Eleventh Night: Prologue, A Poster in Moygashel

It is an Irish town with a clearly Irish name, though since it is almost entirely made up of settlers, they would deny that there is anything Irish about the place whatsoever; it is striking that the settlers refused to rename the places they invaded, speaking of course to the settler pathology, a desire not to settle as such, but to turn theft into a continual act, a process, however much they like to say that they think nothing of us. Here in this small town we find a monument to a Murderer. This man was a double terrorist, being not only a member of the local chapter of the English Army, the appropriately sinister-sounding Ulster Defence Regiment, but also of the settler militia known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (note the similarity of the names of the legal and nominally illegal Entities, speaking to the known overlap and general cooperation between them).

He and several other UVF double-jobbers (some army, some police) put on their official uniforms to stop and then massacre the popular Miami Showband; this man was killed by his own bomb and is celebrated locally as a Hero. A few years ago a banner went up in the town celebrating this man. Now is this open threat to the native people a Crime? The new police force, totally separate and distinct from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, whose members were transferred en masse into it—and which for some reason cannot recruit native Irish, a Peace Process™ policy of 50:50 recruitment having been quickly dropped—helpfully clarified that

Whilst the display of this poster may be perceived as offensive and distasteful, the erection of it does not in itself breach the law. Therefore it is being treated as a ‘hate incident’ as no crime has been committed.

It is unclear from this statement whether a hate incident is a third category separate from both Crime and Non-crime, or whether it is just a word for a non-crime, with the same status as, for example, doing a wet Fart, evidencing the fact that the RUC nua is making stuff up as it goes along, busily coining words for its Inaction.

A man from the local residents’ association of Maigh gCaisil (Plain of the Stone Fort) has no idea whatsoever as to who might be behind the poster somehow erected in this small town without anyone noticing—erected moreover by the mysterious Moygashel Cultural Group—but he is delighted it is there:

We are a Settler village, he is part of the culture of the village. He is not a terrorist, he never was a terrorist as far as this village is concerned and that is not glorifying anything. It is nothing against anybody. I don’t understand why people are annoyed about it. There are a thousand things more important than a poster in Moygashel.

Macdara has edited the quote for clarity; he said Protestant rather than Settler. Doubtless he would not object to this designation. Note that this townland has almost entirely been cleared of native people, who form between 2% and 7% of the population (2% use the proxy term Catholic, 5% use Other, some of whom are likely natives who object, as would Macdara, to designating with a religious label). This makes it something like the ideal village of the Occupation: enough natives to continually get the pleasure of dominating and threatening them, not so many that there can be any real fear of Insurgency, Retribution, or Change of any kind.