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14 June 2007 Edition

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Fifth Column

Paisley’s past pals

The appearance of armed and masked members of Ulster Resistance in a photograph and interview in the Sunday Life must have sent shivers up the collective spine of the DUP leadership.
Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson donned the red berets of the paramilitary Ulster Resistance when it appeared at the Ulster Hall in November 1986.
As the Sunday Life reminded readers, Peter Robinson told one rally: “The Resistance has indicated that drilling and training has already started. The officers of the nine divisions have taken up their duties.” Drilling and training for what, dear Peter? Drilling to just marching up and down in straight lines like soldiers? Training on how to carry a flag? Or was there more?

There was more.

When Ulster Resistance got caught in a joint operation with the UDA and UVF smuggling guns and grenades through Belfast Docks, Ian Paisley and his DUP lieutenants buried their berets and washed their Blanco white-gloved hands of the whole shebang.
A year later, three Ulster Resistance heads – including one British Army reservist sergeant  – were grabbed by the gendarmes in Paris, while they were trying to sell stolen missile technology from the Shorts factory in Belfast to a diplomat from apartheid South Africa.
In the Belfast Docks gun running, Ulster Resistance, the UDA and the UVF brought in 200 AK47 rifles, hundreds of grenades and 90 Browning 9mm pistols to share between them.
The RUC couldn’t help but seize the UDA share when the overladen cars were buckling under the weight of weapons on the road outside Portadown. Half the UVF’s gear was found within weeks. But only part of the Ulster Resistance arsenal was ever found.
Now Ulster Resistance says it’s still intact, still armed and still dangerous. I’m sure the DUP are helping police with their enquiries.

DUP snap out of it

Accepting his chain of office, the new DUP Mayor of Derry has called for major events such as the Hallowe’en Festival to be held, even occasionally, in the largely unionist Waterside district “to help address division in the city”.
Alderman Drew Thompson also pledged to be a mayor for all of the city, to represent everyone, and that he wants citizens to feel at home throughout the area.
Fair play, Drew. But he means everyone except republicans and Sinn Féin voters, of course.
The ‘Mayor for All the People’ refused to have his photo taken with the Deputy Mayor of Derry, Councillor Patricia Logue of Sinn Féin. Drew complained that there are “unresolved issues of Protestant alienation and trust”. He explained:
 “I believe there is a lot of trust that has to be built. There are still a lot of barriers there, one being Protestant alienation and the other being trust. You have to feel confident in the people you are working with and that doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time.”
Drew obviously thinks you can solve unionist alienation by alienating the people who vote for the majority nationalist party. And he’s overlooking the fact that nationalists – particularly in Derry – have a lot of very recent memories of alienation from decades of unionist misrule, including gerrymandering, institutional discrimination, Bloody Sunday and DUP-backed repression of the Civil Rights Movement.
But surely the mayor has to work with his Sinn Féin deputy?
“I intend to have a working relationship,” the DUP man insisted, “but we do not have to be all ‘buddy buddy’ about it.”
Indeed not, Drew. Not like when the DUP was really ‘buddy buddy’ with the UDA and the UVF in the Ulster Workers’ Council strike, and Ian Paisley was all ‘buddy buddy’ with the Third Force and Ulster Resistance unionist paramilitaries.

Prince of Ales

Channel 4’s investigation last week of the car crash in which Princess Diana died was causing her sons “acute distress”, according to the princes’ private secretary, Colonel Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton.
One of her sons was so distraught that, hours before the C4 documentary dwelling on his mother’s horrific car smash death, Prince William was down the supermarket with his army buddies and his bodyguards, stocking up with £850 of wine, beer, and crisps before settling down to watch England play Estonia in the World Cup.
Just to make sure that he coped with the trauma during the evening, William bought up the ASDA store in Weymouth’s entire stock of the posh people’s plonk, the gin-based Pimm’s No 1 Cup.
Willie’s wagon train needed four trolleys to carry all the vodka, rum, Carlsberg and other booze back to barracks in nearby Bovington.
Store manager Darren Rideout told reporters that the prince – who was suffering “acute distress” because of that evening’s impending Channel 4 documentary, remember – jumped on the back of a supermarket trolley “and free-wheeled across the aisle, just like a teenager”. Prince William is 24 and training to lead a troop of mechanised cavalry.
“When customers realised who he was they started chatting to him and he seemed very amiable and was laughing and joking.”
That “acute distress” does strange things to yer royalty. They’re not like us, you know.

Paris Hilton – Prisoner of Conscience

We couldn’t leave without a word about that now most famous felon, Paris Hilton.
The Hilton Hotels heiress has had a bit of a Hokey-Cokey jail sentence – ‘You put Paris in... You put Paris out... You put Paris in... And you shake her all about.’
The court put her in. The Los Angeles sheriff then got her out because he thought she had ‘severe mental health problems’. Her lawyers claimed later she had a skin rash (those prison blankets do chafe so). The sheriff wanted her to serve her time under house arrest in the gruelling conditions of her $2.1 million Beverly Hills Mansion, with nothing to comfort her except her silk sheets, servants and the swimming pool in the hills above Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. But a very miffed court judge put her right back in jail again, this time to serve her full 45-day sentence.
Now Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has denied reports that his dodgy decision to let poor Paris out of jail was in any way influenced by her grandfather’s $1,000 (€748) donation to his 2006 re-election campaign.
But Paris has said she will not appeal the judge’s decision. At last she accepts that no one can use the excuse of being too beautiful to be in jail. Just ask Arthur Morgan.


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