This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

I'm awaiting apologies from all the smug buffoons who told me that surrendering to the IRA in 1998 was a good thing to do. It brought peace, they said, ignorant of the true long-term price.

As the gruesome Sinn Fein approaches actual state power in Dublin, will these cowards and trimmers finally admit that they took the low road of superficial success, and left the real problem unsolved?

I am reminded (I often am) of an April 1940 cartoon by the great David Low, in which a defenceless Norwegian worker is menaced by a black Nazi tank and a squadron of dive-bombers.

Beneath are written the cruel words 'The Iron Comes Back', a sneer at Norway's policy of selling its iron ore to Hitler's Germany.

Well, on this occasion, the lies have come back. We sold Ireland to gangsters for a few years' respite. Now we see exactly who we sold it to.

We worry whenever some tiny band of neo-Nazis win a few votes in a backward corner of Germany. But this is as nothing to what is now happening in Dublin. Actual gangsters are now close to the offices of real national power.

I note the BBC, tireless in getting everything wrong, has taken to describing Sinn Fein as 'Left-wing'.

Well, its supposed leader (we will come to this) Mary Lou McDonald cannot be accurately described as Left-wing. It's another wing that she stands on.

In August 2003, Ms McDonald stood willingly beside the grisly apostle of violence and convicted IRA bomber Brian Keenan. But that wasn't all.

Both were there to 'pay respect' at the statue of one of the nastiest people who ever lived.

The memorial to Sean Russell in Dublin's Fairview Park is, as far as I know, the only monument to a Nazi collaborator still standing in democratic Europe.

Russell, the IRA's Chief of Staff in 1939, travelled on the eve of the Second World War to Nazi Germany to offer his services to Hitler. They gave him the use of a villa in Berlin, and provided him with a car and chauffeur.

He was taken to the Brandenburg military camp to study the latest techniques in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and met Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop.

After the fall of France, Russell urged the Germans to use the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland.

Luckily for the world and for Ireland, Russell died from a burst gastric ulcer in the U-boat (U-65) that Hitler provided to take him back to Ireland. He is a kind of litmus test.

Any decent Irish person shudders at this embarrassing memory of fanaticism beyond all bearing.

Only the real hardliners of pro-violence Republicanism, who hate Britain to the point of lunacy, still defend him.

Well, Ms McDonald, now coated in Euro-gloss, feminism and modern PR, did not have to go there.

She did not have to listen without protest as the grisly Keenan praised the grislier Russell as a man 'who preferred freedom to slavery'.

But she did, and we can learn a great deal about her and what she stands for from this incident.

Quite how she rose to her position is a mystery.

Her 'election' to the leadership of her party was uncontested, and, having met some of Sinn Fein's leading lights in the USA back in the 1990s, I wouldn't have wanted to be a heckler on that occasion.

But who actually runs Sinn Fein, which, thanks to the 1998 surrender, is free to raise huge funds in the USA, unlike any other party in the UK?

Well, for that, I refer you to a November 2019 statement by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, reported in the Belfast 'News Letter'.

The newspaper said that the PSNI saw 'no change' from a 2015 government report that concluded Sinn Fein 'continues to be overseen by the deadliest terror group of the Troubles, which although much reduced in scale and 'committed to the peace process', still has 'specific' departments and 'regional command structures', gathers intelligence, retains weapons and may engage in 'isolated violence' including murder'.

They haven't gone away, you know. In fact, they'll soon be running the government of a major European country that has until now been a highly creditable law-governed democracy.

And it will be the fault of those who rewarded murder in 1998, and called it peace.

Boris really is turning into Blair

Well now, are any of you beginning to wonder if I wasn't right about Alexander 'Boar-iss' Johnson being the new Blair?

Why, he even has similar problems with his holidays. Where is the rule that says powerful people must have luxury long-haul vacations?

Harold Wilson used to spend his summers on the Isles of Scilly. Harold Macmillan liked a grouse-moor.

Clement Attlee paddled on Welsh beaches. Margaret Thatcher regarded holidays as a form of torture.

I'd prefer any of these to a man who takes his girlfriend to Mustique at the expense of, well, who?

He may say that Winston Churchill was given to grand getaways. But Churchill was the saviour of the nation.

He could do what he liked.

The shameful liars are STILL in business

When I learned many years ago that the truth about a man-made famine in Stalin's USSR had been suppressed with the help of Western media, I could not understand how such a thing could have happened. Now I do.

An interesting new film, Mr Jones, dramatises this extraordinary event.

The brave and independent Gareth Jones, and the equally courageous Malcolm Muggeridge (later to be a major figure in British broadcasting), both ventured into Ukraine and the Russian North Caucasus, and found starving men, women and children.

When a Soviet official denied that there was starvation, Jones flung a crust of his own bread into a brimming spittoon, and immediately a haggard figure grabbed it and ate it.

But the British-born Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, a one-legged libertine called Walter Duranty, first wrote a disgusting article under the headline 'Russians hungry but not starving', in which he described the brave and enterprising reports of Muggeridge and Jones as a 'scare story'. He knew that they were, in fact, true.

A few weeks later he lied again, writing 'any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda'.

At the time he did so, people in the famine regions were going mad and eating their own children.

It now seems that the truth about the famine was seen as an obstacle to the USA's desire to open diplomatic relations with Stalin.

So the mass-murder had to be ignored and denied. How low we sometimes sink.

I don't in any way compare myself to great men such as Jones (who was later killed in strange circumstances) or Muggeridge, but I have been having a similar experience in the past few weeks.

I have reported on the bravery of two scientists at the poison gas watchdog OPCW who have raised serious concerns about the accuracy of important reports put out by that body, reports which led to major military action.

The two are hugely experienced non-political experts who sought for months to raise their concerns in private, and were ignored and worse.

They have nothing to gain by their actions. They serve no cause except scientific truth.

But the response of their employers has been to belittle them, to suggest wrongly that they were minor low-level figures barely involved in the issue.

And many in the media have either ignored their bravery, or – still more shamefully – joined in the chorus of smears.

One of these smears is that Ian Henderson, a chemical engineer who was sent by the OPCW into the Syrian war zone, was never in fact a member of the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) that went there.

Well, I can tell the OPCW, and others, that there exists in the OPCW's own archives a document (of its own) in which Mr Henderson is listed as a member of the FFM.

So it should just stop saying this. There is much more about this here

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/02/someone-has-been-telling-lies-about-a-and-b-kafka-comes-to-the-hague.html

on the Peter Hitchens blog.

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