Posted by Jim on September 2, 2016
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.
Posted by Jim on September 1, 2016
A welcome off-shoot from the recent ‘Brexit’ referendum in Britain is that talk of a United Ireland has come again to the fore of political discourse all across Ireland – even in the mainstream of the 26-Counties – coupled also with more favourable polling numbers regards the prospect of Irish Unity.
Radio stations such as Newstalk took reporters onto the streets and asked the general public their opinions. Unsurprisingly there was a warm response to the notion of a reunified Ireland, but lacking from the discourse was an honest addressing of the facts – with experts plucking figures from thin air and passing them off as gospel in relation to the annual deficit the Six Counties accumulates and that Britain supposedly bridges as an act of charity (from £6-14 billion!).
Regardless, it’s worth noting that Ireland as a singular entity ceased being a net contributor to Britain in 1911 – Britain a few years later shedding itself of the non-contributory part of Ireland and keeping the industralised North (which at the time of partition generated 75 percent of the economic output on the island and was wealthier per head than any part of Britain).
The decision to divide Ireland was sold at the time, and to this day, as a gesture of goodwill and love for their loyal patrons who died in World War I. I’d argue otherwise and say that, like every other decision, it was an act of self-interest done purely on an economic basis.
Just as the reasons given for partition have been distorted, so too are the arguments as to why it should be maintained. As noted earlier, various experts continue to trot out random figures for the prospective tab the 26-Counties would need to pick up in the event of Irish reunification. All are false and indeed English economist Michael Burke, in a report using the British government’s own ONS data from 2013, showed that the annual fiscal deficit was closer to £730 million and not anywhere near the £10 billion quoted by many.
Findings by the University of British Columbia also forecast a €36 billion injection into the economy (over eight years) upon an end to trade barriers internal to Ireland and a corresponding harmonisation of the tax systems in the event of Irish Unity, highlighting that we would operate better as a single economy with a single tax code, currency, public services, governmental bodies etc.
All of this has been ignored by the chattering classes since new-found interest on the merits of a United Ireland emerged in wake of the Brexit vote – which is disappointing but not at all surprising.
In Scotland likewise, Britain refuses transparency on key issues and as with the North uses smaller regions to bolster England’s economic health at their expense, distorting the picture. A prime example is Scottish whisky. Hugely popular worldwide and with a large market in North America, it contributes £4.5 billion per annum to the UK Exchequer. The vast majority of that total is not attributed to Scotland as the UK state attributes it to the point where it leaves the UK itself – which conveniently is largely England.
There are similar goings-on in the North, which distorts appearances and impacts on those seeking a reasoned decision on where they see their future. As with the ‘love bomb’ David Cameron threw at Scotland during the referendum campaign in 2014 – just as with Ireland in 1922 – their desire to keep Scotland was not based on any spirit of benevolence towards Scotland or her people.
It was purely with self-interest in mind for England, mirrored in this country with corporate interests such as gold mines in Tyrone and fracking in Fermanagh. The reality is that, despite protesting otherwise, Britain does have selfish and economic reasons for staying in Ireland. Indeed this would explain the lack of transparency in the figures she makes available.
It is difficult for republicans to counter the ‘voodoo economics’ perpetuated by Britain to maintain the Union when the media ignores known facts when discussing the matter. What hope then that the dodgy bookkeeping distorting the debate in the pro-union camp’s favour will ever be seriously looked into? That Britain has no right to govern here in the first place aside, we should be making the case for reunification when and where we can, demanding transparency from our opponents so people can at least be armed with the facts.
Nelson Mandela once said, ‘let your choices be defined by your hopes and not your fears’. Making a positive case for Irish Unity is in my opinion vital to the campaign for a national referendum on Irish Unity. Should we succeed towards that objective and take part in such an act of self-determination, deciding our country’s constitutional future, we must ensure our arguments are clear and coherent and that we indeed appeal to the hopes, not the fears, of the Irish people.
Patrick Donahoe is a former Organiser with the 1916 Societies and current Secretary of the Sean Heuston Society in Dublin.
Posted by Jim on
Allison Morris. Irish News (Belfast). Thursday, September 1, 2016
The Belfast of my childhood was bleak. There’s no point in trying to dress it up as anything other than that. It was grey and at times terrifying but it was also all I knew.
Being a child growing up in what was then effectively a war zone isn’t in any way normal.
Our house regularly shook from the tremor of bomb blasts. At times I was woken with the shudder of the rattling windows or the sound of automatic gunfire.
The deaths of the hunger strikers were marked by the banging of old metal bin lids on the pavements outside our house.
The first dead body I ever saw was that of Kieran Doherty, his family lived at the top of our street and I could hear the adults around me speaking about him in hushed tones.
I’ve always been nosey, an essential quality in a reporter. I sneaked away and positioned myself in the queue of mourners outside the Doherty home.
I’d my wee brother by the hand – I was supposed to be minding him – when I reached the top of the queue a man said to another, “there’s two kids here, what will I do?”
I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday he said, “let them in, she should see, everyone should see”.
Watching my dad cry when my cousin was murdered. Being stopped and having your school bag searched by British soldiers on your way to school. The endless funerals, there were so many funerals.
It’s not a normal way to grow up, the look of horror on my own children’s faces when I tell them stories of my childhood makes me realise how far removed it is from the life they’ve lived post peace process.
When I look at what is happening in the world today, the plight of children in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, little bodies washed up on beaches and realise I was actually quite lucky. Their wee lives make my childhood look like a Disney cartoon.
Then last week the release of state papers from 1987 brought it all back to me, the stuff seared in my memory and some events that had been lost in the annals of time.
It was a time when the world I lived in was filled with death and destruction but as a teenager my thoughts were filled with discos, boys and puffball mini skirts.
Sir Ken Bloomfield, a man I interviewed at home a few years ago and found to be welcoming, full of stories about the fascinating experiences he’d had in his lengthy career, made the most horrendous slur on my community.
In a memo to former secretary of state Tom King the then head of the civil service said west Belfast had a “ghetto mentality” and a large section of the population was alienated from “normal civilised behaviour”.
And I didn’t recognise the place he was referring to. Abnormal yes, but there were historic, political reasons for that. Terrified, yes, poor, most definitely, it was an economic waste ground, although current deprivation statistics would indicate there’s much still to be done in that respect. But uncivilised – that I dispute.
We were raised with food in our bellies, shoes on our feet and a sense of right and wrong.
My mother would have walked us around burning buses to make sure we availed of an education never offered to her, not even a riot would deter her.
This description of my friends and family as ‘uncivilised’ angered me in a way a 30-year-old dispatch never should.
The memo was in fact saying that any investment in west Belfast needs to take into account the wider perception of the people who live there.
Mr King was warned not to anger the unionist community by being seen to reward the poor people of my community.
Look at it like that and what chance did we really stand? Being misruled by people who treated us like savages and penalised us so as not to anger a unionist community they had helped pit against us.
When those who govern are conspiring against an entire community and yet still we thrived and survived, that’s something to look back on with pride.
Posted by Jim on August 30, 2016
What once are derogatory, offensive terms often change in time. “Irish” was once a terrible and oppressive thing to be called. In the ports of New York, Boston and New Orleans and in the Pennsylvania mines, the Appalachian mountains and anywhere else in the United States after the Famine, to be named such a thing was akin to spitting in your face. The Irish were clan-like, fiercely communal people who fenced themselves off from the incumbent Anglo-Saxon culture.
They worked hard, sure. But they played like animals. Bare-knuckle fist fighters that fought each other for the spirit in it and the fun. For blood and boast. Pride in the prowess of their ancient surnames. Gamblers that played a foreign card game called “faro” with words that harkened to an ancient language. The language of a nomadic Celtic past that had been banished from the mainland of Europe centuries earlier by Julius Caesar. Pushed to the Western-most islands of the continent. Now pushed passed the isle of Ireland, they took to the sea and landed in a new world. Born to soldier and brawl.
Like the Irish in the 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans have fenced themselves off from the Anglo-Saxon culture. Many have mixed their race with whites, whether on purpose or of rape. If there is one thing that mystifies the people of homogenous countries, it is the idea of the typical American being of mixed race. An entire country of mostly mixed-blooded people clashing together to make the most powerful culture the world has ever known. All were once desperate to leave their homogenous cultures like traveling gypsies running from war or famine, or were enslaved, only to land in a mish-mash of mixed raced people.
That is a Diddicoy. A mixed-blooded gypsy.
In Ireland still to this very day, a group known generally as Travelers roam the boreens (country roads) in caravans challenging each other to bare-knuckle fights for the right to boast. One-on-one they fight with almost no rules between them, other than honor. Some of them are part Romani, some of them are not sure if they have any true Romani gypsy blood as they almost all carry Celtic or Norman surnames like the Joyce’s and the Doherty’s. There are many derogatory terms for them like Tinkers, Pikeys or the Pavee and of course, Diddicoys.
In Chapter 7 of Light of the Diddicoy, the first book in the Auld Irishtown trilogy, an immigrant is shot at 25 Bridge Street, the saloon that the White Hand Gang calls headquarters under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, 1915. Detective William Brosnan, a 53-year old Dubliner turned New York cop investigates as the immigrant takes his last breath on the floor among the mortar hods and shovels in the corner of the saloon.
The candles that light the saloon flicker when the front door is opened and the sounds of the trolleys rushing overhead along the Manhattan Bridge rail tracks breaks the silence inside. Brosnan is attempting to extract information from Paddy Keenan, himself a native of a small town outside Kilkenny, Ireland and the saloon’s tender. When Keenan, who is known as the gang’s Minister of Information, refuses to part with any knowledge of the shooting, Brosnan slams his hand on the bar and looks upstairs where the office of the gang’s leader is, Dinny Meehan. Brosnan then points his finger at Keenan and says, “This gang ain’ nuttin’ but a bunch o’ thiefs an’ diddicoys, anyhow. They’re days’re numbered, ye heard it from me right here and now!”
It takes a Dublin jackeen who knows English slang to describe the gang as Diddicoys, as the word comes from the derogatory description of a mix-blooded Romani-gypsy, particular to England. But a good description it is. You see, I spent three and a half years reading articles about the White Hand Gang and its members. When you pull police reports and death certificates and any description you can find of the lifestyle and habits of the Irish-American gangsters along the Brooklyn waterfront of the era, you find out a lot about them.
What I found in them that is most glaring is a complete lack of regard for law, as most gangsters do, of course. Actually, calling it a “lack of regard” isn’t strong enough. Not close enough. I would rather describe it as a complete distrust in law.
An excellent description of the mentality of the people who lived in what used to be called Irishtown in Brooklyn, which nowadays we call DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and Vinegar Hill, was Willie Sutton’s book Where the Money Was. He said the people who lived where he grew up didn’t believe in even the most basic organizations such as hospitals because it was said “they’d give ye the black box.” This black box symbolized death and the reason the Irish always got it was because the hospital administrators didn’t believe the Irish were worth the bed. And when someone more upstanding arrived at the over-crowded hospital, they had to make room. So they gave the black box to the Irish to give the bed to more law-abiding, respected citizens. Sounds crazy and superstitious, but that was his description. And I found a consistency to that in my own research of the White Hand Gang members of Brooklyn’s Irishtown.
After reading so much about these gangsters and coming across Sutton, the greatest bank robber of his time, I began to put it all together. It suddenly made sense: These Irish-Americans were the offspring of victims of possibly the worst, most atrocious and horrific miscarriage of justice the world has chronicled. They were the Famine-Irish that settled originally along the waterfront in Brooklyn. The ones that survived the casket ships and the Great Hunger of 1845-1852, An Gorta Mor, it’s called in Irish. It was law that starved their people and their children to an emaciated death in the ditches and road-side graves back in Ireland. Over a million dead and a million more sent to places like the Five Points in Lower Manhattan and “Auld Irishtown” in Brooklyn. Their tenant farms replaced by cattle, a more suitable income for English landowners in Ireland.
It was law that sent them to foreign lands. And it would be law that instilled the greatest distrust in them.
It would not be unlikely to assume that some, if not many, of the original Famine-Irish were actual gypsies, for there is a great relation to gypsy culture and the gangsters of Irishtown in Brooklyn. Not just in the disbelief in man-made law, but the superstitions, the thieving from the established people, the tradition of bare-knuckle fighting, the powerful belief in honor and, of course, the great Code of Silence that pervaded men and women who lived underneath the bridges in Brooklyn.
There are countless examples of a gangster getting shot and refusing to name his perpetrator. “I got mine, I’ll make sure he gets his” was usually the answer. The Traveller community in Britain and Ireland still think this way. They do not seek law to settle their disagreements, they seek blood. Whether it be retribution or a challenge. Just as was done in Irishtown and the Diddicoys of the White Hand Gang. A challenge is a challenge. One-on-one. Man against man with no weapons and no rules. Just a pair of fists and a man’s will. That was the character of the people of Auld Irishtown.
Eamon
Posted by Jim on August 28, 2016
A priest has spoken about God’s “perfect timing” after he officiated at
the joint funeral mass of a man murdered by British soldiers and the
wife who campaigned in his memory, despite them dying exactly 45 years
apart.
Joseph Murphy, who was buried with his wife Mary on Thursday, was one of
the 11 victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre which happened during the
introduction of internment without trial in August 1971.
Ten people, including Mr Murphy, a priest who had gone to the aid of one
of victims and a 50-year-old mother of eight children were shot dead by
British soldiers in west Belfast. Inquests have yet to be concluded into
the killings.
An eleventh victim, who does not come under the terms of the inquest,
Paddy McCarthy, died from a heart attack after a soldier allegedly put
an empty gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
It is believed that most if not all of the killings were carried out by
members of the British Parachute Regiment. The incident took place
months before the same regiment was involved in the Bloody Sunday
killings, which resulted in the deaths of 14 innocent civilians.
Last October, as part of the Ballymurphy inquests, the coroner ordered
that Mr Murphy’s body be exhumed so that an investigation could be
carried out into his family’s belief that he was shot on two occasions
by the British army.
In hospital before his death, Mr Murphy told his family he was first
shot in the upper thigh on the streets of Ballymurphy, but soldiers then
brought him into the nearby Henry Taggart barracks and shot him again
through his open wound.
A suspected bullet fragment found among his remains after his exhumation
supported his dying comments, and this will be a factor in the inquests
into his killing.
With other members of the Ballymurphy families, his widow Mary
campaigned for decades to establish the truth behind the killings. It
had been her hope that a second funeral Mass could be heard for her
husband before he was re-interred.
However, Mrs Murphy died from cancer on August 22nd, the same date that
Mr Murphy died from his injuries in 1971.
“Little did she think that he would be buried 45 years to the day when
he was first buried,” said officiating priest Fr Darach Mac Giolla
Cathain.
“More than that, that she would have the grace when she died that they
would be side by side in the church and be laid to rest together,” he
added. “God’s timing really is perfect.”
Their daughter has spoken of her mixed emotions that her beloved parents
were laid to rest together.
Janet Donnelly, said that the family had found out only the day before
her mother’s funeral that the Coroner’s Office were releasing their
father’s remains to them.
“The original plan was to have daddy buried and for our mummy to be
there. Our mother was a woman of great faith. When our daddy’s body was
exhumed in October she insisted that there was a priest present and that
there were prayers at the graveside. She wanted him to have a proper
funeral when the time came for him to be reburied. Little did we know
that he would be waiting for her in the chapel 45 years from the day of
his original funeral.”
After her husband’s death Mary Ellen Murphy was left to raise nine
children alone – three of her children have already passed away. She
remained in the same house in Ballymurphy Parade until her own death.
“After daddy passed away our mummy raised us on her own. She did what a
lot of women back then had to do: she just got on with it, she worked
non-stop. She had a house shop, she sold candy apples and she took any
work she could get, that’s what people did back then. Her faith carried
her through those hard years, she said her Rosary every day.
“It is bittersweet.. we’re happy because she always wanted to see him
buried again and we promised her it would happen.”
Janet says all the Ballymurphy families know the truth about their loved
ones, but it’s vital that the truth is put on record.
“We want an inquiry, we need for the rest of the world to know what
happened to the victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre. It’s about
justice. In years to come when people look back on history we want it
stated clearly in black and white that our loved ones were innocent
victims.
“Now that mummy has passed away it’s even more important for the
inquests to be heard as our witnesses are dying… there’s money sitting
there for inquests, it needs to be released.”
