Activities
In 1998 and 1999, the Orange Volunteers were led by Clifford Peeples, a Protestant pastor from Belfast. One of the group's first actions was a synchronized attack on 11 Catholic churches. Peeples defended the attack on the grounds that the churches were "bastions of the Antichrist".
On 27 November 1998, eight masked OV members brandishing guns and grenades staged a "show of strength" for a local journalist. The gunmen began the meeting with a Bible reading and ended it with prayers. They produced a "covenant" that said: "We are defenders of the reformed faith. Our members are practising Protestant worshippers". They went on to state: "We are prepared to defend our people and if it comes to the crunch we will assassinate the enemies of Ulster. Ordinary Catholics have nothing to fear from us. But the true enemies will be targeted, and that's a lot wider than just Sinn Féin and the IRA". They vowed to target IRA prisoners released as part of the Belfast Agreement and claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on nationalist-owned businesses a month beforehand.
Read more about this topic: Orange Volunteers
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.”
—Jean Marzollo (20th century)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“If it is to be done well, child-rearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of decentering from one’s own needs and perspectives. Such decentering is relatively easy when a society is stable and when there is an extended, supportive structure that the parent can depend upon.”
—David Elkind (20th century)