The 5th Column

Loose cannons

LARRY PRATT, director of the Gun Owners of America, has called for all the Protestants in South Armagh to be armed.

The top gun made his curious call after visiting South Armagh at the invitation of Willie 'Blunderbuss' Frazer,(pictured) head of the self-styled Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR). Willie's wild-eyed cousin is reported to be well known in the USA, according to the Sunday Tribune's Susan McKay.

"He was forced to stand down as campaign chairman to the republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, in 1996 because of his links with white supremacist groups. He admitted sharing a platform with a former Ku Klux Klan leader and a [neo-Nazi] Aryan Nations official. He has also been associated with the right-wing extremists of the US militia movement."

Wild Willie Frazer is himself described by McKay as "a well-known Orangeman who has said loyalist paramilitaries 'should never have been locked up'. He defended members of the security forces who passed information to loyalists."

Pratt is now reciprocating Willie's hospitality by taking him and his crew on a three-week tour of the States to try and stop people supporting the Peace Process. The British Government-funded FAIR, Susan McKay reports, also wants to "tell the world about Roman priests facilitating terrorism".

The DUP's South Armagh MLA, Paul Berry (too young to have been involved with the DUP's good ol' boys in the paramilitary Ulster Resistance), said he sympathised with FAIR but even he's worried about the idea of arming Willie Frazer's rednecks. "At the end of the day, there's strict control of weapons in NI and there has to be," Berry says. "It would be a recipe for disaster if everyone was running around with guns".

Paul feels safer just leaving it to those tens of thousands of unionists with legally-held weapons, the UDR/RIR, the RUC/PSNI, etc, and British Military Intelligence, who shipped shed-loads of guns to their surrogates in the unionist paramilitaries. That's a recipe for stability, right?

Naked exhibition

DUP MEMBERS of Fermanagh District Council have been concentrating on nude pictures at an exhibition in Enniskillen.

English artist Alison Lambert accused DUP councillors of censorship by stopping the display of four pieces of work among the six central charcoal drawings in her exhibition, The Human Image.

Alison said that she had no problems at several other galleries before unveiling her show in Enniskillen. Her manager told the local newspaper, The Impartial Reporter, that one of the reasons he had been given for the drawings being dropped was "it was felt that the pictures would alienate a 'powerful political grouping', which he described as the DUP".

This is a curious stance by the DUP's Fermanagh fraternity, given that they seemed to have no objection to the pictures of naked images of another DUP member, former Belfast mayor Sammy Wilson, whose intimate photos of his naked romp in the forest with a lady friend made their way into a tabloid newspaper. Unlike their Enniskillen exhibition of naked Puritanism, the Fermanagh DUP has been tight-lipped about their Sammy's exposures. Perhaps they can handle the real thing better.

Minister's auld Orange flute case

GEORGE GALLOWAY, the Scottish MP expelled from the British Labour Party last October for opposing the war on Iraq, scored a victory over the British war machine and the Orange Order last week.

Britain's Armed Forces Minister, the former Six-County Minister, Adam Ingram, failed in a court attempt to prevent the rebel Glasgow Kelvin MP from publishing a book that accuses Ingram of religious bigotry. The action is expected to cost Ingram (or the taxpayer) up to £25,000 in legal expenses.

Ingram went to court in Edinburgh to try to stop the publication of Galloway's I'm Not the Only One. The book claims that the former Six-County Minister played the flute in a "sectarian, anti-Catholic, Protestant-supremacist Orange Order band".

Ingram, Labour MP for East Kilbride, claimed the statement was false and highly defamatory because, although he had been in the Junior Orange Lodge for a year at the age of 16 and attended three parades, he hadn't played the flute.

Graeme Henderson, his counsel, said the quotation had appeared in the Sunday Herald in a review as a statement of fact, and as such was clearly defamatory.

However, Stephen Woolman QC, for Penguin Books, argued the statement of fact was true in its essentials and that "the adjectives are matters of fair comment when applied to the institution in question".

The presiding judge, Lord Kingarth, agreed that the balance of the argument was in favour of Penguin and rejected Ingram's claims.

'Gorgeous George' Galloway, kicked out of the British Labour Party by Ingram and his cohorts for allegedly bringing Blair's party into disrepute for actively opposing the war in Iraq, said he hopes Ingram, and not the taxpayer, will foot the legal bill.

"It is almost beyond belief. I would have thought that the country's Armed Forces Minister would have had more pressing matters on his horizon than whether someone said he was simply a member of the Orange Order or a flute player in the Orange Order and whether he was defamed by that."

Royston's radio gag

YOU would have thought that the normally bellicose Fianna Fáil Mayor of Dublin, Royston Brady, would have jumped at every chance to go on prime-time radio in a bid to convince Dubliners that he has the vision, politics, policies and enough integrity and maturity to earn their confidence and the right to be their MEP. But the motor-mouth mayor has gone into hiding.

Previously, Royston was seen as the wunderkid who would help Taoiseach Bertie Ahern stave off the rising Sinn Féin challenge in his backyard. Since being made mayor courtesy of the Fianna Fáil/Labour pact, though, Royston has gone from Boy Wonder to Boy Blunder, slagging off fellow councillors, sitting MEPs and anyone else that will get him cheap headlines in the media.

This week, radio station Today FM offered Royston (and other Euro candidates) half an hour of prime drive-time broadcasting in a one-on-one interview with Matt Cooper. Royston, however, doesn't want the chance to talk to his electors (or rather his Mount Street minders have imposed a media gag on the babbling Brady boy). Royston can't be seen and won't be heard. Maybe he's typical Fianna Fáil MEP material after all.