Posted by Jim on November 11, 2017
A prominent Armagh republican, Gabriel Mackle, has been interned on the
orders of the British Direct Ruler James Brokenshire.
From Tandragee, he was imprisoned in April 2014 on IRA charges at the
high security Maghaberry jail, where he was assaulted while resisting
the punitive prison regime. On Thursday night, he was seized by the
PSNI at his home and brought to Banbridge PSNI base before being
brought back to Maghaberry.
His ‘release licence’ has been terminated by the British government for
reasons not yet disclosed. Last weekend, Mr Mackle took part in the
annual Edentubber commemoration organised by Republican Sinn Fein in
County Louth where he delivered an oration.
His lawyer Fearghal Shiels said he intends to fight his detention.
“He strenuously denies having breached any conditions of his license
and his return to custody shall be vigorously challenged through the
courts,” he said.
RSF president Des Dalton described Mackle’s reincarceration as
politically-motivated internment. He called for his immediate release.
“Gabriel Mackle is being interned for no other reason than his
adherence to his republican beliefs,” he said.
“The British government are once more using internment to silence
opposition to their continued occupation and partition of Ireland.”
600 DAYS BEHIND BARS
Meanwhile, there have been calls for the release of another internee,
Derry man Tony Taylor, as he reached the 600th day of his detention
without trial.
His wife has spoken of how her family have been “living in a nightmare”
since her husband’s arrest 600 days ago last Tuesday.
Lorraine Taylor reiterated calls for her husband to be released or
given a fair hearing. Mrs Taylor has also appealed to the Taoiseach,
Leo Varadkar, to intervene in light of his government taking action to
help secure the release of another Irish citizen, Ibrahim Halawa, in a
separate case in Egypt.
A ‘closed hearing’ was held in May this year, which included ‘secret
evidence’ from MI5, after which a decision was again taken to refuse
Mr Taylor’s release. No fresh charges have been put to him in a case
which Sinn Fein has branded “an affront to human rights.”
Lorraine Taylor said: “600 days now and we are coming up to another
Christmas and it’s not fair. My children need their daddy home. A
family should all be together at Christmas time.
“Every day we are living a nightmare. He is missing out on so much. He
has missed the wain’s formal. We love him and we miss him every day.
“It is 600 days and all we are asking for is a fair trial; a fair
hearing in an open court so Tony can prove his innocence.”
Mr Taylor’s family and supporters are currently awaiting the results of
an appeal against a decision not to award him Legal Aid in respect of a
Judicial Review.
Mrs Taylor said that she wanted to thank the people of Derry and all
those from right across the political and campaigning spectrum who have
helped highlight her husband’s case and raised human rights concerns
over his continued detention.
“The support we have received has been amazing from the people of Derry
and all the different groups. They cannot all be wrong,” she said.
She also said Mr Varadkar could help put pressure over her husband’s
case. Representatives from the ‘Free Tony Taylor’ campaign earlier this
month handed over a letter to Mr Varadkar welcoming Mr Halawa’s release
and urging him to raise Mr Taylor’s case, while the Taoiseach was
visiting Derry.
“We welcome the release of Ibrahim Halawa and we are asking if he can
do the same for Tony.”
Posted by Jim on November 10, 2017
Foster’s refusal to briefly step aside over RHI has had disastrous political consequencesIf the then First Minister had agreed to stand aside for a week or two…I’m pretty sure she would still be First Minister today. … The Assembly and Executive wouldn’t have collapsed. There would have been no throwaway lines about crocodiles and Sinn Féin wouldn’t have been able to galvanize and mobilize an angry Republican/Nationalist electorate.Alex Kane. Irish News. Belfast.
Friday, November 10, 2017
I was reading Lilah-Liberty For Want of a Nail the other night. You know the one: ‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost’, followed by the horse, the rider, the message, the battle and the kingdom itself…’ And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.’
When I reached the end and kissed her goodnight, I suddenly thought of Arlene Foster.
If the then First Minister had agreed to stand aside for a week or two (as Peter Robinson would probably have done; or, at least, have found a way of resolving the standoff) and allowed an initial inquiry to rummage through the BBC Spotlight allegations, I’m pretty sure she would still be First Minister
today.
The Assembly and Executive wouldn’t have collapsed. There would have been no throwaway lines about crocodiles and Sinn Féin wouldn’t have been able to galvanize and mobilize an angry Republican/Nationalist electorate. There wouldn’t have been an early election and Unionists would still have an overall majority; with the DUP still able to wield the petition of concern on any and every issue. Northern Ireland wouldn’t be as polarized and unsettled as it has become.
There wouldn’t have been 10 months of impasse. Mike Nesbitt would still be leader of the UUP. It’s possible, in the absence of the increasingly toxic relationship between Unionists and Republicans before and after the Assembly election, that the UUP and SDLP wouldn’t have lost all their parliamentary seats in June. The political debate would not have been dominated by Sinn Féin’s ‘rights’ agenda; and the Irish language issue wouldn’t really be registering as a make-or-break problem.
We wouldn’t be facing a long period of direct rule. Public confidence in the assembly wouldn’t be at its lowest ever ebb. And, ‘Is the assembly actually worth preserving?’ wouldn’t have become the most asked question in pubs, at water coolers and across dining tables.
All of this mess because Arlene Foster wouldn’t step aside. There could, of course, be more mess to come. If Sinn Féin remains of the opinion that James Brokenshire’s decision to legislate for a budget means – as John O’Dowd said on last week’s The View – “this present process is over”, then it could take a while before another talks process is established. And if that is the case, then it’s a pretty sure bet that Sinn Féin won’t be in the mood for compromises from their side.
Similarly, Unionism generally and the DUP in particular isn’t going to be happy if Foster’s stubbornness (some call it pride) leads to the collapse of devolution. They may not love power sharing with Sinn Féin, but they also know that direct rule has rarely done any favours for Unionism. They know, too, that the deal the DUP has with Theresa May does not carry any guarantee that her government – assuming, of course, she hangs on – would take sides with them against Sinn Féin and risk the implosion of the entire political/institutional process. And while Foster will be keen to boast of the importance of the DUP in the Commons at the moment (expect at least one big name at their annual conference in a few weeks), she won’t want to tell her party that she has crashed Stormont.
So yes, her refusal to stand aside led to a veritable avalanche of unexpected, unintended consequences. But – and it’s an important but – I suspect that those consequences were coming down the line at some point, anyway. The sheer despair and anger in Martin McGuinness’s resignation letter last January (the one in which he finally blew the lid on the nature of the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Féin) wasn’t actually anything new. Some of us had been writing about it for years. But its publication blew away the manufactured, self-serving fiction that “we actually get on very well together”.
In essence, all her refusal to stand aside for a while did was hasten the point at which we all begin to accept that the present process cannot work. We have tested, tested again and then retested the process since 1998; yet every attempt ends in a new crisis and a mountain of fudge. Sinn Féin was clearly uncomfortable with Foster. RHI provided the opportunity to embarrass her and the competence of her colleagues and advisers. Her refusal to stand aside (and they couldn’t take it for granted that she wouldn’t) gave them an unexpected opportunity to up the ante, bring down the Executive and push their own agenda.
We are where we are. We are where we were always going to be.
All the pretences and sleights-of-hand and cosmetics have been rendered worthless. We’re back at base camp, with the unclimbed mountain still there; still unconquered.
As I keep saying, politics here is heading to a very, very bad place.
Posted by Jim on November 9, 2017
The Hibernian
He or She is proudly an Hibernian
He or She proudly wears the green
Like his or her father did before.
He or she is proud to let it be seen.
For whether he or she is young or old
Irish born or of descent
When the pride takes hold
It’s Ireland, proud to represent.
They call it the land of winter
But to him/her it’s full of warmth
For each visit it gets better
Full of the Craic and the charm.
It’s the heart of an Irish Nation
That history made borderless
With The Famine and Starvation
Emigration and British oppress.
But its heart, it is still beating
More proudly and stronger than ever
And at the hall of the Hibernian meeting declares ‘Ireland Free,Pro-Life and Gaelic Forever’.
Martin Corey
Proud Hibernian
Posted by Jim on November 8, 2017
“The fact that the police don’t represent society and that its senior officers are overwhelmingly Unionist [Loyalist/Protestant] accounts for the PSNI’s hostility.”
Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. November 8, 2017
How do you solve a problem like the PSNI? Seventeen years ago, it emerged as a bright shiny new police service – service, not force – civilians in uniform.
Hopes were high that with unprecedented transparency, accountability and a 50-50 recruitment policy it would develop to be representative of society in The North.
Let’s be clear about this. No one wanted a reliable, impartial, effective, representative police service more than northern Nationalists. They’d never had one. They still haven’t.
The bad news is that all indications are the PSNI isn’t going to become representative of society, isn’t on track to be, and because of that hasn’t managed to treat nationalists or manifestations of nationalism impartially. We’ll come back to that later.
The biggest blow to preventing a representative police service emerging was the success of Unionists in stopping 50-50 recruitment. Unionists [Loyalists/Protestants] don’t want a representative police service, never have, and have worked consistently to prevent one. In one of the many stupid decisions he made, the then proconsul [Northern Ireland Secretary of State] Owen Paterson, a caricature English blowhard about ‘Ahland’[Ireland], mollified his DUP sycophants and abolished 50-50 recruiting in 2011. Of all actions, that one, vindicated Gerry Adams’s description of him as a ‘complete tube’.
In 2015 there were 400 new recruits to the PSNI. Seventy-seven of them were Catholic -19 per cent. Bit of a drop from 50-50 eh? About 200 police leave every year. Increasingly the majority of them is Catholic. Soon we’ll be getting down to around 25 per cent Catholics in the PSNI. Not good. At senior level, it’s far, far worse. You might have read here last year that of the 7,500 or so full-time and part-time officers about 500 were of the rank of inspector or above. Only ninety-two of those were Catholic, probably fewer now. That means about one per cent of the PSNI of the rank of inspector, or above, is Catholic. What’s being done about this disparity? Nothing.
Outside the PSNI in the real world, the Equality Commission requires affirmative action to change that state of affairs. Not in the PSNI. That’s clear neglect by the Department of Justice and NIO but then what would you expect? No nationalists involved. Sinn Féin silent.
The PSNI doesn’t look like The North. The majority of children in school is Catholic. In third level education, 47 per cent of students are Catholic, 30 per cent Protestant and the rest other denominations.
Yet in the PSNI, 75 per cent aremanifestations of Nationalism compared to appeasement of Loyalist manifestations. One example will suffice.
You might have noticed a mild letter in this paper last Friday from a Tyrone GAA fan. He pointed out that after Tyrone won their third All-Ireland in 2008 the cavalcade from Dublin went up through Monaghan where the Gardaí turned out in light-hearted mood wearing false beards, like many of the Tyrone team that year, and waved them on. As the writer said in a telling phrase, when the team crossed the border ‘into OUR OWN COUNTY’, the PSNI stopped the cavalcade to check for tax discs. Utterly disgraceful given the day that was in it. When the difference in the behavior of the Gardaí celebrating the historic win was pointed out, the PSNI threatened to arrest the complainant. Welcome home with Sam Maguire.
In Mid-Ulster where that GAA cavalcade was headed, 66 per cent of the population are Catholic and massively supportive of the GAA. If there’d been a senior Catholic PSNI officer in charge when the winning team entered their own county the reaction may have been different. Maybe not, but that’s another story. The important point is that police behavior that night was not an isolated incident. There are numerous examples of hostile behavior towards people and players attending GAA matches.
In the last week, there’s been a lot of debate about the GAA and the PSNI. There are two sides to the story.
Posted by Jim on November 7, 2017
Emma Rogan, MLA.
Connla Young.Irish News. Belfast.
Monday, November 6, 2017 THE daughter of a man killed in the Loughinisland massacre has strongly criticised the PSNI after it requested an investigation into how sensitive documents came to be used in the film No Stone Unturned.
The documentary, due for general release this Friday, named three people suspected of involvement in the UVF gun attack that claimed lives of six innocent men as they watched the Republic of Ireland play a World Cup match in a bar in June 1994.
It also claimed that the wife of one of the suspected gunmen gave his name to police shortly after the massacre.
The man, Ronald Hawthorne, was arrested after the attack but has never been charged.
The film by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney also alleges that during an interrogation of Hawthorne an officer tried to convince him to kill a prominent republican.
It comes after a Police Ombudsman’s report published in June last year identified “catastrophic failings” in the RUC investigation and found that collusion was a significant feature in the murders.
In a statement issued last week, Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Martin acknowledged the “hurt and anger” felt by families and said police remain “firmly committed” to apprehending those responsible for the attack and will be reviewing the documentary.
However, he added that police were aware that sensitive documents thought to originate from the Police Ombudsman’s Office are suspected to have been used in the film.
He said Durham police are already investigating how a solicitor’s firm obtained separate documents from the ombudsman’s office.
“While there is nothing to suggest these matters are linked, the PSNI has requested that the existing investigation is extended to include this recent suspected theft of sensitive material,” he said.
The film makes clear that the Loughinisland documents were posted to the filmmakers unsolicited.
Last night Sinn Féin MLA Emma Rogan, whose father Adrian Rogan was killed, slammed the PSNI response.
“Six men are dead and families still devastated but they want to go after a document,” she said.
“A document that’s in a film that gives the families the truth.
“How dare they distract from their responsibilities to us and all the other families.”
Ms Rogan described the PSNI’s response as “cruel”.
“The families’ first concern is for the perpetrators to be brought to justice,” she said.
“But the PSNI statement provides us with a cruel insight into their priorities.
“Their only investigative action arising from the film, and the work of journalist and lawyers to expose the truth, is an allegation of theft against the film makers.
“It’s stunning and disgraceful in equal measure.”
The PSNI could not be contacted last night for comment