Posted by admin on May 6, 2014
I came voluntarily from the Dail in Dublin to Antrim PSNI barracks last
Wednesday having contacted the PSNI two months ago through my solicitor
Seamus Collins, to tell them that I was available to meet them following
yet another spate of media speculation, part of a sustained malicious,
untruthful and sinister campaign alleging involvement by me in the
killing of Mrs Jean McConville.
When the PSNI contacted my solicitor on Monday afternoon I was concerned
about the timing, given that Sinn Fein is involved in very important EU
and local government elections across the island of Ireland.
But I quickly made arrangements to come here and I left Leinster House –
the Oireachtas – and Leaders Questions with the Taoiseach to do so.
I want to thank my solicitor Mr. Seamus Collins for his diligence and
professional approach and his colleague Eugene McKenna.
I also want to thank everyone who has sent goodwill messages to Colette
and our family and to my comrades in Sinn Fein for their solidarity.
Ta me fior bhuioch daoibhse uilig.
I am conscious that there is another family at the heart of this. That
is the family of Mrs Jean McConville.
Let me be very clear. I am innocent of any involvement in any conspiracy
to abduct, kill and bury Mrs McConville.
I have worked hard with others to have this injustice redressed and for
the return of the bodies of others killed and secretly buried by the IRA
and I will continue to do so.
The Commission set up by the two governments at the request of myself,
and the late Fr Alex Reid, has said that it is receiving 100% support
from republicans.
Martin McGuinness and I were actually to meet the Commission around this
time as part of this work.
I am mindful also that tomorrow is the anniversary of the death on
hunger strike of H Block martyr Bobby Sands MP.
Sitting in my cell here in recent days I reflected on that and on the
dreadful summer of 1981.
Of course this is not 1981 or 1972.
The people of this island – with a few exceptions, have carved out a new
dispensation.
So while the past needs to be dealt with – and Sinn Fein is up for doing
this – including the issue of victims and their families, there can be
no going back.
Peace needs to be built with determination and a consistent focus.
That remains my intention and is Sinn Fein’s constant endeavour.
I bear no animosity to anyone. I have no wish to be treated differently
from anyone else.
I am an activist – this is my live and I am philosophical and I
understand that I have detractors and opponents.
I especially understand that there are sinister elements, who are
against the changes Sinn Fein and others are committed to achieving.
I did not come here expecting special treatment but it is crucial that
everyone is treated fairly. I seek fair treatment not only for myself
but because it is crucially important that everyone knows that these are
changed times, that they can and will be treated fairly and that we can
all have hope and confidence in the new developing dispensation,
including the police service.
To send any other signal is to encourage the bigots.
So I make the case that those who authorised my arrest and detention
could have done it differently.
They had discretion.
They did not have to use pernicious coercive legislation to deal with a
legacy issue – even one as serious as this, which I was voluntarily
prepared to deal with.
They did not have to do this in the middle of an election campaign.
Remember I contacted them two months ago.
Despite this I want to make it clear that I support the PSNI.
I will continue to work with others to build a genuinely civic policing
service.
The old guard which is against change whether in the PSNI leadership,
within unionism or the far fringes of republicanism, or the Dark Side of
the British system cannot be allowed to deny any of the people –
Protestant, Catholic or Dissenter – from our entitlement to a
rights-based, citizen-centred society as set out in the Good Friday
Agreement.
I am an Irish republican.
I want to live in a peaceful Ireland based on equality.
I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will but I am
glad that I, and others, have created a peaceful and democratic way
forward for everyone.
The IRA is gone.
During my interrogations much was made by my interrogators about my time
in the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s, my arrest and detention in
Palace Barracks, in Long Kesh and in the peace talks in 1972.
Newspaper articles, photographs of Martin McGuinness and I at Republican
funerals, books and other open source material were used as the basis of
the accusations made against me.
Much of the interrogations concerned the so-called Belfast Project
conceived by Paul Bew, University lecturer and a former advisor to
former Unionist leader David Trimble, and run by Ed Moloney and Anthony
McIntyre as part of Boston College.
Both Moloney and McIntyre are opponents of the Sinn Fein leadership and
our peace strategy and have interviewed former republicans who are also
hostile to me and other Sinn Fein leaders.
These former republicans have accused us of betrayal and sell-out and
have said we should be shot because of our support for the Good Friday
Agreement and policing.
The allegation of conspiracy in the killing of Mrs McConville is based
almost exclusively on hearsay from unnamed alleged Boston College
interviewees but mainly from Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes.
Other anonymous alleged Belfast Project interviewees were identified
only by a letter of the alphabet, eg interview R or Y.
One of these is claimed by the PSNI to be Ivor Bell although the
interrogators told me he has denied the allegations.
I rejected all the allegations made about me in the Boston Tapes.
Finally, let me be clear. There is only one way for our society to go
and that is forward.
Yes deal with the past. Yes deal with victims but the focus needs to be
on the future.
That is the road we are on. There will be bumps in that road. There will
be diversions.
Obstacles will be erected.
We know that.
I thank everyone for their support.
I extend sympathy to the McConville family and all those who have
suffered especially at the hands of republicans.
My resolve remains as strong as ever. It is to build the peace and see
off the sinister forces, who are against equality and justice for
everyone.
Posted by Jim on May 3, 2014
By J O’Toole (for swp.ie)
In a conflict that generated horrific atrocities in abundance, few
delivered more grief to its victims than the murder of widowed
mother-of-ten Jean McConville in December 1972. Looking back more than
forty years later it is almost impossible to fathom the pain that such
atrocities inflicted on families and friends.
And yet the conflict in the North brought misery without end in the
early seventies — 15 civilians were killed in the UVF bombing of McGurk’s
Bar in Belfast in late 1971; British Army massacres in Belfast the same
year and in Derry in January 1972 took 11 and 14 lives respectively; and
a devastating IRA bombing at Claudy just a few months before
McConville’s abduction left 9 dead–and these were but the worst in a
long string of staggering atrocities that accompanied the outbreak of
war in the North.
Jean McConville — a Protestant in a mixed marraige — had moved to Divis in
the Lower Falls area after she and her husband were burnt out of East
Belfast by loyalists. After her abduction by the IRA, McConville’s
surviving family was broken up and her children scattered, some of them
taken into care.
Her son Michael insists that the RUC had information on the 32
year-old’s disappearance within two days, yet the police never attempted
to find her.
Although the British government have gone to extraordinary lengths to
resurrect the case over the past couple of years — pouring huge resources
into bringing a high-profile court case in the US to win access to
interview transcripts and, in the last few weeks, arresting high profile
veteran republicans, including most recently Sinn Fein president Gerry
Adams — the fact is they never even opened a file on McConville until
forced to do so by her family in 1995, almost a quarter century after
her death.
While there are few who will not sympathise with the McConvilles in
their search for the truth, many are understandably cynical about the
British government’s motivation in bringing a case now, within weeks of
Tory NI Secretary of State Teresa Villier’s announcement of a “fresh
approach” to the past that will focus on “the wrongdoing of
paramilitaries” and away from reckoning with the “activities of the
state.”
On one level there is nothing “fresh” or new in this:
David Cameron’s rejection of the call for an independent inquiry into
the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane is only the most well-known
attempt to bury the story of the state’s deep complicity in sectarian
murder, and the notion that state forces have come under some special
scrutiny in recent years is delusional. The new turn is a flagrant
attempt to draw a line under investigations into state terror, though
Villiers reserves the power to prosecute republicans and loyalists as
the needs of the ‘peace process’ dictate.
Facing “dozens of inquests” into Troubles-related killings and with a
string of High Court cases “by victims alleging state collusion in
murder,” London is looking for a way to shut down the search for truth,
not to expand it. It is the convergence of interests between the British
state and the most backward elements in Unionism–exposed for their
scuppering of the recent Haass talks–that explains Villiers’s
declaration.
Villiers’ announcement just a day before Adams’ arrest that she would
block an independent review into the 1972 murder by British paratroopers
of 11 unarmed civilians–including a mother of eight–in Ballymurphy
provides clear evidence of the double standards at play.
“When you will stop harbouring murderers in the ranks of the British
Army?” John Teggart, speaking for their families, asked of David
Cameron. “Never” would be Cameron’s response if he were speaking
honestly, and in this he has the full backing of the British and Irish
establishments. All of this comes within days of the grand hooley at the
Queen’s residence in London, after all, when the Irish elite of all
political stripes–including Sinn Fein–fell over themselves in begging
London’s forgiveness for having once intruded on imperial prerogatives.
In the aftermath of Villiers announcement that there would be no review
of the Ballymurphy murders, Enda Kenny expressed his “disappointment”
with the decision. Such a feeble response is to be expected from the
head of a state which has never pressed the British government to
release its files on the 1974 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, the worst single
atrocity of the Troubles–in which 34 civilians were killed and more than
300 injured in an operation described by an Oireachtas committee as “an
act of international terrorism colluded in by British Security Forces.”
The southern establishment also has a stake in seeing Adams and Sinn
Fein taken down. They face an electoral upheaval as a huge sentiment of
disgust with the Troika parties of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour
unfolds. Up to now Sinn Fein has been the main beneficiary, topping two
out of the three Euro seat polls. A surge to Sinn Fein would not
de-stabilise the state in itself and some of the more perceptive
establishment figures know that they can be eventually co-opted into a
coalition with Fianna Fail and neutered.
By contrast, not a single soldier has ever been identified, let alone
prosecuted for the murder of 11 unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy in 1971
or 14 in Derry early the following year. In some cases Army officers who
presided over the slaughter or who have been proven to have lied through
their teeth were decorated and promoted, and went on to serve out long
careers overseeing counterinsurgency in Iraq and elsewhere. In many
cases involving allegations of RUC collusion, important files have been
burned or gone missing, while veterans of the sectarian force have found
their way back into paid employment in the ‘reformed’ PSNI–even as
‘investigators’ on cases going back to the period of their tenure in the
RUC.
But the break-up of the cosy political club that has dominated Irish
politics since the foundation of the state would still create a major
problem. It would raise the expectations of working people and help
remove the thick cloud of fatalism that has demobilised them. If FF, FG
and Labour were destroyed at the polls, the confidence to fight water
charges and spread the example of resistance from Cork would grow. Enda
Kenny and the entire establishment will gloat over Adams’ arrest not
because they feel any particular sympathy for the McConvilles, but
because it diminishes the threat of an electoral thrashing they so
richly deserve.
Villiers’ call for a “proportionate” focus on paramilitaries reinforces
Unionist complaints that too much attention has been paid to state
violence, but this represents an obscene distortion of the record. For
more than a quarter century the full power of the state was applied to
suppressing what was, in effect, a popular nationalist insurgency in the
North. In the process tens of thousands of young men and women were
jailed and interned, and substantial numbers of them tortured or killed,
in an effort to crush resistance and shore up a repressive, sectarian
state.
The state response to the IRA’s horrific 1978 bombing of the La Mon
hotel (in which 12 people died and dozens suffered severe burns) stands
in sharp contrast, for example, to the official response to Bloody
Sunday. In the immediate aftermath of the La Mon atrocity the RUC
assigned a team of 100 detectives to the case; 25 Republicans were
rounded up for questioning in the days afterward, including Adams. Two
were charged and one individual was sentenced to twelve life sentences.
The British state’s selective approach to the past is not just about
maintaining its control over a staggering peace process that requires
permanent life support in order to survive. The kind of stability that
they seek to preside over for Northern Ireland requires a rendering of
the past that casts them as a neutral party presiding over warring
tribes, and in many ways it is Sinn Fein’s complicity in this charade
that has allowed them to get away with it. If all of this is now coming
back to bite Adams and the SF leadership, they can hardly claim to be
shocked that the state they now help to administer has reverted to a
familiar routine. McGuinness now complains about ‘dark forces’ in the
PSNI, but they did not suddenly appear this week.
The sharp contest over what sparked thirty years of war and over who
will be prosecuted and who will be given a free pass for atrocities
committed during the Troubles is not only about embedding a particular
rendering of the recent conflict that exonerates the state. It is also
about who will shape the future. Regardless of whether the McConvilles
get the answers they deserve over the coming months, the chances of
getting a full and honest accounting of the recent past through a
process overseen by a British government up to its neck in perpetrating
violence are nil. That will only come in the course of a fundamental
challenge to the establishment north and south.
Posted by Jim on May 2, 2014
Why Gerry Adams arrest is a farce and one-sided justice”. Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/Why-Gerry-Adams-arrest-is-a-complete-farce.html#ixzz30VZJQ6JP
While I totally agree with Mr. O’Dowd about the one-sided justice metered out by the British Government, I would like to comment on some of his statements in this article.
In your article you say:
[“The arrest of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams for questioning about the murder in 1972 of Jean McConville is the latest example of the highly selective nature of the prosecution process in Northern Ireland”.]
[“It seems the only alleged crimes being heavily pursued are those on the nationalist side, with little or no attention to atrocities on the other side”.]
I would like to bring to your attention the following:
When Gerry McGeough, an Independent candidate running on an anti-PSNI/RUC platform in the 2007 elections in the north (the first republican arrested (post GFA) on 32 year old alleged troubles related offences dating back prior to the GFA) was arrested, you didn’t call it “selective prosecution”. Mr. McGeough was charged with membership in the IRA at the age of 18 and for allegedly wounding a UDR man Sammy Brush DUP. In fact, as the Chairwoman for the U.S. based Free Gerry McGeough Campaign, your paper refused to publish any letters submitted by me about his case. Your paper even demonized him because he spoke out against supporting the PSNI/RUC at the time Sinn Fein was calling for the nationalist community to support them. Gerry McGeough was one of the architects of the GFA and was on the Board of SF until he left them due to political and religious differences and you labeled him a “dissident” which you knew was far from the truth. His case was truly one of “selective prosecution”.
Ivor Bell, Adams 2nd in command back then, was arrested a few weeks ago on the same charges as Adams, but you didn’t condemn his arrest? Nor did you condemn the arrests of other republicans who have been arrested (post GFA) on decades old charges. This is the first time you are condemning “selective prosecution” since the GFA. Why? Because you practice the same double standards as the British Government. You and your paper are in bed with Sinn Fein and the Irish government, therefore you are biased in your reporting. You use your paper to try to demonize anyone who doesn’t agree with Sinn Fein. You use buzz words in your articles to try to “bully” and “criminalize” them into keeping silent and accepting the status quo or to alienate them.
[“Take a bow BC, Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre – you have done a wonderful job on behalf of British spookdom allowing them to whip up a whole new round of empty charges”.]
By trying to place the blame on the researchers of the Boston College tapes for the arrest of Adams, when clearly it was in
the hands of the British Government, even though they had passed the policing responsibilities on to Stormont (who could have stopped these subpoenas at any time before they got off the ground) you in essence are saying you don’t believe that there should ever be any research compiled regarding the troubles, or any revolutionary movement that has taken place around the world, for that matter, to eventually be used in an academic setting? Pointing the finger at McIntyre and Moloney also indicates that you don’t truly believe in freedom of speech, freedom of academic research, only selective academic research and selective freedom of speech like the kind your paper practices You write articles intended to bully and demonize those who you don’t agree with. If you were really being honest with your readers, you would place the blame for the subpoenas, (even being issued in the first place) where it really belongs; first at the feet of Stormont, the PSNI/RUC and finally the British and American government.
The time has come now, Mr. O’Dowd, to call for an end to ALL pursuit and prosecutions of republicans on prior GFA offences regardless of their political affiliations since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement!
Helen McClafferty
Posted by admin on May 1, 2014
The British Government never fully implemented the Weston Park Accord (paragraph 20) because they didn’t have to. They already knew they never had any intentions of ever prosecuting members of the security forces. On the other hand, they had every intention of arresting, incarcerating and interning republicans (post GFA) on alleged offences committed prior to the GFA and in some cases without charge or trial.
In not fully implementing the WPA, the Brits were able to selectively incarcerate any republicans who spoke out against them, the PSNI/RUC, the DUP, AND it also guaranteed SF that those who opposed them would be silenced (McGeough, for one, as he was the first republican arrested and given a 20 year sentence on 31 year old troubles related charges after the signing of the GFA) thus sending a clear message to others: “Step in line or else”.
Mary Lou McDonald, Gerry Kelly and others within SF are calling Mr. Adams arrest, around election time, “politically motivated”. Well, wasn’t that exactly what happened to Gerry McGeough? Only McGeough, an Independent candidate at the time, was arrested at the count center in Omagh and Sinn Fein never called McGeough’s arrest “politically motivated”.
According to media reports, the interviews recorded on tape of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price cannot be used in court in the McConville case because they are both now deceased? In contrast, the judge in the McGeough trail allowed the taped testimony of deceased witnesses to the alleged shoot-out, between McGeough and Sammy (the “UDR/DUP”) Brush, to be used in court against Mr. McGeough. My, how things can change when you are considered politically correct in the eyes of the Brits.
If Mr. Adams is cleared of any wrong doing in the McConville murder then so should Ivor Bell. In fact, Sinn Fein should take the lead on calling for an immediate end to the charges brought against Mr. Bell by the PSNI/RUC. If the tapes cannot be used in court, then how can the Diplock court justify continuing any prosecution against Mr. Bell without incriminating Mr. Adams, again?
When Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness insisted that the PSNI/RUC march in the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, after the parade committee rescinded their invite to them due to pressure from Irish-American activists, it was a slap in the face to the families of the innocent victims murdered by members of the security forces in collusion with loyalist death squads.
Instead of kissing the arse of the PSNI/RUC, British and Irish government, it would behoove Mr. Adams & Company to be calling for a complete HALT to the continuing pursuit of republicans on prior GFA offences by the PSNI/RUC. One would think that since Mr. Kelly and other members of SF sit on the NI policing board they would have some say in the matter? If the Brits are not holding members of their own security forces (war criminals) accountable for the murder of innocent civilians during the troubles, then why should republicans be held accountable any longer?
It should be realized that Sinn Fein is just as guilty as the Brits for allowing British injustice and double standards to continue to be used in northeast Ireland against republicans while known murderers within the PSNI/RUC, British Army, UDR and loyalists go unpunished. It wouldn’t hurt for the SDLP to step up to the plate on this issue as well.
McClafferty 32
Posted by admin on
The Pensive Quill
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has been arrested in connection with the 1972 disappearance and death of Jean McConville. Despite much political handwringing about never returning to the dark days of the past, pre-peace accord toxicity continues to pollute the present and some, the PSNI among them, are intent on ensuring it remains that way.
Sinn Fein had hoped to play it cutely by having Mr Adams make himself available to meet the PSNI so that the unseemly spectacle of an arrest could be avoided which would surely project the image of the party president as an official suspect at the centre of a police investigation of an action widely regarded as a war crime. The party would have sought to spin the ‘meeting’ as their leader ‘putting manners’ on the police. Any chance of seizing that initiative was lost the minute Mr Adams presented himself at Antrim PSNI station where the PSNI duly placed him under arrest.
The party, stung by the turn of events, has taken to accusing the British police of interfering in the electoral process. Prior to his arrest Adams said he was suspicious of the timing in the midst of an election campaign. It was a line repeated by Gerry Kelly and Mary Lou McDonald last night following his detention and again this morning by Conor Murphy. McDonald in particular is in something of a bind as she had previously welcomed the arrest of Mr Adams’ fellow negotiator at 1972 truce talks in London between the IRA and the British government, Ivor Bell. Sinn Fein is also hoist on its own petard, having agreed to the process of evidence based prosecutions for past conflict activity, even going as far as to abandon a long standing republican demand for amnesty.
Given that the PSNI has since March been arresting others in connection with the McConville investigation, had it postponed the arrest of Gerry Adams until after the elections it could have been accused of political policing.
Yet the detention of Mr Adams is a political arrest for which the PSNI should be robustly rebuked. Its pursuit of the Sinn Fein president oozes political motivation through its pores although not for the reasons stressed by his party. One day before the arrest which was part of an ongoing British police inquiry into IRA activity, the British government slapped down, on the grounds of it contravening public interest, a demand for an inquiry into the 1971 British army massacre of civilians in Mr Adams’ then neighbourhood, West Belfast’s Ballymurphy.
This suggests that even if there is evidence of some sort against Mr Adams, it is not the existence of evidence per se that fuels the drive to prosecute. There is unlikely to be material evidence any more substantive than has previously been available. At the same time the PSNI and British government know the identity of every single member of the British security establishment who killed Irish civilians while on duty. They know the police, prison service and army torturers. They know the state personnel who colluded with loyalist deaths squads in killings such as that of the lawyer Pat Finucane. They are also in possession of the material evidence to prosecute many of these people. In the case of the Ballymurphy massacre they have had the evidence for 43 years and have shown not the slightest inclination to use it.
The family of Jean McConville have every right to know the story behind the abduction, death and disappearance of their mother. All victims of the North’s conflict have the same right to know what happened to their loved ones. The tragedy is that few will get it courtesy of the PSNI making this type of vengeful political arrest.