Mrs Bland needs more facts on that

From the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Oct 21, 1978

In an interview with The Sunday Times, published last Sunday, Dom Mintoff’s daughter was asked about that time she and her pro-IRA friends threw horse excrement around at the House of Commons.

She said: “That was about human rights. I knew people who were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment in the prisons in Northern Ireland who wanted a united island free of military forces. I was particularly close to a mother who had two sons and one husband in prison. I won’t go through their conditions because they were horrendous. (…)”

Well, it’s a blessing, isn’t it, that Mrs Bland’s friend had only one husband in prison. How much more terrible it would have been had she had two or three.

The interviewer’s comeback was that while Mrs Bland was agitating for human rights in Northern Ireland, back home in Malta human rights were being breached, arguably by her father’s government.

“Did you feel unable to react in the way you did in the UK? Or do you feel that human rights were not being breached at all?” interviewer Chris Peregin asked.

Her response, which was the talk of the town that Easter Sunday and will probably pass into legend, was:

I WOULD NEED MORE FACTS ON THAT.

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It was good to be reminded of something I had forgotten: that the horse-shit incident was all about the IRA. Back then when it happened, I distinctly remember the grown-ups thinking how disgraceful it was not so much that Yana Mintoff, as she was then, had thrown manure about in the House of Commons (though that too), but that she was in favour of the Irish Republican Army.

To put this into context, you have to know – if you didn’t live through the 1970s and remember what things felt like with the escalation of European terrorism by the IRA, the Brigate Rosse and the Bader Meinhof – just what the IRA was like back then, and how it was perceived.

The Irish Republican Army was not about human rights but about extreme violence. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was basically a highly organised and well-financed group of murderers, with the worst of the violence in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Nobody knew who would be killed next, or where the next bomb would go off in a British urban centre, killing very many people, including children.

It’s horrible when you come away from an interview thinking ‘Damn! I should have asked this or that.’ I went through it so many times myself. I’ll bet her interviewer is kicking himself for not following up his good comeback on human rights in Malta in the 1970s with a question about how Mrs Bland reconciled her vociferous support of the IRA with the mass murders committed by that same terrorist group.

And why was she supporting a terrorist group in the first place?

Less than a year after Miss Mintoff threw her manure, the IRA continued with their ‘human rights protests’ by blowing up 79-year-old Lord Louis Mountbatten on his boat in Ireland. The same bomb killed his 14-year-old grandson, leaving his twin brother to live on without him. A 15-year-old local boy, who was working on the boat, died too. So did an elderly lady, who was a guest.

The IRA admitted responsibility straight away, and just a couple of hours later killed 18 soldiers with booby-trap bombs. All those soldiers had families, but it was only her friend’s ‘two sons and one husband’ in prison that Miss Mintoff appears to have bothered about.

If Miss Mintoff needs the facts on that, then what we need is her views on that. Let’s hope she won’t tell us that it’s terrible the boys died but ‘taking out’ a symbol of British imperialism was a necessary measure in the war to kick the British out of Northern Ireland. Did daddy, embroiled in his own battles with the British, approve? Sadly, he’s gaga so we can’t ask him now.

But then why should we be surprised at all this twisted morality and ‘head in the sand’ reasoning. The Irish Republican Army was financed by Muammar Gaddafi, who bankrolled its weapons. The bomb that blew up Mounbatten and those two boys was, like all the other IRA bombs that killed so many people in those years, made with Semtex sponsored by Libya.

Yes, the same Libya and Muammar Gaddafi who sponsored Mrs Bland’s father, paid him money and pulled his strings.

Mintoff’s Malta was, in the 1970s, a conduit for arms trafficking and the transfer of money from Libya to the IRA. We will probably never know at this stage whether Mrs Bland’s father knew about it and didn’t do anything because he couldn’t or because he had no moral objections, or whether he simply adopted a ‘three monkeys’ approach and just got on with things.

Everyone seems to have become sidetracked on the horse manure business, forgetting to ask WHY Yana Mintoff did it and what she was protesting about – which are the obvious things to ask. It is her support of the IRA when the IRA were murdering people that is shocking, and not that business with the horse-shit. That’s just laughable. It has been turned in the public imagination into some fabulous protest whereby Miss Mintoff went up into some gallery and threw sacks of manure over the heads of MPs.

But it was typically half-assed and pathetic. She walked into the House of Commons with the manure under her coat – and if you have ever seen a sack of manure you will know that it is impossible to hide one under one’s coat, which means this was probably a supermarket bag – and dumped it on the floor and on Dennis Skinner’s (of all people – a bigger leftie than she is) head.

It made the news mainly because her father was that Gaddafi bug*er in Malta and his daughter was protesting in favour of IRA members who had been jailed.