MODERN TIMES/Bobby Sands

It is said we live in modern times,
In the civilised year of ‘seventy nine,
But when I look around, all I see,
Is modern torture, pain, and hypocrisy.

In modern times little children die,
They starve to death, but who dares ask why?
And little girls without attire,
Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire.

And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones,
Young children bury their parents’ bones,
And secret police in the dead of night,
Electrocute the naked woman out of sight.

In the gutter lies the black man, dead,
And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red,
And there was He who was born and came to be,
But lived and died without liberty.

As the bureaucrats, speculators and presidents alike,
Pin on their dirty, stinking, happy smiles tonight,
The lonely prisoner will cry out from within his tomb,
And tomorrow’s wretch will leave its mother’s womb

BOBBY SANDS was twenty seven years old when he died on the sixty sixth day of hunger-strike in the H-Block prison hospital, Long Kesh, on the 5th May 1981. The young IRA Volunteer who had spent almost the last nine years of his short life in prison as a result of his Irish republican activities was, by the time of his death, world-famous having been elected to the British parliament and having withstood pressures, political and moral (including an emissary from Pope John Paul II), for him to abandon his fast which was aimed at countering a criminalization policy by the British government.

A country with three armies

What other country has three armies? You have the army of the 32 county Republic, Oglaigh Na hEireann. Then there is the army of the 26 county state, and then there is the British army in the six counties.

What do we need a defence force for, we do not do wars with other countries, the FCA will do fine.

Do we really need 7000/8000 soldiers sitting in dispersed barracks throughout Ireland. What do they do twiddle their thumbs? Look at the guts on some of them and you will quickly conclude their physique is a disgrace to the uniform. The army is becoming a joke a hiding place for maligners and part time devotees of the black economy.

I fully understand the need for the Navy. I would support the idea extending and developing their role. When not chasing down drug smugglers or illegal fishing in Irish waters they get at least due a little bit of shrimping, which may be of use to the economy