TALES OF THE PARA NORMAL

“The best four million pounds I ever spent,” beamed Dermot Desmond last month from the front page of Celtic View, the official magazine of Glasgow Celtic FC. Which raised the question of how many four million pounds Dermot has spent in his days, so as to be able to make the comparison.

You’ll remember Dermot. Moustache, big grin, pal of Charlie Haughey, boss-man of National City Brokers. Hailed as a wonderful human being by Celtic supremo Fergus McCann for kick-starting the club’s £13.4 million share issue with that £4 million investment.

Dermot first became something of a national figure as a result of so falling in love with the architectural splendour of a disused building in Ballsbridge that he upped and bought it for a property company he was involved in for, if my memory serves me right, three pounds, seventeen and ninepence. One of Dermot’s colleagues in the property company happened to be none other than Dr. Michael Smurfit, head honcho of Telecom Eireann. And then, by the sort of amazing coincidence which constantly makes life such a rollicking adventure, Telecom realised that the building could have been purpose-designed as its new headquarters!!! In a twinkling, Telecom agreed to buy it from the property company for – again I work from memory – riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

All this is by way of caricature, of course.

Anyway, it refers to how some of us first came to hear of Dermot who has just spent four million pound on Glasgow Celtic shares. Or rather he hasn’t. When you take time to read the story it turns out Dermot has invested a mere two million of his own mazooma. Half of “the best four million pounds I ever spent” was, in fact, other people’s money. So confusing, high-finance.

Anyway. My own earnest hope is that Parkhead won’t be concreted over by the end of next season and transformed into the headquarters of newly-privatised Scotsrail Plc and that the team isn’t nestling at the bottom of the First Division as a result of its play not being as vastly enriched as fans had been led to expect by a new central defensive formation of Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien.

F F F F F F

Much has been made by mouthpieces for the British ruling class both here and in Britain itself about the different roles of the “security forces” and the “terrorists” in the North and about the need, therefore, to make a distinction between killings by the one and the other.

Members of the security forces, like Lee Clegg, might kill in the wrong, as a result of recklessness or overreaction. But they don’t set out to kill in the wrong. That’s the difference.

Let’s check this out by taking a look at the home life of Clegg’s battalion, 3 Para. Some readers might recall that we’ve passed this way before. A couple of years back I commented here on a book about the background to 3 Para’s involvement in the Falklands/Malvinas war.

In Excursion To Hell a former corporal, Vincent Bramley, had described fellow members of 3 Para killing Argentine prisoners and committing other atrocities during and after the battle for Mount Longdon, the hill which commanded the capital of the Falklands/Malvinas, Port Stanley.

Following publication of the book, the Argentine authorities demanded that charges of war crimes be brought against any culprits who could be identified. In the event, no charges were ever brought, but media interviews with members of the battalion about the Argentine demand combined with Bramley’s book to throw a bright light on the way the Paras saw themselves and their role.

Bramley described how, after Mount Langdon had been captured, Argentine conscript prisoners were arbitrarily bayoneted and shot, some as they begged for mercy or sobbed for their mothers. He told that some of the dead were mutilated, their ears or other body parts cut off as trophies. The ammunition pouch of one member of 3 Para who was killed in action was discovered to be stuffed with human body pieces.

It was elsewhere reported that members of 3 Para had forced a captured unit to lie beneath a huge canvas ground-sheet under which they then tossed phosphorus grenades, sizzling their victims to death.

But more telling was the picture which emerged from these sources of the spirit and self-image of the Paras in peacetime – and the extent to which they regarded conditions of peace as futile and intensely irritating and hopefully a mere prelude to the resumption of war.

Commenting on Bramley’s book, another corporal from 3 Para mused: “In my section there was me – and I’d been a foster child – and 12 men under me. There wasn’t a single one of them who came from a normal family, who hadn’t been in council care, in foster homes and the rest of it. Everyone thought Vince (Bramley) was a real oddity because he had a mum and dad. The Para Reg, with its rules and regulations and discipline, became our family.”

Members of 3 Para went through bonding rituals involving practices normal people would find revolting – consuming vomit, urine and excrement, for example – as if to emphasise their violent separateness from the society around them. Their ideological reference points seem to have been chosen for the same purpose. They carried around copies of Who’s Who in Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Teutonic Knights. The songs with which they commonly ended violent, drunken nights out at their home base in Aldershot were ‘Lorelei’ – better known as the ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ song from the film Cabaret – and the SS anthem ‘When We March On England’.

“Killing,” one former paratrooper told the Independent On Sunday. “You long for the opportunity. You wait your life for the chance to slot someone.”

Against that background, the erection in the battalion canteen of a “mural” celebrating Lee Clegg’s success in slotting Karen Reilly is not to be wondered at. A sick pride in doing a teenage girl to death will have fitted very well into the mind-set of 3 Para.

I don’t believe any of the propaganda about Lee Clegg. I believe he meant to kill her, the sick fuck.

The support of the British establishment for Clegg isn’t an accidental or emotional thing. It’s a necessary, integral element of their thinking. Soldiers sent out licensed to kill have to know that their bosses will stand by them if controversy arises as a result.

The point of releasing Lee Clegg is to send a message of reassurance to others like him.

This is particularly important when it comes to a member of an elite regiment. If a Para could be made to serve out a murder sentence for killing a West Belfast teenager, what would the effect be on the thinking of ordinary squaddies in some other messy theatre of operations?

Ian Thain, who killed Kidso Reilly in Belfast in 1983 was a squaddie. He was released quietly, furtively, after serving 34 months. Ian Latimer, one of the “UDR Four” sentenced to life for the killing of Adrian Carroll in Armagh the same year, is still in prison after 11 years.

Ordinary squaddies from proper regiments are bundled out the back door. Members of scruffy, locally-recruited regiments are left to rot. But when it comes to the creme de la creme of the officially-uniformed killers, the full college of establishment cardinals is summoned into session.

The British ruling class isn’t doing Clegg any favours. They need such killers around them, for purposes of protection. They have no option but to spring Clegg. The same would apply, of course, to the armed forces of any class-divided State, including the southern Irish State.

Meanwhile, I see that Newt Gingrich, leader of the crazies who have won a majority in the US Congress, has had to give the elbow to Christina Jeffrey who he had wanted to appoint official House Historian. “He was very kind about it,” said Ms. Jeffrey. “But the press and the vicious, malicious, mean-spirited liberals who are out to get him would have used this to keep on stirring things up.”

By “this” she meant her view that in the interests of objectivity the Nazi attitude to the Holocaust and the Ku Klux Klan attitude to racism should be taught in US schools and given equal weight with other views.

Fifty years after the discovery of the full horror of Auschwitz, the holder of the third most important political position in the US appoints a person of these known views as official chronicler of his term in office and is “very kind about it” when forced to dis-appoint her.

Weird, or what?

A RIGHT BURKE

I SEE Mary Robinson was over in Geneva wearing a knitted flag and making a speech to the World Economic Forum. I met a travelling woman from the west of Ireland at the Bloody Sunday weekend in Derry who told me, “Never forget, Mary Robinson is one of the snooty Burkes of Ballina.” I wonder, does that mean there’s “the Snooty Burkes” in Ballina to distinguish them from loads of other Burkes in the vicinity, the way there’s The Rock Dohertys, the Goose Dohertys and so on in Donegal?

Anyway, it will have been no bother to Ms. Robinson to talk to world economic leaders, her being a veteran of conferences of the Trilateral Commission. That’s the sinister, semi-secret global body which brings together bankers, military chiefs, politicians and significant “opinion formers” to discuss, in secret, how to run the world for the benefit of the rich. Way back in the ’70s, Robinson, a mere senator, was one of only half a dozen Irish members. Membership is by invitation-only. I suppose there’s a perfectly simple explanation for it all and that if we asked her she’d tell us.

One of the reasons for the persistence of the economic set-up whereby the rich minority exploits the world’s poor is that formal discussion of the disparity and what to do about it tends to be conducted through the medium of meaningless bullshit. RTE News on January 29th included a clip of Robinson talking about world poverty. Maybe it was heavily edited. Or maybe not.

Here, in its entirety, is her spake: “There’s a malaise, there’s an uneasiness, and that I think has made thoughtful leadership realise you must have values in your system. You have got to have some shared values that people are committed to. And these have to be global values. The churches have given a good lead. There’s been great leadership in the parliament of world religions. And Hans Kung spoke here yesterday, very eloquently, about the need for a global ethic.”

Set that to music and you could sing it in Sudanese.