YOUR Northern Ireland correspondent, Stephen McBrearty (October 28) recently insisted that "the British Government is once again proving the paramilitaries' boast that . . . rule trom wmtenaii is on a par with colonial oppression".
Quite frankly, I am bewildered by such views. It is difficult to imagine a group of people more unworthy of full civil rights than those affected by the new bans. Pointing out the injustices of the new laws, these people have, for years, been guilty of appalling injustices. They jealously guarded their own civil rights while brutally denying their opponents the most fundamental civil right, the right to life itself.
Interestingly, a local cartoonist once summarised something of this mentality: at the bottom of one of his cartoons about terrorists, he wrote a short caption which said simply but poignantly, "Be my brother — or else!"
CL Killyleagh Co Down
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