn't come though the grammar schools or higher education,yet they could hold their own when debating on TV or elsewhere. But of course the answere was as I have already said ...they had a belief. I don't think half of the unionists have a belief. They are career politicans.

This is another excerpt taken from an Eoghan Harris article.

I can still recall clearly the night in 1998 I began to read The IRA and its Enemies. As soon as I saw the heading on the first chapter, 'The Killing of Sergeant O'Donoghue', the hair rose on my head. It concerned the IRA's shooting on Wednesday, November 17, 1920, of Sergeant James O'Donoghue of the RIC, who never carried a carbine, on his way home from Tuckey Street barracks to Tower Street.

Tower Street is just around the corner from where my IRA grandfather, Pat Harris IRA, lived at 11 Nessan Street, making him a neighbour of the murdered man -- I say murdered because my grandfather must have thought so too since he fell silent whenever O'Donoghue's name came up in the long conversations he carried on with his old IRA comrades, and to which I listened avidly as a boy.

Hart's book still causes a bitter reaction among ultra-nationalists. It challenges perceived nationalist wisdom that the IRA did not wage war on ordinary Protestants

A TWISTED MORAL ARROGANCE by Kevin Myers

As we witness yet another funeral (Ronan Kerr) from paramilitary violence,and as we steal yet more of our grandchildren's future to pay for our follies,its surely reasonable to wonder how long this nonsense can go on.

Within a single generation,thousands of people died in a 'war' that is still not quite over and which no-one can now explain. The Republic also lies in ruins,burdened with historically unprecedented levels of debts.

As the Dunnes' ad proclaims: ''The difference is,we're Irish.'' What does the smug exceptionalism behind 'being Irish' actually mean? Does it mean that we may violate the universally accepted rules of God and man and kill certain people whenever the mood so takes us?

Consider the totality of all of this: Ben Dunne of Dunnes Stores was a major subscriber to the Haughey personal slush-fund. As the Republic's finance minister,Charles Haughey had previously used state assets to finance the formation of the Provisional IRA. One of the earlier victims of the Provisionals' campaign was Constable Sean Hughes a policeman shot though the head at his home in Belfast. Totally blind, quadriplegie,doubly incontinent and an epileptic for life,he nevertheless survived; Rather similarly to Ronan Kerr.this GAA man had joined the newly-disarmed RUC, but in his case,at the promptings of the SDLP. Ten years after he was shot,a special GAA congress in 1981 unanimously endorsed the 'war'for national liberation - the Provisional IRA campaign.

Irish society's crucial failing is the lack of an all-binding moral order. The greatest of all commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill,is still only conditionally observed: our political parties enter passionate caveats for their predecessors' right to take the lives of their fellow countrymen.

In three weeks,the Republic will once again celebrate the violent events in which hundreds of Irish men,women and children were killed. Others have used - and still use - 1916 as their moral authoriser to take yet more life.

The evil murder of Ronan Kerr was not morally different from the shooting of Sean Hughes 40 years ago,or of the killing of Constable Patrick Murphy in Belfast 30 years before that,or of the murders of the unarmed Constables O'Brien and Lahiffe in Dublin in 1916. Those deeds were authorised by the autonomous moral orders that define so much of Irish life. So it's not very difficult for other autonomous moral orders to disregard the lesser commandments.

Long before Lowry,such autonomous moral orders enabled de Valera to trouser the millions raised in the US and Haughey the financial progenitor of the Provisionals,to live as Taoiseach, tax-free,on the backs of Irish businesses.

''The difference is,we're Irish,'' Quite so.