Posted by Jim on October 30, 2018
Martin Galvin – National and NY State Chairman F.F.A.I.
(718) 665-1800
CARMEL QUINN BALLYMURPHY MASSACRE APPEAL
Saying “the ‘Ballymurphy Massacre’ families need American help in their 47 year battle for justice”, Carmel Quinn, a sister of one of 11 victims John Laverty, will begin a five state American tour as the Inquest opens in Belfast. The tour follows attacks by 150 Tory MPs and British Prime Minister Theresa May aimed at discrediting investigations of British forces for ‘Troubles’ killings in the north of Ireland. A founding member of the ‘Ballymurphy Massacre’ Campaign and member of Relatives for Justice, Carmel Quinn will ask for American help at public events and Congressional meetings in a tour organized by the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Relatives for Justice, but now assisted by a growing list of Irish-American groups.
AT STAKE
Since August 1971 the Ballymurphy families have said that 11 people, including Catholic priest Fr. Hugh Mullan, and mother of 8 children Joan Connolly were murdered over a three day period. The British whitewashed these murders by smearing the victims. These families want their loved ones exonerated by an Inquest with eyewitnesses and cross-examination of anyone claiming these killings were justified. They have met with repeated delays, jibes about “innocent victims” from DUP head Arlene Foster, and the deliberate cutoff of Inquest funding.
Last week 150 MPs called for an end of former British troopers being “hounded and pursued” by murder investigations, and Theresa May praised the ‘heroism’ of British crown forces who “upheld the law.” While not specifically referring to Ballymurphy, such claims may impact an Inquest considering whether British forces upheld the rule of law by 11 murders.
AOH Freedom for All Ireland Chair Martin Galvin added:
” The Ballymurphy Massacre is a fundamental test of Britain’s ability to give legacy justice. If victims cannot get justice where 11 people, including a Catholic priest and mother of 8 children were killed by British troops, how can we expect justice in any killings or collusion murders where British forces were involved? AOH National Vice-President Danny O’Connell and National Secretary Jere Cole recently promised the Ballymurphy families that America would stand behind them in their battle for justice. We are committed to keep that pledge”.
SCHEDULE
Ms. Quinn’s first public address will take place in Philadelphia on Sunday November 11th at the FOP LODGE 5 BALLROOM,11630 Caroline Road, Philadelphia, beginning at 3pm.organized by Gerry McHale and Pearse Kerr.(267-767-7854).
On Monday November12th, she will speak in New Jersey at the Bayshore Catholic Center 12 Rt. 36, Middletown at 7PM, organized by Sean Pender, Malachy McAllister and Rich O’Brien. (vp@njaoh.com)
On Tuesday November 13th, Ms. Quinn will be at the Suffolk County AOH Division 2 Hall,27 Locust Avenue ,Babylon, at 8pm, hosted by New York State AOH President Victor Vogel and County President Jerry Belmont.(jnlcbel@verizon.net)
Ms. Quinn will travel to Washington DC for a series of key Congressional briefings on Wednesday 14th and Thursday before returning to New York City for an event at O’Lunneys, 145 West 45th street November 15th. She will speak in Albany on Friday November 16th at the AOH Hall, 375 Ontario Avenue, Albany where the prestigious Fr. Murphy award will be presented.
The Midwest will host her Saturday November 17th, at the Cleveland West Side Irish-American Club, 8559 Jennings Road Olmstead Turnpike, organized by Danny O’Connell, Marilyn Madigan and Roger Weist.(216-235-1551)
Carmel Quinn will be honored alongside Congressman Joseph Crowley and IRISH ECHO Editor Ray O’Hanlon at Rory Dolan’s, on Sunday November 18th by Bronx County AOH at 3pm, hosted by Bob Nolan.(347-880-1403)
Please contact me at MGALVINESQ@AOL.COM
Slan
Martin Galvin
Posted by Jim on October 27, 2018
By Chris Bray (Boston College Subpoena News)
I am now convinced that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is an
elaborate prank, a kind of brilliantly large-scale Candid Camera — and
the courts are totally on on the joke.
Let’s start with some background. Feel free to skip to the heading
WOODSHOP FELONY below if you’ve been following the Belfast Project
subpoenas closely (you poor bastard) and don’t need to go through the
whole farce again.
In 2011, investigating a 1972 murder that they had ignored for
thirty-nine years, the Police Service of Northern Ireland went shopping
for unearned confessions in a historical archive in the United States.
The subpoenas served on Boston College were, the claim went, desperately
necessary, investigative tools scratching away the truth behind the most
serious of crimes: the kidnapping, murder, and secret burial of a
widowed mother of ten children, Jean McConville, killed by the
Provisional IRA as a suspected informer in the employ of the British
army in Belfast.
Locked away in a university library, the Belfast Project tapes
supposedly held the answers; consisting of frank oral history interviews
with former members of paramilitary organizations, they would allow the
authorities to bring a set of killers to justice. The headlines said so,
plainly and uncritically. “Tapes Hold N. Ireland Murder Secrets,” CNN
reported. It was all pretty simple: Get the tapes, press the “play”
button, make some arrests.
The police got the tapes they sought, but it doesn’t appear that the
police got their Northern Ireland murder secrets. More than seven years
later, no one has ever been brought to trial over McConville’s murder,
or on any other crime supposedly exposed by the tapes. One elderly man,
allegedly a former Provisional IRA member of high rank, was charged more
than four years ago with crimes related to the killing, but his case has
become the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the criminal courts — forever subject
to status conferences, forever unresolved.
Following another, later subpoena, another set of charges were brought
against another elderly man alleged to have once been a ranking member
of a Loyalist paramilitary organization. Those charges have also gone
Full Kafka, forever wandering the hallways of the courts of Northern
Ireland and rattling their chains. One day the sun will implode, our
solar system will vanish into a black hole, and the charges brought on
the basis of the Belfast Project tapes will finally meet their
resolution.
WOODSHOP FELONY
But now the farce of the Belfast Project tapes has become something else
altogether, the word for which probably hasn’t been coined, yet. We’ll
need a neologism that combines the ideas of raw sewage, things of
microscopic importance, and pure farce. (This would be easier if we all
spoke German.)
In 2014, circling back to a source that had brought them no form of
success in court at all, law enforcement authorities in Northern Ireland
asked the U.S. Department of Justice to promulgate a new Belfast Project
subpoena. This time, the PSNI was seeking the recorded interviews
archived at Boston College in which a Belfast Project researcher,
Anthony McIntyre (a former Long Kesh prisoner who has a PhD in history),
is said to have discussed his own role in the Provisional IRA.
Federal authorities in Boston got McIntyre’s interview materials, and
the DOJ sent them off to Belfast. But McIntyre went to court to stop the
police from reading the transcripts or listening to the tapes. This
week, the High Court in Belfast issued a decision in McIntyre’s legal
challenge, which they heard almost a year ago.
The decision is, God help us all, comic opera. It makes the farcical
nature of the whole production abundantly clear, while attempting to
manage the discussion within the boundaries of language that declares
that this is terribly serious judicial business. I have a draft copy,
not yet signed by the court, and the court has posted a summary of the
decision here (link opens to PDF file). I’ll stick to discussing the
publicly available summary until the whole decision becomes public.
Now, remember that this all began, seven years ago, with a great deal of
somber tut-tutting about the seriousness of the Belfast Project
subpoenas, and the urgent work of the PSNI as it raced down the trail
after some murderers. So take a look at the summary posted by the court,
which describes the matters now being investigated by the PSNI with
regard to Anthony McIntyre:
“On 3 September 2014 the PSNI requested that the Public Prosecution
Service (‘PPS’) issue an International Letter of Request (‘ILOR’) in
respect of a criminal investigation it was carrying out into the
following matters:
[….]
The detection in 1978 in the applicant’s possession of an imitation
firearm while in custody in circumstances suggesting that he may be
planning an escape from custody. The applicant states that this is a
reference to an incomplete wooden gun in two parts which was found in a
search cubicle in prison reception. He was questioned at the time of its
discovery but not charged with any offence.”
Note that this sentence about events in the 1970s begins with “the
detection,” at the time, of the thing being discussed. So in 1978,
prison officials caught Anthony McIntyre with some pieces of wood, which
they suspected, probably for good reason, that he was planning to turn
into a fake gun so he could bluff his way out of prison. They questioned
him about it but decided not to charge him with a crime. Thirty-six
years later, the PSNI decided to conduct an investigation to determine
if Anthony McIntyre had possessed some pieces of wood that could be
turned into a fake gun for use in an attempt at a prison escape, and
they went through the complex and difficult process of obtaining
international legal assistance to subpoena interview materials archived
in another country.
The reason the PSNI suspected that Anthony McIntyre had once possessed
wooden materials that could be used to make a fake gun was that, nearly
four decades ago, prison officials in Northern Ireland caught Anthony
McIntyre in possession of wooden materials that could be used to make a
fake gun.
We suspect this man of Crime X because forty years ago he was caught
committing it, so now we need to find out if he committed the crime that
we know about because we know he was caught committing it.
Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, ladies and gentlemen.
The PSNI used the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the United
Kingdom and the United States in an attempt to find out if Anthony
McIntyre hid some wood in his socks forty years ago, a thing they
already knew he did.
But let’s keep going, and take a look at the other things the PSNI
supposedly set out to investigate by digging into McIntyre’s Belfast
Project tapes. Like this:
“Membership of an illegal organisation.”
Goodness yes: Let’s use international legal assistance to conduct an
investigation to find out if Anthony McIntyre was ever a member of the
Provisional IRA, more than forty years after the time he was actually
convicted on that charge. McIntyre’s own website, by the way, has a
review of his book on Irish republicanism, which describes McIntyre as
“a historian, a former member of the IRA and a onetime party activist
with extensive contacts in the organisation.” It took me five seconds on
Google to come up with that one — but I don’t have the option of asking
the Department of Justice to issue subpoenas on my behalf, so I was
forced to fall back on other means.
Finally, the PSNI suspects that McIntyre carried out a bombing, with a
few problems:
“A bomb attack on a house at Rugby Avenue on 6 February 1976. The PSNI
claimed to have received information on that date the applicant was
involved in the bomb attack. The applicant, however, maintains that he
was in fact the target of the attack and that in any event if the attack
was on the date alleged he was in police custody throughout that day.”
More about the Rugby Avenue bomb later, when the full decision is
available, but alleging in an international letter of assistance that
McIntyre bombed somebody’s house on a day when he was in police custody
is an interesting choice.
Analyzing the international letter of assistance — the letter the PSNI
asked Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service to prepare in order
to ask American law enforcement officials for help — the High Court
acknowledges in its decision that the police and prosecutors made a hash
of the whole thing. From the summary released by the court, and take a
moment to read this carefully:
“There were a number of errors in the ILOR including reference to the
incorrect date of birth of the applicant, the incorrect section of
legislation in respect of an offence, an assertion that the applicant
had been convicted of armed robbery in 1975 and sentenced to a period of
imprisonment of three years when in fact there was no evidence to
support that assertion and an incorrect date of Judicial conviction for
the offence of membership of a proscribed organisation.”
So the police set out to investigate whether Anthony McIntyre once
possessed some wood that they suspect he possessed because they know he
possessed it, and also set out to learn if a convicted IRA member had
ever been in the IRA, and also set out to determine if he blew up
somebody’s house on a date when he was locked up in the police station,
and when they wrote the letter outlining their investigation, they got
most of the supporting facts totally wrong.
These two conclusions come one after the other in the summary of the
decision posted on the court website:
* The errors in the ILOR were due to a distinct and surprising lack of
care on the part of the PSNI and the PPS;
* The errors in the ILOR were not indicative of bad faith.
Got that? They f*cked up everything they touched, which we’re pretty
sure proves that they were trying to be careful and do a good job.
More to come.
Posted by Jim on
A Catholic priest who comforted the bereaved after the Greysteel
massacre 25 years ago has said he believes the revulsion felt after the
savage mass-murder helped move the North of Ireland towards peace.
“It was very true of Greysteel that those who suffered the most were
quickest to forgive, to look for peace,” Fr Stephen Kearney said ahead
of the 25th anniversary.
On October 30, 1993, loyalist gunmen entered the Rising Sun pub in the
quiet, rural village in County Derry during a Halloween party and, with
the words ‘trick or treat’, opened fire. At first, those inside believed
the gunmen were playing a Halloween prank.
The shootings at the Rising Sun Bar claimed the lives of seven people,
and another who died from his injuries six months later. Six of the
deceased were Catholics, while two were Protestant.
The attack was claimed by a group styling itself ‘Ulster Freedom
Fighters’, a cover name for the UDA. The attack was said to have been
in revenge for an IRA attack which targeted a UDA meeting on the
Shankill Road in Belfast days before.
It took place just before 10pm, when three gunmen – Stephen Irwin,
Geoffrey Deeney and Torrens Knight – entered the busy pub. Irwin was
armed with an automatic rifle, Deeney with a pistol, and Knight with a
sawn-off shotgun.
The Czechoslovakian-made VZ-58 assault rifle used by Irwin was one of
several hundred smuggled into the north with the help of UDA member
Brian Nelson, who was working for the British Army’s Force Research
Unit.
Knight was also widely alleged to have been an RUC Special Branch agent
after it emerged he had been paid tens of thousands of pounds from an
unidentified source. Unanswered questions remain about the role of
collusion in the massacre.
Fr Kearney, who is now based in County Tyrone, told the Derry Journal of
his memories of the aftermath of the shooting ahead of the 25th
anniversary this week.
He said his colleague, the late Fr Jack Gallagher, had been the first
person to enter the bar after the carnage.
“The place was lit up with the lights of cars,” he said. “The first
person I saw coming out was Fr Jack Gallagher. I didn’t know how many
were actually dead. We couldn’t have counted them.”
He recalled a “haze of grey dullness” hanging over the village in the
immediate aftermath.
“I remember certain moments,” he said. “One was when I was standing
outside the chapel the next morning. I hadn’t been to my bed until that
morning. I was over for the nine o’clock Mass in the chapel and I saw a
few people standing there.
“They were barely able to speak, in shock. It was a dry, cool autumn
morning. If I could paint the picture I wouldn’t have to describe it –
everybody seemed to be grey, everything seemed to be grey, everyone
seemed to have been wearing grey clothes. Everything was in a haze of
grey dullness.
“One of the people I saw was John Duddy whose wife had been killed.
“I had given her a lift home a few days before and she had arrived at my
door with an apple tart as a reward for leaving her home. She was a
lovely woman. They were there, a middle aged couple out for a drink that
night, as were most of the people there. They were mostly older people.”
Asked how the community reacted to the terrible events that night, Fr
Kearney said: “The people joined into their suffering. In the immediate
aftermath there were some who found it hard to cope, who were saying
things that wouldn’t have been normal for them to say, out of anger or
hopelessness.
“But most were neither hating, nor angry, nor hopeless.”
But he said “there was a strength that came out of the people” when they
felt least strong. “It has been said that the Troubles had its origin in
Derry, but it had the beginning of its end in Derry.”
The dead were Karen Thompson (19), Steven Mullan (20), Moira Duddy (59),
Joseph McDermott (60), James Moore (81), John Moyne (50), John Burns
(54), and Victor Montgomery (76).
Posted by Jim on
Collusion continues to be suspected in the murders of Gerard and Rory
Cairns, who were killed by a UVF murder squad 25 years ago this week.
During the conflict several sectarian attacks were carried out against
the Catholic community in the wider Bleary area. The remains of nine
victims, including the Cairns’ brothers, are interred in the small
graveyard adjacent to nearby St Colman’s Church in Clare.
The mother of Gerard and Rory says she can never forgive their loyalist
killers. Sheila Cairns said she wants to know why her sons were
targeted.
“All I would like to know is why,” she said. “Why were they singled out
and why were they murdered?”
She said that despite the passing of time she will not forgive the
killers. “I don’t care what happens, my sons (are) in the Clare
graveyard at the minute, no, I couldn’t forgive anybody.”
Her son Liam agreed. “I certainly can’t forgive at any cost, it’s
something I could never do,” he said. Liam says he wants to know who
had knowledge of the murders. “I am more interested in how far it goes
up the ladder, where it stops,” he said.
His sister Paula, who abandoned her studies in England after her
brothers were killed, believes they were targeted because of their
Irish culture.
She believes the killers were helped by loyalists in the wider area. “I
would like to know who actually set us up,” she said. “Who would have
singled you out otherwise, there had to be somebody local.”
Notorious serial killer Billy Wright was one of nine loyalists
questioned about the murders. Fellow UVF men Mark Fulton and Robin
Jackson were also arrested and questioned but later released without
charge.
Paula has no doubt there was collision in the murders. “I would like
for it to be admitted that there was collusion, because it was evident
and that sticks in me. It sticks in all of us.”
Forensic evidence and interviews with the suspected killers were all
destroyed after the RUC claimed they were “contaminated with asbestos”
while in storage.
The boys’ father Eamon has little faith in the British justice system
to provide the truth about the murder of his sons.
“If they deny that truth, being honest and open about it, to me that’s
fair enough but leave my country and, above all else, take your
judicial system with you,” he said.