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Inaccurate Snow report
By Malcolm Rogers
 Operation
Banner has nothing to do with Clare, funnily enough.
It’s the name the British army have given their ‘military
normalisation’ programme in the North of Ireland.
While reporting on it last week on Channel 4 News, Jon Snow had a bit
of a Freudian slip when he spoke about the British army’s 35 year
occupation of the place.
At the end of the report he announced an apology.
What he meant to say was ‘operation’, not occupation.
Er, no. right first time, Jon.
On the same programme Lt Gen Nicholas Parker GOC said that the troop level
in the North would soon be of the same level as that in Glasgow, Yorkshire
or Cornwall.
In fact, he went one better.
Asked what life would be like for soldiers in Norn Iron in five years
he said: “I think they should be going into Tesco’s to get
their shopping on the way home from the barracks in their uniforms, and
nobody would bat an eyelid.”
Well, I’d like to ask Paddy Power, a man who is seldom wrong, what
odds he’d give on that.
PS: Bernadette McAliskey, aka Bernadette Devlin, has just celebrated
her 60th birthday by asserting that peace has been brought to the North
by “perjury, fraud, corruption, cheating and lying”.
I wish, just for once, Bernadette would stop sitting on the fence. |
