Posted by Jim on February 18, 2016
Brian Feeney. Irish News (Belfast).Wednesday, February 17, 2016
The stalled inquest into the death of teenager Arlene Arkinson is a classic example which amply illustrates why people do not give any credence to the speech our proconsul[Theresa Villiers, NI Secretary of State] made on February 11.
The NIO billed it as ‘a keynote speech’. That’s defined as a speech to set the underlying tone or present the core message, as she said, ‘of the sovereign government’ here.
In fact there was nothing new in it at all. If you read it, and probably not one person in ten thousand did, you’ll see it’s simply a restatement of the NIO’s position on the past.
Luckily you didn’t have to sit through it for it’s arrogant, patronising, full of internal contradictions, intellectually feeble and in places seems to assume people here came up the Lagan in a bubble.
In case you’re forgotten or never knew, it was about why the British government intends to use the national security ploy to withhold information about how people were killed during the Troubles. Ironically for our proconsul, one of her minions you’ve never heard of had just signed off on the grounds of national security the withholding of information about the death of the school girl Arlene Arkinson whose death had nothing to do with the Troubles. Why?
It rang hollow when our proconsul said in her speech: “National security is not an open-ended concept which can be used to suppress information about whatever actions the State does not want to see the light of day.” Huh.
Does she think no-one here remembers her predecessor Sir Patrick, now Lord Mayhew, in 1988 shutting down prosecutions in the hayshed shootings in Lurgan in 1982 on, guess what, national security grounds? Recently released documents show the Irish government was furious.
We now know what ‘national security’ in that context really meant. An MI5 tape had been purloined and then destroyed. It would have revealed no warnings were shouted and as a result one of the survivors has been awarded substantial compensation. Not only were the shutters pulled down but John Stalker was deliberately discredited and his report never published. Why should anyone believe anything’s different?
In her speech the proconsul used the tired technique of setting up Aunt Sallys[ straw men] to knock down. She went on about a disproportionate emphasis on security force killings claiming they’re blamed for every atrocity. Not true. Security forces were responsible for fewer than 10 per cent of killings and only a few of them are controversial.
Whoever advised her on her speech allowed her to make a list of killings which included some where— although security forces were not directly involved—those in their pay were, which is particularly true in the case of Greysteel. These are exactly the kind of murky incidents she proposes to withhold information about, just like Mayhew.
Her pretext for keeping information under wraps is especially laughable. Information about security force techniques would be useful to dissidents, and wait for it, Islamist terrorists. Yet in another part of her speech she contradicted herself when she said, ‘policing practice and methodology has (sic) changed radically over the intervening years’.
Nobody’s talking about recent killings. Is she really trying to say that since the ceasefires in 1994 when the internet was in its infancy, when email was a rarity and those who had modems ran them at 14.4kb/sec, that security forces still use the same techniques? What could anyone possibly learn from techniques used in say, 1988-9 that have long since been superseded?
We know that homers and miniature microphones are attached to suspects’ clothing, whereas 20 years ago the listening device in Sinn Féin’s Connolly House was five feet long and weighed 10 pounds.
What’s never said in British ministers’ speeches is that some of the most horrifying incidents were sanctioned by politicians like Lady Hacksaw[Maggie Thatcher]… that responsibility for lethal ambushes and agents provocateurs lies at the feet of some of our proconsuls’ party colleagues now retired… that blame cannot be confined to soldiers and police carrying out politicians’ instructions.
And by the way, why would it take five years and £35 million to inquire into Scappaticci’s activities when all the PSNI have to do is call in his handlers and ask them what he did?
Posted by Jim on February 17, 2016
Posted by Jim on
The opinion polls during the Irish election seem to be all over the place at the moment: some very good for Sinn Fein, some very bad.
But to be honest it doesn’t matter if Sinn Fein ends up in coalition with Enda Kenny or Micheál Martin (and, believe me, neither man will allow their personal view of Gerry Adams to stand in the way of leading the next government), because it isn’t going to move Sinn Fein one inch closer to delivering Irish unity.
So what if Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams are at the centre of coalitions in Dublin and Belfast? Ireland will remain divided and they’ll be in two separate governments. And there isn’t one convincing scrap of evidence to suggest that a border poll in Northern Ireland would produce a majority for leaving the United Kingdom anytime soon.
The IRA accepted a very long time ago – within two years of the Provisionals forming – that they weren’t going to unite Ireland by violence. That’s why they opened ‘formal’ channels of communication in 1972.
A decade later, in 1981, they opted for the ‘armalite/ballot box’ strategy. By the early 1990s they knew the game was up in terms of the ‘armed struggle’ and cooperated with the British, Irish and American governments to extract themselves from the hole they had first dug 30 years earlier.
But that meant redefining their purpose and perception. Let’s face it the Provisionals (in their IRA and SF manifestations) didn’t lift the torch just to end up in Stormont, with the DUP, jointly governing a Northern Ireland which remained firmly rooted within the United Kingdom. So they had to find a narrative to explain not only how they ended up in that position, but also why it actually makes sense for them to be there.
In this narrative Sinn Fein has been trying to reinvent itself as the civil rights campaign and an early version of the SDLP. They pretend that they were the champions of the electoral/institutional/social/political changes that took place throughout the 1970s. They pretend that the IRA were ‘defenders’ rather than protagonists: almost as if there never was a terror campaign involving them. They peddle the line that while they may have made ‘mistakes’ (“for which we are sorry, don’t you know, blah blah blah”) it was actually the British and their ‘police and army machines’ who were the real, cold-blooded killing machines. And while Gerry Adams was never in the IRA, it was British agents in the IRA who were doing bad things and blaming the IRA!
Running alongside this absurd mythology Sinn Fein is also pushing another story; one that argues that being in government in Northern Ireland is something they’ve never had any problem with (“sure, we’ve always wanted peace and cooperation with our unionist fellow citizens”) and that it’s part of a long-term, thought-through strategy leading to eventual unification.
As works of fiction go it’s not bad and all that’s missing is Dan Brown’s Professor Robert Langdon to make sense of the obscure language and convoluted logic. For good measure they blame the SDLP, unionism, dissident republicans, the Brits and the Irish establishment for standing in the way of reconciliation and reunification.
The reality, of course, is that the IRA got nothing. Sinn Fein got nothing. They were rolled over and sucked in by a state which is a past master at that sort of thing. Since the mid-1990s they thought they were playing hardball with successive governments, whereas all they were doing was everything demanded of them. And for what? The fantasy – and that’s all it is – that unity is around the corner and that they are worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with Michael Collins, Parnell et al.
None of this mythology, reinvention and rewriting is intended for a Northern audience. That vote is close to maxing out because most people here have seen through the guff and know the real story.
No, this is to do with their Southern strategy and is a cynical, clinical attempt to bamboozle people who, not having seen the IRA at their worst or followed events closely since the mid-1960s, might be willing to believe Sinn Fein’s version of events. People, in other words, who think that Gerry Adams is a statesman rather than a flim-flamming opportunist.
Which is why media attacks seem to make so little difference to Sinn Fein’s poll appeal down there. Everything that can be thrown at Adams has been thrown at him and he’s still standing, still smiling, still pumping out his deodorising tweets and still preparing for a victory speech at the end of the month.
Yet, as I said earlier, it doesn’t really matter in terms of the overall Sinn Fein project. Adams won’t be uniting Ireland and he won’t be carried through the streets of Dublin as the man who did what no-one else in the past 800 years has been able to do.
Adams will be added to a list: that list of people – some democrats, some terrorists – who have tried to reunite Ireland as a sovereign state. Like all the others, he has failed. The IRA has failed. Sinn Fein has failed. All they have left is the pretence that they are on the road to success.
Ironically, a foothold in two governments in a still partitioned Ireland would demonstrate the sheer scale and absurdity of their failure – probably stuck between Arlene Foster and Enda Kenny.
Posted by Jim on
Dermot McEvoy @irishcentral
Even ninety-four years after his death Michael Collins remains a pivotal part of Dublin City life. You’ll see photographs and paintings of him in shops and pubs around the city and there are two busts of him, at the Hugh Lane Gallery and in Merrion Square Park.
But who exactly was this national icon, Michael Collins?
He was the most wanted man in Ireland – the British put a £5,000 bounty (sometimes embellished to £10,000) on his head – yet Collins walked and cycled around Dublin with a devil-may-care attitude that inspired his small army. (His fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, referred to him in letters as her “elusive Pimpernel.”)
He fought in the General Post Office at Easter 1916, spent eight months in prison, then returned to Dublin at New Year’s 1917. For the next five years he ran a revolution that has become textbook for nationalist insurgents around the globe.
He was Ireland’s first Minister for Finance (floating the National Loan that helped birth the inchoate Irish nation) and gained notoriety as the Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army. As DOI he formed his infamous assassination team – “The Squad” or “The Twelve Apostles” – who systematically executed the British Secret Service in Dublin on “Bloody Sunday,” November 21, 1920. Just over a year later, he negotiated the Treaty which freed most of Ireland from seven hundred years of British rule.
He was killed in an ambush at Béal na mBláth, in his native County Cork, on August 22, 1922. He was only thirty-one-years-of-age. Fittingly, his body was returned to his beloved Dublin and he is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Although Michael Collins has been dead for nine decades, many of his Dublin haunts – amazingly–remain intact. And luckily for the exhausted tourist, a walking tour of Collins’ Dublin will take only an hour because many of his buildings and pubs are located smack in the City Center.
Trinity Street and #3 St. Andrew Street: Let’s begin the tour at the front gate of Trinity College. Cross Grafton Street and walk up College Green to Trinity Street. Turn left and advance to St. Andrew Street. Your first impression of this fist of tiny intersecting streets is that “this would be the perfect spot for an ambush” – and you would be right. This area is the location of one of Collins’ main finance offices at #3 Andrew Street – right next to the Trocadero Restaurant – but, as your instincts may have warned you, it is also the location of one the great ambushes gone awry. It was here that Collins and the Squad waited in 1919 for the arrival of Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, as he made his way from Trinity College, heading home to the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park. Their mission was assassination. French did not show and Collins dispersed the Squad, wary that his hot tip may have been a British set up.
Old Stand Pub, corner of St. Andrew & Wicklow Streets: After going over the books for the National Loan across the street Collins would often meet up with his men here. According to the Old Stand’s website, “From time to time, Collins held informal meetings of the outlawed I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood) in the premises as true to Collins’ tradition, he was less conspicuous while in the midst of the public.”
Wicklow Hotel & Weir’s Jewelers: If you turn left and continue down Wicklow Street you will come to the former location of the Wicklow Hotel at #4 Wicklow Street (now a bank). This was a regular hangout for Collins and his Squad. However, the porter, one Willie Dolan, was a British informer and Collins had the Squad take him out. Mrs. Dolan, not knowing that Collins was behind her husband’s death, asked Collins for a pension. Collins granted her request. On the corner of Grafton Street is Weir & Sons, jewelers, where Collins brought the engagement gift, a watch, for his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, in 1921.
#10 Exchequer Street & The Central Hotel: If you backtrack on Wicklow Street it becomes Exchequer Street. #10, to the left of Dunnes Stores, was Collins’ first office in Dublin in 1917. It was here that he ran the National Aid and Volunteers Dependents Fund, a charity but also a front for his rebel activities. His office was on the top floor. Across the street is the Central Hotel – now home to one of the great Dublin drinking venues, the fabulous Library Bar – which Collins often used to accommodate visiting I.R.A. men.
The Stag’s Head: Do an about face at #10 and you’ll be staring down Dame Court. At the end of it, on the right hand side, is the Stag’s Head, one of the most beautiful Victorian pubs in Dublin. By day it is quiet and a great place to have lunch. By night it is a mad house. Any time of day or night it is a great pub and was a favorite of the Big Fellow.
After a hard day at #10 he would come here and enjoy a whiskey from “Mick’s Barrel,” which they kept especially for him. The Stag’s Head is within one block of Dublin Castle, the then center of British power in Ireland, and Collins’ used it to meet his agents, keenly aware that British touts might also be on the premises. Many movies have been filmed here, including “Educating Rita,” “The Treaty” and one of James Cagney’s last films – and maybe the best film ever made about the Irish revolution – “Shake Hands With the Devil.”
Collins’ Alley & #3 Crow Street: Right outside the Stag’s Head is a short, yet sinister, tunnel that leads to Dame Street, which I have nicknamed “Collins’ Alley.” If you look directly across the thoroughfare you’ll see Crow Street. At #3 Collins kept his intelligence office, disguised as John F. Fowler, printer and binder. If was through this office – which he seldom visited because of security issues – that Collins’ agents plotted the downfall of the British Secret Service.
#32 Bachelors Walk, the Oval Bar & “The Dump”: Llet’s make our way to the River Liffey and cross the Ha’penny Bridge. Walk towards O’Connell Street and you’ll come to #32 Bachelors Walk. Collins kept an office here throughout the revolution and, like the Crow Street office, it was never discovered by the British. It is on the corner of Bachelors Way, an alley that leads to Middle Abbey Street. If you look down this alley you’ll see the Oval Bar. The Oval was used by Collins and his Squad perhaps because of its proximity to “The Dump,” a “waiting” room for the Squad on the top floor of the adjacent Eason bookshop building on the corner of Abbey and O’Connell Streets.
General Post Office (GPO) and #16 Moore Street: At O’Connell Street turn left and you’ll see the portico of the General Post Office. The Easter Rising started here on Monday, April 24, 1916. Collins, then a staff captain, fought in the building alongside the leaders, who included Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly. By the end of the week Collins and the other rebels were forced to evacuate the burning GPO and take refuge at #16 Moore Street, off Henry Street. A plaque between the second floor windows marks the spot. Currently, #16 is being turned into a museum.
Vaughan’s Hotel, #29 Parnell Square: Proceed along colorful Moore Street – its food and fish mongers are straight out of Joyce and O’Casey – to Parnell Street and turn right.
A short walk will take you to the Rotunda Hospital, the oldest maternity hospital in Europe, and Parnell Square, a hotbed of Fenian revolutionary fervor during the War of Independence. Proceed along Parnell Square West until you come to #29. In Collins’ time this was Vaughan’s Hotel – he called it “Joint Number One” – probably the most important address associated with Collins during this period. He was in and out of the place several times a day even though British “touts” were sniffing about looking for him.
Mountjoy Street: Continue up Parnell Square and continue past the appropriately named Black Church (the Dublin legend swears that if you run around this foreboding structure three times at midnight the devil himself will appear!). At the corner to the left is the cul-de-sac of Mountjoy Street, almost untouched since the early twentieth century. Collins lived at #44, the Munster Hotel in 1917. (Seán MacDiarmada, a signer of the Proclamation, also spent his last night here prior to the Rising.) As times got hotter Collins was forced to abandon the Munster Hotel as a place of lodging, but he continued to have his laundry done there. Right across the street from #44, one of his girlfriend/agents, Dilly Dicker, lived at #30 and he would park his bike in the lane to the side of the building. Another girlfriend, Susan Killeen, lived at #19.
Hugh Lane Gallery & the Garden of Remembrance: As we end our tour, we retrace out steps back to Parnell Square and on the north side you’ll find the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Lane, a nephew of Lady Gregory, drowned when the Lusitania was torpedoed. He bequeathed many works of art to the city of Dublin in his will. Inside the front door is a marble bust of Michael Collins by Cork sculptor Seamus Murphy. Also at the Hugh Lane are many paintings by Sir John Lavery, a friend of Collins. It is rumored that Sir John’s wife, Lady Hazel Lavery, was Collins’ secret lover.
The Dublin Writers Museum is also on this block. Across the street is the Garden of Remembrance, directly behind the Rotunda Hospital. In 1916 all the rebels from the GPO, including Collins, were bivouacked here for the night after their surrender. Indignities against two of the leaders, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDiarmada, by a Captain Lea Percival Wilson of the British Army, would bring retribution years later when Wilson was gunned down in Gorey, County Wexford by the Squad on Collins’ orders.
It was here that Queen Elizabeth II, on her state visit to Ireland in 2011, laid a wreath in memory of those who died in the fight for Irish freedom. As the Queen stood at attention as the Irish national anthem was played, many Dubliners observed that they wouldn’t be surprised if the ghost of Michael Collins, just across the way at Vaughan’s Hotel, was keeping a close eye on the proceedings – and that he would, finally, approve.
* Dermot McEvoy is the author of the “The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising and Irish Miscellany” (Skyhorse Publishing). He may be reached at dermotmcevoy50@gmail.com. Follow him at www.dermotmcevoy.com.
Posted by Jim on February 15, 2016
By Jarlath Kearney (for Irish News)
In December, Britain’s Ministry of Defence published a strategic
analysis entitled ‘Future Operating Environment 2035′.
The document identifies the “survival of the state” and “pursuit of
national security” as foundations of Britain’s security doctrine.
It’s a reminder that Britain’s security elite systematically invests
time and energy in long-term planning and forecasting.
That factor, as much as anything, underwrites the British government’s
current handling of national security in relation to dealing with our
past conflict.
Britain sees national security in terms of twenty years ahead, weighing
the implications of today’s decisions for tomorrow’s outcomes; never
ham-stringing itself for future unknown conflicts.
In tragic contrast, victims of state actions here – those seeking truth
and justice – see national security through the harsh realities of its
devastating effects, stretching over maybe twenty years ago or more (and
continuing).
It’s like looking into the same telescope from opposite ends, but
distanced by a lifetime’s experience.
Britain’s victims don’t understand how a democratic state defends
indefensible practices during the conflict using so-called national
security grounds.
Their perspective magnifies every consequence of Britain’s human rights
breaches, with hundreds of ghosts staring back at still-suffering
relatives.
But Britain’s modern bureaucrats care little about victims’ feelings or
views, or indeed, the implications for the present and future from
failure to properly address the past.
Their primary objective is the future protection of state interests (and
their own careers). They look down the telescope from the wrong end, and
– to them – the victims appear as tiny, insignificant and far away.
The state’s approach is a fundamental mistake, even at the level of
sustaining its own contested notions of ‘democratic Britain’ and
‘national security’.
Remember, it was Westminster’s studied indifference towards 50 years of
sectarian one-party rule which permissively nurtured multi-generational
grievances here among nationalists and republicans.
The irony is that Britain’s national security would be strategically
strengthened by more honesty and openness about the conflict.
Unfortunately the tactical interests of protecting influential officials
and preserving the legends of false reputation are obscuring common
sense approaches on the past. (Maybe similar considerations even affect
all sides, to some degree or other.)
Writing in The Irish News on Friday, Denis Bradley recalled how, six or
seven years ago, a MI5 chief told him that a ‘tsunami’ would rise up on
the past.
So does anyone seriously think MI5 have been twiddling their thumbs for
the past decade or more, sitting around and sweating on that tsunami’s
arrival?
No. They’ve been moving back their deckchairs and buying up the safe
inland real estate – working twenty years ahead.
All of which puts an interesting slant on the recent swelling tide of
public crisis around truth recovery, now rebranded as ‘legacy’.
New revelations leaked to various media? Confusion generated amongst
victims and survivors?
Commentators conditioning people towards limited outcomes? Resource
restrictions continually strangling independent accountability, like the
Police Ombudsman?
Democratic policing weighed down by some unjustifiable decisions on the
past?
When you stand back quietly and look carefully, this supposed chaos
actually reveals patterns. Like a recipe.
Frankly, it feels like our society is now being systematically ‘nudged’
towards a particularly unsatisfactory endpoint on dealing with the past.
(Such a strategy comes from the psychology of behavioural insights.
States use it to shape public attitudes towards preferred policy
outcomes.)
Of course, a positive alternative option still exists.
Any side to the conflict could still take unilateral steps to
voluntarily deliver maximum contributions on truth, thereby reshaping
the public square and recalibrating the whole debate. That could be a
mighty intervention.
Significantly, the most important official counter-narrative to the
steady seepage of British national security ‘nudging’ is currently
coming from the impressive independence and effectiveness of the High
Court.
Two weeks ago, Lord Justice Weir (acting to Lord Chief Justice Morgan)
compellingly demolished every shocking excuse for the state’s ongoing
obstructions and delays of conflict-related inquests.
Likewise, last May, Mr Justice Stephens found the British government
once again in procedural breach of Article 2 of the ECHR – the right to
life – in relation to the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane.
Mr Finucane’s anniversary occurs this Friday – his twenty-seventh.
Perhaps if Britain’s political, military and security elite had not
authorised and caused his murder, Mr Finucane might even be sitting
today on the High Court bench calling the past to account (with
characteristic brilliance) and upholding the rule of law for the safety
and security of all.
And it’s the colossal sadness of such stolen potential which, above all,
reveals how counter-productive and bankrupt Britain’s position can
become when national security undermines human rights.