SAOIRSE32

An Phoblacht

Frank Stagg dies on hunger strike - Remembering the Past

BY SHANE Mac THOMÁIS

Frank Stagg (click for larger view)

On 12 February 1976, 29 years ago, Frank Stagg died on hunger strike in Wakefield jail in England.

Frank Stagg, of Hollymount, County Mayo, came from a long line of Irish republicans. His father had fought in both the Tan War and the Civil War on the republican side. By the 1970s, Frank, who like so many from the West of Ireland had emigrated to England, worked as a bus conductor in North London. He joined Sinn Féin in Luton in 1972 and shortly afterwards joined the IRA.

In April 1973, he was arrested in Coventry and charged under the 19th Century Conspiracy Laws, which were used to convict all members of an IRA unit of the same crime, regardless of degree of involvement — so that a driver could be charged with a shooting or an unarmed man with possession of a gun carried by another man.

Frank Stagg and six others were convicted of conspiracy to commit arson. He was given a ten-year sentence.

Frank was taken first to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, where, demanding that he was a political prisoner, he refused prison work and was frequently punished with solitary confinement. In March 1974, having been moved to Parkhurst Prison, he and fellow Mayo man Michael Gaughan joined a hunger strike begun by the Price sisters in Brixton and their comrades Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, demanding repatriation to Ireland.

All were force fed by the authorities, despite the fact that such inhumane methods were being condemned by Amnesty International and the Court of Human Rights. The Price sisters, Kelly, and Feeney succeeded in achieving repatriation to the Six Counties but Stagg and Gaughan were refused.

Frank suffered force feeding for 70 days, a barbarous procedure that took the life of Michael Gaughan. Following Michael Gaughan’s death, negotiations were begun and the hunger strike was called off. But the talks were a trick to halt the strike and prevent further highly publicised deaths.

Instead of meeting the demands, the authorities moved Frank to a solitary confinement punishment cell, where he remained under 23-hour lockdown. He was allowed no furniture, radio, newspapers or cigarettes, and prevented from sleeping by a bright light burning in his cell day and night.

In Wakefield Prison, on 14 December 1975, Frank Stagg began his fourth and final hunger strike, with the demand again for repatriation. Frank battled against starvation for 62 days before he died on 12 February 1976. He last request was “to be buried next to my republican colleagues and my comrade, Michael Gaughan”.

Michael Gaughan had been buried in Ballina, County Mayo, with republican honours, which had embarrassed the then Fine Gael/Labour Government under Liam Cosgrave. Now they faced the prospect of another high-profile funeral of another Irishman who had died in an English prison while they had sat back and done nothing.

The plane carrying the coffin was diverted from Dublin, where Stagg’s widow and friends were waiting, to Shannon, and the body was hijacked by 26-County security forces. It was taken by helicopter to the cemetery at Ballina and buried in a hastily arranged plot and covered over in concrete. A 24-hour guard was place to prevent the family and from exhuming the coffin. A Requiem Mass was allowed to the family, but they boycotted it in protest at not being allowed to have the funeral that Frank wanted.

The following Sunday, the Republican Movement held its own ceremony at the Republican Plot, despite a massive police presence. A volley was fired and following an oration by Joe Cahill, a solemn pledge was made that Frank’s body would be moved to lie beside his comrades in accordance with his wishes.

Some six months later, when the guard had been removed, since the expense could not have been justified indefinitely, a party of IRA Volunteers tunnelled into the concrete under cover of darkness and buried him as he wished, next to Michael Gaughan.

The practice of hunger striking has deep roots in Irish culture. The ancient Irish under the Brehon Laws would use self-inflicted starvation as a means of discrediting someone who had done them wrong, as would unpaid poets or trades people, who would camp outside the home of an unjust patron and begin a hunger striking ritual until their wrongs were righted or their debts paid.

To fast on or against a person was called ‘Troscad’; and to fast to achieve justice was called ‘Senchus Mór’. If the striker died, the accused would suffer societal ostracism and would have to pay compensation to the dead person’s family.

Since 1917, 22 republicans have been let die on hunger strike by British and Free State forces.

Belfast Telegraph

For survivors, Dresden is still an ‘open wound’ 60 years on

By Tony Paterson
12 February 2005

Rudolf Eichner produces a blackened chess piece from the pocket of a tattered shoulder-bag. His attempt to give an “objective” account of what happened to him in Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945 fails before it has even started. Big shiny tears well up in his pale blue eyes.

Years after that terrible night, which he spent huddling for shelter from the savage air raid and the firestorm that razed 75 per cent of Dresden and killed 35,000 people, Mr Eichner, now 80, found the chess piece - a knight. It was on the small patch of ground where he had endured the onslaught.

“It is the only thing I managed to salvage from the bombing and every time I look at it I am overcome by emotions I can’t control,” he confessed this week.

In February 1945, Mr Eichner had recently returned from the Russian front. The 20-year-old machine gunner was billeted at a military hospital in a converted school in Dippoldiswalde Street, about a mile from the city centre, and was recovering from his wounds. “My father and I were chess players,” he recalled. “My father brought his chess set to the hospital to help me while away the time. When the bombing started, I just thought I must hang on to the chess set.”

In the end, only the board was any use - for beating out the flames on his and his companions’ heads and, when all their hair had burned, to put out the flames on their clothes and skin.

By Dresden standards, Mr Eichner was better equipped than most to cope with the raid. His hospital had a team of trained fire fighters and he and his wounded comrades survived the first wave of bombing almost unscathed.

Together, they extinguished scores of RAF incendiary bombs that had burned their way through the roof of the building. “We were ready to go on fighting the fires until it was all over,” Mr Eichner recalled. But then, at around 1am on the morning of 14 February, came the second RAF raid.

“There were no warning sirens,” he said. “We were completely surprised and rushed back down into the cellars of the hospital. But these quickly became hopelessly overcrowded with people who could no longer find shelter in their own burning buildings. The crush was unbearable, we were so tight you couldn’t even fall over.”

The hospital received several direct hits. The lights went out and bricks from the safety wall over the windows were blown into the basement. “The air was thick with dust and smoke that was choking us. I remember seeing one woman throw herself across her baby’s cot in an attempt to protect her child,” Mr Eichner recalled.

Then someone shouted that the ground floor of the hospital was on fire. “We had to get out but we had no idea where to go,” Mr Eichner said. “Apart from the fire risk, it was becoming impossible to breathe in the cellar because the air was being pulled out by the increasing strength of the blaze.”

He and five other soldiers emerged from the hospital basement into the growing firestorm that was sucking air at hurricane force towards what by now was the inferno of the old town. “We could not stand up, we were on all fours, crawling,” Mr Eichner said. “The wind was full of sparks and carrying bits of blazing furniture, debris and burning bits of bodies.”

The six men found a spot in a front garden behind a pile of rubble and made a circle. “Our faces were covered in wet rags and we spent the next six hours beating out the fires that kept flaring up in our hair and on our clothes that were tinder dry. We just kept praying,” he recalled.

By now the asphalt surface on many of the streets had melted and was tearing the shoes off Dresdeners who were fleeing the cellars of their burning homes. Many of the victims who suffered badly burned feet could not go on. They slumped to the ground and choked to death on the fumes.

Hundreds of others sought safety in large concrete reservoirs that had been built in the town centre a year earlier to help fire-fighters. However, these proved a treacherous refuge because the smooth-sided tanks were more than 10 feet deep and had no ladders. By daylight, many inside had drowned.

But, as the light of dawn became dimly visible through the smoke, Mr Eichner and his five companions knew they had survived the worst. They could hardly see - their eyes were swollen red from the smoke, and their skins were like parchment but covered in weeping blisters. They had all lost their hair, eyelashes and eyebrows.

Mr Eichner made his way towards the main railway station which had been packed with refugees at the time of the raid. He saw terrible scenes. “There were charred bodies everywhere,” he said. The corpses were blackened around the torsos but the legs were “pink like pork”. There at the station, Mr Eichner found his father. He had collapsed with exhaustion after spending hours shifting corpses. The two fell into each other’s arms and made their way across the devastated city. They narrowly missed being crushed by the falling façade of a burned-out building.

In the days that followed, Mr Eichner remembers crossing the Altmarkt, the old town square, when SS guards - sent from a Nazi death camp - were supervising the burning of 6,865 bodies piled in a heap. The operation took two weeks to complete. Today, Mr Eichner will unveil a plaque on the Altmarkt in memory of the dead.

“The experience of the bombing was far worse than being on the Russian front, where I was a front-line machine-gunner before I was wounded,” Mr Eichner said. “At the front, you were scared most of the time, but at least you had some freedom of action. During the firestorm, the worst thing was that you felt completely powerless. You could do nothing but wait and pray.”

Despite the horror of his experiences that night, he doesn’t blame the British: “No, like me, they were just fighting a war and trying to end it as quickly as possible.”

As we walked through Dresden this week, Mr Eichner pointed to the city’s granite paving stones - among the only original features to survive the firestorm and subsequent reconstruction. Nearly every stone is deeply scored by shrapnel splinters from the raid.

In photographs he took of Dresden in the early 1950s, the city centre is like a great moonscape - just three buildings marginally intact in an ocean of rubble. “Around here the houses were built so closely together that you could shake hands across the street from your bedroom window,” he recalled as we crossed an area that is now a soulless, concrete arcade.

Despite the rebuilt Frauen-kirche - the main structure was completed last June - and the painstakingly restored Baroque buildings of the old town, once immortalised by Canaletto, Dresden is still a city with too many green empty spaces to feel at ease.

“For me, most of Dresden is an open wound,” Mr Eichner remarked. It was hard to disagree.

Belfast Telegraph

A few minutes of terror which struck fear into a community
‘He never even had a chance to waken’.

By Ben Lowry
blowry@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
12 February 2005

It was shortly after 6am on a Sunday morning that the quiet of an affluent Belfast suburb was shattered by a rampage by two brothers who burst into three houses in search of car keys.

In the first of these properties, 56-year-old Maurice McCracken lay sleeping beside his wife, when Gerard Michael Donegan (then aged 21) and his brother Kevin Barry Moyna (then 18), both of the same Ross Road address, entered the bedroom of the Strangford Avenue home.

Mrs Maureen McCracken later gave evidence that immediately after coming into the room on that morning in March 2003, the elder Donegan brother called her husband a “bastard” and began hitting him about the head with a hammer.

“He never had a chance to waken,” she said.

The jury saw photographs of Mr McCracken’s blood-soaked pillow, but for evidential reasons the nine men and three women were prevented by the judge from seeing horrific photographs of the victim in the aftermath of his operation.

Surgeons operated on for more than 12 hours, during which damaged parts of his brain were removed.

Mrs McCracken testified during the trial that her husband was “just a memory of the person I knew” who had “no intellectual capacity”.

Other neighbours were injured as the brothers moved on to other houses. Mr John Harris was left with a depressed skull fracture as he attempted to defend his 88-year-old father Maurice Harris. Margaret, the pensioner’s wife, later suffered a heart attack.

The pair then moved on to a third house, where they escaped in a car.

The rampage, which lasted a few minutes, destroyed a life but Donegan, the principal attacker, could be free in his late 20s if he gets early remission for good behaviour.

Belfast Telegraph

Thousands take to streets in water charges protest

By David Gordon
dgordon@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
12 February 2005

Thousands of people took to the streets of Northern Ireland today to demonstrate their anger at Government plans to introduce household water charges.

Protests were held in Belfast, Londonderry, Enniskillen and Cookstown in what a senior trade unionist called a “ratcheting up” of opposition to the looming “tap tax”.

But the Department for Regional Development, which is introducing the charges, today challenged its critics over the massive funding injection needed to upgrade water and sewerage systems.

Today’s rallies were organised by the Coalition Against Water Charges, which involves the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), community groups, political parties and campaign organisations.

The biggest turnout was in Belfast. Protesters assembled at the Art College to march to a rally at the City Hall.

Tom Gillen, ICTU deputy assistant general secretary, today said: “It’s quite clear from our contacts with communities and politicians that there is serious concern about water charges.

A DRD spokesman today argued that the “tap tax” is needed to raise money for modernising water and sewerage services.

Belfast Telegraph

Party in support call for young Ukranian woman

12 February 2005

Oksana Sukhanova

The SDLP is calling upon the government to allow the young Ukranian immigrant, who lost her legs when she became homeless, to rebuild her life in Northern Ireland.

And young party members will today circulate a petition on the matter among MPs, Assembly members, councillors, delegates and members of the public who attend the party’s annual conference in Derry.

The petition expresses horror at the plight of Oksana Sukhanova, who had both legs amputated at Christmas time.

The young woman had developed frostbite when she became homeless and was forced to sleep on the streets of Ballymoney after being made homeless.

The petition goes on to call on the government to allow the woman to remain in Northern Ireland so that she can recover fully and rebuild her life.

SDLP’s chief whip John Dallat, who is heading the campaign, said: “Oksana’s plight has been raised with the direct rule ministers and as a first step the party’s youth wing is asking for an assurance that she will not be deported but will be given every opportunity to complete her rehabilitation and find a job.

“She is a wonderful young person who has shown remarkable courage and she must not be forgotten and allowed to be sent back to her village where there are no opportunities for her.”

BreakingNews.ie

SDLP stands for true republicanism, says Hume

12/02/2005 - 21:05:18

The nationalist SDLP stands for true republicanism, former party leader and Nobel prize winner John Hume insisted today.

In his last party conference speech as the MP for Foyle, Mr Hume expressed disappointment that the Good Friday Agreement’s implementation was being frustrated.

And he also predicted that his protégé, SDLP leader Mark Durkan, would defend the party’s seat successfully in Foyle at the next general election.

He told party colleagues: “ The new generation of SDLP activists must work for the better Ireland we believe in. We stand for true unity of catholic, protestant and dissenter.”

And in a swipe at Sinn Féin and the IRA, he added: “We stand for true republicanism because it is not true republicanism to try to unite catholic, protestant and dissenter with a gun.”

Mr Hume, who has been the MP for Foyle since 1983, said his time as a public representative was now drawing to an end.

He urged the party to stand firm for a new agreed Ireland and said he would support them fully.

“This is the final time I will address our party conference as the member for Foyle,” he said. “By the time we meet again next year Mark Durkan will be a member of parliament for this constituency.

“There is no better man for the job and I have full confidence that the people of Derry will stand shoulder to shoulder with Mark.

“We know we need an MP who is trusted by the people of Derry, who will work for all the people of Derry, someone who will secure investment and fight our corner for better public services and ensure our needs are reflected at all levels.”

Belfast Telegraph

Conlon thanks SDLP over release campaign support

By Chris Thornton
cthornton@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
12 February 2005

Gerry Conlon showing his letter of apology from the British Prime Minister Tony Blair on his arrival at the SDLP’s 34th annual conference in Derry today

The SDLP got an emotional endorsement today from Gerry Conlon, the Guildford Four man who received an apology from Prime Minister Tony Blair this week for being wrongly jailed as an IRA bomber.

Mr Conlon, who spent 14 years in jail, thanked the party “from the bottom of my heart” for helping him, his family members and others who were wrongly jailed secure the apology.

Three days after hearing Mr Blair say sorry for the miscarriage of justice that left his father, Guiseppe, dead in prison, Mr Conlon spoke to the SDLP annual conference in Derry.

Speaking without notes, Mr Conlon, whose story was told in the film ‘In the Name of the Father’ - said his family only got the meeting with Mr Blair because SDLP leader Mark Durkan “pushed for it”.

He described the SDLP as “good people who are all tirelessly working to improve people’s lives”.

“Anyone who’s living in Northern Ireland today, if you really want a change in your life, you have to get up and support the people working for it,” he said. “It’s no good sitting in your kitchen.”

Mr Conlon’s speech was greeted with a standing ovation.

Earlier, former SDLP leader John Hume opened the conference by giving his last address to the party as an MP. He is due to step down from Westminster at the next general election.

He told the party to “stand strong”. “My time as a public representative is almost at an end now, but my commitment to the ideals and vision of this party will never end,” he said.

BreakingNews.ie

Two held after ammunition find in Derry
12/02/2005 - 15:12:59

Police in Northern Ireland are questioning two people after seizing ammunition in Co Derry during investigations into terrorist activities in the areas, it emerged today.

A 25-year-old man and a 39-year-old woman were arrested after a search of a house on Avish Road in Derry.

Officers found a fire arm and a quantity of ammunition during the raid last night.

The search was linked to ongoing police investigations into terrorist activities in the north west regions.

BreakingNews.ie

12/02/2005 - 16:10:09

The gloves came off today in the battle for nationalist votes in the next General Election in the North as SDLP leader Mark Durkan launched his bitterest attack on Sinn Féin.

As the SDLP prepared to defend three Westminster seats in the face of a confident Sinn Féin electoral machine, Mr Durkan accused his rivals of besmirching the reputation of the nationalist community following the £26.5m (€38m) Northern Bank raid.

But as he launched his attack, Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness accused Mr Durkan of trying to make his party relevant following a series of electoral setbacks since 2001.

In a no-holds-barred attack on Sinn Féin’s refusal to accept the IRA was responsible for the bank robbery, Mr Durkan told the SDLP conference in Derry: “The reason we are in this crisis is because the Provisional movement has let down everybody who made leaps of faith in this process.

“So don’t anyone think that the answer is now to ask us to make leaps of fiction. When their (Sinn Féin’s) doublespeak runs out and their lies aren’t just believed, what do they seek cover in? Their mandate.

“But no nationalist voted for bank robberies. No nationalist voted for abductions or families being threatened with death.”

With the Northern Bank heist shattering any hope that power sharing could be restored early this year, Mr Durkan ruled out proposals to have devolved government without Sinn Féin.

Exclusion of Sinn Féin would play into the hands of the party, he warned.

Downing Street distanced itself, however, from earlier claims by Mr Durkan that British Prime Minister Tony Blair lobbied him to freeze Sinn Féin out of government by signing up to a voluntary coalition at Stormont with unionists.

A spokesman said: “The (British) government’s position is that it has to explore all the options being put forward by the various parties. That does not mean it has decided on a particular one option.”

Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness dismissed Mr Durkan’s claim.

“The NIO script always favoured a UUP/SDLP partnership and Seamus Mallon and Eddie McGrady encouraged this approach,” the Mid Ulster MP said.

“In reality, Mark Durkan’s remarks today are an effort to make his party relevant going into elections. The electorate has already spoken on this matter. They have ruled out exclusion and the abandonment of the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin is confident that they will do this again in the upcoming elections.”

In a measure of the deep rivalry between both parties ahead of the Westminster and local government elections, around 15 republicans picketed the hotel which hosted the SDLP conference in Derry.

Sinn Féin believes it can take all three SDLP seats at the next election.

However, while Sinn Féin outpolled the SDLP in Newry and Armagh in the Assembly election, SDLP strategists point out they remained 3,915 votes ahead in 2003 on a lower turnout in Eddie McGrady’s South Down constituency.

The SDLP was also 1,532 votes ahead in Foyle where Mr Durkan will defend his mentor John Hume’s seat against Sinn Féin chairman Mitchel McLaughlin.

Mr Durkan today lambasted his rivals’ handling of recent negotiations, accusing Sinn Féin of not negotiating in the interests of all the people of Ireland but for themselves.

“It was about protecting the self-interest and self-image of the Provisional movement, their ex-prisoners on district policing partnerships, an amnesty for their on-the-runs, a blind eye to their criminality and no sight of their guns,” he alleged.

“And what was their deal breaker? The release of their garda-killing bank robbers.

“There’s only one thing Sinn Féin are true to – their name. Sinn Féin means ourselves. That’s all they care about. That’s who and what they negotiate for - themselves. So much for their Ireland of equals.”

Mural of Pat Finucane

Photo by CRAZYFENIAN (Click here for larger view, more photos and links)

An Phoblacht

Sinn Féin opposed to return to conflict BY MARTIN McGUINNESS (Sinn Féin Chief negotiator)

Photo: Martin McGuinness

The Sinn Féin leadership is totally opposed to any return to conflict. It would have devastating consequences for all of us on this island. Our priority in the time ahead is to defend the Peace Process, to pursue the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and to uphold the integrity of Sinn Féin and the rights of our electorate, alongside the rights of all others. It is for the two governments to decide where their priorities lie.

This crisis began with the DUP’s refusal to support last December’s comprehensive agreement and to join in power-sharing government. No amount of mudslinging and false allegations can alter that fact. But for whatever reason the two governments chose to acquiesce in the DUP position and their confrontational approach to Irish republicans ever since is making a bad situation worse.

A charitable description of this approach by the British and Irish Governments‚ would be that they have misread the events of recent months, with the resulting damage to the Peace Process. But, unfortunately, I don’t believe that to be the case. Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair are far too experienced politicians and negotiators for this to be a simple case of misreading a series of events that they didn’t anticipate. I believe that both governments have acted very deliberately in the hope that they may inhibit or reverse the electoral growth of Sinn Féin. They saw the Northern Bank robbery as an opportunity to smear republicans, and deflect people’s attention away from the mess they made of the negotiations pre-Christmas all in one fell swoop.

The simple explanation for Bertie Ahern’s offensive and unfounded personal attacks on the collective leadership of Sinn Féin in recent weeks is that he knows that a strong Sinn Féin in the South will expose the real criminality in Irish politics. The criminality of political sleaze, the brown envelope culture, offshore accounts and tax evasion by the great and the good in Irish society that has cost the people of Ireland billions of euro in Tribunals and lost Revenue.

Bertie Ahern and the other political leaders in Dublin fear Sinn Féin’s determination to give a voice to those who are disenchanted with the political system because of the corruption and ‘cute hoorism’ rife in the establishment parties. He also knows that a strong Sinn Féin will force him and the political establishment to once and for all address the core cause of political conflict in Ireland - Partition.

Tony Blair too fears the growth of Sinn Féin as a political power, not just in the North but as the only Irish national party on the island. He recognises that a growing Sinn Féin electoral mandate throughout the island signifies increased broad support for Irish reunification and a demand for British withdrawal from Ireland.

And make no mistake about it; Tony Blair is a unionist. Tony Blair’s hope when he helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement was that it would arrest the Sinn Féin vote, that the SDLP and the UUP would coalesce in a partnership of the centre and Northern nationalists would conform as obedient British subjects, thereby containing the Sinn Féin threat.

That’s not what happened; in fact, the opposite occurred and nationalists and republicans recognised the Agreement as an opportunity to promote the benefits of all-Irelandism. Seeing the all-Ireland Ministerial Council, the Implementation Bodies and the areas of co-operation working, more and more people recognised the folly and waste of resources of having two of everything. Two economic systems, two currencies, two agriculture, education, health, infrastructure systems, etc, on a small island of just over 5 million people just didn’t make sense.

The electorates, North and South bought into this analysis promoted by Sinn Féin and endorsed it at the ballot box. Irish unity was now firmly on the agenda and a vehicle to achieve it peacefully was available in the Good Friday Agreement. Rather than the Agreement securing the Union, as Tony Blair and the unionists believed, it actually increased support for Irish Unity and independence.

Sinn Féin was seen as the only party capable of driving that agenda. That is why the British Government — as its Chief Spymaster Joe Pilling and the British Secretary of State said publicly in the United States — is intent on stopping Sinn Féin becoming the largest party in the North.

But I detect a realisation by the governments that the confrontational approach that they have adopted towards Sinn Féin since Ian Paisley scuppered the chances for agreement last December will not work and could even backfire. Mitchel McLaughlin and I met with the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, in Derry on Friday and I have to say that it was a very cordial but forthright meeting. I came away from that meeting with the clear impression that the governments wish to reflect on how their approach is digressing from their stated aim to see the full implementation of the Agreement. So I hope that cooler heads will prevail in the coming days and we can leave all the distractions aside and concentrate on getting the Process back on track.

I have no doubt that the truth about the bank robbery in Belfast in December will eventually emerge and I have made my position on this matter crystal clear. Sinn Féin has no intentions of allowing those who wish to use that event as an excuse to stall the process or use it as an attention-seeking device to succeed. Whether it is this side of the Westminster election or following it this Peace Process has got to be put back together again. A lot of damage has been done and it will take a collective effort to repair it but repair it we must. The assertion by the two governments that the IRA is the only obstacle will only succeed in delaying progress and is downright dishonest. I believe progress will not be made unless and until the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair and Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern accept that unionist opposition to sharing power with nationalists and republicans and their opposition to all-Ireland institutions lies at the heart of our difficulties at this time.

BreakingNews.ie

Govt denies Sinn Féin ‘freeze-out’ claim

12/02/2005 - 12:40:56

Downing Street today distanced itself from claims by SDLP leader Mark Durkan that it canvassed its party vigorously on forming a devolved executive in the North which would freeze out Sinn Féin.

As SDLP members attended their annual conference in Derry, Mark Durkan claimed British Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed him on the issue of entering a voluntary coalition with unionists during a meeting in January.

Mr Durkan said: “He pushed us very strongly in the direction of voluntary coalition or exclusion, call it what you will. He was quite prepared to accept those terms as being interchangeable.”

The idea of a voluntary coalition at Stormont has been promoted by the Rev Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists and the cross-community Alliance Party.

However, the SDLP has been loath to sign up to it.

A Downing Street spokesman said the British government did not have a fixed idea on the way forward for the North following the failure to revive power-sharing institutions and the political mess in the wake of December’s £26.5m (€38m) Northern Bank robbery in Belfast.

“The government’s position is that it has to explore all the options being put forward by the various parties,” a Downing Street spokesman said.

“That does not mean it has decided on a particular one option.”

Sinn Féin chief negotiator Martin McGuinness said Mr Durkan’s comments were designed to make his party relevant ahead of forthcoming Westminster and local government elections.

“It has always been clear that it was the hope of the British government that the Good Friday Agreement would see the emergence of the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP as the dominant parties in any institution of arrangement,” the Mid Ulster MP said.

The NIO (Northern Ireland Office) script had always preferred to SDLP and the UUP and they have been encouraged in this by Seamus Mallon and Eddie McGrady.

“In reality, today’s remarks by Mark Durkan are an effort by him to make his party relevant going into the election.

“The Electorate has always spoken on this matter and Sinn Féin in confident they will do this again in the upcoming elections.”

BBC

PM ‘wanted voluntary coalition’

SDLP leader Mark Durkan opposes sanctions against Sinn Fein.

Tony Blair tried to persuade the SDLP to enter a voluntary coalition without Sinn Fein, Mark Durkan has said.

Following the Independent Monitoring Commission report on the Northern Bank raid, unionists urged the government to move ahead without Sinn Fein.

However, the idea of a coalition without republicans, favoured by both unionists and the Alliance Party, has always been stymied by SDLP opposition.

A Downing Street spokesman said the government had to explore all options.

He added that did not mean the government had chosen one.

Mr Durkan, the party leader, has reiterated his opposition to sanctions against Sinn Fein.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster’s Inside Politics on Saturday, he said the prime minister tried to persuade him to enter a voluntary coalition in a meeting in Downing Street at the end of January.

“He pressed and pushed us very strongly in the direction of voluntary coalition, exclusion, call it what you will,” said Mr Durkan.

“And he was quite prepared to accept those terms as being interchangeable as well.”

The comments co-incide with the SDLP’s annual conference which is being held in Londonderry on Saturday.

It is to discuss a motion rejecting voluntary coalition and an assembly with diminished powers.

Gerry Conlon will be guest speaker at a session devoted to justice and policing.

Mr Conlon’s family secured an apology from the prime minister on Wednesday over their wrongful conviction for the Guildford and Woolwich bombings.

dannymorrison.com

Never Going Away

by Danny Morrison

Frank Stagg (click for larger view)

I love St Valentine’s Day. But with it comes sad memories, especially of the year 1976. In subsequent years there were other sad memories, such as hearing, just two days after the killing of Pat Finucane, about the assassination of Sinn Fein Councillor John Davey, with whom I had been interned.

I think it was in the early morning of 12 February 1976 that we heard about the death of Frank Stagg on hunger strike in an English jail. He and his comrade Michael Gaughan had been on hunger strike in 1974 demanding to be transferred to a prison in the North. Michael Gaughan died in June of that year and, unfortunately, the solidarity protest movement on the outside was nothing of the order of the protests that we witnessed in 1980 and 1981.

This had been Frank Stagg’s fourth hunger strike and he died in Wakefield Prison, blind, weighing four stones after sixty-two days, his wife and mother at his bedside. There were some protests on the streets, but not many, some rioting and some IRA operations. I was standing at the corner of Brighton Street that night with a friend, Seando Moore, when we heard a muffled explosion from the direction of Iveagh. About half an hour later we learnt that a small bomb had exploded in a house in Nansen Street and that our friend and comrade, Sean ‘Stu’ Bailey, was seriously injured, along with several young people.

I wrote ‘young people’ there and it has just occurred to me that Stu himself was just eighteen. He had been in the IRA for over a year and had been very close to Paul Fox who had been killed on active service two months earlier. Stu had been shot and wounded by the Sticks in that disastrous feud of October 1975 and was still recovering. Days after the feud ended Stu, with his leg still in plaster from the gunshot wound, had gone to his brother-in-law’s wedding where the majority of the guests were Sticks!

That night of the explosion I went around to tell his wife, Geraldine, that he had been seriously injured and taken to the Royal. On the mantelpiece was a Valentine’s card from Geraldine and their young daughter, Seaneen, which Stu was never to see. Geraldine and, I think, Stu’s mother, Mrs Bailey, rushed to the hospital where he died a few hours later. He was a very funny fellow with an infectious laugh and I can still see his spirit in his daughter. It is hard to believe that that was twenty-five years ago. But all of us, from whatever walk or persuasion, carry around inside us these evocative reminiscences, with the images and voices of our dead friends asserting themselves, and not just on anniversaries.

Frank Stagg had made a will requesting that he be buried in the republican plot in Leigue Cemetery, Ballina, beside his comrade, Michael Gaughan. Before his remains were released, several other people lost their lives, including 17-year-old IRA Volunteer James O’Neill in North Belfast and 15-year-old Anthony Doherty on the Falls Road.

As Frank Stagg’s body was being flown home, and as the aeroplane was approaching Dublin airport, the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government ordered Aer Lingus to fly on to Shannon were the special branch seized the coffin. To this day I can still see Frank Stagg’s mother standing at Dublin airport, completely bewildered, but absolutely dignified. The government had split the family, with one son, Emmet, who is now a Labour TD, sanctioning the hijacking.

And so the special branch buried IRA Volunteer Frank Stagg and poured six feet of concrete on top of his grave to prevent republicans from re-interring his body alongside Michael Gaughan’s. The following day, republicans gathered in Leigue Cemetery where they heard Joe Cahill make a promise to Frank Stagg. He said: “I pledge that we will assemble here again in the near future when we have taken your body from where it lies. Let there be no mistake about it, we will take it, Frank, and we will leave it resting side by side with your great comrade, Michael Gaughan.”

For six months the gardai were stationed in the cemetery watching the grave but eventually they gave up and left. And when they did, the IRA disinterred Frank Stagg’s remains and reburied them with Michael Gaughan, thus carrying out his last request.

When you consider all the state and loyalist violence, all the laws, all the sermons, all the editorials, all the censorship, that were used to stop republicans from being republicans and practising republicanism, what is left is mountain after mountain after mountain of failure, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of republicans who haven’t gone away and never will.

INA/Irish Hunger Strikes Chapter 12

Irish Hunger Strikes Chapter 12
The Road to the “First” Hunger Strike
The 1970s: Part II

In 1974 and 1976, two Irish Republicans died on hunger strike in British jails in unsuccessful bids for political status, Michael Gaughan in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight and Frank Stagg in Wakefield prison. Both Gaughan and Stagg were natives of Mayo. Perhaps the success of the Price sisters, Kelly, and Feeney in achieving repatriation to Irish jails, although not immediately, gave them reason to hope.

Michael Gaughan

At the time of Gaughan’s hunger strike, Brit policy for dealing with such protests remained one of forced feedings, a brutal process whereby the jaws were painfully forced open with clamps and a pipe rammed down the throat into the stomach. Sometimes it went down the windpipe by mistake. It was to be the last time the Brits would use force feeding as a tactic.

As the protesting Republican prisoners in the H-Blocks and Armagh Women’s prison contemplated putting their names forward for the imminent hunger strike, and the prison command staff began the process of deciding who would be the ones to go on it in grim, successive waves, the deaths of Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg were the last that they could reflect on. It wasn’t very pretty.

The Demands

The basic demands of Gaughan and Stagg were essentially the same demands that were being put foreword by the hunger strikers of 1980: political status, the right to wear their own clothes [which really meant the right not to wear criminalizing prison gear], and not to be forced to do prison work like ordinary prisoners.

Michael Gaughan began his strike on 31 March 1974 and was force-feed from 22 April until his death, officially of pneumonia, a condition brought about as a direct result of the abuse his body took from the forced feeding. He steadfastly refused all medical treatment.

Gaughan received but one visit throughout his ordeal, his Mother just three weeks before he died. They both cried. What make his death even more pitiful was that the Brits had only a week earlier given in to the demands of several Loyalists who were also on hunger strike at the time. But as Tim Pat Coogan was to write in The IRA: a History, “… there would be no capitulation to the demands of a lone IRA hunger striker in a British jail.” And so he was let die.
The Aftermath: Controversy, Tears and Posthumous Triumph

Gaughan’s death was to set off a major debate among medical professionals and self-professed British moralists: does a patient have the right to end his own life for any reason, political or otherwise? The use of forced-feeding by prison authorities was clearly a form of assault, not a benign gesture on the government’s part to save hunger strikers lives. It was a political strategy just as much as was the hunger strike itself.

Later, in a similar display of cynical righteousness, a prominent bishop of the Catholic Church in England by the name of Hume was to make the astounding pontification in 1981 that dying on hunger strike for one’s beliefs was the moral equivalent of suicide.

In any case, nothing in particular came of the whole controversy, at least not enough to effect the death on hunger strike two years later of Frank Stagg.

The controversy and publicity disaster the Brits endured over Michael Gaughan’s funeral and burial in his hometown of Ballina, Co. Mayo, was another matter. The British government was in a quandary as to what to do when it discovered that Gaughan was to be very publicly buried with full IRA honors, but not before a tearful yet triumphant funeral procession across the breadth of Ireland, from Dublin airport through the center of the country to a Co. Mayo grave in the Republican plot. If the Brits used physical force or overt political pressure to prevent this from happening, they would have been hammered in the press and elsewhere. To allow it to happen was perhaps even worse. But the Dublin government was in no position nor inclined to stop the funeral and so the Republican movement was able to pull off an emotional and political demonstration of strength in the face of the Brits, who were hopping mad at being flaunted in such an arrogant manner.

Hundreds of thousands participated in one form or another. The press went wild on both sides of the Irish Sea and in America. The classically romantic and poignant song “Take Me Home To Mayo” is a tearful reminder of those times. Whenever the opening words “My name is Michael Gaughan…” are heard it’s impossible not to get caught up in the emotions of his death, his love of his country, and the meaning of his sacrifice. Even if you never heard the name of Michael Gaughan before in your life, you knew something was calling you from the grave.

But as we know, the Brits do get even, or at least try to, regardless of the cost to themselves or others.

Frank Stagg

On 12 February, 1976, Frank Stagg died after 62 days on hunger strike in Wakefield prison for political status. Because of the Gaughan publicity disaster, the Brits were resolved not to allow the Republican movement to so publicly canonize another martyr for the cause of Irish freedom. Stagg’s last request as he lie dying, blind and his body wasted to a fraction of himself, was to be given an IRA military funeral along the same route that Michael Gaughan’s body was taken, from Dublin to Ballina, in Mayo.

The world media waited in ghoulish anticipation at Dublin airport for the expected showdown between the British government and IRA supporters over the Frank Stagg’s coffin. But the clash never materialized as the Brit aircraft with Stagg’s body overflew Dublin, landed stealthily at Shannon airport, and whisked the remains to Leigue Cemetery in Ballina, where the Gardai [Irish police] hastily dug a grave in his family’s plot and buried him under 18 inches of solid concrete to ensure against his removal. His grave was within sight of Michael Gaughan’s, but it was not in the Republican plot which was his dying wish.

The next day Joe Cahill, undoubtedly the most publicly prominent Republican of the time, gave a powerful oration over Frank Stagg’s grave, promising that one day he would lie with his comrades. Joe must have also been thinking of his best friend Tom Williams lying in an unmarked Crumlin Road jail grave 30 years after his execution. It would be 50 years before Williams would be buried with honor. Frank Stagg didn’t have to wait that long.

The Gardai put up a 24-hour watch. But on 6 November, 1976, after the guards had removed their constant vigil, at around midnight a group of IRA volunteers accompanied by a priest dug throughout the night, tunneled under the concrete to recover Frank Stagg’s coffin, blessed it, and reburied Frank in the Republican plot just a hundred yards away.

The Past and the Future

These events were well known by the men and women Republican prisoners in Long Kesh and Armagh as they prepared for the much anticipated hunger strike in 1980. If they hadn’t heard of the hunger strike martyrs of the past before being imprisoned, they certainly found out about them now.