Posted by Jim on January 21, 2015
Eamonn McCann witnessed the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, when British soldiers killed 14 demonstrators in Derry. He spoke to Judith Orr about the long campaign for justice.
You once wrote that the families of those shot on Bloody Sunday didn’t need to be told the truth – they just wanted the truth to be told. What was it like in the Guildhall when they finally saw the Saville inquiry findings?
I arrived about an hour and a half before the report was made public. I bounded up the grand staircase of Guildhall in Derry to the main hall where there were about 200 members of the families assembled, and you didn’t have to ask them what they thought of the report. Half of the people there were weeping, half had shining smiles on their faces, and then we were just in a frenzy of hugs and backslapping. It was a highly emotional moment, one of the most intense and emotional experiences in my political life.
I was absolutely 100 percent confident that all the dead and wounded would be exonerated and was being rebuked in the days leading up to the publication of the report by other campaigners for taking too much for granted. My certainty was based quite simply on the evidence given to Saville. It became clear that none of the soldiers were seriously claiming that any of the dead and injured had been handling weapons; their consistent account was that they hit innocent people by accident when firing at terrorists. An obvious cock and bull story.
We didn’t have a plan B. As soon as I arrived at the Guildhall I read out to all the families the text of what it was proposed should be said outside. It had been written for days, I had it in my pocket, and we didn’t have to change a word. Had Saville found that some of the dead and wounded had been armed or doing something else which “justified” their shooting, we would have been at a complete loss. Everything in our whole presentation, family by family saying “innocent”, and all the pictures for the big screen had been prepared. Once or twice on the long nights before we thought, “We better have got this fucking right.” But we did. It was great.
How did the family campaign evolve?
The family campaign dates from around 1987. In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday the Civil Rights Association (CRA), which had organised the Bloody Sunday march, organised commemorative marches. By the mid-1970s the CRA had faded from the scene and Sinn Fein started organising the march. But there were families who simply refused to take part either because they disagreed sharply with Sinn Fein or because they didn’t want any political party involved. So it was an unsatisfactory situation.
By the mid to late 1980s the feeling developed that there was no point in Republicans marching the route every year demanding a second inquiry – it would have to be a much broader campaign. The organisation that subsequently became the Bloody Sunday Trust emerged and we began to organise the annual march and to look for wider support. Initially we found very little, but we kept fighting and eventually it became part of conventional wisdom that there had to be a second inquiry.
Winning the second inquiry was an enormous achievement.
The scale of the achievement is difficult to exaggerate because there was the Widgery inquiry in 1972 set up under the 1921 Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act. It was conducted by the Lord Chief Justice no less and he pronounced the “official truth”. Constitutionally speaking it ought to have been utterly impossible to have a second inquiry under the same act into the same event, and when we started the campaign proper 25 years ago nobody at all gave us any encouragement, even in Derry.
President Mary Robinson refused point blank to meet the families. She only agreed to meet them once some went with placards and picketed her official residence. The Catholic cardinal Cahal Daly refused point blank to meet the families. I went to Dublin with the families to launch a book I wrote for them called Bloody Sunday in Derry: What Really Happened. We invited about 30 members of parliament to it in a hotel literally across the street. Only one turned up, an independent, the late Tony Gregory. There wasn’t a single editorial in the Dublin newspapers saying there must be an inquiry until the late 1990s when the thing began to develop a momentum.
After all these years of the struggle for justice can you remember how you felt on Bloody Sunday itself?
On the day it was just like a thunderclap. It took some time after all the killings to quite get it into one’s head what had actually just transpired on the streets. Like many others I spent a couple of hours the night of Bloody Sunday walking from one wake house – houses where people had been killed – to another. There was just constant silent movement around the Bogside and the Creggan area. With one exception everybody came from the same relatively small area. Mickey Bridge, who was wounded, had been a friend of mine from school. The older brother of Hugh Gilmour who died had been in the same class as me in school. Jim Wray was shot in the back as he lay wounded in Glenfada Park – Jim’s father is also a friend of mine, and he and I were on the committee of the local tenants’ association. Willie Nash was killed and his father Alex was wounded on a barricade. I knew the Nash family – everybody in Derry would have known them.
So it was not just the atrocity that had just been committed: these are people you’d be running around with and in and out of their houses as a child. It was a wound inflicted on a whole community.
There is a whole younger generation of activists and trade unionists who will not be familiar with the outpouring of solidarity that came from workers in the following days.
There was a huge reaction immediately afterwards. Dockers blacked British ships on the east coast of the US which caused great consternation. At one point in the week after Bloody Sunday the general secretary of the TUC – Vic Feather – came over and met with Derry trade unionists in a room above a pub to ask them to tell the US dockers that Derry trade unionists didn’t want them to strike because it was damaging! The trade union movement disgraced itself in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday.
There was a mass upsurge in solidarity and anger in Southern Ireland, and the highlight of that was the burning of the British embassy in Merrion Square in Dublin. The police stood aside and let it happen because they realised that that was the popular will and had they tried to stop it there would have been incalculable consequences.
The Dublin government was terrified. In the immediate aftermath of the killing a general strike was called. The march that burned the British embassy was called and led by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, a rank and file trade union group. The strike covered the whole of Southern Ireland. Nothing moved. Every airport was closed, the post was closed, no buses ran, no trains ran, no factories opened, pubs and shops were closed, for two full days.
On the second day of the action government ministers began declaring their support for it and called it a period of mourning. It wasn’t mourning – it was a strike – but the politicians wanted to transform it into that.
The victory is that the Saville report shows the dead and injured were innocent. But what does it say about who is to blame?
To get to some of the interesting stuff in Saville you have to get to the main body of the report, and that’s a daunting task as it is over 5,000 pages long. But it does reward. Some of Saville’s conclusions seem to be unsustainable. It is a highly political and deeply flawed report.
Saville exonerates senior British army officers in defiance of the evidence simply by stating that they’re innocent. The main person criticised is Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, the commander of the first battalion of the Paras on the day. Of course he was a commander and was on the ground, and he deserves all that can be thrown at him, but above him was Major General Robert Ford, who was commander of land forces in the North. It was Ford who decided to bring the Paras from Belfast to send them into Derry. He had written memos in the previous couple of weeks after a visit to Derry talking about the need to go in hard in the Bogside. He was very critical of the garrison regiments in Derry and said they were useless and namby-pamby and that the police chief, Frank Lagan, was far too sympathetic to the Bogside and so forth.
Ford wanted someone to go in and teach the hooligans a lesson. He said that selected ringleaders of the rioters and hooligans in Derry should be shot. Ford says all that on 7 January 1972. He then sends the Paras into Derry.
Saville sees no significance in this, and just takes Ford’s word that he had no reason to believe that the Paras were going to behave improperly in Derry. But Ford would have known the reputation of the Paras; he would have known that they killed 11 people in Ballymurphy the previous August. It’s just nonsense that he had no idea that the Paras would behave in a reckless and unjustifiable way.
If you go on down the chain of command something terribly interesting happens. Below Ford was Wilford and he gets a kicking from the report. Below Wilford there is Captain Mike Jackson, who subsequently became General Sir Michael Jackson, chief of the general staff and Nato commander in the Balkans. He was number two to Wilford and was on the ground in the Bogside. You would think that if Wilford was responsible for this unacceptable behaviour his underling, Jackson, must share some of the blame. But not at all. You bypass Jackson and come to the people below him, the soldiers on the ground, and they are all attacked by the report.
Jackson wasn’t a senior officer at the time, but he was soon to become a very senior officer indeed, and Saville lets him off the hook. Jackson had copied out in his own handwriting the “shot list” – lies purporting to be an account of what had happened. And he is exonerated. There are a number of things like that in the report. It’s much less favourable to people on the ground than initial reaction would suggest.
It was obviously much too politically dangerous to have Jackson carry the can at all.
There’s Major Ted Loden who prepared this shot list, which is totally inaccurate because some of the shots he describes would have had to go through brick walls to hit their targets. It’s nonsense. But in the report, “We are satisfied that Major Loden prepares his list in good faith and not for the purpose of deliberate deception or cover-up to place the army in good light.”
Saville talks about the difficult circumstances under which the list was prepared, the cramped and dark quarters, the unavailability of some soldiers, their unfamiliarity with the area. Those may be relevant factors, but at the end of the day he got it completely wrong and those lies were distributed around the world by British information services. The official propaganda unit wired every British embassy and consulate with that shot list. It became the basis of the cover-up and all Saville has got to say is that circumstances were very difficult. Loden passed this shot list on to Jackson, Jackson then wrote it out in the middle of the night. He then had to pass it on to army headquarters in London from where it was disseminated. Jackson then gave evidence in October 2003 in London to the tribunal in which he said he had no memory at all of any of this, couldn’t remember a thing.
Jackson was in the Bogside when all this shooting was going on around him and didn’t see any of it. Mike Jackson gets off the hook. Such is the nerve of the British ruling class and its military associates that immediately after David Cameron had sat down after announcing the Saville inquiry’s findings the BBC had Jackson on, responding and acting as if he was a suitable person and not a contemptible liar.
It would be very cynical to think that the reason for this resounding victory for the families is that the establishment and the ruling class hoped the cheers would drown out any criticism. Though incidentally it was widely reported that it was amazing to hear this nationalist crowd in Derry, if that’s how they can be described, cheering a British prime minister up on the big screen. Martin McGuinness, and others who have made their peace with imperialism, went round saying Cameron did a great job.
But the reason people were cheering was because they had forced Cameron to say the things he said. It was a shout of triumph and not applause for Cameron. The biggest cheer of the day was at about 3.20pm when people saw at one of the windows of the Guildhall this little hand with a wristband around it, which identified the person as a member of one of the families, just turning their thumb up.
Part of the black propaganda that went out about the day included the claim that the bodies of the “real terrorists” shot by the Paras had been secretly spirited away.
It’s an utterly ludicrous story of course, the idea that their family told the neighbours that “Oh, he’s got a job in England” to explain someone’s sudden disappearance. It was madness, but it shows how difficult it was to account for what happened.
The cover-up included the destruction of the rifles used on the day, didn’t it?
That was much later, yes. The MoD were informed that five rifles which had been identified by Saville’s officials as having been used on Bloody Sunday were to be preserved as evidence. They were bagged and directed to be held securely. Nevertheless when Saville came back for them they had disappeared.
There were also ten British army photographers on duty on Bloody Sunday taking pictures, for historical record but also to identify rioters to be arrested later. Not a single photograph survived. If they had a photograph of someone pointing a gun from the crowd that would have been preserved. The reason the photos disappeared was because they would have shown a very extensive record, minute by minute, of what happened and they would not have borne out the British army story. Film taken from a helicopter also disappeared.
The forensic evidence introduced in the original Widgery tribunal was shown by Saville to have been fraudulent – not mistaken, fraudulent. So alongside senior British officers, senior civil servants and politicians you also had forensic scientists involved in the cover-up. The entire establishment came together to tell the world a lie about Bloody Sunday.
Why did they do it? Was it to show they could crush Derry or was it about propping up Stormont?
I think the military were not particularly concerned about shoring up Stormont. I sat day after day waiting for evidence of a memo or some statement to the tribunal which said, “Well, we had to preserve Brian Faulkner’s government at Stormont.” They didn’t say that at all. In fact the attitude of the military people towards the Unionists in Northern Ireland was almost contemptuous. To suggest that Bloody Sunday happened because of a perceived necessity to shore up the Unionist government is to try and put Bloody Sunday into the context of the preferred narrative about the Northern Troubles – with Catholics and Protestants fighting one another and the British army just there to hold the ring between them.
Everything was put down to the internal dynamics of this twisted society of Northern Ireland, but this was a very British atrocity by the British army, with the deliberate support of politicians. One of the strongest things in the minds of British officers, in the memos that have been published and the minutes of the joint security committee meetings, was their outrage at the existence of Free Derry, from which the forces of the state had been excluded. General Ford was quivering with anger that this existed and thought the British army officers on the spot, the garrison regiments in Derry, weren’t taking a sufficiently hard line. He felt this was an insult to Britain and its army.
So outrage that working class people had taken control of their lives and cut themselves off from the authority of the state was a major motivation for sending in the Paras.
Where do the families go from here? Do you think there will be prosecutions?
I think it is very unlikely, even when they found that somebody has been shot who was entirely unarmed and innocent, for example Jackie Duddy who was 17 years old and the first person shot dead on Bloody Sunday. He is the young guy whose body is being dragged away in that iconic photograph with the priest waving the handkerchief. We know exactly where he was when he was shot, that he was shot by a bullet fired from the other end of a car park, and that he ran away and was shot in the back. But there were three soldiers shooting in that space. Any one of them could have shot Jackie. So how could you prove within reasonable doubt that it was soldier A rather than soldier B? I’m just being practical about whether you would actually get the case into court. One of the reasons you can’t tell who fired the fatal shot is that all three of those soldiers perjured themselves about what they were doing, the shots they did fire and what they were aiming at.
Saville is very clear and quite trenchant about the perjured nature of their evidence. But should they have to bear all the responsibility? You’re reminded of Rudyard Kipling writing that the rank and file Tommy Atkins pays the price while senior officers continue with their dinner.
Some of the families do want prosecutions, and present the simple argument that when the state guns down an innocent citizen that’s a crime and whoever did it on behalf of the state ought to be charged with murder. If you don’t you are putting a cheaper price on the life of that person than would be put on a person who was murdered in any other circumstances. That’s a very sound argument. I think myself that the punishment for Bloody Sunday should go a lot higher than the grunts on the ground.
The Saville inquiry was portrayed as part of the Peace Process, as a way to bring “closure”.
The Saville report was used in an orchestrated way to try to give the British government a soft landing. The content of Cameron’s speech had been signalled to Nationalist politicians in the North of Ireland in advance. On the morning of the report Cameron let Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach in the South, know what was going to be said. So everybody could make their matching statements. Of course this collusion is also what happened during the negotiations of the Peace Process. Then the IRA actually saw statements which were to be made by Tony Blair in the Commons before they were made, and we have the word of Jonathan Powell that on occasion senior British officials, including “security officials”, helped to write IRA council statements.
People have called the Saville inquiry a staging post on the way to reconciliation. What are we talking about? If we mean reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant people that’s absolutely grand. Some of us, particularly socialists, have wanted that for a long time. But what politicians really mean is for people to reconcile themselves to authority and to the nature of the state. That’s a different sort of reconciliation. To see the Bloody Sunday event as a way of reconciling people to the British political establishment is a wee bit cheeky.
The proper questions we should be asking are, what does the report say about the British army? What does it say about the nature of Britain’s role in Northern Ireland? What does it say about Britain’s role in Afghanistan? These are the questions that ought to be asked.
Posted by Jim on January 19, 2015
Martin Galvin, a co-founder of Noraid which funded the IRA, says the popular appetite for republican violence has receded
A hardline Irish-American backer of the IRA, who was once banned from
Northern Ireland by Margaret Thatcher’s government, has said the conditions no longer exist for dissident republicans to continue their “armed struggle”.
Martin Galvin, a co-founder of Noraid and later a bitter critic of Sinn Féin’s peace strategy, is the latest voice within dissident republicanism to call into question the use of violence by the new
IRA and other anti-ceasefire paramilitaries.
The New York-based lawyer said he was an unapologetic supporter of Provisional IRA violence during the Troubles. But Galvin – the public face of the Provisionals in the US for several decades – said there was a lack of support for armed struggle within the republican community at present.
“You would need a sufficient popular acceptance or acquiescence in the use of force in nationalist areas, or at minimum in republican heartlands. You will not get such support until political alternatives fail and are seen to have failed,” he said in an interview with the Guardian.
“You must have the personnel, resources and support network to sustain a campaign. There must be a well-developed political strategy in which armed struggle is only one part. Republicans had the capacity to sustain a long campaign across the north [of Ireland] which could not have been done without meeting these conditions.
“I have no inside information about any armed group and do not pretend to have any special knowledge or expertise in this area. I am making a personal judgment based upon information publicly available. It does not seem that these conditions exist today.”
In 1997 the Provisional IRA split with a minority faction opposed to further political compromises, which broke away to form the Real IRA. At the time Galvin broke with Sinn Féin and openly supported Real IRA figures including its founder, Michael McKevitt.
The former spokesman for Noraid also admitted there was a debate going on within the armed anti-ceasefire groups about the efficacy of using violence. “I would expect and believe that the leaders of any armed republican group are evaluating their own capabilities in relation to these same conditions and making a pragmatic as well as moral judgment on whether their campaigns are advancing the objective of ending British rule and uniting Ireland.”
The recent election of independent republican candidates to local councils in Northern Ireland was an encouraging sign, Galvin said. “The issues are there to be raised. The unionists have Jim Allister as the
Traditional Unionist Voice tail that wags the Democratic Unionist party dog. Could independent republicans do the same?
“Suppose an independent republican made a real issue of the crown arresting Ivor Bell [a former IRA negotiator] and other republicans on decades-old charges, while drip feeding the Bloody Sunday families with empty promises of still more investigations. Could Sinn Féin take up a call to walk away from its justice ministry compromise or [police] constabulary boards? Could it afford not to do so and be seen as party to such injustices? Could it still get away with lip-service?” he asked.
“It should be remembered that not so many years ago the SDLP scoffed at the idea of Sinn Féin ever winning seats and taunted them with questions about having no support and being afraid to contest elections.
“The openings are there if independent republicans have the political will, commitment and strategy to make proper use of them.”
In August 1984 the Thatcher government banned Galvin from entering Northern Ireland but he defied the ban, turning up at a republican rally in west Belfast. When Royal Ulster Constabulary riot squad officers tried to arrest him outside a Sinn Féin office there were violent clashes. During the disturbances a policeman fired a plastic baton round into the chest of a local man, Sean Downes, who later died from his injuries. In 1989 Galvin again tried to defy the ban but this was time was arrested and deported to the US.
The ex-Noraid publicity director and former editor of the pro-
PIRA newspaper the Irish People is the third major figure in the disparate dissident republican family to call for a halt to the armed campaigns of the new IRA, Continuity IRA and Oglaigh na hEireann.
The Guardian has also obtained a taped conversation between a leading dissident republican, the late Tony Catney, and members of the Presbyterian church in Belfast. On the tape Catney reveals his own doubts about ongoing “armed struggle”.
Catney, who after breaking with Sinn Féin became an influential figure within dissident republicanism, tells Fitzroy Presbyterian church in Belfast it is time to admit that the IRA lost the war it fought from 1969 to the ceasefires of the mid-1990s.
In the interview, Catney is particularly scathing about romantic portrayals by some of his former comrades of the Troubles and the armed campaign. “I think part of the dilemma we face at the minute is because the conflict, the war, the Troubles, whatever term you want to put upon it has been so fudged that it has become an old black and white newsreel. Which isn’t really real and didn’t have consequences.
“It was a ‘bit of craic’ to burn buses on the Falls Road; it was a ‘bit of craic’ to barricade yourself into the area so the Brits couldn’t get in; it was a ‘bit of craic’ to hijack the local bread lorry and then give the bread out free to the residents. It was all ‘craic’ and fun because the consequences of it are not openly dealt with,” he tells the Presbyterians.
The convicted IRA killer, who served 16 years in prison for shooting a Protestant teenager during an attempt to steal the victim’s shotgun in 1974, tells his interviewer from the church that there exists a “potent mix” of continued social deprivation and the mythologising of the conflict.
“There is the mystique of ‘let’s-get-back-to-the-early-70s’, let’s-get-back-to-getting-the-balaclavas on’ … it becomes Robin Hood, resistance in the second world war and it also becomes glorification, the jingoism rather than someone turning around and saying: ‘Look, listen, let me tell you I was involved in it and I wish, I wish it had been otherwise.’”
The tape was made last January and only handed to the Guardian after Catney was buried with full paramilitary honours in August. His interview was part of an engagement between mainstream and dissident republicans and members of the Protestant churches, facilitated by a Belfast Catholic priest. The talks are aimed partly at persuading hard-line republicans opposed to Sinn Féin’s peace strategy to abandon armed campaigns.
Earlier in 2014 Gerard Hodgins, Catney’s close personal friend and an IRA hunger striker, also called publicly on the three armed republican organisations to declare ceasefires and create the space for “alternative republican politics”. Hodgins, also a critic of Sinn Féin, told the dissident groups: “The tactics and strategy they are trying to develop are tactics and strategy that we tried, but which failed: the British can deal with these frames of reference. There is also no popular support for armed insurrection and, without a support base, armed insurrection is irresponsible.”
from The Guardian
HENRY McDONALD INTERVIEW
1-Can you elaborate on why you say the conditions do not exist for the continuation of armed struggle at this time?
My views about armed struggle are no secret. When I joined Irish Northern Aid, decades ago, I took a considered decision to join an organization whose guiding principles included moral support for the armed struggle to end British rule. For more than fifteen years as INA Publicity Director I gave interviews and speeches, and also as Editor of the IRISH PEOPLE weekly newspaper, wrote editorials and columns defending this viewpoint.
Just last month I spoke in Tyrone at the 25 year commemoration of my closest friend Liam Ryan. He was a victim of a ‘collusion murder’ arranged by crown forces as he worked in the Battery Bar. I did not go to demean his life and legacy by any ‘sorry’ initiative, but to remember a patriot with pride. I recounted the British injustices which drove him and so many others to armed resistance to break British rule and establish a 32 county Ireland that could belong equally to all of its citizens without sectarian divisions.
Obviously anyone who ever believed armed struggle against British rule was justified, must have been convinced that British rule was wrong, irreformable and could only be maintained, indeed propped up by deeper injustices. That argument can still be made despite the reconfiguration of British rule. Today Britain is determined to stay in the north and confident they nailed the door shut on Irish reunification by sanctioning the DUP to treat any moves toward justice like toilet paper.
However beyond the injustice of British rule there must be a reasonable possibility of successfully ending British rule and achieving a free and united Ireland. This means a reasonable expectation that the struggle, as part of an array of political and economic forces, can convince Britain to leave, after negotiations where they are persuaders for Irish unity with guarantees of equality, instead of guarantors of continued British rule and persuaders for unionist intransigence.
You would need a sufficient popular acceptance or acquiescence in the use of force in nationalist areas, or at minimum in Republican heartlands. You will not get such support until political alternatives fail and are seen to have failed. You must have the personnel, resources and support network to sustain a campaign. There must be a well developed political strategy in which armed struggle is only one part. Republicans had the capacity to sustain a long campaign across the north which could not have been done without meeting these conditions.
I have no inside information about any armed group and do not pretend to have any special knowledge or expertise in this area. I am making a personal judgment based upon information publicly available. It does not seem that these conditions exist today.
2-In your own opinion, do you think those groups involved in armed action should call off those campaigns?
I would expect and believe that the leaders of any armed Republican group are evaluating their own capabilities in relation to these same conditions and making a pragmatic as well as moral judgment on whether their campaigns are advancing the objective of ending British rule and uniting Ireland.
3-Do you think that a tactical cessation at this time would enable the emergence of alternative Republican politics?
Clearly there are issues which provide openings for alternative Republican politics. There is an inherent contradiction between partnership with the DUP in British ministries and advancing Republican objectives. Look at justice issues for a start. I accept that there were people who did not join constabulary boards and partnerships or back David Ford’s justice ministry intending to become cheerleaders for the constabulary. Today that constabulary carries out the same policy of undeclared immunity or impunity gifted to the Bloody Sunday or Ballymurphy Massacre Troopers or those who arranged hundreds of collusion murders. That constabulary meanwhile has no difficulty in moving against respected Republicans like Ivor Bell, Gerry McGeough, Seamus Kearney and others on decade’s old charges.
Are those who took up places on these boards unwilling or unable to do anything about these injustices? The British certainly use them as cheerleaders, pointing to them to deflect any Irish- American pressure about these injustices.
Look at the Tory cuts bludgeoned through by David Cameron and Theresa Villiers. Why has so much already been spent on water meters for the north if they are not going to be used? Where are the peace dividend jobs for West Belfast and across the north beyond slots for party workers?
The universal response to these and other potential issues seems to be that if you raise such inconvenient truths you want a “return to the past.” That is just code words to scare voters by falsely linking votes for any Independent Republican with an armed campaign.
I would expect and believe that leaders of any armed Republican group are taking this on board as they make their own pragmatic and moral judgments whether their campaigns are advancing the objective of ending British rule and uniting Ireland.
4-You make reference to emerging support for alternative/independent Republican representatives in Ireland, say for example in Derry. Do you see hope of that force building?
The issues are there to be raised. The unionists have Jim Allister as the TUV tail that wags the DUP dog. Could independent Republicans do the same?
Suppose an Independent Republican made a real issue of the crown arresting Ivor Bell and other Republicans on decades old charges, while drip feeding the Bloody Sunday families with empty promises of still more investigations. Could Sinn Fein take up a call to walk away from its justice ministry compromise or constabulary boards? Could it afford not to do so and be seen as party to such injustices? Could it still get away with lip-service?
If issues like the lack of peace dividend jobs or the money spent for water meters were raised by Republicans such questions could no longer be deflected or dismissed as unionist point –scoring.
It should be remembered that not so many years ago the SDLP scoffed at the idea of Sinn Fein ever winning seats and taunted them with questions about having no support and being afraid to contest elections.
The openings are there if Independent Republicans have the political will, commitment and strategy to make proper use of them.
5-I assume you still hold the position that the current SF leadership’s policy of being in a British backed power sharing government is not going to deliver a British withdrawal and a united Ireland?
The British have no such illusions about any such strategy. David Cameron formulates twenty-five year plans for the six county economy. His priority in the Stormont House deal was bludgeoning through cuts on the road to austerity. Theresa Villiers, like a modern Lady Macbeth, walks around trying to rub away the bloodstains from British hands by denying inquiries and giving speeches whitewashing the record of British forces in the six counties.
They would not bother unless Britain planned to stay. Republicans may have thought they had an agreement which would open the door to a British withdrawal. Britain sees it as a chance to nail that door shut.
Britain need no longer answer for its own injustices. It can simply nod as the DUP treats any move towards justice, much less a united Ireland like toilet paper. The British then say it is a devolved matter or the parties will not agree, while denying funds and disclaiming any responsibility. The British deflect any Irish-American pressure by saying that Sinn Fein supports their policies and is integral to their administration and constabulary boards.
Where is there any pressure for British withdrawal? They feel they have consolidated their strategic objectives of normalization, Ulsterization and criminalization as never before, masked by Sinn Fein’s visible presence.
6-Do you think-at present at least-that the armed Republican groups are being ground down and thwarted in large part by British forces arguably as never before?
I have no special knowledge about what is happening inside of any armed Republican group. I would be hesitant to make any assessment in those terms. I can still remember one of Villiers’ predecessors, Roy Mason, boasting of squeezing out Republicans like a tube of toothpaste. I would not want to risk sounding so foolish.
Posted by Jim on January 18, 2015
An investigation into the destruction of evidence in a Crown force
murder ambush has been announced just weeks after the reported death of
the deputy head of the police Special Branch who was central to its
destruction.
On Wednesday, the chief Crown Prosecutor in the Six Counties, Barra
McGrory, announced that he had asked for a police investigation into the
circumstances surrounding the destruction of evidence in the 1982 Crown
forces killing of 17-year-old Michael Tighe and the wounding of Martin
McCauley, then aged 19.
The PSNI has agreed to investigate whether the MI5 and the (then RUC)
Special Branch colluded to falsify records and carry out the destruction
of vital evidence.
The investigation is to concentrate on the role played by the former
deputy head of Special Branch in the disappearance of a copy of a
recording made inside a hayshed in Lurgan November 1982, where the
shooting took place.
The hayshed had been under surveillance, but a recording of the incident
was destroyed within 24 hours of the shooting, allegedly on his orders.
However, it is understood that the former RUC boss died in November
following a lengthy illness, a fact which will greatly hamper any
genuine investigation.
A second copy of the tape made by MI5 was kept secret during McCauley’s
original trial and was also destroyed, two and a half years later.
The bugging operation was discovered when John Stalker, the former
deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, conducted his probe
into allegations that the RUC was operating a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of
planned assassinations and ambushes.
McCauley successfully appealed his conviction last year. His lawyers
said had the tape been presented in evidence it would have backed his
claim that the RUC issued no warnings before opening fire.
It was also alleged during McCauley’s appeal that the deputy head of
Special Branch also ordered monitor logs to be destroyed because of the
“deep embarrassment” they might cause the force.
Sinn Fein’s John O’Dowd welcomed the launch of an investigation.
“They were two innocent young boys who were shot by the RUC in a hayshed
in Armagh in 1982, with Michael Tighe being shot dead,” he said.
“It has already been made public that potential evidence was destroyed
and facts surrounding the shooting concealed and it is absolutely right
this is investigated further.
“As well as this case, the deaths of five other men who lost their lives
in a series of shoot-to-kill operations carried out by the RUC in Armagh
1982 should also be properly investigated.
“More than three decades after these shootings the families are still
waiting for truth and justice and this is unacceptable.”
Posted by Jim on
by James O’Shea
Tens of thousands of young Irish American men and women between 18 and 26 may have the opportunity to spend up to ten free days in Ireland learning about Irish culture and history – if a proposed government initiative gets off the ground. The Irish Times reports that Minister for the Diaspora Jimmy Deenihan has outlined proposals for “an orientation course on what it is to be Irish” for young people with a connection to Ireland, “similar to the Israel Taglit-Birthright scheme which has seen more than 400,000 young Jewish people visit Israel over the past 15 years.” The idea was first framed by Irish American leaders.
The Deenihan proposal is part of a broader package that also addresses issues such a emigrant voting rights.
The Israeli program, founded in 1999, sends young men and women of Jewish origins to Israel for a ten day immersion in the language, culture, history and modern day life of Israel. To date over 400,000 young adults from all over the world have taken part in Birthright, which began as the initiative of two philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, who shared the belief that it was “the birthright of all young Jews to be able to visit their ancestral homeland.” Participants have come from 66 countries, all 50 U.S. States and Canadian provinces, and from nearly 1,000 North American colleges and universities. To be eligible, applicants must be between the ages of 18 and 26, have graduated from high school, have at least one Jewish parent, and identify as Jewish. Those who have been on prior educational trips to Israel or who have spent more than three months there since the age of 12 are not eligible, and Israeli citizens or those who were born there may only apply if they left Israel before the age of 12. An Irish outreach program would likely involve a similar blend of private philanthropy and government funding and would provide a powerful new linkage between the Irish Diaspora and Ireland at a time when there is much discussion about the future. IrishCentral spoke with Birthright participants to get a sense of how Ireland could model its initiative on the program and what it could do differently. Most lauded the degree of planning involved and the effort made to allow participants to see as much of the country as possible. “The trip was well planned and covered (as in miles) so much of the country. We saw the nature, the culture and the religion all in a week and a half,” said Hana Itkis, a playwright who went on Birthright seven years ago. “I met some amazing people and after spending ten hours on the bus with them for the first couple of days, it already felt as though we were longtime friends. The night we slept in the desert was by far the most memorable evening for me. We camped outside in Bedouin tents, cooked dinner and ran around like wild children. We played music and fell asleep under the stars,” she recalled. In addition to displaying the idyllic and historic aspects of Israel, including Herod’s Temple, the Wailing Wall, and the desert fortress Masada, they said that the trip also exposed them to some of the harsher realities. Lauren Taylor, a 26-year-old film/TV freelancer in Brooklyn, went on Birthright in January 2014 with friends she’d known since the age of 13. “We went to the West Bank border and saw the extremely intimidating security checkpoints regular people have to go through to and from work everyday, or not – sometimes the gates aren’t open and they just can’t get through to the other side,” she said. “It was hard to see and it’s still hard to understand. Being exposed to these things forced me to examine and question the past and to keep hope for the future.” A few past participants who identified as Jewish more culturally than religiously said they found the religious emphasis of Birthright a challenge. “The trip would have been incredible if it wasn’t so focused on religious conversion. The guide should have taken a step back from pushing her views onto us,” Itkis shared. “I think just by exploring and talking to some of the locals I gained a better sense of what the country was going through, rather than sitting in a circle and discussing whether or not I would shoot down a child running at me with a bomb. But the general consensus seems to be that the program offers a small taste of everything Israel has to offer. “It felt like we were constantly getting on the bus and off of it and I could have spent days at the Dead Sea, not just a mere 3 hours. I wanted to sink my teeth into it,” Taylor said. But then again, that may be just the point. “I guess they want that, so you go back,” she added. It also provides a unique chance for young American Jews to bond with each other and with their Israeli counterparts. Michelle Ronay, a lawyer in Chicago, went on Birthright five years ago when she was 21 and found the experience to be so positive that she still volunteers with an afiliated organization. “I loved Birthright and overall,” she said. “For me, the best parts of the trip were being able to talk and bond with the young Israelis who accompanied us. We were able to ask them probing questions about Israel’s politics, religion, culture, etc and likewise, they were fascinated by our American culture. Naturally we didn’t agree on every topic, but I think Birthright is very smart to have Israelis accompany Americans on the trips. It does a great job driving home the sense of the diaspora yet also reminding us of the similarities we share. “Not only are you ultimately bonding with Israelis who are your age, you are also bonding with other American Jews. For many people on the program, it was the first time they ever got to be with other Jews and not feel like a minority.”
