As an organisation that maintains excellent relations with the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement and an organisation that has distributed their periodicals at the Scottish games in the Bay Area in the past, we recognise that the RUC pipe band is as much out of place at an event celebrating the Scottish nation and its culture as they are the RUC are out of place in the nationalist communities of the six Irish counties still under British occupation.

The RUC represents neither the people of Ireland nor the people of Scotland, rather they are attached to a paramilitary force making up a part of the occupation forces in Ireland, overwhelmingly composed of that part of the populace in Ireland who stand steadfastly opposed to all aspects of the culture which makes Ireland or Scotland distinct entities from the British State. The British State has sought, through force, settler colonialism, and discrimination against the native people to ensure that the economic and political interests of England remain paramount throughout the many nations comprising the islands of Ireland and Britain.

The RUC are a sectarian force, suspected of complicity in the murder of human rights activists such an Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, recently accused of having actively supported loyalist mobs seeking to intimidate the nationalist communities of the Garvaghy Road, and of having stood idlely by while the major loyalist paramilitaries -- the Ulster Defense Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters and the Ulster Volunteer Force -- blatantly breached their declared cease-fires in a murderous feud that has spilled over into the nationalist communities, resulting in nationalist families being burned out of their homes.

The RUC are not a police force, in the traditional sense, but part of an army of occupation, actively hostile to over 40 per cent of the populace of the occupied six counties of Ireland and composed almost exclusively of members of the unionist/loyalist communities who are the descendants of the settler colonialists implanted in Ireland precisely to uphold continued British rule there.

Their participation in the Scottish Games is an insult to those locally who identify themselves as Irish and are a stain on an event that should be a celebration of the vibrant Scottish national identity so much on the rise of late. It is time for those who claim to take such pride in their Scottish heritage to face the reality of Scotland today. A proud and distinct nation struggling to reassert its sovereignty and identity in the face of continued hostility by the British State.

There is an expression used among those Scots who remain proud of their distinct national heritage for those among them who have come to identify with their colonial overlords -- they call them "North Brits." It is plain to those of us within the IRSCNA that those who organised the Scottish Games in Pleasanton this year deserve that appellation. By inviting the RUC Pipe Band, they have behaved not as Scots -- long having provided solidarity to the national liberation struggle in Ireland -- but as North Brits, seeking to complete the cultural imperialism of England.

Is mise le meas,