Posted by Jim on October 27, 2018
British Direct Ruler Karen Bradley has been accused of subverting
democracy after postponing Stormont elections for up to ten months while
prioritising the interests of unionists during Brexit.
New legislation introduced by Bradley at Westminster includes new
provisions for direct rule of the north of Ireland from London. It will
also postpone any attempt at reviving the political process in the North
well into next year, when Brexit will have taken effect.
It means that the Six Counties will probably be without an assembly for
two-and-a-half years, despite the continuation of salary payments to the
politicians elected to Stormont in March 2017. It also means the next
elections in the North of Ireland will probably be the local government
elections in May.
Bradley’s vague new legislation allows British civil servants to take
decisions which are “in the public interest” of the Six Counties.
Because it stops short of full, explicit Direct Rule, it leaves Stormont
departments open to legal challenges as to the extent of their powers.
The main goal of the legislation appears to be to neutralise
nationalists amid ongoing concessions to the unionist DUP, who still
prop up the minority Tory government at Westminster.
This week, the Guardian newspaper reported the British Direct Ruler as
defending Brexit on the basis that 60% of the North’s unionists voted to
leave the EU — ignoring the fact that the Six Counties rejected Brexit
overall by 56% to 44%.
Bradley is also quoted as warning that much of what the EU have put
forward in regard to the border through Ireland is ‘not acceptable’ to
unionists and the British government.
“This is not the first time Karen Bradley has caused controversy with
her comments on voting intentions in the north but it is the first time
she has made such a public admission of her government’s intention to
prioritise unionism,” Sinn Fein Conor Murphy said.
“In doing so, she is doing a disservice to everyone in this society by
attempting to make Brexit a green and orange issue.
“Karen Bradley is supposed to be a co-equal guarantor of the peace
process who is legally and duty-bound to act with impartiality yet here
she is publicly stating that it is only the votes of unionists that
matter.
“Never mind the fact that the majority across the North as a whole voted
against Brexit. Never mind the fact that nationalists overwhelmingly
opposed it, this British Government is quite prepared to subvert
democracy in order to pursue its reckless agenda.
“Karen Bradley’s government is in a pact with the DUP and has acquiesced
to that party’s refusal to share power on the basis of equality.
“And with these comments, the British secretary of State has clearly
indicated that her government will continue to prioritise unionist votes
over equality and the rights of citizens.”
Posted by Jim on
The British Army were involved in a dawn raid on the national
headquarters of Saoradh in Derry as concerns increase over the
increasing use of British military units in political oppression.
The PSNI police confirmed the 5am operation on Thursday morning in Derry
city centre included a ‘military search’ unit of the British Army. The
raid was followed the next day by separate British Army searches in and
around a farmyard and green areas in the Creggan area.
Saoradh said the recent actions by British Crown forces follows on from
weeks of surveillance operations which have included helicopters,
drones, planes, and undercover members of MI5 and the Special
Reconnaissance Regiment of the British Army.
For its part, the PSNI said it had removed 300 Halloween fireworks from
the Saoradh offices. It claimed that the British Army had been required
to deal with “explosives”, but later admitted that the store-bought
fireworks they found had already been destroyed.
Saoradh said they had confiscated and destroyed the fireworks in
response to community concerns over anti-social activity.
“Having patrolled the area continuously for a number of weeks, Saoradh
activists seized a large quantity of fireworks, something that we have
openly and publicly displayed,” the party said in a statement.
“These fireworks were then taken to Junior McDaid House where they were
dismantled and soaked in water in preparation for other community
representatives to safely dispose of them.”
The raid follows on from others on the homes of local Saoradh activists
where family phones, computers and children’s school work have been
taken seized. The party’s local chairman and vice chairman were also
arrested before being released unconditionally in recent days.
Spokesperson Paddy Gallagher said it was “no coincidence” that the
latest raid came as Saoradh were holding a high-profile launch of a
policy document on Brexit. The party had also been preparing for a
protest to mark the visit of 26 County Taoiseach to the headquarters of
the loyalist marching body, the Apprentice Boys.
He added: “Over the course of the past week British Crown Forces have
directed an onslaught of harassment towards Saoradh activists and this
has culminated in a combined British Army and British Military
Intelligence raid on our party headquarters, despite former Republicans
telling us there is no British Army operating within the Six Counties
anymore.
“It is clear that our party headquarters, our party members and our
support base are being actively targeted in a futile attempt to stop the
public availing of the free services we offer.”
He said British military personnel, British military intelligence and a
Tactical Support Group had been openly operating in the Creggan estate.
“Despite the same old narrative spewed by former republicans and
constitutional nationalists, British soldiers of occupation continue to
remain active within the Six Counties and while they remain we will
continue to oppose them.”
Independent Creggan councillor, Gary Donnelly, said there was anger in
the community at the office raid.
“This reinforces for me the real nature of British policing in Ireland,”
he said. “It’s not community policing. They don’t care about the
community.”
Cllr Donnelly said it was alarming a political party had been targeted
in this manner.
“They were backed up by British soldiers to raid the office of a
political party to score cheap political points. There is anger.”
He pointed out there had been broad support for Saoradh’s seizure of the
fireworks, which, he said, were a scourge in the Creggan area and
elsewhere.
“It was my understanding that they [the PSNI] were told by people who
would support policing about the fireworks problem but that they refused
to act. But when people within the community removed the fireworks,
which are a danger and a menace, then they poured all the resources of
the State into an early morning raid whilst at the same time these
people ignore crime within our community.”
Posted by Jim on
FDNY ANCHOR CLUB
On Sunday, October 28, the FDNY Anchor Club is sponsoring a “Visit to Calvary Hospital” located at 1740 Eastchester Road, Bronx, NY. The visit will start at 10:00 am – 12:00 pm. Lunch will follow. The event will resume from 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm. The outline for the day includes visiting patients, distributing candy and flowers, and providing some light entertainment. All off-duty members, their families and friends are invited to participate. For additional information, please contact William Greco, Engine 68, at 917-575-1012.
FDNY CSU – SPECIAL NEEDS SUPPORT GROUP
On Monday, November 19, join the FDNY CSU Special Needs Support Group to hear an important presentation about setting up your assets to best benefit your special needs child and your family. The Special Needs Support Group will be joined by: Matthew B. Levens, Director of Wealth Management at RMR Wealth Builders, Inc.; John McGuiness, VP of the Strategic Benefits Group; and Attorney Cole Schotz, P.C., Steven M. Saraisky. The guests will talk about estate planning and wealth management for your special needs child and your family, along with everything you need to do to secure your child’s future, from setting up wills to special needs trusts, and will answer your questions. The meeting will take place on Randall’s Island in the Auditorium from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm. To RSVP, contact Kim Ahearn Young at the CSU at 212-570-1693 x 322 or Kimberly.Young@fdny.nyc.gov or Captain Eugene Kananowicz (aka K9) at ek953@icloud.com.
50TH REUNION OF ALL PROBIE CLASSES OF 1968
New York Retired Firefighters of Orange County Retired Lieutenant Ralph Quaglia and Retired Chief Nick Visconti are planning the 50th reunion of all probie classes of 1968. The event will be held at the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 3rd and 4th. Cost will be $200 per person based on double occupancy, which includes two nights hotel room and dinner on December 4th. Please contact Ralph at the updated email address rquaglia@hvc.rr.com. Please designate your room partner and include your email address for contact.
MANHATTAN AFFORDABLE HOUSING OPPORTUNITY
540 W 53rd Street Apartments (http://www.540w53.com/) is a newly constructed, rent stabilized luxury affordable housing building in historic Hell’s Kitchen. This Affordable Housing Lottery for 102 units includes elegant studio, one, two and three bedroom residences in this 13 story building adjacent to a community garden with rooftop views, nearby cultural institutions, public parks, and with zoning for neighborhood public schools. @TheActorsFund is happy to share this NYC Affordable Housing Lottery opportunity with you and encourages you to apply at https://a806-housingconnect.nyc.gov/nyclottery/lottery.html#current-projects today, before the lottery deadline of December 7, 2018. Please check the guide at https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/renters/ready-set-apply.page for assistance.
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Posted by Jim on
Two exit polls have predicted that Michael D Higgins has been
re-elected to the ceremonial post of President of Ireland with well
over half of the vote.
The polls by the Irish Times and RTE were released after voting closed
at 10pm, and matches predictions that the dimunitive academic and poet
would easily win another seven years at Aras an Uachatarain.
The exit polls also suggest that former Dragons Den celebrity Peter
Casey has come from bottom of the polls to second place with about 21%
of the vote, largely as a result of publicity he received after making
bigoted comments against Ireland’s gypsy-like Travelling community.
In third place was Sinn Fein candidate Liadh Ni Riada, whose vote was
roughly half the party achieved with Martin McGuinness seven years ago.
The party’s worst result in a 26 County election in recent decades, and
her failure to hold her election deposit, could place pressure on the
leadership of Mary Lou McDonald who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Fein
leader in February.
Another star of Dragons Den and a previous candidate seven years ago,
Sean Gallagher, is expected to come third, followed by charity
entrepreneur Joan Freeman. A third Dragons Den star, Gavin Duffy, is
set to the first eliminated when counting begins officially tomorrow
morning.
All of the candidates but Higgins and Casey will have lost their
deposits. The full results of the Irish Times exit poll are as follows:
Michael D Higgins – 56%
Peter Casey – 21%
Liadh Ni Riada – 8%
Sean Gallagher – 7%
Joan Freeman – 6%
Gavin Duffy – 2%
The full results of the RTE exit poll are as follows:
Michael D Higgins – 58%
Peter Casey – 21%
Liadh Ni Riada – 7%
Joan Freeman – 6%
Sean Gallagher – 6%
Gavin Duffy – 2%
A referendum to delete a little-known reference to blasphemy in the
Constitution was also passed easily in voting today, with the Irish
Times exit poll predicting that 69 per cent of voters have backed the
proposal.
A full report on the results will be carried in tomorrow’s
regular edition.
Posted by Jim on October 26, 2018
Farcical High Court Decision Backs PSNI Farce
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Chris Bray on the farcical High Court decision, giving cover to the PSNI when caught lying.
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 in 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.
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 fucked up everything they touched, which we’re pretty sure proves that they were trying to be careful and do a good job.
Chris Bray Blogs @ The Shade Of The Cloud Of Arrows. He describes himself as an itinerant historian, former infantry soldier, and the author of Court-Martial: How Military Justice has Shaped America, from the Revolution to 9/11 and Beyond
– forthcoming from W.W. Norton