Posted by Jim on February 6, 2016
by Brendan Patrick Keane
Just before he died, Daniel Cassidy released a pioneering book that begins to prove how American slang has a root in the Irish American urban experience.
As usual, snoots would rather fall on the side of error than to end the kibosh on ascribing Irish origins to any aspect of Anglo-American society.
Ireland has a native civilization older than England or France, and it has out-proportioned contributions to modernist culture, but it is more usually described as derivative rather than an originator of trends. Despite stubborn refusal, “jazz” and “poker”, “moolah” and “spunk” all derive from Irish Gaelic, which was used in New York by the Irish like Yiddish and Spanglish was used later-on in the city.
Some dismiss these theories without any real understanding of the Irish Gaelic language. They existentially must disallow the language had mixed with English – jerks without the knack to dig it. Others dismiss the theories in loyalty to academia’s wine and cheese status quo, and don’t wish to seem too maverick, or too “street,” like Cassidy who had an unabashed Brooklyn accent. There’s an element of snobbery involved in the outright refusal many swells have for this working stiff’s tome.
Cassidy was among those who have begun to case the hidden history, anyway, and show how gambling slang, underworld lingo, street gang terms, street-wise cant, merchant code and political jargon in New York City is teeming with Irish Gaelic that melted into American English.
Fellow politically-minded academics present English history and culture as being spic and span of Irish influence, and so ignore impulsively, both Irish American slang-smiths in the modern period and Irish Gaelic teachers who taught the early Medieval English how to read and write. They prefer to label Irish words in English as unknown, or originated in more swank cultures like Latin or French. It’s basic prejudice on the side of the common hegemony, rooted in ignorance.
This is a small taste compiled from Daniel Cassidy’s boss book, “How the Irish Invented Slang”, and from Niall Ó Donaill’s “Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla”.
We don’t normally exclaim “Gee whiz” or “Gee whilikers” anymore. We associate such talk with a classic time in New York, when Irish Gaelic was the secret language of the slums, an Irish Gaelic word which means ‘s slom é, or “it’s bleak.” In the slums it was common to hear Irish people say Dia Thoilleachas, Gee Hillukus, which became Gee Whilikers, and means the “will of God.” “Gee” is the approximate pronunciation of Dia, or the Irish word for God. “Holy cow” means Holy Cathú or Holy Cahoo or Holy Grief. “Darn” is another Gaelic exclamation. In Irish you say daithairne ort, which means, “darn on you” or “misfortune on you.” Gee whiz comes from Dia Uas or Geeuh Woous which means “noble god.”
Irish love words were once all over pop songs pumped out from Tin Pan Alley. “Mother Macree”, or mother of my heart, was a huge hit from those early days of pop. A big name in early popular theater, was Irishman Dion Boucicault who wrote ‘The Streets of New York”, and included lots of Gaelic in the titles and dialogue of his blockbusters.
Irish pet names like peata, or pet, are still current, as is báb or bawb, which is babe today.
Love songs were published as sheet music for people to sing to at the piano, and it was commonplace to hear Irish pet names like Avourneen, Mavourneen, Acushla, Agrah and other lovely words like that
The Irish were pioneers in pop culture, and they littered American popular entertainment from Mother Macree to Huckleberrry Finn with snippets of their language.
If you want to cully support, you’re calling on your cuallaí, or friends to help you. In modern Irish, collaí has the sense of being carnal or sexual.
If you want to gather people together you make a ballyhoo about the gathering, which in Irish is bailliú, and pronounced like ballyhoo. You might use a slogan in your ballyhoo to promote the gathering, as slogan comes from slua ghairm, the yell of a crowd or a battle-cry. Ballyhoo entered the language at the circus, where Irish people would use slogans to make ballyhoo about a new show everyone should come out and see. Buddy is another Irish Gaelic word, which comes from the Irish expression, a vuddy, or a bhodaigh, which means something like “pal.” The root of the word bhodaigh is strangely, bod, which is the Irish word for penis, and pronounced like bud.
Speaking of body parts, the Irish put their Gaelic mark all over the stiff, or corpse, which comes from the word staf or “big guy.” If someone has their snoot in the air, they’re acting like snoots, which comes from the Irish expression snua aird or when someone appears to be on high, and is acting like a swank swell with his nose in the air.
Swank is the Irish word somhaoineach or “valuable” in disguise. Swell is the word sóúil or “luxurious” dolled up to suit the English speaker. If you kick a rich guy in the can, you’re kicking him in his ceann which is the “extremity” of a thing, and also “head,” which is at the other end from the tail end.
Dogs comes from do chos your feet. The vulgar word for the vagina, pussy, isn’t so bad, it just means pus or pouty lips in Irish Gaelic. It’s a descriptive term, and not insulting. Mug, however, is insulting, and the common phrase “ugly mug” comes from the word muic, which means pig.
Irish Gaelic was a secret language in Éire, which was once an Ireland riddled with foreign spies, and so it was a language to keep the copper (the catcher, the thinker) from catching on. Cop comes from ceapaim, and means “I catch, think etc.” You try to keep the cop from figuring out your racket, or your reacaireacht, your “dealing, selling or gossiping.”
Just like the word bailiff came from the Gaelic word baille for bally or homevillage, the word in New York for the cop on the beat, was the ceap on the béad, the protector on ill-deeds.
Another kind of Big Shot is the racketeer, who can be a cop or a goon – glommers collecting grift – official or underworld. There’s little difference when you boil it down between official thieves and illegal ones, and the Irish knew this, observing the most organized acts of criminality enacted by a dolled up British state, exploiting and criminalizing their own civilization. Big Shot is the Irish word for chief in disguise: seoid, meaning “jewel” or figuratively, “chief.”
Racketeer is also related to the Irish word reachtaire which was the title for the money-taking administrator at a colonial big house or at a church office back in Ireland. On the streets of New York, the racketeer has translated the duties and strategies of the colonizer into street crime rackets for himself–the oppressed learn the methods of oppression better than anyone.
A word that should be brought back is “joint” for place or establishment or room. It’s a word that instantly conjures an entire world of old New York. It comes from the Irish word for protection or shelter, a place with a roof, such as in the root of the Irish word for penthouse, díonteach or jeent-ock.
If you want to ditch a joint, and skedaddle in a jiffy, because some dick has copped on to your whereabouts, you want to de áit a díonteach or de-place a joint, and sciord ar dólámh or make an all out slip in a deifir in a “hurry,” because some dearc or “eye” or PI, has ceaptha or thought or caught on to your whereabouts.
Eugene O’Neill was another huge name in early American pop culture. His plays were also high art, but riddled with Irish themes and language. His favorite word for money was jack, which is a straight-up glom from the Irish tiach, or money or purse. A guy with a jack-roll, was a guy with a wad of cash, spoondoolies or dollars, rolled up. Spoondoolie is one of those old slang words that got resurrected recently in video games, along with Simolions, the currency of Sim City, an urban planning computer fantasy. They’re weird English takes on Irish Gaelic expression for a big pile of money or suim oll amháin.
Not everyone is hip to the process where words in one language get misheard and pronounced differently in the new language. In Irish if you want make sure someone understands your meaning, you say, Diggin tú? It’s a normal phrase you hear at the end of sentences all the time. In America, An duigeann tú? Became Diggin you? or You dig? It takes a certain knack to understand how closely related the concepts and sounds of tuig and dig are to each other.
Most scholars go by their goofy hunch, that tells them that Irish Gaelic is some dead language no one ever spoke. In fact, it was the first language of most Irish Americans that came here in the big flood of Irish after the famine, when that famine adversely targeted Irish-speaking areas first and foremost, sending Irish speakers to America before anyone.
In the anti-Gaelic mind, Irish language is a queer idea, and way too vast a thing to even engage – easier to kill it than to incorporate it into an academic’s repertoire of reference. The academic makes this decision usually because he or she is already burdened with three centuries of censorious English state propaganda about the meaning and origin of Anglo-American civilization, which did not come about like their poets’ tell us it did.
Another reason Irish Gaelic is neglected as an original source for American slang, is because a lot of the street slang that the Irish made up, relates to a world of vice and crime, some Irish would prefer did not exist.
There is shame associated with the destruction of native Irish Gaelic civilization, because the Irish lost their literature and institutions with the victory of the British Empire over their native government. They were impoverished, and took up crime in some instances. The Irish share with Black people and Jews, an urban legacy in America that is not squeaky clean, but rather dirty, like life is dirty when you have no money.
Having street smarts is one way to look at the world realistically, and not be duped by those who would double cross you to take your jag on the personal level or your natural resources on the imperial one. Those who first come to the city as hicks or boobs, come with the law of hospitality firmly entrenched in their hearts, only to awaken from such kindness by the cruelty of urban America. It’s dangerous to be a dork or ninny in the dog eat dog world. That’s why there are so many words for the person-preconditioning, the person before he develops the cop-on that accompanies an ambitious life post-nincumpoop to make it in New York.
One way to wake up is to get slugged in the face and have your jag jacked. The Fighting Irish is a common aptronym that describes the occupation of many a brawler that had to whale on an opponent to survive or climb the ladder leading out of the rat race.
As an organized people, they were sparring with the much better organized establishment. The Irish bickered with the WASP elite until the established order in New York broke down, reformed the sweatshop system of labor in Victorian Anglo-American society, and conceded to the unions and political machines the rights and benefits that created the middle class from the working class that the establishment would have been happy to see slaving away in sweatshops to this day. Instead, the Irish organized and fought for a conception of America that yielded working people an American Dream, a chance to climb out of the slum and into a middle class job and lifestyle.
Lace curtain Irish is a term that describes the middle class Irish who climbed out of the slum into the spic and span homes of the American dream. They left behind a time in American cities when the Irish were smack dab in the middle of street life, theater, pop entertainment and politics. The swells from the WASP tradition who owned the banks and institutions of American society tried everything to defame and prevent the Irish from joining their swank ranks, but that ended, or so the story goes, when JFK broke the barrier that separated the WASP from the Irish, and went from Harvard to the White House, key bastions of the establishment’s institutional power.
One of the ways the Irish got there was by giving up their jazzy speech for the snazzy touch that remade them into crackers and honkies. Although it’s commonplace to describe the Irish today as white establishment members, par excellence, they come from Irish Gaelic roots that put them in the middle of New York street life. We’re comfortable enough now where we can re-engage that original condition, and reclaim for ourselves a key position in the history of American pop entertainment, language and culture.
Taken from the article originally published in 2010.
Posted by Jim on February 3, 2016
by Michael J. Cummings
American activists have worked hard to educate their fellow citizens about Britain’s murderous role in Northern Ireland. Success of a sort for their efforts was achieved when President Clinton acknowledged England’s deceit and demanded an a end to violence and more dialogue. As the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising approaches, it is worth remembering the issues that gave rise to the Easter Rebellion in 1916 were also at the center of the modern struggle: democracy, rule of law, justice and a cruel inequality. So why did it take three decades of war in six of the 9 counties of Ulster for the U. S. to realize that?
Advocates here …the Hibernians, the Brehon Law Society, NORAID, the Irish American Unity Conference and human and civil rights activists…were variously labeled as Communists, gun runners, terrorists, dupes, dreamers and dissidents. Many Americans would claim to be well read on the subject or knowledgeable solely because they were Irish-American or born in Ireland. Most, including public officials and graduates from prestigious institutions of higher learning, were surprisingly ill informed or comfortably ignorant.
Most of those opposed to the pleas for U. S. involvement were one of three types: The Optimist; The Know-It-All; and The Delusional. The Optimists seemed satisfied with every report of progress invariably promoted by British media. For example, a ‘reform’ involved the forced retirement of 1000 Royal Ulster Constabulary. It was, in fact, a two part scheme to provide hush money to “…the worst of the lot…” and to mask many being re-hired months later for the unstated purpose of covering up their dirty work. Yet another scenario is the well received announcement that the Britain was to conduct independent inquiries into the murder of Patrick Finucane (1989) and the bombings of Dublin and Monaghan (1974). For over two decades the British Army and MI-5 have used every bureaucratic and legal obstacle to prevent the truth being told. A ‘reform’ announcement that Executive authority was being returned to the N. I. Director of Prosecution Services was later followed by disclosure that the ability to actually indict remains firmly with the UK Attorney General.
The Know-It-All, on the other hand, reckons the conflict is a ‘chicken or egg story’. The IRA are the antagonists while loyalists and the British are innocent bystanders responding in self-defense. Many believed that the gun was introduced into Irish politics by the IRA but in the late 60’s it was Ian Paisley’s Ulster Protestant Action group and the Ulster Constitution Defense Committee that detonated bombs at the Ballyshannon power plant, at the Silent Valley Reservoir and during a 1970 trial where jurors were deliberating the fate of loyalist bombers. All were blamed on the IRA initially. Paisley was following the 1914 example of loyalist leader Sir Edward Carson who was buying arms in 1914 to insure the Irish Home Rule statute would never come into effect. Then there is Britain’s 40 years of lying about soldiers being attacked on Bloody Sunday by IRA gunmen to justify their slaughter of 14 innocent and unarmed Catholic protesters. The Saville Report proved there was no threat to the soldiers. One later testified they were instructed “…to get a few kills.” The Royal Ulster Constabulary and B Specials killed 8 of the first 9 people of the conflict including a 9 year old child.
Then we have the Delusional. With no more fact than your average British Army press release, these people cling to the proposition that Britain is the font of all democracy and the rule of law. However, British voting chicanery and violence in the North would shock a Chicago Alderman. Five elected Sinn Fein Councilors and 11 campaign workers were assassinated while performing such threatening activities as vote canvassing and the carrying of petitions. Not for them an arrest or trial by jury. Britain’s MI-5 authorized Brian Nelson to purchase a cache of modern weaponry in 1985 from South Africa, despite a U. S. ban on arms sales and sanctions at the time. Then, in violation of British law the arms were given to N. I. loyalist death squads. The effect? From 1988-1994 229 killings, mostly innocent Catholics, were linked to those weapons. This not only was in aid of the apartheid regime but against every tenet of international and human rights law. The British cultivate these delusions with propaganda stunts like periodic royal visits. But how’s this for “Keeping up appearances.” Britain murders two Subjects of Her Majesty, lawyers Patrick Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, but duped the American Bar Association into hosting a nationwide tour of the Magna Carta, touting it as the foundation of democracy and the rule of law!! Talk about being used, insulted and stroked all at once! The public pays homage to the 1000 year old sheepskin clueless as to just how lawlessly Britain has governed in N. I. No less a person that the late Speaker of the House Tom Foley testified before a House Foreign Affairs sub-Committee on the International Fund for Ireland that “..there was no such thing as British oppression.” Gives a whole new meaning to delusional, no?
The 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising should not be an occasion to arouse old hatreds but to recognize the common injustices and cruelty that forced a resort to arms in 1916 and again in the 1970’s. Britain still buries the bitter and violent legacy of the North and blocks every effort to disclose the truth of their treachery. Now is the time for America and Americans to shed their delusions and optimism about the so-called ‘special relationship’ and demand the type of full disclosure that can bring true peace.
Posted by Jim on
February 1, 2016 by Mike McCormack
Wallabout Bay is small body of water along the northwest shore of Brooklyn, NY. In 1801, a settlement called Vinegar Hill was built on that bay to attract Irish immigrants to settle there and provide the labor to build the Brooklyn Navy Yard which opened in 1806. However, Vinegar Hill was built on an area which, 20 years earlier, had seen incredible horror!
During the American Revolution, the British had captured thousands of soldiers, sailors, and even private citizens who would not swear allegiance to the Crown. When they ran out of jail space to house their prisoners they used ship hulls, no longer seaworthy, anchored in Wallabout Bay as floating prisons. Conditions were so terrible that more Americans died on these prison ships than in all the battles of the Revolution! According to the U.S. Dept of Defense, there were 4,435 battle deaths during the War yet more than 11,500 died from neglect, cruelty and disease on these rotting hulls. William Burke, a prisoner aboard the prison ship Jersey, wrote, At night, when the prisoners were assembled at the hatchway, for the purpose of obtaining fresh air, one of the sentinels would thrust his bayonet down among them, and one morning twenty-five of them were found wounded, and stuck in the head, and dead of the wounds they had thus received. I further recollect that this was the case several mornings, when sometimes eight or ten, were found dead by the same means. The dead would be carried ashore and buried in the sand in shallow graves, or simply thrown overboard.
Among the patriots imprisoned were a great many Irish. In 1888, the Society of Old Brooklynites published a pamphlet which gave the names of those confined on the ship Jersey. From that source, John D Crimmins in Irish American Miscellany (1905) lists at least 363 Irish names and reports that many more could be added, but these were sufficient to make his point that a large number of the sons of Erin were among those who suffered on the prison ships. Capt. Thomas Dring, who was imprisoned aboard the Jersey, added, There were continual noises during the night. The groans of the sick and dying; the curses poured out by the exhausted upon our inhuman keepers; the restlessness caused by the suffocating heat and the confined and poisonous air, mingled with the wild and incoherent ravings of delirium, were the sounds which, every night, were raised around us in all directions. Another writer stated, Dysentery, smallpox, and yellow fever broke out, and while so many were sick with raging fever, there was a loud cry for water; but none could be had, except on the upper deck. One incident is recorded regarding a prisoner, who died on the Jersey: Two young men, brothers, were prisoners on board the ship. The elder took the fever, and, in a few days became delirious. One night (his end was fast approaching) he became calm and sensible, and lamenting his hard fate, and the absence of his mother, begged for a little water. His brother, with tears, entreated the guard to give him some, but in vain. The sick youth was soon in his last struggles, when his brother offered the guard a guinea for an inch of candle, only that he might see his brother die. Even this was denied. ‘ Now,’ said he, drying up his tears, ‘ if it please God that I ever regain my liberty, I’ll be a most bitter enemy!’ He regained his liberty, rejoined the army, and when the war ended, he had eight large, and one hundred and twenty-seven small notches on his rifle stock. After the surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the fighting ended, but the cruelty on the prison ships continued until the Treaty of Paris was signed and the Brits left New York, two whole years later, in 1783!
In the History of the City of Brooklyn, author Henry Stiles narrates a scene that took place on July 4, 1782, after the war was over, as prisoners attempted to celebrate the anniversary of Independence Day. He wrote: A very serious conflict with the guard occurred in consequence of the prisoners attempting to celebrate the day with such observances as their condition permitted. Upon going on deck in the morning, they displayed thirteen little national flags in a row upon the booms which were immediately torn down and trampled under the feet of the guard. Deigning no notice of this, the prisoners proceeded to amuse themselves with patriotic songs, speeches, and cheers, all the while avoiding whatever could be construed as an intentional insult of the guards who, at an unusually early hour in the afternoon, drove them below at the point of the bayonet, and closed the hatches. Between decks, the prisoners now continued their singing, until about nine o’clock in the evening. An order to desist not having been promptly complied with, the hatches were suddenly removed, and the guards descended among them with cutlasses in their hands. Then ensued a scene of terror. The helpless prisoners, retreating from the hatchways as far as crowded condition would permit, were followed by the guards, who mercilessly hacked, cut, and wounded everyone within their reach; and then ascending again to the upper deck, fastened down the hatches upon the poor victims of their cruel rage, leaving them to languish through the long, sultry, summer night, without water to cool their parched throats, and without lights by which they might have dressed their wounds. And to add to their torment, it was not until the middle of the next forenoon, that the prisoners were allowed to go on deck and slake their thirst, or to receive their rations of food, which, that day, they were obliged to eat uncooked. Ten corpses were found below on the morning following that memorable 4th of July and many others were badly wounded. And the war had been over for 10 months!
In a letter to Naval Magazine, General Jeremiah Johnson wrote, It was no uncommon thing to see five or six dead bodies brought on shore in a single morning, when a small excavation would be dug at the foot of the hill, the bodies be thrown in, and a man with a shovel would cover them. The whole shore was a place of graves; as were also the slope of the hill, the shore and the sandy island. The atmosphere seemed to be charged with foul air from the prison-ships, and with the effluvia of the dead bodies washed out of their graves by the tides. We believe that more than half of the dead buried on the outer side were washed out by the waves at high tide. The bones of the dead lay exposed along the beach, drying and bleaching in the sun, till reached by the power of a succeeding storm; as the agitated waters receded, the bones receded with them into the deep. For years after, the bones of these martyrs to American freedom were visible along the shore.
Stiles noted, There was however, one condition upon which these hapless sufferers might have escaped the torture of this slow but certain death, and that was enlistment in the British service. This chance was daily offered them by the recruiting officers who visited the ship, but their offers were almost invariably treated with contempt by men who fully expected to die. In spite of untold physical sufferings, which might well have shaken the resolution of the strongest; in spite of the insinuations of the British that they were neglected by their government; in defiance of threats of even harsher treatment, and regardless of promises of food and clothing, but few sought relief from their woes by the betrayal of their honor. And these few went forth into liberty followed by the undisguised contempt of the suffering heroes whom they left behind. It was this calm, unfaltering, unconquerable spirit of patriotism, defying torture, starvation, loathsome disease, and the prospect of a neglected and forgotten grave, which sanctifies to every American heart the scene of their suffering in the Wallabout, and which will render the sad story of the ‘prison-ships ‘ one of ever increasing interest to all future generations. As a footnote to the tragedy, the Brit Commander of the prison ships was charged with war crimes and subsequently hanged.
Eighteen years later, when the community of Vinegar Hill was established, residents were shocked by the skeletal remains of the prison ship victims exposed along the shoreline. During the summer of 1805, local Irish women began collecting the remains when they became exposed or washed ashore. The bones were saved and finally interred in a vault patriotically erected by the Tammany Society. The corner stone of the vault for the bones of the martyred dead, was laid in April, 1808 and marked with a great demonstration, a military and civic parade in the city and artillery salutes. When completed, the bones were re- interred in 13 thirteen coffins, with veterans of the Revolution acting as pall bearers. Stiles records that, The procession, after passing through various streets, reached the East River, where, at different places, boats had been provided for crossing to Brooklyn. Thirteen large open boats transported the thirteen tribes of the Tammany Society, each containing one tribe, one coffin, and the pall-bearers. The scene was most inspiring. At Brooklyn, the procession formed again and arrived at the tomb of the martyrs amidst a vast and mighty assemblage. There was an invocation by Rev. Ralph Williston. The coffins were huge in size and each bore the name of one of the thirteen original states. The first grand sachem of Tammany was William Mooney, a man of Irish extraction and leader of the Sons of Liberty – a patriot society formed before the Revolution. By the 1840s, the monument was in a state of disrepair. In 1873 a large stone crypt was constructed in the heart of what is now Fort Greene Park, and the bones were re-interred therein. A small monument was erected on the hill above the crypt. By the close of the 19th century, funds were raised for a more fitting memorial – a 148 ft. tower which stands today in Fort Greene Park (www.fortgreenepark.org) and was unveiled in 1908 by President Taft. Today, the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial marks the site of a crypt containing the bones of more than 11,500 of America’s prison ship martyrs.
Posted by Jim on
The 26 County President, Michael D Higgins, has dissolved parliament at
the request of Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who has called a general election.
Mr Kenny arrived at around 10.30 and quickly signed the proclamation
formally dissolving parliament. Speaking in Leinster House, the
Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader said that the next parliament would meet
on Thursday March 10th and confirmed that the election would take place
on February 26th.
The Taoiseach and Tanaiste and Labour leader, Joan Burton, posed for
photographs on the steps of Government Buildings as their coalition
government was dissolved. Kenny declared “this is not goodbye” as he
headed for the Aras an Uachtaran, the President’s official residence in
Dublin.
Burton told reporters she’s also confident of being back: “This is
Seachtain Naoimh Bride [St Brigid’s Week] which is also the week of my
own birthday. She was a very powerful woman and role model in early
Irish history and I have to say I am absolutely delighted to be the
first woman leader of the Labour party.”
The most recent opinion poll saw Fine Gael at 30 per cent and Labour at
7 per cent, Fianna Fail at 19 per cent, Sinn Fein at 21 per cent and
Independents/Others at 23 per cent. Political commentators see little
chance of any party holding an overall majority folowing the election,
and speculation over future potential coalitions has dominated news
coverage so far.
It is set to be a short election campaign officially, but the election
announcement had been repeatedly delayed. When it came this morning, it
finally brought an end to a faltering parliament as fewer and fewer TDs
bothered to appear, having already begun canvassing in their
constituencies. Dail proceedings were delayed on occasion because a
quorum of TDs were not present for the normal 9.30am start.
In another controversy, some TDs had erected election posters in
favoured locations ahead of the announcement, in contravention of
littering laws.
Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin complained that there was no
opportunity to pay tribute to retiring members and Sinn Fein’s
Caoimhghin O Caolain described it as “a pathetic end to a pathetic
Dail”.
In a statement, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams outlined the steep cuts to
education, welfare and health brought in by what he said were “some of
the most reprehensible policy decisions ever made by a Government in
this State”.
They have brought chaos to the lives of ordinary citizens, he said, and
another generation had been forced into emigration.
“But now, for the first time since the foundation of this State, there
is an opportunity for real change. I hope they choose for fairness and
for genuine Republican politics. I hope they vote for Sinn Fein.”
Posted by Jim on February 1, 2016
Decrypted classified documents obtained by the Provisional IRA have
shown that a state agent was behind one of the most notorious tragedies
of the conflict, the Shankill Road bomb attack in 1993.
According to a report this morning, a former IRA ‘commander’ in Ardoyne
has been exposed as an informer and double agent working for RUC Special
Branch for more than a decade. Known to Special Branch as ‘AA’, he
cannot be named for legal reasons.
According to the documents, the informer’s handlers were fully informed
of the plan to target the offices used by loyalist death squad leader
Johnny Adair and other UDA leadership figures.
For reasons still unknown the bomb exploded prematurely, killing eight
civilians as well as IRA Volunteer Thomas Begley and injuring his
comrade Sean Kelly. The outcry over the loss of life increased pressure
on the Provisional IRA to call a ceasefire, which they did ten months
later. It also brought about a wave of ‘reprisal’ attacks by loyalists
such as the Greysteel massacre a week later.
The informer in question was identified after the IRA decoded
information from documents taken from inside the Special Branch’s
headquarters at Castlereagh on St Patrick’s Day in 2001. Calls made to
his special branch handlers are logged throughout the documents,
including the information that he carried out the scouting operations
for the attack himself.
He was also involved in numerous other IRA actions at the time he was
working for the RUC. He was quietly replaced by the Provisional Army
Council in 2002, although no explanation was given to the Volunteers
under his control, and continues to live in the Ardoyne area.
The British Crown forces have previously been accused of allowing other
attacks to proceed for their own sinister agenda, such as the devasting
‘Real IRA’ attack in Omagh in 1998. Twenty-nine people died in that
attack after telephoned bomb warnings failed to clear the area around
the bomb. The public outcry led to the organisation calling a ceasefire
three weeks later.
The Police Ombudsman has now been asked to investigate the evidence that
the RUC “could have prevented” the Shankill bomb. The complaint has been
made by a family member of one of the victims, and was lodged on Friday.