A disturbing development

Posted by Jim on September 1, 2018

“ The Good Friday Agreement promised a ‘ new beginning to policing.’

Some new beginning!

The two jounalists who exposed the collusion behind the awful slaughter of Laughinisland are arrested, the killers are free since 1994. As the Editorial from today’s Irish News of Belfast ( below) says : ‘It has also been noted that the authorities seem more interested in finding journalistic sources than in tracking down those responsible for these terrible crimes.’”
—Fr. Sean McManus.

A disturbing development

Irish News Editorial. Belfast. Saturday, September 1, 2018

The arrest of two award-winning journalists who carried out a major investigation into the Loughinisland massacre is a disturbing development that has caused deep concern, particularly among families campaigning for the truth.

Former Irish News journalist Barry McCaffrey and independent film maker Trevor Birney both worked on a documentary about the UVF murders of six men at The Heights Bar in 1994.

No Stone Unturned, which was produced by Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney and released last year, examined claims of collusion in the killings, raised questions about the police investigation and named those suspected of involvement in the atrocity. It was an important and hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism, aiming to uncover the full truth about a dark and murky episode.

Mr. McCaffrey and Mr. Birney were detained yesterday by officers from Durham Police, who had been asked by the PSNI to conduct an investigation into the theft of confidential documents relating to the Loughinisland killings.

Police said the material, which featured in the documentary, had been in the possession of the Police Ombudsman.

Relatives of the Loughinisland victims said they were “shocked and appalled” by the arrests while the National Union of Journalists expressed “grave concern” at the development, saying the protection of journalistic sources of confidential information is of vital importance.

Certainly, the way in which these arrests have been conducted, along with the searching of homes, is profoundly alarming.

There will be justifiable fears that this aggressive approach will have a chilling effect on investigative journalism which plays a crucial role in holding the powerful to account.

It has also been noted that the authorities seem more interested in finding journalistic sources than in tracking down those responsible for these terrible crimes.

Six innocent men died in Loughinisland. Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney delved into the circumstances of their murders and asked legitimate questions about those responsible as well as the RUC investigation.

Their work is undoubtedly in the public interest. Their arrests most definitely are not.

Journalists arrested over Loughinisland documents release
Allison Morris. Irish News. Belfast. August, 2018 31

A JOURNALIST arrested by police investigating the suspected theft of confidential documents linked to the Loughinisland massacre said it was “an attack on the press” as he and a colleague were released on bail on Friday night.

Families and supporters of those killed in the 1994 attack had staged a vigil in solidarity with award-winning reporters Barry McCaffrey (48) and Trevor Birney (51).

The two men, who produced the documentary No Stone Unturned about the UVF gun attack at the Heights Bar, were detained at 7am on Friday.

They walked out of Musgrave police station in Belfast at 8.55pm, with a tearful Mr McCaffrey saying: “There are families here [who] lost loved ones who didn’t get justice today.

“This man [Mr Birney] was taken away from his wife and his children this morning. My neighbours had to see me getting taken away. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

“And it’s an attack on the press, everybody should realise. It’s us today. Tomorrow it could be you.”

Mr McCaffrey’s lawyer John Finucane said he was “deeply disturbed” by the men’s detention, while Mr Birney’s solicitor Niall Murphy said he had gone through four taped interviews but “not one scintilla of evidence” was put to him.

Police said the confidential material under investigation, which officers say featured in the documentary, had been in the possession of the Police Ombudsman’s office.

Durham Constabulary – which made the arrests – was asked to conduct an independent investigation.

Around 100 people turned out at the Heights Bar in Co Down on Friday night in silent solidarity with the journalists.

Several held aloft a banner calling for justice and others held framed photographs of their murdered loved ones.

Emma Rogan, whose father was murdered in the shootings, said the “whole community were shocked to hear [the journalists] were arrested while the perpetrators of this heinous act have never been charged”.

 The 1913 Lock-Out

Posted by Jim on

A brief history of Ireland’s landmark industrial and social dispute,
between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers, which began in
Dublin 105 years ago this week. By Francis Devine.

In Dublin City in 1913
The boss was rich and the poor were slaves,
The women working and the children hungry,
Then on came Larkin like a mighty wave.

Dublin 1913

In 1913 Dublin lacked a real industrial base and work was generally of a
casual nature with poor union organisation and slave wages. A third of
the city’s teeming population inhabited the centre city tenement slums.
The overcrowding, squalor and inadequate sanitation combined with poor
diet to give Dublin one of the highest infant death rates in Europe.

High levels of violence and prostitution offered further evidence of the
demoralised state of many of the population. It was in many ways an
unlikely seed-bed for trade unionism. The social system was typified by
insecurity of employment, personal daily struggles for survival and the
frequent indifference of the longer established – but conservative –
craft trade unions.

The New Unionism, marked by its organisation of the unskilled and
socialist zeal, had briefly flourished in Dublin in the 1890s. But the
odds were heavily stacked against permanent success: many union
organizations had become moribund. With James Larkin’s arrival in
Ireland as Organiser for the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL),
the waterfront workers rose again, firstly in Belfast in 1907 and
subsequently in other Irish ports.

Disagreement with the NUDL’s Liverpool Executive led to Larkin’s
suspension and the launch in 1909 of a Dublin-based union for unskilled
workers – the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. From the
beginning the new union enunciated in its rule book a wide programme of
industrial and political agitation to change society in the interests of
the Irish working class. But the employers would not be silent
observers.

The Bosses Organise

Under the calculating leadership of William Martin Murphy, owner of the
Irish Independent and controller of the Dublin Tramways Company, over
400 employers combined in the Dublin Employers’ Federation to deny the
same rights of combination to the city’s underprivileged. Their aim was
to remove the threat of the ITGWU and its message of discontent so
marvelously articulated by Larkin’s street oratory.

The crunch came on 15th August, 1913 when Murphy offered the workers in
the Independent’s dispatch department the choice of Union or job. When
their loyalty to the Union resulted in dismissal, prompt solidarity
action saw the dispute escalate with further dismissals in Eason’s and
on the trams.

The now confident employers issued the infamous ‘document’, locking out
any worker that refused to sign a pledge to disown the ITGWU. By the end
of September over 20,000 were locked out.

Bloody Sunday

On Sunday, 31 August, the police attacked a crowd gathered to hear
Larkin address them in O’Connell Street. The meeting had been banned by
the authorities. Scores were injured in the baton charge and British
public opinion was shocked at the scenes. As a result of injuries
recived in the baton charge and subsequent violence James Nolan, James
Byrne and Alice Brady paid for their loyalty to the workers’ cause with
their lives.

Questions were raised in the House of Commons and the issue was debated
at the British Trades Union Congress.

Support soon came on foot of the distress but Larkin’s ‘Fiery Cross’
crusade in Britain, where he preached the ‘Divine Mission of
Discontent,’ generated rank-and-file rather than official reaction.
Assistance was limited to food and material support rather than
sympathetic industrial action.

James Connolly, now co-ordinating industrial matters, drew the port of
Dublin shut as ‘tight as a drum’ and both sides settled for a long
attritional war through the winter with the bosses relying on starvation
and the workers on the simple message of ‘each for all and all for
each.’

To The Bitter End

The TUC Dublin Food Fund and other support marshalled by the Dublin
Trades Council sustained the workers and there can have been few
occasions as emotive as the landing of the food ships on the quays. The
workers also began to defend themselves through the formation of the
Irish Citizen Army. Intellectuals and many middle-class sympathisers
rallied to the workers’ side shocked at the awful conditions and
horrified at the pig-headedness of the employers. The Church was less
sympathetic and positively hostile to the notion of Dublin’s starved
youngsters going to the ‘godless’ homes of English sympathisers for the
duration. Connolly wondered why souls were of greater concern than
bellies.

In the face of uneven odds the Lock-Out began to crumble in January 1914
as the Building Labourers’ Union returned – as many others were to do –
without signing the offending document.

Some stuck it out until May, but in the end the employers could and did
claim victory as resistance collapsed. But they lacked the strength to
enforce their victory, as the ITGWU survived.

In defeat, the ITGWU had gained many adherents and, more significantly,
had laid the foundations that led Connolly to conclude:

“From the effects of this drawn battle both sides are still bearing
heavy scars. How deep those scars are, none will ever reveal. But the
working class has lost none of its aggressiveness, none of its
confidence, none of the hope in the ultimate triumph. No traitor amongst
the ranks of that class has permanently gained, even materially, by his
or her treachery. The flag of the Irish Transport and General Workers’
Union still flies proudly in the van of the Irish working class, and
that working class still marches proudly and defiantly at the head of
the gathering hosts who stand for a regenerated nation, resting upon a
people industrially free.”

The Legacy of 1913

1913 was, in fact, a victory drawn from the jaws of defeat. The trade
union and labour movement was soon to become an essential and important
part of the new southern Irish State but the battle was not won in 1913,
and progress since has been uneven.

Despite tremendous growth in numerical terms in the size of the trade
union movement in the 1970s, working class organisation has not been
reflected in political gains.

In terms of a social audit of Ireland today as compared to 1913 can we
really claim to be in credit? Certainly extreme poverty has gone but
things are relative to the times. We still have acute housing problems,
attacks on hard-won health, education and social services and new
problems of urban decay, drug abuse, vandalism and crime in the
alienation of our youth. Regrettably there is now a gathering attack on
trade unionism and the essential collective value that it represents and
to which the whole of Irish society owes many of its freedoms.

The new’ documents’ are the beliefs in privatisation, deregulation,
public spending cuts and increasing appeals to individualism. Trade
union values are being dismissed as ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘belonging to the
nineteenth century’ but in fact they were never more necessary if we are
to win the struggle for control of our destinies and management of our
own economic, social and political affairs.

The Lessons of 1913

We must learn from 1913’s solidarity between different trade unions,
national and international. The trade union movement fought for the
whole of the working class not just the organised sectors.

Larkin’s newspaper the Irish Worker through its mass readership
countered the employers’ message from the bosses’ servant press. The
trade unions provided social and cultural activities for its members as
well as industrial and political leadership.

The Lock-Out tried to outlaw a culture counter to capitalism. It failed
partly because it was so crude and ham-fisted. Today’s attack is more
subtle and all the more dangerous because of it.

To honour the memory of 1913 we must once again set out the task of
regenerating a nation on “the shoulders of a people industrially free.”

Tories threaten partition, once again

Posted by Jim on

The Tory Brexit campaign is sliding towards a “take it or leave it”
showdown with the EU amid an increasingly bloody-minded approach by
British officials.

There were furious condemnations this week of Tory extremist Jacob
Rees-Mogg after he he said Britain could use “historic arrangements” to
control the Irish population after Brexit.

“There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have
people inspected,” he said.

“It’s not a border that everyone has to go through every day. But of
course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close
eye on the border to try and stop gun-running and things like that.”

Nationalist politicians have long warned that the British government is
acting in bad faith in regard to the 1998 Good Friday peace Agreement.

Sinn Fein Assembly member Mairtin O Muilleoir said “Jacob Rees-Mogg and
the Tory Brexiteers have again shown contempt and a complete disregard
for the people of Ireland north and south.

“Anyone labouring under the misapprehension that the Tories care a jot
about the north is living in a fool’s paradise.”

The SDLP’s Claire Hanna branded Rees-Mogg’s remarks as “pig ignorant”.

“It is offensive that a senior politician would use the ‘Troubles’ as
benchmark for solving the border issue,” she said.

“This unguarded answer exposes how empty all the honeyed phrases about
not returning to ‘the borders of the past’ over the last two years
really are.”

There was no denial of the comments by Theresa May or others in the
leadership of the Conservative Party. Instead, Theresa May indicated
that a ‘no deal’ Brexit would “not be the end of the world”, again
infuriating nationalist politicians.

Britain has previously pledged to maintain an open border in Ireland but
has made no progress on agreeing how it would work. The deadline for an
agreement is October, but that looks likely to slip to November. If no
agreement is reached by then the prospect of a no-deal scenario or
‘crash Brexit’ looks increasingly likely.

Last week, ‘technical guidance’ published by the British government
suggested cross-Border businesses should simply contact Dublin for
advice in the event of a no-deal Brexit. This is in line with warnings
that the British simply intend to launch a blame game against Brussels
and Dublin over the return of border checks.

Sinn Fein’s northern leader Michelle O’Neill said the Tories had shown
“absolute contempt and blatant disregard” for the people of the North.
She called for a special London-Brussels meeting to solely deal with the
North.

Party colleague Martina Anderson said it was becoming “clearer by the
day” that the Tories are now actively planning for a no-deal Brexit,
“whether by design or by accident as a result of the fact that they have
no coherent strategy.” She accused Theresa May of “a total lack of
empathy” and “disdain” for those in Ireland.

“It is characteristic of the attitude of Tory Brexiteers, particularly
towards the north of Ireland where the true extent of a no-deal Brexit
will be fell most acutely,” she said.

“Theresa May might not think it’s the end of the world but it will be
the end of many of the rights we take for granted.”

Former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said the British government had
resiled from the ‘backstop’ agreement in December under which it said
the North would remain within the single market and customs union in the
absence of an overall deal.

“The onus therefore is on the Irish government to step up its engagement
with the EU to ensure that Europe sticks to the backstop agreement and
that everything is done to protect the two economies on this island and
in particular the rights of EU citizens in the north,” he said.

RADIO FREE EIREANN will broadcast  this Saturday September 1st

Posted by Jim on August 31, 2018

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on August 30, 2018