Dixie and the Sash

Thank God for Fern Lane's observations. I keep working to convince people on the western side of the Atlantic that marching season is an important human rights issue, that we white Americans would be no more guilty by running through a ``black'' section of town playing ``Dixie'' and shouting ``nigger'' than Orangemen are with their triumphal songs and the similarly offensive ``Fenian'' and ``Taig'' taunts. What's the matter with the British government? Don't they see what this same attitude created in America in the 1960s?

The Orange attitude is the same one that unionists showed with the collapsed attempt to form an Executive. It's the same attitude that Ian Paisley and other DUPes utilize to rear their ugly heads not into workers of peace but into rousers of the rabble.

It's an attitude of dominance, to hell with anyone who believes otherwise. Ireland would be much better off without the attitude and the people who hold it.

Phil Alexander
Asheville
North Carolina
USA

How many guns do unionists want??

A Chara,

Why doesn't Ulster Unionist big shot Ken Maginnis or the silky Dermot Nesbitt tell us just exactly how many guns the IRA would have to hand over to cut through all their bullshit about decommissioning? Supposing the IRA offered Maginnis a dozen weapons? Ken would demand one hundred. So how about if they offer him a hundred then? Maginnis would want two hundred. And so and so on.

Let's face it, whatever number republicans came up with, the unionists - armed with 139,000 legally-held weapons and rising - will never be satisfied.

And isn't it a bit rich when the likes of ex-UDR gunman Ken Maginnis, John Taylor and David Trimble, who cut his political teeth with Bill Craig's neo-fascist Vanguard movement, lecture nationalists about the threat and use of violence?

We remember the loyalist and RUC onslaught against Bombay Street and the Bogside - and the part the Unionist Party played.

Trimble, Taylor and Maginnis have got a bloody nerve - their one-party state has a bloody record.

Andy Byrne,
Lurgan.

The Sash Trimble Wears

A Chara,

Amongst all the leaks about the Patten Commission's plans for the future of the RUC, why is there no mention of banning RUC members from being members of an organisation dedicated to religious supremacy over 40 per cent of the population in a divided society - i.e. the Orange Order.

And when are RTÉ's, the BBC's or even UTV's batteries of probing interviewers - who revel in challenging Sinn Féin leaders about alleged IRA links - going to put First Minister David Trimble on the spot over his membership of the legal but anti-Catholic Orange Order? Evelyn McGraine,
County Galway