Between 1968 and 1973 all the inhabitants of the British Indian Ocean Territory were forcibly removed by British Crown Forces from their homes and from their territory and dumped hundreds of miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles. They had imagined they lived under British protection but neither court order, nor health hazard had prompted their peremptory deportation.
The United States wanted to build a vast base in the territory, and in those pre-internet days a secure world-wide communications system, linking Giego Garcia via a British base in Simonstown, South Africa, and Ballykelly in the North of Ireland with the United States. The Wall Street Journal revealed the purpose in the 1970s.
Now I know there are people in the North of Ireland, and even, God save us all, in the West, East and South of Ireland, who think that their lives, health, prosperity and happiness are dear to those who reign and govern in London. Theresa Villiers has an article in THE IRISH TIMES today calculated to reinforce their thinking.
A letter by another British Minister in the same paper recently seemed to assume that Ireland was already a member of NATO and her people rearing to have a go at the Russians. Britain’s ex-War Minister Michael Portillo has been invited to tell Irish people how they should think about the 1916 Rising. But might I suggest that there is ample evidence that the Powers that Do Be and Have Been in London consider the whole population of Ireland as expendable as those who once lived in Diego Garci and the rest of the British Indian Ocean Territory?
The evidence is a memorandum by the British Cabinet Secretary to the British Prime Minister in 1949, the year in which Britain co-founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The North Atlantic is nearer Britain’s heart than the Indian Ocean and Ireland a nearer neighbour. Ireland had established a republic ruling 26 counties in 1938 and an Act of Dail Eireann formally declaring a Republic came into force in April 1949.
Ireland had not formally left the Commonwealth in 1938 but the British deemed that they had left it when the Republic was declared. So the Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook wrote a memo. He was rather dismissive of Unionist claims to the Six Counties but declared that for “strategic reasons, some part of Ireland must remain within His Majesty’s Dominions.” Prime Minister Clement Attlee marked the memo “noted.” and it was filed away and kept secret until December 1979.
But Attlee had Parliament pass THE IRELAND ACT of 1949 purporting to give the “Parliament of Northern Ireland” total power to hold or cede the 6 counties as it saw fit.
The so called “Parliament of Northern Ireland” was abolished by London with less effort than the Wolf in the Fairy Tale used to blow away the straw house in which the little pigs had sheltered. The pig-headed Unionists should have known that in the UK the Parliament in London is sovereign and can do what it wants, and their concerns are as close to
British politicians hearts as those of the benighted natives of Diego Garcia.
Deluded ex-Nationalists should also take note.
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