http://www.garry-bushell.co.uk/ontheblog.htm
At half-time on Saturday, during Celtic’s triumphant 9-0 thumping of Aberdeen, the self-styled Green Brigade among their supporters produced anti-Remembrance Day banners reading: "Your deeds would shame all the devils in Hell. Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan. No bloodstained poppy on our Hoops." Celtic has long had its rotten apple of hardcore IRA supporters, but only an historical illiterate would be unaware of the tens of thousands of Catholic soldiers who died in World War I. Millions of our people, of all creeds, died to defeat the Nazi war machine and protect our freedoms in WWII. Does their sacrifice really deserve to be denigrated so crudely? In fairness, Celtic has apologised, but that’s not enough. This shameful disrespect for our war heroes has been seen before in Parkhead and will be seen again. It’s not an aberration either. Reactionary IRA nut-jobs have long had an association with those who opposed the fight against continental fascism. The IRA’s courting of Nazi Germany is well-documented. In 2003, Sinn Fein held a rally in Dublin at the statue to honour IRA man Sean Russell, a collaborator who died on board a U-boat as he travelled to Ireland to foment a pro-Nazi rising in 1940. Russell’s mission was to foster a coup in the Irish Republic and to attack ship-yards and British military installations in Northern Ireland. The only thing that stopped him was his death from a perforated ulcer 100 miles off the coast of County Galway. That same year, a German agent called Goertz was captured after he’d parachuted into Ballivor, Co Meath, to discuss an IRA proposal for an attack on Northern Ireland by the Germans to be supported by 5,000 IRA recruits. In Belfast during WWII, IRA volunteers were ordered to help the Luftwaffe to bomb their own city at the cost of nearly 2,000 dead and thousands more made homeless. And just a few years ago, a US Nazi hate group, the National Alliance, called on Irish Americans to support the Real IRA (who bombed Omagh) and its political wing the 32 County Sovereignty Movement. Nice company you’re keeping, Mr. Lennon.
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