Posted by Jim on July 12, 2017
Last night saw an almost 50% increase in bonfire-related emergency
callouts since last year as state-funded loyalist ‘Eleventh Night’
blazes damaged property and threatened lives across the North.
Firefighters were summoned to 133 emergency situations last night, a 49%
increase in the number of incidents over the same period in 2016.
There were chaotic scenes in Belfast city centre, where residents fled
one high rise development as a giant bonfire at Victoria Place looked
set to engulf a building just yards away.
Fire crews soaked the high-rise development for hours and succeeded in
preventing a disaster, although heat damage included cracked windows and
melted plastics.
It is thought the building, which is home to a diverse and international
mix of young professionals and their families, may have been
deliberately targeted in an act of racism.
Lucy Ryan was inside the apartment complex when panic spread. She said:
“We were standing on the first floor, looking out onto the bonfire and
saw it all collapse. Obviously we felt the heat and we saw the fire was
literally coming right over to the building, so we were like ‘right, we
have to get out’.”
Before being lit, in scenes mirrored in loyalist areas across the North,
symbols of Irish nationalism such as tricolours, Celtic FC banners and
Sinn Fein election poster were added to the bonfire in the traditional
expression of sectarian hate and intimidation.
“All the glazing [on the apartment block] facing the bonfire has been
damaged and cracked,” said Assistant chief fire officer Alan Walmsley of
the Victoria Place bonfire. “If our crews had not been on the scene
working so hard, there is no doubt that fire would have spread into that
building.”
Firefighters were attacked as they left the scene by members of the
paramilitary gang, one of those which receives Belfast City Council’s
infamous grant aid for loyalists criminals. This week the council
announced it was pulling some of its financial support for the group via
the euphemistically titled “Sandy Row Fun Day” event, blaming a nearby
bonfire at Roden Street, which had been constructed to an unprecedented
height.
However, the city council backed away from its threat to prevent four
bonfires they fund in east Belfast from being increased, despite
receiving a court order to permit them to intervene to limit their
height. Masked gang members were photographed defying the council posing
by piling on wooden pallets.
Authorities instead focused on mitigating the damage of the pyres by
boarding up windows at a number of the sites, including Ravenscroft
Avenue and Cregagh in the east of the city and Lanark Way in the north.
At Cluan Place in east Belfast, where thick black fumes from burning
tyres filled the area and spread into the nationalist Short Strand,
firefighters also spent hours soaking properties to prevent them from
catching fire.
Meanwhile, Sinn Fein’s national chairperson Declan Kearney called on
unionist politicians to condemn “hatemongers” who put a replica coffin
bearing the image of Martin McGuinness, who died in March, on a bonfire
in east Belfast.
A replica casket with a picture of the former deputy first minister
Martin McGuinness was hung on a bonfire in east Belfast.
John Finucane, the son of loyalist murder victim Pat Finucane and a new
Sinn Fein candidate in the recent general election, reported a hate
crime and theft to the police after learning that a number of his
campaign posters had been attached to a bonfire.
One pyre in County Tyrone was completely covered in stolen election
posters belonging to Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Alliance Party and the
Green Party.
Images also emerged on social media of a bonfire in east Belfast draped
with a banner carrying a racist message directed at Celtic footballer
Scott Sinclair.
“I am directly challenging the leaders of all unionist parties to
immediately disassociate themselves and their parties from this and
other examples of sectarian hate crime,” Mr Kearney said.
Posted by Jim on July 8, 2017
Joe McDonnell
A deep-thinking republican with a great sense of humour
THE FOURTH IRA Volunteer to join the hunger-strike for political status was Joe McDonnell, a thirty-year-old married man with two children, from the Lenadoon housing estate in West Belfast.
A well-known and very popular man in the Greater Andersonstown area he grew up, married and fought for the republican cause in, Joe had a reputation as a quiet and deep-thinking individual, with a gentle, happy go-lucky personality, who had, nevertheless, a great sense of humour, was always laughing and playing practical jokes, and who, although withdrawn at times, had the ability to make friends easily.
As an active republican before his capture in October 1976, Joe was regarded by his comrades as a cool and efficient Volunteer who did what he had to do and never talked about it afterwards.
Something of a rarity within the Republican Movement, in that outside of military briefings and operational duty he was never seen around with other known or suspected Volunteers, he was nevertheless a good friend of the late Bobby Sands, with whom he was captured while on active service duty.
Not among those who volunteered for the earlier hunger strike last year, it was the intense disappointment brought about by the Brits’ duplicity following the end of that hunger strike, and the bitterness and anger that duplicity produced among all the blanket men, that prompted Joe to put forward his name the next time round.
And it was predictable, as well as fitting, when his friend and comrade Bobby Sands met with death on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike, that Joe McDonnell should volunteer to take Bobby’s place and continue that fight.
RESOLVE
His determination and resolve in that course of action can be gauged by the fact that never once, following his sentencing to fourteen years imprisonment in 1977, did he put on the prison uniform to take a visit, seeing his wife and family only after he commenced his hunger-strike.
The story of Joe McDonnell is of a highly-aware republican soldier whose involvement stemmed initially from the personal repression and harassment he and his family suffered at the hands of the British occupation forces, but which then deepened – through continuing repression – to a mature commitment to oppose an occupation that denied his country freedom and attempted to criminalise its people.
It was that commitment which he held more dear than his own life.
FAMILY
Joe McDonnell was born on September 14th 1951, the fifth of eight children, into the family home in Slate Street in Belfast’s Lower Falls.
His father, Robert, aged 59, a steel erector, and his mother, Eileen (whose maiden name is Straney), aged 58, both came from the Lower Falls themselves.
IRA volunteers fire a volley of shots over Joe McDonnell’s coffin
IRA volunteers fire a volley of shots over Joe McDonnell’s coffin
They married in St. Peter’s church there, in 1941, living first with Robert’s sister and her husband in Colinward Street, off the Springfield Road, before moving into their own home in Slate Street, where the family were all born.
These are: Eilish, aged 38, married with five children; Robert, aged 36, married with two children; Hugh, aged 34, married with three children; Patsy, aged 32, married with two children, and now living in Canada since 1969; Joe; Maura, aged 28 and single; Paul, aged 26, married with two children and Frankie, aged 24 and single.
Frankie is currently serving a five-year sentence on the blanket protest in H6-Block on an IRA membership charge, following his arrest in December 1976, and is due for release this December.
A ninth child, Bernadette, was a particular favourite of Joe’s, before her death from a kidney illness at the early age of three.
“Joseph practically reared Bernadette”, recalls his mother, “he was always with the child, carrying her around. He was about ten at the time. He even used to play marleys with her on his shoulders.”
Bernadette’s death, a sad blow to the family, was deeply felt by her young brother Joe.
DATING
One of his friends at that time was his future brother-in-law, Michael, and he began dating Goretti from around the time he was seventeen.
Joe and Goretti, who also comes from Andersonstown, married in St. Agnes’ chapel in 1970, and moved in to live with Goretti’s sister and her family in Horn Drive in Lower Lenadoon.
At that time, however, they were one of only two nationalist households in what was then a predominantly loyalist street, and, after repeated instances of verbal intimidation, in the middle of the night, a loyalist mob – in full view of a nearby Brit post, and with the blessing of the raving Reverend Robert Bradford, who stood by – broke down the doors and wrecked the houses, forcing the two families to leave.
INTERNMENT
The McDonnells went to live with Goretti’s mother for a while, but eventually got the chance to squat in a house being vacated in Lenadoon Avenue.
Internment had been introduced shortly before, and in 1972 the British army struck with a 4.00 a.m. raid.
Joe was dragged from the house, hit in the eye with a rifle butt and bundled into a jeep. Their house was searched and wrecked. Joe was taken to the prison ship Maidstone and later on to Long Kesh internment camp where he was held for several months.
Goretti recalls that early morning as a “horrific” experience which altered both their lives. One minute they had everything, the next minute nothing.
On his release Joe joined the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, operating at first in the 1st Battalion’s ‘A’ Company which covered the Rosnareen end of Andersonstown, and later being absorbed into the ‘cell’ structure increasingly adopted by the IRA.
RAIDS
Both during his first period of internment, and his second, longer, internment in 1973, as well as the periods when he was free, the McDonnell’s home in Lenadoon was constant target for British army raids.
During these raids the house would often be torn apart, photos torn up and confiscated letters from Joe (previously read by the prison censor) re-read by infantile British soldiers, and Goretti herself arrested.
In between periods of internment, and before his capture, Joe resumed his trade as an upholsterer which he had followed since leaving school at the age of fifteen. He loved the job, never missing a day through illness, and made both the furniture for his own home as well as for many of the bars and clubs in the surrounding area. His job enabled him to take the family for regular holidays but Joe was a real ‘homer’ and always longed to be back in his native Belfast.
BOMBS
Part of that attraction stemmed obviously from his responsibility to his republican involvement. An active Volunteer throughout the Greater Andersonstown area, Joe was considered a first-class operator who didn’t show much fear. Generally quiet and serious while on an operation, whether an ambush or a bombing mission, Joe’s humour occasionally shone through.
Driving one time to an intended target in the Lenadoon area with a carload of Volunteers, smoke began to appear in the car. Not realising that it was simply escaping exhaust fumes, and thinking it came from the bags containing a number of bombs, a degree of alarm began to break out in the car, but Joe only advised his comrades, drily, not to bother about it: “They’ll go off soon enough.”
Outside of active service, Joe mixed mostly with people he knew from work, never flaunting his republican beliefs or his involvement, to such an extent that it led some republicans to believe he had not reported back to the IRA on his second release from internment.
The Brits, however, persecuted him and his family continually, with frequent house raids, and street arrests. He could rarely leave the house without being stopped for P-checking, or held up for an hour at a roadblock if he had somewhere to go. A few months before his capture, irate Brits at a roadblock warned him that they would ‘get’ him.
Outside of his republican activity Joe took a strong interest in his children – Bernadette, aged ten and Joseph, aged nine – teaching them both to swim, and forever playing football with young Joseph on the small green outside their home.
CAPTURE
His capture took place in October 1976 following a firebomb attack on the Balmoral Furnishing Company in Upper Dunmurray Lane, near the Twinbrook estate in West Belfast.
The IRA had reconnoitred the store, noting the extravagantly-priced furniture it sold, and had selected it as an economic target. The plan was to petrol bomb the premises and then to lay explosive charges to spread the flames.
The Twinbrook active service unit led by Bobby Sands, was at that time in the process of being built up, and were assisted consequently in this operation by experienced republican Volunteers from the adjoining Andersonstown area, including Joe McDonnell.
Unfortunately, following the attack, which successfully destroyed the furnishing company, the escape route of some of the Volunteers involved was blocked by a car placed across the road.
During an ensuing shoot-out with Brits and RUC, two republicans, Seamus Martin and Gabriel Corbett were wounded, and four others, Bobby Sands, Joe McDonnell, Seamus Finucane and Sean Lavery, were arrested in a car not far away.
Three IRA Volunteers managed to escape safely from the area.
A single revolver was found in the car, and at the men’s subsequent trial in September 1977 all four received fourteen-year sentences for possession when they refused to recognise the court.
Rough treatment during their interrogation in Castlereagh failed to make any of the four sign a statement, and the RUC were thus unable to charge the men with involvement in the attack on the furnishing company despite their proximity to it at the time of their arrest.
ADAMANT From the day he was sentenced Joe refused to put on the prison uniform to take a visit, so adamant was he that he would not be criminalised. He kept in touch instead, with his wife and family, by means of daily smuggled ‘communications’, written with smuggled-in biro refills on prison issue toilet paper and smuggled out via other blanket men who were taking visits.
Fierce rioting followed the funeral of Joe McDonnell when British soldiers tried to arrest the IRA colour party.
Fierce rioting followed the funeral of Joe McDonnell when British soldiers tried to arrest the IRA colour party.
Incarcerated in H5-Block, Joe acted as ‘scorcher’ (an anglicised form of the Irish word, scairt, to shout) shouting the sceal, or news from his block to the adjoining one about a hundred yards away. Frequently this is the only way that news from outside can be communicated from one H-Block to the blanket men in another H-Block.
It illustrates well the feeling of bitter determination prevailing in the H-Blocks that Joe McDonnell, who did not volunteer for the hunger strike last year because, he said, “I have too much to live for”, should have become so frustrated and angered by British perfidy as to embark on hunger strike on Sunday, May 9th, 1981.
IMPACT
In June, Joe was a candidate during the Free State general election, in the Sligo/Leitrim constituency, in which he narrowly missed election by 315 votes.
All the family were actively involved in campaigning for him, and despite the disappointment at the result both they and Joe himself were pleased at the impact which, the H-Block issue had on the election, and in Sligo/Leitrim itself.
Adults cried when the video film on the hunger strike was shown, his family recall, and they cried again when Joe was eliminated from the electoral count.
MARTYR
At 5.11 a.m., on July 8th, Joe McDonnell, who – believeably, for those who know his wife Goretti, his children Bernadette and Joseph and his family – “had too much to live for” died after sixty one days of agonising hunger strike, rather than be criminalised.
Posted by Jim on July 4, 2017
The collapse of talks to revive power-sharing has been described by Sinn
Fein’s Michelle O’Neill as a “monumental failure” by British Prime
Minister Theresa May who she said had “set back decades of work” in the
peace process.
The talks finally fell apart today as participants sought a soft landing
for the negotiations before the traditional summer break.
Next week will witness the height of the unionist marching season, when
hundreds of sectarian parades follow a night of bonfire intimidation and
violence.
Addressing journalists at Parliament Buildings in Belfast, Democratic
Unionist leader Arlene Foster spoke of contacts continuing through the
summer, and insisted her party’s Assembly members should continue to be
paid.
“I have indicated very clearly that we intend to continue the
negotiations, the coming together, the talks over the summer months,”
she said.
“I do accept that there will be people off on holidays from time to
time, but I think what you are hearing from myself and the DUP is a
commitment to continue the work, because we want to find an
accommodation that everybody can buy into and we want to find an
accommodation that is long-lasting and that will not lead to further
problems six months down the line.”
While Assembly members have not been sitting in Parliament Buildings
since March’s snap election, the politicians’ summer recess starts on
Friday.
In a statement this evening, British Direct Ruler James Brokenshire
finally confirmed the talks had ended and that a new power-sharing
Executive will not be formed “in the immediate term”.
But the Tory cabinet member, who still claims to be a neutral talks
arbitrator, said the northern parties had “emphasised their desire to
remain engaged and to find a way to return to and resolve these issues.
The [British] Government welcomes this and will do all it can to work
with the parties to achieve a successful outcome.”
Negotiations have ended until at least the end of the peak marching
season, and will likely not fully resume until late August at the
earliest.
The talks had been struggling with the DUP’s refusal to implement
previous agreements, but faced a new obstacle with the hugely
controversial deal between the DUP and the Tories to allow Theresa May
to return as British PM with the support of the DUP’s ten MPs.
One secret element of that deal may have been revealed on Monday when
Brokenshire said a requirement for details of party donations in the
North to be released would ignore those paid before July this year,
drawing a legislative veil over secret donations to the DUP worth
hundeds of thousands of pounds.
Details also emerged of a 20,000 pound flight on an RAF jet afforded to
Foster at the conclusion of her deal-making with Theresa May, confirming
her role as the Westminster ‘kingmaker’, with power and status far in
excess of that currently wielded by her political rivals.
Sinn Fein indicated the talks could remain frozen for months. Party
leader Gerry Adams blamed the failure of the talks on DUP intransigence.
He said: “The reality is that the Sinn F�in electorate will not consent
to being governed by the DUP on DUP terms. And we wouldn’t expect the
DUP electorate to be governed or to consent to be governed by Sinn F�in
on Sinn F�in terms.”
Sinn F�in leader in the North, Michelle O’Neill, also blamed the Tories.
She said: “What this constitutes is a monumental failure on behalf of
Theresa May – she has set back decades of work that has been done here
throughout the years.
“And it’s a consequence – as we all know – of the DUP supporting the
prime minister and, in turn, the prime minister supporting the DUP”.
Ms O’Neill also insisted her party’s Assembly members should continue to
be paid.
“Our people are here, our MLAs are here,” she said.
“They are working and they will continue to work. We are very focused on
wanting to make these institutions work and we are also very focused on
delivering first class constituency services for all of our citizens.”
She said that her party were focused on delivering rights that are
available to citizens in other parts of these islands and added, “the
reason we don�t see those rights afforded and the reason that Theresa
May is sitting back and allowing that to happen is because she is in
hock to the DUP”.
Posted by Jim on June 27, 2017
By John Mulgrew
June 24 2014
A loyalist march has been granted permission to march along a section of the Garvaghy Road in Portadown for the first time in almost two decades.
The Parades Commission gave the go ahead for bands to march along the lower section of the predominately nationalist area on Saturday evening.
Two bands are due to take part in the march, including the Portadown True Blues Flute Band and Hillhaven Flute Band.
The application was made by the Parkmount Arch Committee.
Around 200 people are due to take part.
The march will pass by along a section of the road close to the town centre on Saturday.
Concerned nationalist residents are due to meet the commission on Tuesday morning, according to the Irish News.
Now the commission has said it has received “fresh information” from residents and is to review the decision.
‘Garvaghy Road’ parade is reviewed after outcry
“Following the issuing of its determination regarding a proposed parade organised by the Parkmount Arch Committee on Saturday, June 28, in Portadown, the Parades Commission has received a request to review its decision,” a spokesman said.
“The commission has concluded that this request contains fresh information and, in line with procedure, will meet today (Tuesday) to review its original determination.
“The Parades Commission cannot comment on details relating to a decision currently under review.”
The stretch of road in Portadown has been at the centre of Northern Ireland’s parading disputes – with the Drumcree crisis having flared for years in the town.
The Orange Order has been banned from parading along the nationalist stretch since 1998.
In its determination, the Parades Commission said the march “is notified to take place partly in the lower Garvaghy Road area of Portadown”.
“Parades in this area from Protestant/loyalist/unionist tradition have in the past been the focus of serious tension and disorder,” it said.
“The Commission recognises that, although there has been a reduction in these tensions in recent years, there continues to be a strain on community relations in this area.”
The latest decision comes as signs for a peaceful marching season looked increasingly positive in Belfast, after a contentious parade passed off without trouble earlier this month.
The Tour of the North had in the past been marred with violent clashes between nationalist protesters and unionist band members and supporters.
Branches of the loyal orders gathered at Carlisle Circus before passing through Donegall Street and continuing their route.
Last year, a number of arrests were made during and after the parade, while there was also a controversial incident when Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly was driven a short distance while clinging to a police Land Rover.