SAOIRSE32

Danny Morrison

Myth of ‘totalitarian militarism’ in republican areas needs challenged

by Danny Morrison

“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one,” he said.
“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but still they come!”

* ‘The War of the Worlds’, Jeff Wayne

The chances of anything coming from Mars and getting elected are a million to one, he should have said!

Except that the Martians assure us that they came in peace. They had a brilliant election. In 2001 they got 215 votes in West Belfast. This time they received 147. Gerry Adams scraped through with 24,348.

Liam Kennedy, a professor of economic history at Queens University, is no doubt a nice guy. But neither he nor his supporters understand the nationalist psyche or care little for the nationalist experience of state repression. Indeed, he and his supporters do appear to have come from out of space and speak a strange language. He ran on a ticket to protest publicly against “the vicious beatings, shootings and intimidation meted out by the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries to people in their own communities.”

He got 147 votes. So why waste time on him?

He got 147 votes but his campaign, and the perpetuation of a myth about life in nationalist areas, despite being roundly repudiated by the massive support for Sinn Fein in secret ballot, is the fodder for attacks on the republican community by British and Irish newspapers and their columnists. Their work, poor and pitiful journalism that it is, creates a culture which complements political parties and republican opponents in their continued demonisation of Sinn Fein.

In the past two weeks nationalists in republican areas have been described as living under “totalitarian militarism”. In these areas Sinn Fein “practises the most extreme forms of coercion” [‘Sunday Telegraph’] and Sinn Fein “practises terror and engages in heinous acts” [‘Sunday Times’]. On the other hand, nationalists who vote for Sinn Fein are “politically and morally delinquent… And they are responsible for any horrors that may follow as much as the Germans who voted for Hitler were responsible for the horrors that followed” [‘Sunday Independent’].

Dismiss this nonsense though we may, people read it, in the South, Britain and abroad. It might well reassure or buttress the prejudices of some loonies but it influences others, particularly the naïve, to form wrong opinions. Often, one is tempted just to let it go, but occasionally it needs challenged.

FOR decades there has been a policing vacuum in nationalist areas. That was hardly surprising given the RUC’s sectarian history; that the RUC led mobs of loyalists at the time of the pogroms in 1969; that the RUC tortured prisoners; shot protestors; executed republicans; and has a long history of collusion in the deaths of nationalists and political activists.

The nationalist community turned to the Republican Movement and put pressure on the IRA to fill the policing vacuum. The bulk of policing was done through mediation between those in dispute, unreported and away from the media spotlight. But republican vigilantism (a propaganda gift to republican critics) was rough and imperfect, especially when the IRA was fighting an armed struggle and had little time for niceties.

The IRA viewed community policing as a major distraction from its chief purpose and suspected that the RUC indulged criminals in order to tie down IRA resources and demoralise the nationalist community which might, just might, out of desperation, look favourably to the return of a ‘reformed RUC’ as a possible solution.

Republican policing was at its most exertive in those areas where the IRA was strongest. Despite being ‘popular’ and expected by communities it had major downsides. It could alienate the extended families of those individuals the IRA took physical action against or could rebound more broadly when the IRA made mistakes, as it inevitably did.

However, republican policing could not go on forever, especially when republicans were taking part in a peace process and negotiations, which were to lead to power-sharing institutions, and all-Ireland bodies, in which they were investing legitimacy.

Underpinning the political security and rights of the nationalist community has been fraught and would still involve “a battle a day” within an assembly and executive. Underpinning that community’s physical security involves, ironically, the complete demobilisation of the IRA (which was reorganised initially to defend nationalists from attack) and its replacement with a truly representative and just policing service, operating professionally, impartially and with high standards. In the past such a service was unattainable and could not exist anyway in an unjust society.

The SDLP argued that the PSNI was the answer, jumped on the bandwagon and reduced the pressure on the British government to deliver a proper policing service. Sinn Fein disagreed and has had its analysis powerfully endorsed by the nationalist community. Clearly, the policing issue cannot be resolved without further legislative changes. Unionists will resist such change because they are terrified of a police force not in their image and at the prospects of republicans joining the PSNI in large numbers.

Currently, we are ruled directly from London by day trippers. It remains to be seen if the new British secretary of state, Peter Hain, can inject new momentum into the stalled negotiations.

The unionist community have overwhelmingly voted for Ian Paisley’s DUP, a party of intransigence. His campaign was the old campaign of ‘No’ and playing on people’s fears about Sinn Fein emerging as the largest party. The only motive that will drive the DUP to share power with Sinn Fein and the SDLP is self-interest. That is, that it would prefer to run the North on behalf of its people and avoid the neglect they suffer under direct rule ministries - though the price of devolution is sharing power with Sinn Fein. Whether it can do that under Paisley is another matter. Whatever, it is only postponing the inevitable.

THE Martians came, issued their statements, did their interviews and fulfilled their roles. They climbed back into their UFOs, put them into first gear and disappeared in a splutter.

Irish American Information Service

SINN FEIN ACCUSES IRISH GOV.T OF SMEAR CAMPAIGN

05/15/05 13:46 EST

Sinn Féin today accused the Irish Government of plotting to halt the party’s electoral advance.

Senior Sinn Féin representative Gerry Kelly also warned the DUP that their power-sharing plans will not be thwarted. Mr Kelly told supporters gathered in Belfast to mark the 1981 hunger strikes, that Sinn Féin had defied a smear campaign led by the Taoiseach, to triumph at the polls.

He said: “Never since the Thatcher regime have I witnessed such on onslaught from the establishment attempting to criminalise our republican past and present. The difference this time is that the front runners in this opportunistic propaganda drive has included leading members of the SDLP as well as Irish Government ministers such as Michael McDowell and Dermot and Bertie Ahern.”

“At the core of this are electoral interests in the 26 Counties. In pursuit of that the interests of the peace process have been set aside, the interests of national and democratic rights and the rights of citizens have been set aside.”

Even though Sinn Féin faced huge pressure over the Northern Bank robbery and murder of Belfast man Robert McCartney, both blamed on the IRA, it made gains in the recent British general and local government elections.

The party now has five MPs, two MEPs, five members of the Dail and 252 councillors across Ireland, Mr Kelly told supporters.

With the DUP now Northern Ireland’s biggest party after the elections, the Irish and British governments face a major headache in trying to strike a deal to restore the devolved government at Stormont.

Sinn Féin said today that party president Gerry Adams and chief negotiator Martin McGuinness have been in talks with London, Dublin and Washington in an attempt to kick-start the peace process.

And Mr Kelly insisted his party would not be denied.

“Despite the onslaught, we advanced our representation and our national project,” he added.

“Of course the DUP have consolidated their leadership of Unionism. Many people find Paisley’s politics distasteful to say the least; the bluster, the bigotry and the belligerence. But if the DUP believe they can turn back the clock to 1969 or even pre 1998 (Good Friday Agreement), they have another thing coming,” he said.

BreakingNews.ie

Toxic fuel dumped on farm by smugglers

15/05/2005 - 18:16:07

An investigation is underway after thousands of litres of deadly toxic waste was discovered dumped on a farm in Co Monaghan.

Gardaí believe the substance was being used by cross border fuel smugglers, to remove the colouring from diesel fuel.

Gardaí and environmental officers visited a road-side farm in Drumleek, about three miles from Castleblaney where they found 5,000 litres of acid and several containers of cat litter, which is used as a run-through for coloured diesel.

They said they believed the containers were dumped there from a tractor and trailer during the night.

Officials fear the highly dangerous substance could pose a serious threat to local water sources.

The area has several river tributaries that flow into Lough Muckno, which provides water supplies to hundreds of homes.

A spokesperson for Monaghan County Council said that the teams are working to eliminate the environmental threat.

He said that the dumping of these acids by the smuggler gangs that are doctoring fuel along the border has cost the council more than €750,000 in the past year.

cryptome.org

15 May 2005. Thanks to A. Images shown and arranged as received.

Previous documents: http://cryptome.org/omagh-docs.htm (**or earlier posted on this day here)

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Daily Ireland

US help sought to halt loyalist parades

Residents of a small nationalist enclave in east Belfast have raised concerns with US politicians about the number of loyalist parades allowed to march past the area unrestricted.
Thursday’s meeting between Short Strand residents and Dean Pittman, the US consul general, came two days before a parade around the estate by the Sons of Joseph Royal Black Preceptory.
Today’s march is to feature one loyalist band and 60 participants. It will be the fifth contentious parade within the past eight weeks to pass by the Short Strand.
At the meeting with Mr Pittman on Thursday, locals criticised the Parades Commission for failing to place restrictions on previous marches.
On Friday last week, during an Ulster Volunteer Force parade past the Short Strand, several men walking behind a loyalist band donned balaclavas for a short period of time.
Local Sinn Féin representative Deborah Devenny said: “This is totally unacceptable. The people of the Short Strand deserve better than to be subjected to this sort of triumphalist and sectarian coat-trailing.
“You have to question the reasoning behind the Parades Commission determinations that continue to allow these marches here.
“The impact on the local community is devastating. It does nothing to improve community relationships and only serves to heighten tensions in the run-up to the marching season proper.”
Mrs Devenny added: “Loyalists and unionists need to understand that they do not have a God-given right to trample over the rights of nationalists to live free from fear and sectarian harassment.
“The days of unionist supremacy are long gone. It time that they accepted this and worked with nationalists and republicans to create solutions rather than create problems.”
A spokesman for the Parades Commission said every parade application was considered on its individual merits.
Last summer, several senior Orangemen were questioned under caution by the PSNI about the display of paramilitary symbols by bandsmen parading by the Short Strand.
In the wake of this, Orangemen stopped filling in parading application forms properly, making their marches illegal but also preventing any member being arrested over breaches of Parades Commission guidelines.
Orangemen would have previously put names of march organisers on parade applications, meaning the PSNI could arrest an individual if any illegality occurred.

Daily Ireland

Peter Hain challenged over Daily Ireland advertising ban

Secretary of state Peter Hain was challenged last night to prevent job losses at Daily Ireland.
Daily Ireland publisher Máirtín Ó Muilleoir made the appeal in a letter to Mr Hain following yesterday’s revelation that new jobs at Shorts Bombardier were costing £100,000 (€140,000) each to create.
Up to 30 employees at Daily Ireland could lose their jobs if a British government ban on advertisements is not reversed. “I wish Shorts well and they are totally entitled to their support,” Mr Ó Muilleoir said.
“But it’s worth noting that not only was Daily Ireland, in the heart of west Belfast, denied government aid by Invest NI but now it’s the only daily newspaper in which the government refuses to advertise.
“That discriminatory policy is being challenged at the Equality Commission but, if it isn’t lifted, more jobs will be lost.
“An advertisement in Daily Ireland is sold as part of our newspaper group, guaranteeing over 40,000 sales per ad, a rate comparable or better than our main rivals.
“The government has no policy on advertising, no criteria on advertising, and is making up conditions on the hoof to deny Daily Ireland ads because it reflects a republican point of view, even though our audited figures show us selling over 10,000 copies per day,” Mr Ó Muilleoir added.
Insisting that the British government ban reflected the worst characteristics of employment discrimination, Mr Ó Muilleoir said such an attitude “won’t be tolerated now”.
“I have asked Peter Hain to meet with me to bring the discriminators to book and to save these jobs at Daily Ireland,” Mr Ó Muilleoir said.
In a separate development, Sinn Féin economy spokesman Mitchel McLaughlin welcomed the £55 million (€74 million) investment from Invest NI to safeguard jobs at Shorts Bombardier.
However, the Foyle assembly member questioned why similar levels of financial support had not been funnelled west of the Bann, particularly in the northwest.
He said: “It is great to see significant levels of public money securing jobs at a key manufacturing centre such as Shorts in east Belfast. However, I think that there is the clear challenge to INI [Invest Northern Ireland] and the new direct-rule ETI [enterprise, trade and investment] minister Angela Smith to deliver similar commitments both west of the Bann and to the northwest region. Given the legacy of underinvestment west of the Bann, the sharp decline in manufacturing and the high levels of unemployment and economic inactivity rates — particularly in rural communities across the North, the Border communities, west of the Bann and in the northwest region — it is time for commitments on targeting social need to be delivered on, with significant investment programmes.”

BreakingNews.ie

Masses mark 80th anniversary of St Therese canonisation

15/05/2005 - 14:54:41

click to view - ‘the Little Flower’

A series of special masses gets underway in Dublin this evening to mark the 80th anniversary of the canonisation of Saint Therese of Lisieux.

The French nun, who died in 1897 aged just 24, has become one of the most popular Catholic saints of modern times.

More than three million people turned out to see the relics of the saint when they toured Ireland four years ago.

The three services take place in the Carmelite chapel in Terenure College.

Times Online

**Via News Hound

Comment: Liam Clarke: Blair doesn’t get it - a deal isn’t what Northern Ireland wants

May 15, 2005

Perhaps the worst thing about the election result in Northern Ireland is the fact that Tony Blair is incapable of reading it. People have, as David Trimble remarked, voted for stalemate yet the British prime minister won’t acknowledge it. The DUP has been installed, not to drive a hard bargain, but to block Sinn Fein ministers from gaining power for the foreseeable future. Sinn Fein has been elected in the full knowledge that the party is unlikely to concede enough to enter into government with unionists.

On both sides of the sectarian divide, intransigence has won widespread apporoval. But, in Blair’s alternative universe, a deal is still possible.

“I am still actually very hopeful that we can resolve it,” he said last week. “I think that, when it became apparent that the UUP couldn’t make the deal with Sinn Fein, the DUP gained from that.”

The prime minister seems to be saying that unionist voters switched their allegiance to the DUP because they were disappointed that the UUP couldn’t reach agreement with Sinn Fein. In fact, people voted for the DUP because they were confident they would resist a deal, whereas they feared the UUP might do one.

The DUP manifesto pledged not to go into power-sharing with Sinn Fein and, before the election, Ian Paisley didn’t mince his words. He told voters: “Let it be said in the plainest possible language that there can be no power-sharing with IRA/Sinn Fein either before or after an election. They have for ever forfeited their right to any such power-sharing place. Democracy and liberty demands that they be excluded.”

Paisley spoke like this because feedback from the electorate and a series of market research polls conducted in key marginal constituencies showed that this was what voters wanted to hear. He said it, his candidates repeated it at every turn, and as a result of these pledges an “electoral tsunami” hit the Ulster Unionists, as Danny Kennedy of the UUP put it.

“No deal” is the mandate Paisley got and after the election he pledged that he would “not be talking to the IRA now, tomorrow or ever”. He added, for good measure, that his victory at the polls represented the “burial” of the Good Friday agreement.

There is, it is true, some room for manoeuvre in the DUP position but not enough to get a deal quickly. Various DUP politicians have suggested “come back and talk to me again” if the IRA makes a dramatic break from violence and criminality. There has also been the suggestion that DUP leaders could seek a new mandate if they thought they could do a deal with Sinn Fein as a result of unprecedented movement from the republicans.

However, it is very hard to believe that the DUP will be prepared to go to the electorate advocating a pact with Sinn Fein this year or next. That would require what Paisley described as “sackcloth and ashes” — an admission that the IRA campaign had been wrong, a complete decommissioning of all weapons and a photographic record to prove it and the standing down of the IRA. It would have to be something so clear that nobody could misinterpret it.

Nothing like that is on offer; nor has it been asked for by the Sinn Fein leadership. Gerry Adams instead suggested that the IRA “fully embrace and accept . . . purely political and democratic activity”.

What this might entail was spelt out in more detail in an interview with Martin McGuinness in which he envisaged an IRA which, although it would agree to be involved in “no activity whatsoever”, would not “stand down” or “disband”. He hinted that the provisionals would retain enough weaponry to take action if required to do so.

McGuinness said: “I don’t think anybody ever envisages again a time when nationalist communities will not be in a position to defend themselves in a crisis.” Weapons for a crisis would also be weapons which could be used to deal with opponents in nationalist areas and carry out robberies. The republican organisation would maintain for ever what Michael McDowell has described as a “lightly armed militia”.

The IRA is already moving in that direction for reasons of its own. Whole areas of the organisation have effectively been stood down and/or streamlined. The robberies it has carried out are largely the work of a specialist unit and many of the IRA’s GHQ staff departments have been closed. The army council itself is being reshuffled and it is clear that the organisation is not preparing for a return to full-scale violence or anything like it.

Even hardliners know that to go back to war would be deeply unpopular and would squander all that has been gained politically by Sinn Fein.

What is now on offer is a unilateral statement from the IRA that the “war is over” or could be over and that the organisation has confidence in the political process. There is also likely to be a formal distancing from Sinn Fein so that the political party will not be tainted if the IRA takes action in the future.

It is unlikely that these words will be accompanied by the sort of complete and transparent decommissioning the unionist electorate requires. Most, perhaps all, of the weapons are likely to be held back for future negotiations.

Saying, finally, that the war is over would undeniably be a step forward and a confidence-building measure, but it would come more than 10 years after an IRA ceasefire, which was supposed to signal a complete end to military activity. It is not enough to tempt the DUP into power-sharing in the short or even medium term.

The extent of the likely IRA offer illustrates the problem that unionists have in dealing with the republican movement. A very narrow majority of them voted for the Good Friday agreement back in 1998 and most of this more moderate group now believe they were sold short. They believed that weapons would be decommissioned within two years — the same time as it would take for prisoner releases — and that IRA activity would quickly sputter out. Those who voted for the agreement consequently feel cheated while those who didn’t feel justified in their scepticism.

That is why last week the unionist community voted overwhelmingly to withhold the one thing that it can still withhold from Sinn Fein now that republican prisoners have been freed — ministerial office as of right. Unionists will withhold their consent to devolution until there is utterly persuasive evidence that the IRA has gone away and that its weapons are no longer available for use.

We are talking at least 18 months of unbroken peace before the unionist community would be convinced.

If the unionists won’t buy it, or won’t buy it quickly, then why would the IRA make the sort of offer I believe they will in June or July? The real reason is that Sinn Fein wants to maintain the impression of a steady move away from violence for the benefit of moderate nationalists. It is a matter of keeping faith with nationalist voters who believed Adams, rather than pleasing unionists who didn’t. It is also a matter of playing cards slowly.

The bonus for Sinn Fein is that Blair will pay them to do this. They can see he is keen and, in the words of WC Fields, they know better than to “give a sucker an even break”.

Last week, Adams set out his shopping list for Blair as “progress on equality, human rights, collusion, the Irish language, demilitarisation, justice and policing”, pointing out that these issues were “entirely within the gift of the British government”.

It has always been a good option for Sinn Fein to horsetrade redundant bits and pieces of the IRA campaign and structures with the British government in return for political capital. That is how Sinn Fein delivers to the nationalist community and makes the SDLP look inadequate. It is also how it puts the squeeze on the DUP who, without seats in a Northern Ireland executive, can do little but protest from the sidelines.

If he had a cool head Blair would sit tight until the IRA delivers. Yet, he is already waving his money around.

BreakingNews.ie

Family support website to be launched

15/05/2005 - 12:14:58

A new website is being launched next month giving families information on services available from the Family Support Agency.

The agency, supported by the Department of Social and Family Affairs, helps families deal with parental separation.

The website, www.fsa.ie, will also detail Government research projects on family issues.

Sunday Independent

Tristan must be adopted within year or not at all

LARA BRADLEY

TRISTAN Dowse - the little boy abandoned in an Indonesian orphanage by his Irish father - will spend the rest of his childhood in an institution unless he is adopted before a strict one-year deadline.

Officials in Indonesia have warned that if the legal quagmire is not sorted out before Tristan reaches the age of five, he cannot be adopted. Under Indonesian law, children become ineligible for adoption at that age.

Tristan turns four next month and has already endured two full years in legal limbo. It is feared that further legal wrangles could leave him trapped in an institution until he reaches 18.

The Indonesian authorities say Tristan’s adoption was illegal, and that it will take several months to get this situation rectified through their courts. In Ireland, a High Court action will seek to have Tristan’s name removed from the adoption register. Only when both these processes are complete can Tristan’s readoption process begin.

The registrar of the Adoption Authority of Ireland (AAI), Kiernan Gildea, said: “He simply isn’t eligible for adoption after the age of five and would probably have to stay in an institution until he reaches 18. We are certainly aware of the urgency and that time is running out for him.”

Two years after Tristan was abandoned, Irish and Indonesian governments have taken an renewed interest in his situation since intense media interest in the case here and, more recently, Indonesia.

A team of Irish officials, including a social worker and a legal expert, returned from Indonesia on Thursday after travelling there to inspect Tristan’s circumstances.

They are expected to produce reports for the AAI and the Department of Foreign Affairs this week.

The Department last night denied reports of a clash between Irish ambassador Hugh Swift and the Indonesian authorities.

One report last week quoted “a senior Indonesian government source” saying Mr Swift had overstepped the mark by “insisting” that an American missionary couple be allowed to adopt Tristan.

A Foreign Affairs spokesman said: “There have been a lot of meetings between the ambassador and the Indonesian authorities and they have a very good working relationship. We are aware that Tristan has to be adopted by the time he is five. We would be surprised if it wasn’t sorted out within a year.”

Sunday Independent

‘Maybe if I listen closely to the rocks, next time I’ll hear something. If not a word, perhaps the faint beginning of a syllable . . . ‘ - Phoebe Hanson

Everything in the world has something to say to us: rocks, garbage, even our disappointments and failures. For everything belongs to the vast, pulsating pattern that is the earth.

Nothing that exists does not belong; if we find this or that piece of the pattern troublesome, it’s because we haven’t perceived its contribution to the whole.

Sometimes, when we’re feeling down on ourselves, nothing seems to fit. What we’re really feeling is isolated and sorry for ourselves - ‘out of sorts’ and unmatched.

Why do we do this to ourselves - why do we pretend that we’re different, pretend that no one can understand us? It’s a childish game, really; we’re surrounded by pattern pieces that we match like lock and key, even the rocks by the cabin door.

“I will listen closely. Who knows? I might hear something I need to learn.”
From The Promise of a New Day

PO Box 616, Cork
Tel: (021) 4314300 Email: livhaz@indigo.ie
www.livingsolutions.ie

Sunday Independent

Twilight glimmers in turn of a Stag’s Head

click to view

SATURDAY afternoon, cabbage, bacon and spuds, silence and the light through beautiful stained glass windows. No television, no soccer, no piped music. No better place to read your paper, no place better to mend your manners.

Outside, they’re drilling for oil, fighting for heroin and conjuring means of murder. Inside, we read about them, get ready to face them, sit back for a few minutes and laugh at it all. And along with the laughter, there’s a sense of privilege, a false confidence that here’s a place that might withstand the barbarity of the Crusaders and Mujahideen, a serenity that ignores the suspended guillotine. For The Stag’s Head is on the block.

Built in the last economic boom, when minor merchant princes had money to invest in beauty and in material substance that would long outlive them, the Stag’s Head is a refuge from idiocy, a place where you don’t have to match wits with half-wits, because half-wits can’t find it.

A cool place on a summer’s day, a warm little cubby-hole when winter howls outside, it stands in a curious cranny in the city’s centre. Rose-red like Petra, and running out of time, it’s approached on every side through a canyon. Surrounded by higher buildings, it doesn’t get much sun, but when the earth is low enough on a summer’s evening, a shaft can sometimes penetrate through the outside lane and illuminate the windows. Those gorgeous stained-glass windows, innocent young deer peering in at you, wise elders looking back at you, and overhead the looming head of a poor old stag who died in 1901 in Alaska.

Often, I explained to tourists that this was a Kerry cow, that you could tell it by the tags on the ears. I went so far as to say that I knew the carpenter who made the antlers. You hear no traffic, see no trouble, endure no penance. No dress code, because it couldn’t be enforced by a staff with no arse in their trousers. A country pub in a metropolis; in China the labouring builders might have gone there for tea after a day on the Wall. Fame claims no recognition here, although the famous and the fashionable are welcome and frequent visitors.

Conviviality is its middle name.

Along a polished granite counter, reputations have been made and unmade, romances have flourished, laughter has been constant, and occasional tears have flowed. Tears were not too far away when the pater familias, Francie Maguire, pulled his coat out of the press behind the counter for the last time recently. Francie also has a middle name - Roguery. A ranger from Ramor, master of the wind-up, Francie has the most duplicitous tongue in the business.

A stranger entering may expect to be treated with deference, but seldom realises that he’s dealing with the most gifted amateur actor in Ireland. An unscripted actor whose lines are always spontaneous. When the trap is set and baited, Francie springs it, and all around is reduced to laughter. No one emerges unscathed, but nobody is ever hurt.

Francie’s minions partake in the charade, a talented cast of minor actors who willingly offer support in the ongoing pantomime that cheers the fretful heart. And among that staff there is the obvious evidence that they like each other - they actually enjoy working together.

The Stag’s Head has been run for many years by the Shaffrey family, who have paid their dues in other ways to Irish civilisation. In the 1970s, when ‘developers’ were pulling Ireland down, Paddy and Maureen Shaffrey published Irish Streetscapes, a beautiful book which displayed the humble gentility of Ireland’s towns and villages. That book began a thought process that helped halt the destruction of the city where we dwell.

Through the Shaffreys we inherited the comfortable drinking saloon designed by AG McGlaughlin in the latter Victorian era. The era of the Shaffreys is now at an end. Eras end, they’ve been ending for eras. But maybe the new possessors will leave to Ireland one of the last havens of urban respectability.

Finbar Boyle

RTE News

McCartney sisters nominated for award

15 May 2005 11:05

The sisters of the murdered Belfast man, Robert McCartney, have been nominated for an international award.

The five women have been shortlisted for the prestigious Robert Burns Humanitarian Award, the winner of which will be announced in Scotland next Friday.

The McCartneys have led a campaign to bring their brother’s killers to justice.
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Robert McCartney was murdered outside a Belfast pub in January by a gang alleged to have included members of the IRA.

The Observer

Close nuclear leak plant for good, says Sellafield

Thorp reprocessing should never be restarted - boss

Oliver Morgan, industrial editor
Sunday May 15, 2005
The Observer

The owner of the Sellafield site in Cumbria, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, wants its main reprocessing facility to shut forever following a leak of highly radioactive liquefied nuclear fuel containing plutonium and uranium.

The move would bring an early end to the UK’s reprocessing programme, which was conceived in the Sixties to provide plutonium for Britain’s nuclear deterrent while recycling uranium for civil energy needs.

In any event, the leak of some 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, dissolved in nitric acid, will keep the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp) shut for months.

But senior sources at the NDA, the government body set up to dismantle radioactive facilities at 20 sites across the UK, now believes that keeping the plant shut is the most economical option, and also one that would remove reprocessing - which has always attracted controversy - from the debate over building new nuclear stations which many believe the government is keen to initiate.

‘The view is that Thorp should never restart,’ said a senior source.

Officials indicate that, even when operational, the plant does not make money. Thorp’s figures are not split out in the NDA’s plan for 2005-6. However, the published figures show that, of a total budget of £2.2 billion, the NDA receives some £1.08bn from the commercial operations it inherited from British Nuclear Fuels. Of this, it expects to get £635.1 million from reprocessing and transporting nuclear material around the world.

A large proportion of this figure will be from Thorp’s activities - reprocessing spent fuel from British Energy’s nuclear power stations, along with contracts from Japan, Germany and other overseas customers. But the NDA also incurs huge costs from Sellafield, forecast to be £727.4m over 2005-6. Also, up to three new storage facilities for separated plutonium and uranium are needed, at a cost of nearly £200m each.

Meanwhile the NDA official said: ‘The government is starting to think about new stations. The view is that it would be impossible to argue that there should be a new generation [of facilities] that relies on reprocessing.’

Closing Thorp would reduce the time it takes to run down the massive stockpile of ‘highly active liquid’ - spent nuclear fuel containing uranium and plutonium - by four and a half years. Nuclear regulators have insisted on the backlog being dealt with by 2015. And closure of Thorp would drastically reduce emissions into the Irish Sea, a continuing source of tension with the Irish government.

NDA chief executive Ian Roxburgh told The Observer that a decision on closure would be up to the government. He added: ‘The NDA must produce by the autumn its plans for the 20 sites it operates, including Sellafield. The latest incident had clearly brought that forward.’

Meanwhile, sources at British Energy have indicated that the privatised nuclear operator wants to run any new nuclear power stations, but is not keen to take a major investment stake in any projects. There are doubts over whether private investors have the appetite to finance and build a new generation of reactors, given the volatility of energy markets.

The sources believe the operation of new plants should be kept separate from ownership and financing.

BreakingNews.ie

Man dies evading PSNI chase

15/05/2005 - 12:07:59

A man’s body was today pulled from water following a police chase in the North.

He had jumped into Carlingford Lough near Warrenpoint, Co Down in a bid to escape officers who stopped his car.

Investigators from Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan’s office have launched a probe into the circumstances surrounding his death.

It is understood police followed the man, aged in his 40s, after a taxi driver alerted them to a speeding car.

They managed to halt the car at around 5am, but he ran from the scene close to the town’s swimming pool towards the lough.

Coastguard and lifeboat crews were scrambled in a bid to locate the man who was dressed in black jeans and fleece top. A rescue helicopter was also summoned from Dublin to help scour the water.

A PSNI spokeswoman said they could not comment while an Ombudsman’s investigation was underway.