Posted by Jim on October 5, 2017
Join us for a Commemoration of Thomas Ashe,
Kerry-Born Irish Patriot,
Victim of Hunger Strike, September, 1917.
Sunday October 8th, 2017 2.00PM
Free Admission/All Invited
Guest Speaker: Gabriel Doherty, Historian, University College Cork
For more information, please contact Association Historian
Gerry O’Shea – jamesgoshea@gmail.com
Posted by Jim on September 30, 2017
Fresh inquests have been sought into the deaths of two IRA Volunteers in
separate incidents in 1972 and 1973 after documents emerged which
confirmed that the men were unlawfully killed by British soldiers.
Recently uncovered British military archives show that an IRA volunteer
shot dead by the British army in 1972 was the victim of a planned
ambush.
Daniel McAreavey was shot and killed by British soldiers at the junction
of Bosnia Street and Plevna Street in the lower Falls area. Local
witnesses at the time stated that the 21-year-old was wounded and then
executed.
The British military claimed that one of their units happened to be
passing when they were fired upon by a gunman and that they then engaged
with him. However, a classified file from the 2nd Battalion of the
Anglian Regiment states that Mr McAreavey was caught in an “area ambush”
which is military parlance for a kill zone.
A record for October 6, 1972 read: “Area ambush in Raglan Street –
Plevana St – Osman St Daniel McAreavey shot dead and 2 gunmen wounded by
SF. (Security Forces).
Ciaran MacAirt of the Paper Trail organisation, who found the archives
said: “This is an admission by the British Army that Daniel McAreavey
was caught and killed in a deliberate British military ambush. This
archive completely subverts the British narrative of an accidental
patrol that happened upon the scene.”
He noted the use the generic term SF or “Security Forces” points to the
involvement of another unit, possibly the notorious military
assassination unit, the MRF.
He also noted the British soldiers called the area of their ambush and
kill ‘the Reservation’, “as if this was some sick hunt and the people
were animals”.
“We can be sure that the British Army’s area ambush was a deliberate
plan to trap and kill its targets. There was nothing accidental in the
deployment of British troops in the area at that time.”
Padraig O Muirigh of O Muirigh Solicitors said the McAreavey family had
always held the view that their loved one was killed unlawfully by the
British Army.
“In recent years new witness testimony has come to light from two
individuals who spoke to the deceased as he lay injured after an initial
burst of fire. Their evidence supports the proposition that the deceased
had died after sustaining fatal injuries in a second burst of fire as he
lay injured on the ground,” he said.
“This find by Paper Trail is further evidence of a cover-up in relation
to the circumstances of Mr McAreavey’s death. It is clear that there was
no adequate RUC investigation at the time. The Royal Military Police
took the statement from the soldiers, a derogation by the police to the
military of their duty to investigate. It is also highly unusual that
there was no autopsy carried out on the deceased’s body.”
COVER-UP
A fresh inquest is also being sought into the separate killing of an IRA
man in 1973 after documents confirm British soldiers did not follow
their own ‘yellow card’ rules of engagement.
Brian Smyth was killed after members of the Parachute Regiment opened
fire on a group of men in Ardoyne in April 1973. Three other men were
wounded in the incident, one of whom suffered permanent brain damage.
The British army originally claimed the men were armed but this was
disputed by eyewitnesses, including a nun, who maintained the men were
not carrying weapons.
One of the injured men was later convicted of having a gun during the
incident — before being acquitted on a retrial after one of the
soldiers involved revealed he was told to lie and claim that they were
armed.
The newly uncovered document, which dates from 1977, considered the pros
and cons of whether the British government should provide an
out-of-court settlement to the injured men and the mother of the dead
man, Mary Smyth.
Mrs Smyth was herself killed along with her 10-year-old grandson after a
loyalist fire bomb attack at her Oldpark Avenue home in 1978.
The document confirms that no firearms were found on the men and that
there was no forensic evidence to indicate that they were armed.
The British army was also worried following the allegations made by the
soldier who came forward and the subsequent acquittal that “the evidence
given by the soldiers concerned is bound to be suspect” and they they
might face prosecution.
Mr O Muirigh said that the original RUC investigation “failed to
establish the facts of this matter” and that no evidence was taken from
civilian witnesses.
“These grave failings in the RUC investigation and subsequent inquest
could be remedied by a fresh inquest,” he said.
“We would appeal to any of those present with Mr Smyth when he was shot
and any other witnesses to the incident to contact our office”.
Posted by Jim on
Ahead of the October 1 referendum on self-determination, the Spanish
government is engaged in a level of political repression in Catalonia
not experienced since the days of the Franco dictatorship. Kate Shea
Baird writes for the Independent on the sudden collapse in Spanish
democracy.
Last week Mariano Rajoy lost control of the narrative on the Catalan
question. Appearing before the press after a series of raids and arrests
designed to halt a unilateral referendum on independence planned for 1
October, the Spanish Prime Minister trotted out the government’s
well-worn arguments in defence of the constitution and the “rights of
all Spaniards”.
However, Rajoy’s professed defence of the rule of law is increasingly at
odds with reality on the ground. Over recent weeks, judges in Spain have
used startlingly loose interpretations of the Supreme Court’s ruling on
the referendum’s illegality to issue orders that violate many of the
rights they’re charged with upholding. Local police across Catalonia
have seized posters and banners related to the 1 October vote, and the
Spanish Civil Guard has searched a number of newspaper offices for
incriminating materials. These aren’t signs of a state that’s confident
in its authority.
Significantly, this legal overreach hasn’t been limited to Catalonia,
and nor has the popular response to it. Judges in Madrid and Bilbao have
ruled public debates on the Catalan question illegal. While both events
eventually went ahead despite the court suspensions, the apparent
attempt to use criminal law to suppress political expression recalls
some of the darkest moments of Spain’s recent history.
The scale of state repression in Catalonia and its extension to the rest
of Spain mark a significant shift in the ongoing dispute over the
national question. The conflict is less and less about competing
conceptions of democracy and increasingly about the defence of the basic
rights like freedom of assembly, speech and the press.
As Rajoy addressed the country on Wednesday night, the streets of
Barcelona swelled with tens of thousands of people demonstrating outside
the Catalan economy ministry, where a junior minister had been arrested
earlier that morning. On the other side of the city, protesters gathered
outside the headquarters of the pro-independence party “Popular Unity
Candidacy”, blocking the entrance of the national police, which had
spent the morning attempting to search the offices without a warrant.
Is this a revolt with a national current? Undoubtedly. But there is
something else going on, too. Wednesday’s rallies were not the highly
organised, disciplined affairs that characterise the annual
demonstrations of the independence movement. Their spirit owed something
to the anti-establishment “indignados” movement that occupied the
squares of Spain’s major cities in May 2011 and politicised a
generation.
Protesters alternated between collective renditions of the Catalan
national anthem, “Els Segadors” and the libertarian and anti-fascist
chants of “the streets will always be ours” and “no passaran”. As night
fell, the air was filled with the sound of people banging pots from
their balconies in protest, even in neighbourhoods where support for
independence is relatively low. Elsewhere in Spain, emergency solidarity
protests were held in more than 20 cities, using the hashtag
#CatalunaNoEstasSola, “Catalonia, you’re not alone”.
Since the financial crisis in 2008, both the independence and the
“indignados” movements have questioned the foundations of the so-called
“’78 Regime” in Spain, the constitutional settlement that transitioned
the country to democracy after decades of dictatorship. While neither
movement on its own has had the strength to pose a serious threat to the
established order, united around a common cause, they could create the
most formidable grassroots movement in Europe.
Posted by Jim on September 27, 2017
Despite their deal, the Conservatives are cutting the ground from under their ‘mates’
Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times. Dublin.Tuesday, September 26, 2017
I apologize to the Democratic Unionist Party. After it did a deal to keep Theresa May in power, I suggested it would eventually be stabbed in the back by its Tory friends. This has proved to be doubly wrong. It didn’t happen eventually – it has happened already. And it has been stabbed, not in the back, but in the front. Sorry about that.
The DUP’s enthusiastic support for Brexit is largely an exercise in identity politics, a way of expressing an emotional attachment to Britishness. But it has two political imperatives. The DUP’s own voters do not want a hard Border. And they do not want to lose the agricultural subsidies that account for 87 per cent of farm incomes in Northern Ireland.
They need their friends in London to swing these two big things for them. Otherwise Arlene Foster will look less like Moses leading her people to the promised land and more like a scout leader who has lost the compass, forgotten the tents and dropped the sandwiches in the bog.
The DUP always acknowledged that a hard frontier is not just undesirable but impossible, a reality made starker by figures showing the Border is crossed 110 million times a year. But it has been pushing a magical solution: technology. Some as-yet-undiscovered technology (vaguely imagined as having something to do with number-plate recognition and data analytics) would allow the frictionless movements of goods and people.
There was something oddly touching in this act of faith, like one of those cargo cults that developed on remote South Sea islands when fridges and TVs washed ashore and were worshipped as mysterious messages from the gods.
But, while the DUP was placing all its bets on this technological thoroughbred, its Tory friends dragged the poor beast out the back and shot it. At the end of July, Jeffrey Donaldson was still rhapsodising about the ingenious machines that were going to solve the Border problem, sighing that “Modern technology is a wonderful thing”. Two weeks later the Tory government published its long-awaited position paper on the Irish dimension of the Brexit negotiations.
It was a mercy killing without the mercy. The DUP’s solution was dismissed in a single line, committing the UK to “avoid any physical border infrastructure in either the United Kingdom or Ireland, for any purpose”. No physical Border infrastructure means no magic machines. Unless it is going to suggest that Border controls will be purely spiritual, it is hard to see where this leaves the DUP.
Sent to slaughterOn agricultural subsidies, too, the DUP has been brushed aside by its Brexiteer mates. The party knows very well that agriculture matters much more to Northern Ireland than it does to England. And most of it is currently unthinkable without the cheque in the post from Brussels: Northern Ireland makes up 3 per cent of the UK population but gets almost 10 per cent of its European Union farm subsidies.
A beef farmer in Northern Ireland who followed the DUP’s advice to vote for Brexit might typically have a commercial income of £14,745. The Brussels cheque is for almost twice that amount: £28,726. What’s going to happen after Brexit? The DUP has a simple answer: London will send that farmer £28,726.
In the short term, this is probably true. The Brexiteers cannot afford an immediate food security crisis, so London will pony up for a few years. But in the medium term, frankly my dears, London doesn’t give a damn.
Remember the tragicomic episode in July when one of the arch-Brexiteers, Michael Gove, now the UK’s food minister, visited a farm show in Antrim and was feted by the DUP? He issued a statement praising the quality and worldwide renown of, um, Welsh lamb. Hard to blame him – all these rainy, hilly peripheries where people talk in funny accents do rather meld into one another.
The ultra free marketWhat the Brexiteers really want is an ultra free-market Britain, liberated from subsidies and regulations. George Eustice, the UK farming minister, has been clear about the implications: “If subsidies equal direct payments, of course we want to move away from that.”
The promise to protect farm subsidies is tied up with the idea that Britain will have a vast amount of money to spend because it will no longer be sending it to Brussels. Leaving aside the mendacity of the infamous £350 million a week that is supposed to be available, has the DUP noticed that this mythic sum has been promised yet again to the National Health Service, not to farmers? In the 4,326-word essay in which Boris Johnson revived these claims, he said nothing about giving a penny of the dividend to farmers.
The DUP needs to consult a self-help manual, He’s Just Not that into You, which is advertised as ideal for those “who want to get past the crappy get-out lines fellas use”. The crappy get-out lines about the wonders of technology and the cheque in the post from London didn’t disguise the truth that the Brexiteers are just not that into dealing with the complications of Ireland. Whether it likes it or not, the DUP has to join the rest of Ireland in trying to do so.
Posted by Jim on September 26, 2017
An Official Communication from the UFA
#34 of 2017 · September 26th
- ROBERT “PUDGIE” WALSH (LADDER 108) STREET RENAMING
This Sunday, October 1st , will be a “Street Naming Ceremony” to honor Lt. Robert “Pudgie Walsh, Ladder 108. Location: Avenue P & East 36th Street, Marine Park, Brooklyn. Time: 12 noon. Pudgie was the former Head Coach and Founder of the Bravest Football Club, long time Head Coach of the Brooklyn Mariner Football Club, as well as a member of the U.S. Navy. All off duty members and their families are invited to attend. Attire for the day is casual.