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Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Posted by Jim on September 8, 2019
5-5-5-5
WTC Line of Duty Memorial Service
Firefighter Michael H. Haub
Ladder Company 4
WAKE SERVICE
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
1:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Krauss Funeral Home, Inc.
1097 Hempstead Turnpike
Franklin Square, NY 11010
MEMORIAL SERVICE
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
4:00 PM
Krauss Funeral Home, Inc.
1097 Hempstead Turnpike
Franklin Square, NY 11010
All Off-Duty Members should attend in Class A Uniform.
Posted by Jim on
Raymond McCord has launched a legal challenge claiming the Prime Minister’s threat to leave with or without an agreement on October 31 is unlawful.
Raymond McCord outside the Royal Courts of Justice in Belfast (Liam McBurney/PA)
By Michael McHugh, PA. Belfast Telegraph. September 6, 2019
A no-deal Brexit would cause chaos in Northern Ireland, a legal challenge in Belfast heard.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is trying to act oppressively and contrary to the constitutional position of the country, counsel for Troubles victims campaigner Raymond McCord alleged.
The anti-Brexit activist claims Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s threat to leave the EU on October 31, with or without an agreement, is unlawful.
His barrister, Ronan Lavery QC, praised the EU for its contribution to peace as Northern Ireland tried to become less tribal.
He said: “To leave without a withdrawal agreement would create chaos and economic misery and a real threat to the peace process in Northern Ireland – it would be madness.”
Mr McCord’s legal team began a judicial review at Northern Ireland’s High Court on Friday.
His son, Raymond McCord Jr, was murdered by loyalists from the Ulster Volunteer Force in North Belfast in 1997.
He has repeatedly voiced concern about the impact of Brexit, which was rejected by a majority in the region, on the peace process.
All-island co-operation deepened following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which largely ended the 30-year conflict.
Campaigners are opposed to the creation of a hard Irish border after Brexit, which senior police officers believe could provide an opportunity for dissident republicans.
Mr Lavery said Northern Ireland was trying to move forward on a cohesive and non-tribal basis and was a model for what could be achieved when people put aside their differences.
He added: “The EU is a peace project.”
He said the EU withdrawal process should serve the interests of the people of Northern Ireland.
“Generous means generous to the people of Northern Ireland; it cannot mean generous to the pursuit of English nationalism, it can only be something which serves the people of Northern Ireland.”
He claimed there was no specific provision for leaving without a deal.
The barrister said the next step after the rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement by Parliament was for a statement to be made by the Government about how it proposed to proceed and making the policy clear.
Instead, he said, the policy was having to be divined from statements to the media as he scrutinized the legislation surrounding Brexit.
“Our very simple proposition is that, when you take this piece of legislation, nothing sanctioned or authorized the executive (government) to take the drastic step of leaving the EU without a deal.
“That needs to be expressly sanctioned by Parliament and it has not been.
“Any withdrawal is premised upon a deal.”
He said the Prime Minister was seeking to act in a way which was “oppressive” to the people of Northern Ireland and contrary to the constitutional position.
Mr Lavery added: “I am not asking the court to do anything radical, I am simply asking the court for the law to be applied.”
He said it was not possible for the UK to leave the EU outside the terms of legislation.
Lawyers whose clients oppose no-deal joined forces during Friday’s hearing, claiming the UK’s Brexit negotiations were a “sham”.
They said the Government needed statutory underpinning from law for its powers.
Judge Mr Justice Bernard McCloskey observed that the Council of Europe, comprising leaders of the EU states, could not be compelled to do anything.
The case is due to continue on Monday when a barrister for the Government will outline his case.
Posted by Jim on
Aaron Edwards writes in the Belfast Telegraph that the deaths of Lord Mountbatten in Sligo and 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint 40 years ago this week marked a watershed in the fight against the Provisional IRA.
Forty years ago the Provisional IRA carried out two of its most audacious attacks. In Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, they exploded a bomb on the boat of the former UK chief of defence staff and cousin to the Queen, Lord Louis Mountbatten – killing him, two teenage boys and his daughter-in-law’s mother. Later that afternoon, at Narrow Water, near Warrenpoint in Co Down, the Provisionals struck again, this time exploding two huge bombs on a military convoy carrying soldiers from the Parachute Regiment.
The pathologist who arrived on the scene shortly after the attack at Narrow Water, Arthur Orr, later told the inquest into the soldiers’ deaths that he had “never seen such carnage”. For Orr it was “the most distressing incident” he had ever encountered in his 25 years as a coroner.
It later emerged that gardai had stopped and arrested two young men from Crossmaglen, who were riding a motorcycle on the Republic’s side of the border near the detonation point in Omeath. At the Smithwick Tribunal, which investigated allegations of collusion between Irish police and the IRA, it was revealed that a forensic report recorded how, even though swabs had been taken from both men, police could not tie the suspects conclusively to the attack and they were released.
No one has ever been brought to account for the murders of the soldiers that day.
Thirty years after the Warrenpoint ambush I met one of the soldiers who survived the massacre, Paul Burns, at the launch of his memoir, A Fighting Spirit. Paul was travelling in a four-tonne truck with seven other paratroopers when the first explosion happened. A massive fireball engulfed the vehicle and he lost a leg in the blast.
“And I do not hear the bang, nor the screams that follow,” he wrote. “I do not smell the stench of burning flesh, or witness the confusion. All I know is darkness.”
While Paul suffered horrific injuries on that day, he would remain in the Army until 1991 and become a tireless advocate for the British Limbless Ex-Servicemen’s Association (now Blesma, The Limbless Veterans).
Paul’s story is like so many others I’ve heard about Warrenpoint. One former soldier, who had been on an earlier tour with the men killed and injured in the attack, recalls hearing the news while he was stationed in an Army camp in Antrim:
“I was in the ops [operations] room at the time and it brought back memories of ’73. The IRA had that well planned, with the secondary device.”
Another veteran, Parachute Regiment officer David Benest, recalled. “I was on leave. I turned up the day after to a battalion in shock. Soldiers thinking: ‘Crikey, that number of people being killed in one incident?'”
Relations between the Army and RUC were badly strained by Warrenpoint. It was said that the General Officer Commanding Sir Timothy Creasey “freaked out” when he heard the news and tried to wrest back control of security operations from the Chief Constable, Sir Kenneth Newman. Recognising the discord within the security forces, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Northern Ireland to calm tempers.
“The people of the United Kingdom will wage the war against terrorism with relentless determination until it is won,” she told reporters.
Thatcher had been personally affected by the Troubles when the INLA assassinated her long-time friend and political mentor, Airey Neave, in 1978. She was renowned for taking an uncompromising public stance; after Warrenpoint she sanctioned an intelligence-led response to IRA violence.
One of the most visible signs of this new approach came when she appointed the recently retired chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield as security and intelligence co-ordinator in Northern Ireland. He arrived in Belfast in October 1979.
Former RUC Special Branch officers have admitted to me that intelligence “coverage” was limited in south Armagh prior to Sir Maurice’s arrival. One officer even suggested to me that “Oldfield’s job was to hold people’s hands” through a process of change.
That change was Thatcher’s decision to keep the RUC in the lead against the terrorists, with the Army in support under the mantra “policy primacy”.
Sir Maurice believed that the best way to deal more effectively with the IRA was to turn its own members against the group. To “start a cancer and watch it spread”, as one veteran RUC spymaster put it. In this Sir Maurice had some success.
The “supergrass” trials of the early 1980s were part of his legacy after his retirement from the post; so, too, was the comprehensive infiltration of the Provisionals by agents. The direction given to these moles was to disrupt IRA activity and to help move the group down a political path.
Sir Maurice also believed – as did Thatcher – that the only way to tackle IRA terrorism was to work closely with the authorities in Dublin. The Irish border had long been porous and IRA members and smugglers crossed it with ease, despite the presence of a number of crossings manned by security forces on the northern side.
Interestingly, Omeath, where the Provos responsible for Warrenpoint had detonated their bombs, would become a key hub of IRA activity over the coming years. It was the place where the Provisionals’ internal security unit (or “nutting squad”) once took suspected “touts” for interrogation. And it was the place where the IRA also kept a major bomb-making factory in the 1980s. These borderlands were synonymous with the political dispute at the heart of the Troubles.
As we remember the 18 soldiers and one civilian killed near Warrenpoint four decades ago, it is also worth keeping in mind how it represents a Pyrrhic victory for the IRA.
Within a decade of the killings the group came under intense pressure from the security forces and had even moved towards secret talks with the British aimed at ending its armed campaign.
Nowadays some republicans have desecrated the poppy wreaths left by the roadside to commemorate the soldiers who died at Narrow Water.
But attempts to dismantle the visible symbols of their past atrocities can never fully eradicate the memories of such evil deeds, nor of militant republicanism’s ultimate strategic surrender.
⏭ Dr Aaron Edwards is the author of UVF: Behind The Mask (Merrion Press, 2017). He is currently writing a new book for Merrion on Britain’s secret intelligence struggle against the Provisional IRA.
Posted by Jim on September 7, 2019
The following is a first-hand account of a violent and highly orchestrated attack on a peaceful legal march for Irish Unity in Glasgow, Scotland last weekend. (for the Socialist Republican Media blog) As several hundred Republican, antifascists and other various supporters of Irish Unity gathered for a peaceful demonstration in support of a United Ireland, organised by the James Connolly Flute Band it seemed like it would be a fairly peaceful uneventful march.
This was not the case, within 30 minutes of the JCFB and the Coatbridge United Irishmen Band setting up, the entrance to Elder Park was blocked by Crown forces preventing the march from starting, whilst further up Govan Rd and part of our planned route, were several hundred members of loyalist and far right groups hell bent on violently disrupting the march and setting fire to makeshift barricades they had dragged onto the roads and squaring off to Police Scotland.
It wasn’t long before the loyalist thugs breached police lines and charged towards the location of the bands and there followers which was also made up of families with young children.
Shouting ‘f*ck the IRA’, chanting ‘Billy boys’ and displaying the usual butchers aprons and a Brit paratroop regiment flag, they were met by a block of roughly 100 Republicans and antifascists who, although heavily outnumbered, held the hordes off and protected the bands under a hail of bottles stones and pyrotechnics.
Eventually the crown forces managed to separate the two and the loyalists were forced back along Govan Rd, only to regroup and enter through the back of the park, where apparently Police Scotland had left the area unmanned. This resulted in running battles between the two sides.
Again outnumbered and surrounded we stood our ground and fought back an armed loyalist mob. It was several minutes before police realised what was happening and another while to regain some control.
They appeared to be more interested in trying to catch several of the younger Republican youths who came to see the bands but ended up defending themselves rating than dealing with the loyalist aggressors.
Eventually the march was able to proceed with police lines surrounding the march every inch of the new route buy this time it was nearly 8.30pm. Less than 15 minutes later several small outbreaks of violence occurred along the route as loyalists and fascists continued to try and stop us from marching. It was at this point we were surrounded by Crown forces in full riot gear, dog units and riot vans and kettled in.
Due to methods enforced by the riot officers the march moved really slowly, stopping and starting at regular intervals but continued on without any more incidents. The march finished at the Tall Crane Bar in Govan which had also came under attack by a large group of knuckle-draggers who smashed car windows and stole flags that were hung outside the bar.
Despite all the odds stacked against us, be it the violence and hatred aimed at us by loyalist thugs or Crown forces pressuring the organisers to cancel the march, we did not bow down, even though we were heavily outnumbered and under hostile conditions.
Posted by Jim on September 6, 2019
How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand
September 3, 2019
There are two things we know about revolutions. One is that they get more radical as they go along. The revolutionaries start out demanding specific reforms and end up imagining that they are inaugurating a whole new world. The other is that revolutions expose the great cracks in the ancien regime that should have been obvious all along. In retrospect, after the upheaval, it is clear that the old system was doomed by its own failure to manage necessary change.
Brexit is a very strange kind of revolution – the heroic overthrow of imaginary oppression, in which tragedy and farce are not sequential but simultaneous and deeply interwoven. But it is a revolution nonetheless, and it is conforming to these patterns. A goal that was unutterable in 2016 – the Year Zero of No Deal – is now mainstream policy. And the ancien regime of the Westminster system is having all its delusions mercilessly exposed by, of all places, Italy.
One thing that still unites the warring factions in England is the belief that Westminster is “the mother of all parliaments” and the envy of the democratic world. Well, it sure looks like the mother of all something right now, but it’s not parliamentary democracy. Consider what has happened. Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Tory party by 92,153 people. He was then appointed prime minister by a hereditary monarch with no parliamentary involvement whatsoever. Since July 24th, when he became prime minister, he has appeared just once in the House of Commons to answer questions. And he has now used those monarchical powers to prorogue parliament and make himself even more unaccountable to it. The one virtue of Johnson’s brazenness is that he has surely made obvious to his compatriots what outsiders can see—that the system in which all of this is possible is a democracy built around a solid core of feudalism.
Unconstitutional vs unlawful
To grasp the absurdity of this spectacle, we might turn to one of England’s great minds, Jonathan Sumption. He is simultaneously one of his country’s most distinguished lawyers, recently retired from the UK’s supreme court, and one of its leading historians, whose superb ongoing multivolume history of the Hundred Years War is much better than Game of Thrones. Last week, the London Times asked him to pronounce on the legality of Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. “I don’t think what the prime minister has said he is going to do is unlawful,” he said. But he added: “It might be considered unconstitutional in as much as it might be argued to be contrary to a longstanding convention of the constitution.”
So what Johnson is doing is probably unconstitutional but probably not unlawful. I don’t think most people in England have any idea how utterly nonsensical this seems to all the rest of us. It’s like saying that a man is almost certainly dead but nonetheless in quite good health. In any other democracy, if it’s unconstitutional, it’s unlawful. Only in the United Kingdom of Absurdistan can it possibly be otherwise. And the heart of the absurdity is that great tautology, the “unwritten constitution”.
The British constitution is so fine a thing that it would be positively insulting, even dangerous, to actually write it down. The people who need to know what it is are able to divine its mysteries – ordinary subjects are not among them. Johnson, for all his habitual mendacity, is exposing the truth that this arcane system of accretions and conventions is of little use when a shameless chancer is given the keys of the kingdom. His maneuver is not even a coup – when you can do all this lawfully, who needs coups?
Right-wing opportunism
Until very recently, most people in England would have pointed to Italy, with its infamous political instability, as the great counter-example that proved the wisdom of the British system. Last week, both countries were faced at the same time with a remarkably similar challenge: a radical right-wing opportunist seeking to bring down his own government and force a general election in which he would run not so much for parliament as against parliament. Matteo Salvini, leader of the prefascist League, has been governing in coalition with the populist Five Star movement. He tried to pull off pretty much the same trick as Johnson and for the same reason: to position himself as the voice of “the people” against the political “elites”.
How puny is Britain when it comes so badly out of a comparison with a country that is a byword for democratic fragility?
But Salvini was stopped – for two reasons. First, enough people within the political system were willing to stop fighting each other and start fighting the radical right. Second, Italy has a written democratic constitution with an elected president who could manage the process of creating an alternative government. The UK does not have the second of these things, and it is not at all clear that its parliamentarians can manage the first.
How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand up to a bluffer like Boris Johnson? How puny is it when it comes so badly out of a comparison with a country that is a byword for democratic fragility? It has come to something when an Italian might well look at the goings-on at the “mother of parliaments” and exclaim “Mamma mia!”
