Posted by Jim on November 27, 2018
Republican political prisoner Tony Taylor is set to be freed tomorrow
after spending 993 days interned at Maghaberry Jail without charge.
It is understood that onerous conditions have been imposed for his
release from Maghaberry jail, which is set to take place in the morning.
British military intelligence had long claimed to hold ‘secret’
information which backed the indefinite detention of the lifelong
republican activist, who was chairperson of Republican Network for Unity
at the time of his internment.
After a lengthy campaign, the Parole Board in the North finally agreed
to his release earlier today, but this was delayed overnight for what
were described as administrative reasons.
Mr Taylor’s wife Lorraine, who has led the group calling for her
husband’s release, paid tribute to all those who helped in the campaign.
“It will really make our Christmas special for us,” she said. “Myself,
the children and Tony’s parents are all delighted and very relieved to
have him back with us.
“We are concerned nonetheless at some of the punitive restrictions which
continue to be placed on Tony, who has already spent the equivalent of a
five-year sentence in jail without charge.”
The release of the local man follows a long campaign led by his family,
legal team, the local community, local political groups and activists.
While his legal team and campaign group had always contested his
imprisonment on basic justice and human rights grounds, Mr Taylor’s
family had recently appealed for his release for humanitarian reasons.
Mr Taylor’s parents are both seriously ill and housebound, while his son
Blaine has a profound disability.
Earlier this month, Mr Taylor’s father Willie made a direct appeal to
the British government for his son’s release.
He said his son’s continued detention was “vindictive and merciless”.
Posted by Jim on November 26, 2018
FIREHOUSE KITCHEN TALK AT FRIENDS OF FIREFIGHTERS:
MOVING UP THE LADDER WITH A HIGHER EDUCATION DEGREE
Back by popular demand! Interested in converting your college credits and putting it towards a degree? Does the idea of enrolling in an institution of higher learning both excite and overwhelm you? Having trouble mapping out a degree completion program? Questions about tuition reimbursement? On Wednesday, November 28th, from 6-9 PM, join Friends of Firefighters (199 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231) for a firefighter-prepared dinner followed by an in-depth presentation on the application and admissions process for FDNY firefighters curious to learn more about pursuing a higher education degree. Hear from Fire Marshal Matt Donnelly, UFA Fire Marshal Rep Steven Tagliani, and Chuck Frank, Director of Emergency Management and Business Continuity at Metropolitan College, all of whom will be on hand to help gather your resources, establish your plan, and answer any questions you may have. FREE for FDNY firefighters, no RSVP necessary, and in the words of retired firefighter Tony Cat, “Bring a friend.”
FDNY NIGHT AT BARCLAYS CENTER
Come out for FDNY Appreciation Night on Friday, November 30, at 7:30 pm, as the Brooklyn Nets host the Memphis Grizzlies at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. To secure your seats, please visit http://www.netspromos.com/FDNYNIGHT. A portion of all ticket sales will be donated to the EMS FDNY Help Fund. FDNY T-shirt included with each ticket purchase. Shirt to be picked up during first half of the game outside Section 19. For group seating of 10 or more, contact William Lamson at 718-942-9695 or wlamson@brooklynnets.com.
FDNY TRIATHLON TEAM MEETING
The FDNY Triathlon Team invites any interested members to attend an informational meeting on Thursday, December 6th, at 6:45 pm, in the Cafeteria at the Bureau of Training, Randall’s Island. The FDNY Triathlon Team is open to any member of the FDNY, active or retired and experience is not necessary – just desire. We are open to all multi-sport athletes. Any questions may be directed to info@FDNYTri.com.
Posted by Jim on
The former Foreign Secretary doesn’t want the DUP to bring down the government, because he wants to take it over
Tom Peck.Independent. London. Saturday, November 24, 2018
Boris Johnson is still occasionally whispered of as a rockstar politician, so we hope the former foreign secretary understands there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in being 54 years old, well past your best, and having to come all the way to the junior ballroom of a business hotel on the outskirts of Belfast just to find a crowd that still wants to hear the only tune you’ve got.
In the Boris Johnson Story as imagined by Boris Johnson, this is not where Boris Johnson was meant to be by now, which is to say being the hype man for the annual conference of a once obscure and soon-to-be-obscure again Northern Irish political party, firing off material about bendy buses that is so far beyond its best before date as to pose a significantly greater risk to public health than anything ever threatened by the buses themselves.
Still, at least Boris Johnson and the Democratic Unionist Party have finally found each other, and together must be wondering how such a blistering run of combined victories appear to have brought them to the brink og humiliating defeat.
At this event last year, in the wake of Theresa May’s disastrous general election, the DUP’s deputy leader Nigel Dodds modestly concluded that it was probably god himself that had decided to intervene and give Nigel Dodds and the DUP so much power over British politics.
Fast forward 12 months and you’ve even got Boris Johnson on hand to lend to this year’s event a kind of Winners Anonymous feel, like a support group for people who’ve got precisely what they wanted and can’t quite work out how it’s ruined their lives.
Yes, it’s a real headscratcher, this one. Ask absolutely anyone at DUP conference what they cherish above all else, and contrary to popular belief, it won’t actually be their Werther’s Originals, it’ll be The Union with Great Britain. It is “the guiding star through the darkness”, the never ecclesiastically under-clubbed Dodds said on Saturday. “We don’t gamble,” he added. “Not with The Union.”
But history kind of intimates otherwise. They backed Brexit, for a start, that thing that absolutely everybody said would risk breaking The Union, and they won that one. And then, as a little bonus, they got an election that allowed them to dictate terms over the actual government.
So how on earth has it come to be that, as of now, Brexit, the very thing they wanted, and through the medium of a prime minister over whom they claim to hold sway, is looking rather like it might, whisper it guys, actually, erm, kind of break up The Union?
God, in his unknowable ways, has really[messed] this up, hasn’t he Nigel? Still, as the search for someone to blame for all this hurtles towards its most desperate phase they really should be thanking the Almighty for putting himself in the firing line at this opportune time.
“It’s hard to imagine how the results could have done more to maximize our influence,” were Dodds’s precise words last year. And yet here we are, long past the point at which the negotiations were meant to have been finished, with a deal on the table that the DUP won’t tolerate, and with precious few ideas what to do about it, other than to use their fully maximized influence to smash everything to pieces because they can’t get their own way.
It’s proper mad stuff, this Northern Irish politics, even if they’re doing their best to emulate it over on the mainland.
That the DUP can be pro-Brexit, put their beloved Union in peril, then clean up the electoral advantages, that come from claiming to be the only ones who care about it, is the sort of national gaslighting that would make Donald Trump jealous. Then there’s the fact that they can squeeze a billion quid out of Theresa May, and when a plan comes together, namely the backstop, that almost all Northern Irish businesses agree would be an absolutely wonderful “best of both worlds scenario”, they’ll gladly give the money back to make sure it doesn’t happen.
There are such things as “liberal unionists”, who aren’t heard so much from anymore, who’ll admit to not having a clue who to vote for. Welcome to 2018. Fun isn’t it.
More to the point, if it’s ideas the DUP were after, I’m afraid to say they flew in the wrong act. Having to listen to the Brexiteers constantly fight the same absurd battles was the price Remainers imagined they’d have to pay for winning the referendum not losing it.
Watching Boris Johnson continuing to fight the referendum campaign two years after winning it is one of Brexit’s most troubling realities.
Every ingredient was there, it’s just that the EU has become the backstop. There were lies about EU regulations that restrict British businesses, this time pertaining to hovercrafts. There was Brussels “having the UK exactly where it wants it.” There was the “freedom to do our own trade deals,” all that stuff that should have come to pass so easily by now, and the mere fact that absolutely none of it has should not in any way lead you to believe that none of it was ever true.
And of course, there was the promise, again to build a bridge to Scotland, over Beaufort’s Dyke, an unexploded Second World War munitions dump at the bottom of the sea, and for precious little economic benefit to either side. “The problem isn’t Beaufort’s Dyke,” he said, “The problem is a lack of political will”.
It was the perfect distillation of eau de Boris, a fragrance of which everybody recognizes the smell. Who knows, maybe he’ll build the thing one day, and when the central supports are suddenly blown away in the middle of rush hour by some giant German bomb everybody told him was there, that too will be the EU’s fault.
But the real purpose of his attendance was clear enough. He knows very well that all that either he or the DUP have come up with by way of a solution, which is to “bin the backstop”, is something the European Union could hardly have been clearer they will not countenance. The answer, both he and the DUP think, is to “carry on negotiating”, to “use the time we have left” to come out with a different solution, one that, in a few short months, can resolve the irresolvable questions that no one has managed to resolve in the last 18.
The only solutions at the DUP’s disposal are a series of very drastic levers, and he has to make sure they pull the right one. In the last few days, Arlene Foster has publicly flirted with ending the “confidence and supply” arrangement with the government, an agreement her senior colleagues already speak of in the past tense. This may very well not be in the national interest, not even in the DUP’s interest, but most of all, it wouldn’t be in Boris Johnson’s interest, and that definitely will not do. So, after savaging everything Theresa May, and his own government, has achieved in the last 18 months, it was, all of a sudden, “absolutely vital that we keep this partnership going”.
Don’t bring down the government, in other words, just bring down the Brexit deal. Let’s keep this machine ticking over, and I can slot right into the driving seat. Then we can do wondrous things together, in this precious United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that together, me through my utter lack of all shame, and you through your mad flag waving nationalistic self harm, will have brought fully to its knees.
Posted by Jim on November 25, 2018
Reporting: Tony Connelly, Reuters, AFP, PA. RTE. Dublin. Sunday, November 25, 2018.
All 27 European Union leaders have endorsed the Brexit deal at today’s EU summit, urging Britons to get behind Theresa May’s package despite furious opposition in the British parliament.
“EU27 has endorsed the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration on the future EU-UK relations,” Mr Tusk said after less than an hour of the leaders’ summit.
The 27 leaders adopted an official statement in which they also committed “to take the necessary steps to ensure that the agreement can enter into force on 30 March 2019, so as to provide for an orderly withdrawal.”
The statement also promised “as close as possible a partnership with the United Kingdom” after Britain leaves on 29 March, 2019, and thanked Michel Barnier, the bloc’s Brexit negotiator. They urged the UK parliament to back the deal as well.
Earlier, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker said that Brexit is a “tragedy” but the EU will not change its fundamental position in the event that the withdrawal treaty is rejected on the British side.
Speaking at an emergency summit of EU leaders in Brussels to formally adopt the Brexit treaty, the EU’s most powerful official said that the Brexit treaty is the best possible deal for Britain.
He said the EU will not deal with the hypothetical case that the UK parliament might reject the deal.
He dubbed it “a sad day”, and said he thinks that the UK parliament will ratify the deal.
“To see a country like Great Britain… leave the EU is not a moment of joy nor of celebration, it’s a sad moment and it’s a tragedy,” said Mr Juncker.
EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said this morning: “now it is time for everybody to take their responsibility.”
“This deal is a necessary step to build trust between the UK and the EU, we need to build in the next phase of this unprecedented and ambitious partnership. We will remain allies, partners and friends,” said Mr Barnier.
A last minute agreement was reached over the weekend on how Gibraltar will be managed once a future EU-UK trade deal is negotiated.
Speaking at the summit, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he still regrets that the UK is leaving the EU, and that “the best outcome for Ireland and I think for Britain and the European Union would be for the UK to stay in the European Union, to stay in the single market and customs union. But we respect their decision not to do that.”
“We spent two years trying to negotiate an agreement that protects our interests, our citizens and our economy, and I believe we have that,” added Mr Varadkar.
Mrs. May wrote a so-called letter to the nation in which she said the withdrawal agreement would work for the whole country – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – whether people voted Leave or Remain.
On 19 June last year, David Davis, the Brexit secretary, arrived in Brussels to begin the divorce proceedings.
Now those negotiations will be formally closed. But it has been a gruelling journey with the path littered with ministerial resignations, failed initiatives and dashed expectations of how Brexit might unfold.
The UK is more divided than it has ever been, and even today’s formal endorsement is only a pause before more bloodletting within the Conservative Party, and a widespread expectation that the House of Commons will reject the deal.
DUP leader Arlene Foster said that if Mrs. May wants the party’s continued support, it means removing the Irish backstop from the withdrawal agreement.
But at the Brussels summit, EU leaders have endorsed the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration which sketches out the future relationship.
The European Council also pledges to remain vigilant to ensure a number of issues are followed through, including reciprocal access to UK waters for European fishing fleets, and the Irish backstop, the issue which became the defining dilemma of the Brexit negotiations.
Posted by Jim on
By Gerry Adams (for Leargas)
When the news broke that a withdrawal Brexit agreement had been reached
between the British government and the EU Sammy Wilson of the DUP
responded in time worn fashion. It was, he said “a punishment beating
for the UK because they dared to vote to leave the EU”.Even before he
had read the agreement Wilson declared that the DUP would not support
it. Later he told Channel 4 News, “If the EU think that what the IRA
couldn’t achieve, they’re going to achieve, they have another thought
coming to them.”
Outside the Westminster bubble loyalist activist Jamie Bryson was
warning that the Brexit deal would “almost certainly trigger a
grassroots unionist reaction that would dwarf the anger of the flag
protests and Drumcree”.
This type of excessive threatening language has long been part of
political unionism’s response when faced with the prospect of change.
It’s a combination of hysterical exaggeration and threat. It’s the
language of dire warnings, of civil war and armageddon, and of fear.
It’s the language of 1998 when the DUP stood outside the negotiations as
the Good Friday Agreement was achieved and then opposed it during the
referendum campaign.
It is the language of 1985 when the DUP and UUP raged against Thatcher
and the Anglo Irish Agreement or when hundreds gathered on a cold
mountain waving their firearms certificates in defence of the union.
It’s language which in the past excused and justified sectarian murder,
and defended thousands of masked men in red berets marching through
towns and villages.
It is the language of inequality and division which fed unionism’s
anti-civil rights – anti-Catholic – attitude in the 1960s, and which 50
years earlier had created the apartheid orange state through partition.
DUP anger at Theresa May’s Brexit deal boiled over on Monday evening
when its Westminster group voted in one instance with Labour against
Theresa May and abstained in a number of other budget related votes in
the British Parliament. The focus of the DUP now appears to be on
joining with those remaining Brexiteer Ministers in the British Cabinet
who believe that it is still possible to renegotiate the Brexit deal –
something which has been ruled out by May and by the EU. They have only
days to achieve their objective before an EU summit at the weekend signs
off on the deal.
What happens if, as likely, they fail to change the withdrawal
agreement? Will May survive? Have the dissidents in the Tory ranks the
48 signatories to demand a vote of no confidence in her leadership? Have
the DUP overplayed their hand?
For most citizens living in the North the political machinations around
the decisions which will shape our lives for decades to come has been
reduced to a spectator sport. It’s a moment of high drama which has seen
the North’s business community and farming sector publicly oppose the
approach of both the DUP and UUP.
However, it is also a crisis with political implications that extend
beyond the economic consequences of Brexit. It is always short sighted
to judge any development solely by the discomfort it causes our
opponents, notwithstanding the entertainment this provides. The reality
is that the Good Friday Agreement now faces its greatest threat.
It is important to recall that in the section of the Good Friday
Agreement, under Constitutional Issues, the role of the British
government in the North is explicitly spelt out…”the power of the
sovereign government with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with
rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of
their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles
of full respect for, and equality of, civil, political, social and
cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of
parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity,
ethos, and aspirations of both communities.”
This fundamental role as joint co-guarantors of the Good Friday
Agreement – of being impartial – has been significantly undermined.
While many of us, including me fein, remain justifiably sceptical about
this, it is what the British government signed up for. The British
refusal to defend the rights of Irish language speakers; to protect
equality and human rights for gay and lesbian citizens; to implement
agreements on legacy; or to honour outstanding Agreement commitments,
for example on establishing a Bill of Rights, and create a Civic Forum,
are all evidence of the absence of ‘rigorous impartiality’.
Moreover, following Brexit the British Conservatives remain wedded to
ending the role of the European Court of Justice and getting rid of the
Human Rights Act which protects the equality and human rights principles
of the Agreement.
All of this heightens the need for the Irish government to defend the
Good Friday Agreement and for the North to have a special relationship
with the EU that reflects our unique situation. This is essential if the
Good Friday Agreement is to be protected.
In this context the objective of Irish unity takes on a greater
significance and imperative. This is a logical, common sense outcome to
the political, social and economic fractures imposed by partition but it
also makes sense in the current Brexit provoked crisis. Reunification
will allow for the North to again become part of the EU. Hard border?
Soft Brexit? Better to have no border at all.