Jim Allister's speech in Assembly on Black murder
05 November 2012
This was undoubtedly a dastardly IRA murder. One's thoughts and sympathies immediately are with the Black family: the widow and the two fatherless children. They stand in a very dark and difficult place, where so many people have stood in the past. Little comfort as it brings, it is relevant and necessary at this time to say that the community as a whole is thinking of them .Some say that the murder was utterly futile, but we have to face the fact that this dastardly murder followed a well set Provo template in which you create discord, difficulty and protest inside the prison and then you begin to murder prison officers outside the prison. Where did we see that before? Many, many times. Indeed, 29 prison officers were butchered by the IRA in pursuit of the same template. People say it was futile, and yet we look at the structures of this House and we see that, sadly, the violence of the past paid. That is still a motivator for those who perpetrate today's IRA violence. They look at those who perpetrated previous prison officer and police murders and conclude, sadly correctly, that it worked for them. The structures of the House are an ineloquent testimony to that sad, hideous reality. These structures are built on the reward of terrorism and the buy-off of terrorism.
The odious, hate-filled deviants who murdered David Black are no better or worse than the odious, hate-filled deviants who butchered in the name of the Provisional IRA and whose murders are still justified today in the House as those of the IRA. Part of the driving force for that continues to be the sad reality that this community rewarded that. Politicians in this community, for the sake of office, rewarded that, and in doing so they set their own template that violence, alas, can pay. I trust that on this occasion it will not, but, given the history of the past, one can have little confidence that that will be so.
