Not him personally, but I've met a thousand Paddy McGees, and have even been related to a few of them; the devout Catholic shop steward, probably oldest Old Labour, probably likely to do anything to help anyone else and possessed of an innate sense of fairness, born of a very deep and universal sense of right and wrong, that makes them as stubborn as mules in the face of real or perceived injustice. Many are like Ents, rooted to the ground on which they were born. I would imagine Martin Meenagh knows quite a few of the type as well.Mr. McGee is now dead, having been decapitated on his doorstep in Manchester. The motive for the killing may have been a neighbourhood noise dispute. His killer violated his mortal remains, dumping his head in a bin. A man is reported to be in custody.
Decapitation is not a particularly Anglo-Irish way of despatching your foes, or hasn't been for at least a few centuries. James Higham has posted a piece which begins, "These names - Bilal Abdulla, Mohammed Asha, Kafeel Ahmed, Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mohamed Atta, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khaled al-Harbi, Shamil Salmanovich Basayev, Osman Larussi, Yacine Benalia, Kamel Rabat Bouralha, Imam Samudra - they're all Jewish names, aren't they?" I titled my own thoughts on the 2006 airliner plot, "I Couldn't See Paddy O' Shaughnessy". Yet one cannot draw conclusions until all the facts are known.Paddy McGee was one of the last of a particular civilisation - the navvy. They were as stubborn as hell, but many had good hearts and did good things. He didn't deserve to go to God that way. I only hope he didn't suffer.O Lord, grant eternal rest unto your son Patrick, and may perpetual light shine upon him, may he rest in peace; and may his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.posted by Martin at 8:17 AM
4 Comments:
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Fate Of The Navvies
From Martin Kelly:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
May eternal light shine upon him, and may he rest in peace. You're right--I did know a few like Paddy McGee. Some still work for the gas companies. My uncle, who died one christmas a while back and whom I admired for his big, John Wayne style strength, was one of them. My mother has the same spirit.
I would differ from you a little. I vividly remember my little sister, when she was 12 or so, suggest a chilling game to a friend of hers, which was to guess where the next druggie's head would turn up in Corby. It was under a bush.
There was a brief moment when, inspired probably by films and the capacities of the machetes that somehow came into rage in the early ninteties, when beheading did make a comeback. It's of a piece with any sort of rise in bladed-edge crime that involves things bigger than pen-knives or flick-knives.
All very sad. I'll go to Laban Tall's place and read. Thank you for the sad link.
Martin
I like the Ent analogy.
Yes, it is a sad incident. But in a world of hope and change, those kinds of incidents may happen in order to protect the noble principle of diversity and cultural respect.
Of course, in America, it is far less likely to happen when the offended one who is attempting to restore his honor with a large knife encounters a Glock... something unlikely to happen in Great Britain.
Martin,
The point you make about bladed crime is good - yet unfortunately Glasgow has one of the worst rates of bladed crime in the world, and I can't recall any incident like this happening here. Could it be that the Corby incidents were some kind of sick local vogue?
Bruce,
It's delightful to hear from you, and I do hope both you and your family are well.
You make a very powerful point; one which has been bothering me for some time.
It is a matter of historical inevitability that during the course of the next four years, the Obama administration will make a concerted, sustained assault on the Second Amendment. This will become the civic equivalent of some horrible Great War battle; just as the donkeys leading the lions killed hundreds of thousands trying to take objectives 30 yards wide, the Obamites will conduct this campaign without regard for the cultural and social cost.
They will do this because an armed citizenry is anathema to their socialism, their brand of which is radically different to that probably espoused by the late Paddy McGee. In their world, the armed citizen is a danger to their authority over the group. They cannot suffer this, so instead of taking out the citizen, they take away his right to bear arms.
This is precisely what has happened in the UK over the last century. The other great Jesuit educated Scottish writer, the guy who wrote detective stories about some guy called Padlock Holmes or some name like that, used to have his protagonist say stuff to his sidekick like 'Watson, bring your revolver'.
Yet there will come a point where this must clash with multiculturalism. I can see a point coming where fear of 'racism' will lead the New Labour socialists to propose that minorities be allowed to arm themselves for their own defence; in which case, some citizens will definitely be more equal than others, and folks who might certainly not qualify for a concealed carry permit in Michigan will be wandering round London and Glasgow quite legitimately tooled up.