The Last Survivors of Old Ireland

Well put KJ but I wonder is already too late? I was quite struck during the gay marriage and abortion referenda at seening (some)senior citizens displaying prominent Yes badges and lobbying for radicalism. I have always associated the old with wisdom and common sense.

However as you say we are all getting on. A 70 year old lady or gentleman in 2019 was a child of the flower power free love left wing revolutionary era. I have discovered most hold to their shabby and worn out prejudices even those who have become rich and successful. In most middle class parishes a greying liberal clique run the show . I fear our seniors are almost as decadent as the rest of us except they have less energy and need more spare parts.

There is a lot of truth in this. I think the early riots of the late 60s were probably the genuine article when the RUC were on the edge of the Bogside, you were risking life and limb.

At least in my memory growing up in Derry, during the 70s there was always a riot in William street (a street leading from the city centre to the edge of the Bogside) every Saturday. It was expected and the British Army just parked a few armoured vehicles at the bottom of the street and contained the rioters. Occasionally the army sent out snatch squads to get a few of the ringleaders. But you had to be careful as the rubber bullets (and later plastic bullets) shot by the army could do you a lot of damage. Occasionally during the riot an IRA gunman would let fly with a volley of shots and everyone would dive for cover, there was no mistaking the crackle of automatic fire.

The Saturday riot was such a known quantity that I remember telling my Mum and aunt to be careful as they shopped in Wellworths in the square just 30 or 40 metres from the bottom of William Street. I was always afraid it could spill over at any moment. Life just went on amidst it all, although there were often innocents that got injured or killed if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You are right about Sinn Fein. Apart from the Eamon McCanns and a few other lefties, the people I knew from school who would later be 'involved' didn't have a marxist bone in their body. They were Catholic and Irish. Sinn Fein have, in my opinion, betrayed these people badly and jumped on the globalist bandwagon without a second thought for these people. 

You are not far off with the ironic remarks about reproductive rights. How would it be possible, one asks, to tie in LGBT issues to a period in the 1960s in Derry when nobody gave a damn about that as they were living in slum houses within an anti-Catholic state? Well the bright sparks of Sinn Fein top brass have obviously sat down and hatched a new narrative and exploited the term 'civil rights' which was the term used in the 1960s for demands for fairer housing, jobs and voting. Now Sinn Fein say that the pursuit of 'civil rights' are still ongoing as N.Ireland doesn't have gay marriage and abortion and they are still the champions. Except that the Catholic mothers of the Bogside, Creggan and Waterside would never have even imagined such things in their wildest dreams, nor would they approve of any of the LGBT nonsense (unless, had they lived longer, maybe 30 or 40 years of BBC and RTE propaganda, emotion and blackmail would have won over some).

Sometimes I wonder if the genesis of Irish liberalism lies in the "oppression" narrative of Irish history.

Irish people may not actually have considered themselves the "most oppressed people ever", as revisionists like to taunt. But certainly, the idea of oppression seems to have become utterly central to Irish identity and Irish historiography. Did the victim mentality, as applied to ourselves in relation to the British, become so appealing that we eventually became incapable of rejecting victimology in any form, that we automatically sided with whichever side was painted as the underdog?

I'm not suggesting Irish people weren't oppressed. I just regret that we allowed resentment and the poison of righteous indignation to enter so deeply into our national soul.