Posted by Jim on September 6, 2016
Letters to Irish News (Belfast).
Fr Joe McVeigh. Tuesday, September 6, 2016
Trevor Ringland, a man with very fixed unionist views, clearly does not like republicans or republicanism. As a unionist he is pro-monarchy and anti-republican. That’s his choice, which limits greatly his understanding of the world. He describes republicanism as a ‘flawed ideology.’ And suggests that the 10 men died for ‘a flawed ideology’.
Mr Ringland began his letter – ‘Hunger strikes sadly a recurring theme of Irish republicanism’ (August 29) – by stating “I probably won’t watch 66 Days…” Such a negative approach to begin with suggests that he is not open to learning and discovering the mind of republicans. He goes on to condemn the hunger-strikers for ‘taking their own lives for a political cause’.
The use of hunger strike as a weapon to obtain justice has a long history in Ireland and indeed in other countries like India where it was used by Mahatma Gandhi. In Ireland it was used as a means of protesting against injustice in Celtic times and was known as troscadh (fasting on or against a person) and cealachan (achieving justice by starvation).
It is important to put the hunger strike in context.
In 1976 the British Labour government introduced a new policy of criminalisation. From then onwards republican prisoners sentenced would be required to wear prison uniform and conform to new prison rules. When the prisoners refused to conform to this new regime they went on a protest of wrapping themselves in a blanket and refusing to be forcibly taken to the toilets.
In August 1978, Cardinal Tomás O’Fiaich visited the H Blocks in Long Kesh prison to see the situation for himself. Afterwards he stated: “I was shocked by the inhuman conditions prevailing in H Blocks 3, 4, and 5, where over 300 prisoners are incarcerated. One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions, let alone a human being…The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta around the walls, was almost unbearable. The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. From talking to them it is evident that they intend to continue their protest indefinitely and it seems they prefer to face death rather than submit to being classed as criminals. Anyone with the least knowledge of Irish history knows how deeply rooted this attitude is in our country’s past.”
The British condemned the cardinal’s remarks. The cardinal was ridiculed in the British press, where it was often noted that he came from Crossmaglen in south Armagh.
The refusal by Margaret Thatcher and the British government to respond to the cardinal’s appeal for justice and mercy led to the first hunger-strike in 1980. When it ended with the promise from the British to introduce reforms a second hunger strike led by Bobby Sands began. In his diary he outlined the reasons why they resorted to the second hunger strike in 1981. From his point of view to accept the new regime would have been to criminalise the entire struggle for Irish freedom. The protesting prisoners hoped that the British would be forced to change their attitude as a result of world opinion and introduce a humane regime in Long Kesh summarised in the five demands.
The prisoners on the fast were acting in solidarity and in the cause of justice and human dignity.
Mr Ringland, being a monarchist, would not understand. I think Mr Ringland should go to see 66 Days.
He might learn something and he might learn to be a little more respectful of others who differ from him politically.
Fr Joe McVeigh
Co Fermanagh
Posted by Jim on September 4, 2016
DEATH IS NOTHING AT ALL
“Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before only better, infinitely happier and forever we will all be one together with Christ.
*Originally published in March 2015.
Posted by Jim on
Dear Fellow Hibernians,
It is with great sadness that I report of the passing of Bill Sheehan of Kings County Division 19.
Today we lost a loyal Hibernian. Though hampered by illness for years, he was always counted on and relied on in many Hibernian events.
We lost a Hibernian Brother and a true friend.
Details to follow when we receive them.
Sadly reported,
Steve Kiernan, President
AOH KINGS County Board
Posted by Jim on
Talk of scrapping the Human Rights Act is part of a pattern of insensitivity.
By Liam McNulty. New Statesman. Friday, September 2, 2015
As the Cabinet reconvenes in Chequers after the summer recess, the preparations for Brexit are top of the agenda. Yet amongst all the various options being considered by government ministers, there is one critical aspect of Britain’s disengagement from the European Union which has barely figured at all in the official debate – the impact on Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
Such an omission is a symptom of the parochial insularity characterizing the Tory right’s drive for Brexit, and is of a piece with Westminster’s historically disdainful attitude towards Ireland.
A history of after-thoughts
The political historians Alistair B. Cooke and John Vincent once wrote in their study of the Home Rule crisis of the 1880s that the “Irish policies of British governments at Westminster cannot be explained in terms of Irish circumstances. They must be explained in terms of parliamentary combinations.”
In other words, domestic British politics trumps whatever impact Westminster policy may have across the Irish Sea. This was true of their immediate subject, and it was an analysis confirmed for the subsequent 1910-1914 Home Rule crisis in a more recent study, Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path.
As summed up by one reviewer, Fanning established that for Asquith and Lloyd George “the essential issue…was never Ireland but was, rather, their own party advantage and, above all, their personal career advantage. Both had to spend more time calculating the consequences of their policies for internal British politics, and their own positions, than for Anglo-Irish relations.”
The same indictment applies to the Tories who, by instrumentalizing Ulster Protestant resistance to Home Rule (playing “the Orange Card” in the infamous words of Lord Randolph Churchill), brought Ireland to the brink of civil war in order to destroy their Liberal rivals.
These events have been prominent in the public consciousness in Ireland during the “decade of centenaries” and in this year especially, one hundred years after the Easter Rising.
Though the stakes are not of the same magnitude, now too can the Tory Party be accused of treating Ireland as an after-thought. The gamble of a European referendum that showed scant regard for the consequences of exit for decades of careful conflict resolution.
The 56 per centers
The new Prime Minister, Theresa May, treads a treacherous, though hopefully not fatal, path as she deals with the fall-out of the European referendum for Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
During the referendum, the then Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, took a Leave position, even as the Irish government and most of the North’s political parties warned it would be disastrous. Her position was unsustainable after 56 per cent of Northern Ireland and a clear majority of its parliamentary constituencies voted for Remain, and she has been replaced by the pro-Remain May ally James Brokenshire.
Brokenshire now has the unenvious task of raising Northern Ireland’s situation in a heated Cabinet argument about Brexit, the terms of which have been framed with little or no reference to the situation across the Irish Sea.
May and Brokenshire’s current bind is this. Though keeping conspicuously quiet throughout the referendum campaign, May has been keen to shore up her right flank by disavowing any notion that the decision to leave the EU would be undone on the sly: “Brexit,” she has repeated, “means Brexit.”
On one level this is meaningless, since in any referendum with a binary choice it is nigh-impossible to identify the individual motivations of the millions who voted for one or other side.
Yet it is simply inescapable that the mood music of the referendum was the desire to limit immigration from the EU into the United Kingdom.
The Human Rights Act tripwire
It is this commitment, at the very least, that the Tory right in the Cabinet expects to be upheld. Though May was quick to reassure Stormont that “nobody wants to return to the borders of the past”, what this means in practice is far from clear.
Fears that May will opt for a form of Brexit-lite, in the form of remaining in the European Economic Area (EEA) – implying some sort of freedom of movement – has had the right wing playing hardball over the summer.
A particularly reckless example of this was Liam Fox’s call in late July for the UK to leave the European customs union in order to seek bilateral trade deals with individual states. The Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Charles Flanagan, expressed himself to be “very surprised” at the comments, and Fox was promptly shot down by Downing Street.
A pattern of narrow British insensitivity is forming. Arguably more serious again are the recent comments by Liz Truss, May’s Justice Secretary, who has reconfirmed support for the Tory’s election manifesto commitment to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights.
The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) into UK law and, if the intention with a British Bill of Rights is to leave the ECHR, it could have grave implications for the whole Northern Ireland settlement.
Though the principle of consent underpinning any changes to Northern Ireland’s constitutional position applies only to the option of a united Ireland, the general spirit of consent and bilateralism could be violated by England and Wales’s unilateral action.
More to the point, the Good Friday Agreement presupposes joint EU membership and adherence to the ECHR. As Ian McBride has recently written: “During the 1990s the EU provided a stage on which Irish and British politicians met as equals. The wider context of European integration also took much of the heat out of the border issue. It made the idea of a region whose inhabitants had the right to be ‘Irish, British, or both’ easier to imagine.”
The ECHR does not just have a symbolic presence in the peace process, but provides practical safeguards designed to ensure there can be no return to the majoritarian Unionist domination of the past.
The arrogance of Brexit
Whatever its faults, the Agreement governs relations in a region of the United Kingdom and should be treated seriously in the discussions around Brexit. Moreover, it is a bilateral treaty with the Irish government, lodged after its ratification with the United Nations.
That such a settlement could be so casually jeopardized in a fit of sour isolationism and post-imperial arrogance demonstrates once more the British Government’s disregard for its international obligations. It is particularly galling in the Irish case that Britain’s involvement and obligations were unwanted and unasked for in the first place by a majority of the island’s inhabitants.
It should give Unionists pause for thought that Northern Ireland, once more, is only an incidental detail in a Westminster power-play.
Perhaps this crisis will, in James Connolly’s words “throw the Irish people back upon their own resources” and provoke discussion of an internal solution to the Irish question.
An optimistic prognosis now, perhaps. Yet, as the Brexit wagon trundles ever onwards, it is a conversation that will become increasingly necessary.
