SAOIRSE32

Indymedia Ireland

by Barry
Tuesday, Oct 18 2005, 7:40pm

Prime Suspect in disappearances of young women both sides of border scrutinised by Nuala O’Loan

The prime suspect in the disappearance of Castlederg teenager Arlene Arkinson as well as a number of young women in the Republic may have been working as a Special Branch agent throughout the time of those disappearances . Robert Howard, the man who gave Arlene Arkinson a lift home from Bundoran on the night she disappeaed without trace was recently cleared of her murder at a trial in Belfast . It emerged after he was cleared that he had a previous conviction for the kidnap, rape and murder of another young girl in England during the 1970s . Legal experts have now said that this would have been admissable in the court but still the PSNI never made it part of their case. Nuala O’Loan is now investigating why the PSNI witheld this information .

PSNI ombudswoman Nuala O’Loan is now launching a full investigation into the Arkinson case as the teenagers family and local politicians now believe the man responsible for her murder may have been working for Special Branch.

It further emerged that at the time of Arlene’s disappearance Howard was unbelievably out on bail for attacking and raping another Castlederg woman, despite his long history of sexual assaults, kidnap and murder. Despite his depraved and murderous history which was known to police and the fact that he was the last person Arlene Arkinson was seen in the company of - Howard was only arrested and questioned about her disappearance after the Arkinson family went to the Sunday World.

Unbelievably after the Arkinson family publicised the fact Howard had left Bundoran heading for Castlederg with the girl the RUC then descended on the Arkinson family home and dug up their garden in full view of television cameras which accompanied them. This gave the public at large the impression that Arlenes family were somehow implicated in her disappearance, or at least that senior detectives believed so.

It has also emerged that the Detective originally responsible for investigating Arlenes disappearance, Special Branch officer Eric Anderson, was the same man tasked with leading the RUC investigation into the Omagh bombing . After an investigation by Nuala O’Loan into his handling of that case it emerged that hundreds of pieces of evidence and eyewitness satements were tampered with or destroyed completely . Evidence that security forces both sides of the border had advance knowledge of the bombing and that Special Branch agents played a central role in it was witheld by detective Anderson, who has since retired .

Irish born Howard , who is now a prime suspect in the murder and disappearance of numerous young women in the 26 counties, also regularly crossed the border from the village of Castlederg were he settled in the late 1980s . Local people in the Tyrone border village claim he appeared from nowhere and had no connections with the village at all. Despite being unemployed he seemed never to be short of money and was never stopped by police despite having no tax or insurance.

Following local suspicion at his involvement in Arlene Arkinson’s murder Howard left Castlederg and moved south to live in the Republic . It was when he moved to the 26 counties that the disappearances of numerous young women began and carried on for years. These disappearances are widely believed to be the work of a serial killer and as yet no-one has been brought to justice for them.

Nuala O’Loan is now investigating the claims that Howard was a Special Branch agent. If a blind eye was turned to his activities it will be yet another damning indictment of Britains use of murderous agents in their dirty intelligence war. Whether Howard was an agent as many in Castlederg now are convinced of remains to be seen. And if he was it raises the further question as to whether the Gardai in Donegal knew about his role at the time as well. And the question mark that leaves over their investigation into the subsequent disappearances of young women in the 26 counties is a huge one.

More >>HERE,
>>HERE, and >>HERE.

BreakingNews.ie

18/10/2005 - 20:35:10

Two more people were charged tonight in connection with the loyalist violence which erupted around a contentious Orange Order parade in North Belfast last month.

The charges came 48 hours after police made a fresh appeal for information and issued CCTV pictures of six males they wanted to interview.

They urged those involved in the violence to give themselves up before they got a knock on their door.

A 40-year-old man has been charged with two counts of arson and one of riotous assembly, said a police spokesman.

A 17-year-old youth has been charged with riotous assembly.

Both are due to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court tomorrow morning.

The violence broke out on September 10 when the Orange Order’s Whiterock Parade was barred from a short stretch of the nationalist Springfield Road by the Parades Commission.

Police came under petrol bomb and blast bomb attack and gunmen opened fire with live ammunition.

The street violence and that which spread across loyalist areas of Belfast over succeeding days was described as the worst seen in Northern Ireland for years.

BBC

A blast bomb has been made safe in a garage in a housing estate on the outskirts of north Belfast.

Police said the device was discovered by officers during the planned search of the premises at Coolshannagh Park in the Rathcoole area of Newtownabbey.

The device and other items were taken away for further examination after being defused by an Army bomb expert.

Chief Inspector Chris Shead said the device “could have caused injury or even death if it had exploded”.

He said leaving the device in a housing estate could have had “catastrophic results”.

There were no arrests.

Sinn Féin

Published: 18 October, 2005

Sinn Féin Assembly member Alex Maskey has accused the British government of ‘breathtaking double standards’ following the revelation that the British government has imposed financial sanctions against Sinn Féin while providing ongoing funding for the PUP.

Alex Maskey said:

” Sinn Féin is opposed to the IMC and to politically motivated sanctions against democratically elected politicians. The British government has no right to discriminate against any Irish political representative.

” However the revelation that Sinn Féin was penalised while the PUP continued to receive funding confirms our view that the IMC was primarily a tool of the securocrats to be employed against Sinn Féin.

” This demonstration of double standards exposes the bad faith of the British government and an inherent pro-loyalist bias within the British system.” ENDS

BreakingNews.ie

18/10/2005 - 17:37:11

Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain vowed today that community restorative justice schemes in the North would be run through the police and not “outside the rule of law”.

Mr Hain said the idea that former paramilitaries could be allowed to use the system to police the community was “just not on”.

But SDLP leader Mark Durkan, who met the Secretary of State and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Downing Street, said his five-strong delegation had not been sufficiently reassured by what they were told.

Mr Hain said: “I want to make it clear that the idea of victims engaging with offenders and offenders having to apologise and come to terms with their victims is an admirable principle.

“But there is no way that this will be done outside the rule of law.

“The guidelines will be very, very tight and the idea that paramilitaries can give up their arms but still police the community through community restorative justice is just not on, full stop, end of story and that has been explained to the SDLP and I think they were encouraged by that.

“This whole process will be supervised by the PSNI and will be operated according to the rule of law.”

Mr Durkan said: “We can’t have local warlords being turned into local law lords.

“We can’t have some kind of next steps agency for paramilitaries.”

Both politicians said it had been a “very good” meeting.

“Both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State tried to reassure us that some of what is in the papers really wasn’t what was going on but we registered our fundamental and profound concerns,” Mr Durkan said.

Issues to do with justice and policing should not involve “privy negotiations and privy deals” with any one party but should be transparent and inclusive, he said.

“We were not sufficiently reassured by everything that we were told,” Mr Durkan said.

“We hope to be reassured by what emerges subsequently.”

He added: “We made the point very clearly that now that the big stone has been rolled away in terms of IRA decommissioning that the veto on institutions that went with the IRA’s failure to decommission should be deemed to be gone as well.”

Mr Durkan called on the British government to work together with all parties.

Mr Hain said getting institutions back up and running depended on the International Monitoring Commission report due out tomorrow and the next one due in January.

They needed to “make it clear that the promise the IRA made on July 28 has been delivered on the ground”.

Mr Hain said of the imminent report: “It’s a significant report but its significance is only qualified by the fact that it has only covered around a month of the period since July 28 in which to really determine whether the IRA’s promise of closing down their illegal activity has been delivered.”

The government would tomorrow be announcing “a lot of progress” on North-South Co-operation, he added.

The SDLP is concerned at reports the British Government is considering funding and recognising community restorative justice schemes in republican areas, even though Sinn Féin and those participating in them may not recognise or support the police.

BreakingNews.ie

18/10/2005 - 17:41:21

Members of the Garda Special Detective Unit pulled over a car at gunpoint and found what an officer believed to be electric timing devices in the boot, the Special Criminal Court has heard.

Detective Sergeant Martin Harrington, who was in charge of a team of detectives, was giving evidence in the trial of three alleged Real IRA members, arrested after a major garda surveillance operation against the dissident terrorist organisation.

Adrian Kirwan (aged 25), a native of Ballymun in Dublin, with an address at Ardilaun Green, Ballymahon Road, Mullingar, Co Westmeath and Colum Wiggins (aged 24), of Annagry, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, each pleaded not guilty to membership of an illegal organisation styling itself the Irish Republican Army, otherwise Oglaigh na hEireann, otherwise the IRA on December 5 last year.

Sean Connolly (aged 26), of Bernard Curtis House, Bluebell, Dublin denied membership of an illegal organisation on December 14.

Det Sgt Harrington told Mr Tom O’Connell SC, prosecuting, that he took up duty in the Mullingar area of Co Westmeath as part of a national surveillance unit looking into the activities of dissident republicans in the area. He said that he had received a briefing from a senior officer the day before about a red Peugeot estate car that was leaving the Mullingar area and heading in the Longford direction and that was believed to have explosives on board.

He said he brought the vehicle to a stop at the side of the N4 and the driver Adrian Kirwan and passenger Colum Wiggans got out of the vehicle. He said he searched the boot of the vehicle where he found a holdall containing eight white cardboard boxes tied together by elastic bands. He opened one of the boxes and found what he believed to be a timing device.

Under cross-examination by Mr Derek Kenneally SC for Mr Kirwan, Det Sgt Harrington said that both men were arrested under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act “simultaneously” with the vehicle being searched.

Detective Garda John O’Rourke and Detective Garda Gerard O’Doherty both gave evidence of having arrested two of the accused. Mr Wiggins requested a solicitor whilst Mr Kirwan had nothing to say.

Mr Kenneally applied to the court for an order stating that both the search of the vehicle and the arrest of the accused were unlawful. He also argued that any evidence given in relation to the arrest and search was inadmissible. He claimed: “Detective Sergeant Harrington stated very clearly that he didn’t say what powers he was exercising” when the search was carried out. It was up to members of the gardaí to inform a person of the legal justification for conducting a search, he said.

The case is due to continue tomorrow before the three-judge court where Mr Justice Paul Butler is presiding.

BBC

Irish police laid siege to the house where the industrialist was held

A former Dutch industrialist kidnapped by the IRA in Limerick 30 years ago is donating his papers relating to his ordeal to the city’s university.

Dr Tiede Herrema, 84, returned to the city on Tuesday to give his collection to the University of Limerick’s Special Collections library.

Dr Herrema, the Ferenka factory chief, was grabbed on his way to work in 1975.

The gang wanted a number of IRA prisoners released, but Mr Herrema was freed after a house siege.

He was abducted on his way to work at the factory in the Ballyvarra area on 3 October.

His kidnap caused outrage and thousands marched through the city of Limerick to condemn it.

For several days it was feared Dr Herrema was dead but more than two weeks later he was traced to a house in Monasterevin, County Kildare.

A siege ensued for 14 days before his release was secured.

His captors, Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle, were sentenced to 20 and 15 years in jail respectively.

In spite of fears that Dr Herrema’s ordeal would traumatise him, he looked calm and collected at a news conference soon after his release.

He showed reporters a bullet from the gun which had been held to his head - it had been given to him as a souvenir by Gallagher.

Dr Herrema said there had been a few occasions when he had feared for his life, particularly in the first 48 hours after his abduction.

But he did not hate his captors who were the about the same age as his son, he added. “I see them as children with a lot of problems. If they were my own children I would do my utmost to help them,” he said.

Dr Herrema then with two of his sons

The files donated to the university include a letter from the former Taoiseach, Dr Liam Cosgrave, along with letters of gratitude to the government from the Ferenka company, as well as letters from well wishers all over the country.

Dr Herrema was made a Freeman of Limerick by the city authorities and he and his wife were granted honorary Irish citizenship.

He moved back to the Netherlands because his employers felt he was at risk in Ireland.

The Ferenka factory closed down after his departure, with a loss of 1,400 jobs.

Interviewed by the Irish Times in 1999, Dr Herrema said he had always believed his captors’ sentences were too severe.

University of Limerick President Dr Rodger Downer said Dr Herrema’s kidnapping was a significant part of Irish history and his calm, controlled behaviour during his ordeal in no small part accounted for his survival.

BBC

David Ervine’s party is linked to the UVF and Red Hand Commando

The Progressive Unionist Party is still receiving government grants despite a ceasefire watchdog recommendation that its money should be withheld.

The PUP, which is linked to the UVF, was entitled to an annual £27,000 grant because it has one assembly member.

Both the PUP and Sinn Fein lost this funding last year because the Independent Monitoring Commission said paramilitary activity was continuing.

Sinn Fein’s fine was renewed but the PUP’s funding resumed in April.

In May, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) said that the small loyalist party should lose its grant, but the government did not act immediately on this recommendation.

Instead, it has been consulting on the matter while continuing to pay the party in monthly instalments.

‘Double standards’

Sinn Fein assembly member Alex Maskey accused the government of “breathtaking double standards”.

He said it “confirms our view that the IMC was primarily a tool of the securocrats to be employed against Sinn Fein”.

Last week, current Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain told MPs he intended to “watch developments carefully” before reaching a decision in the context of an IMC report due in January.

By then, eight months will have passed since the commission made its original recommendation.

In September, the IMC blamed the UVF for five murders and 15 attempted murders as part of its feud with the LVF.

In its special report on the loyalist feud, the IMC reiterated its view that the PUP should lose its grant.

Daily Ireland

Former Policing Board vice-chairman talks about the assault that nearly killed him “I have never been so optimistic as I am at this moment in time.” - Denis Bradley

Eamonn Houston

The vice-chairman of the North’s Policing Board said yesterday that he would like to talk to the man who attacked him with a baseball bat in a Derry pub a month ago.
Former Derry priest Denis Bradley gave his first interviews yesterday.
He said: “I would like to talk to the person – I wouldn’t be angry, I would like to ask, do you know anything about me or the way in which I operate?”
A gash on Mr Bradley’s forehead was still evident yesterday and he apologised to press for what he described as a “lisp” because of four stitches in his lower lip.
“I was surprised how tired I was after the attack.
“It is only in recent days that I feel like my strength has come back.”
Mr Bradley said that he believed his attacker was a teenager acting on the instructions of dissident republicans.
He said that a paramedic told him had he received a blow to the back of his head, he may have died.
However, Mr Bradley said that the North was on the cusp of “sorting itself out” for the first time.
“I’m a great believer in free speech.
“I have never been so optimistic as I am at this moment in time. This is the biggest opportunity for us sorting ourselves out.
“Dissident republicans have to realise that we are in a new world. Both governments have gifted an opportunity on the issue of policing, where we have more control over the police service and where we can all join and take part in a police force whether we are republican or loyalist.”
Speaking just a few miles from the Brandywell pub where he was attacked, Mr Bradley praised his son – who was with him during the assault – for confiscating a photograph that was taken during the incident.
He also praised the people of the Brandywell, where he served as a priest, saying that they had suffered greatly during the North’s Troubles.
“I have the highest regard for the people of the Brandywell,” he said.
Mr Bradley revealed that he will not be serving on the policing board when a new forum is elected in April next year.
He said that he would not be taking extra personal security measures in the wake of the attack.
Mr Bradley stressed that his decision to stand down from the Policing Board was not connected to the attack.
He also praised Derry prisoner, Ciaran McLoughlin for his recent statement advocating the standing down of dissident republicans.
Mr Bradley added that community policing was the way forward, but said that Community Restorative Justice would play a “significant if low-key” role in future policing arrangements.
“The CRJ [Community Restorative Justice] should be under a board and that board should be kept separate from a police force.
“The CRJ should form a part of the criminal justice system and I think that all of the issues regarding this can be easily enough resolved.”
“One of my biggest regrets,” Mr Bradley said, “is that there are still no police officers living in Derry. This transformation has to happen.”

Daily Ireland

Anne Cadwallader

Baroness May Blood and others are correct in one sense. It’s a reasonable assumption to make, after both President McAleese and Fr Alex Reid compared unionist domination to the Nazis, that this is a sub-conscious psychological thread in the minds of many Northern Catholics.
I suspect it is one that is internally rejected after rational contemplation, however, and that it only emerges in public after intense provocation and with immediate and genuine regret.
No sane person could possibly equate unionist political, social, economic and cultural discrimination against Northern Catholics with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
Both Fr Alex Reid and President McAleese are intelligent, thoughtful, Christian people and neither rationally believes the literal truth of what they said.
Most of those on their high horses, including both DUP and Ulster Unionist politicians, cannot either believe, in private, that either individual genuinely meant what they said. Many Catholics, however, subliminally believe some aspects of how they, their families and their forebears were treated by unionism bear a resemblance to the way the Nazis treated the Jews. But are there any real similarities?
The Nazis blamed the Jews for all the economic ills of the pre-World War II German state. They believed in an international Jewish conspiracy against the Teutonic people. They herded Jews into ghettos and regarded them as sub-human.
In our case, some unionists blame an alleged Catholic/Irish “fecklessness” for their lower economic performance. An inability or reluctance to work. A lack of the Protestant work ethic. That is racism, nothing less.
Some unionists say the economic miracle south of the Border only came about not because of hard work and intelligent planning but because the Irish “held their hands out” to Brussels and were amply rewarded. That is racist too.
The Orange Order operates a shady loan and land-bank scheme to prevent Catholics getting their grubby hands on “Protestant land”. Until fair employment laws stopped them, some Protestant employers were reluctant to hire Catholics.
In religious matters, some Protestants, certainly those of Ian Paisley’s ilk, believe in an international Vatican-driven conspiracy to return them into the clutches of Rome.
Catholics have most certainly found themselves living in ghettos (west Belfast, the New Lodge, Ardoyne, the Short Strand) for reasons of safety after repeated loyalist pogroms dating back to the 1920s.
When Protestants vacate land, such as in north Belfast at this time, unionists use every trick in the book to prevent Catholics, who desperately need homes, from moving across the peaceline into “their” territory.
This is not to call unionists Nazis. It is, however, to point out that there are more than passing similarities between the way the 1930s German political elite treated Jews with the way Catholics have been treated in this state, into which they were abandoned by the South.
Like many others, I groaned internally when I heard what Fr Reid had said. I had been turned down for an interview many times over the years. Then, after a lifetime’s discretion, he appears to have blown it at a meeting where he had, ironically, hoped to encourage unionist confidence in his status as an honest broker over decommissioning.
In his defence, he had been subjected at the meeting to ridiculous accusations that the Redemptorist Monastery at Clonard had been “a haven for IRA men” and “used to store weapons in the 1970s”.
Leading the charge against Fr Reid was Ian Paisley’s DUP. Ian Paisley’s own past does not stand up to much scrutiny when it comes to moderation and respect for other creeds and cultures.
Has he, for example, ever apologised, or been asked to apologise, for his words of June 1959?
“You people of the Shankill Road,” an eyewitness heard him say (quoted in Paisley by Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak), “what’s wrong with you? Number 425 Shankill Road. Do you know who lives there? Pope’s men, that’s who.”
“Fortes’ ice cream shop. Italian papists on the Shankill Road,” he said, adding that Catholics now lived at 56 Aden Street and 38 Crimea Street. His followers duly attacked Catholic shops and homes.
An elderly lady from Newington in north Belfast, now passed on, once told me of how her family home on the Old Lodge Road had been daubed with a cross one afternoon in the 1950s after one of Paisley’s meetings in the area.
They knew what it meant and immediately moved out to live in a house offered by a Protestant gentleman in Glengormley. As they left, they saw the mob torching their old home. Shades of Kristallnacht.
In 1968, after loyalist attacks in Belfast, Paisley said Catholic homes had caught fire because they were “loaded with petrol bombs”. The disparity in Catholic/Protestant unemployment rates, he said was because Catholics bred like “rabbits” and multiplied like “vermin”.
After the UUP decided to run a Jewish candidate, Harold Smith, he said: “The Unionist party are boasting he is a Jew. As a Jew, he rejects our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament, Protestant principles, the Glorious Reformation and the sanctity of the Lord’s day.”
Has anyone even thought to ask Mr Paisley to apologise for words he wrote in a Free Presbyterian booklet in 1982? Words such as the following: Rome is “a debauched, degraded, filthy, incestuous, adulterous monster. Her popes, her cardinals and her priests all lived in a state of the most monstrous villainy.”
The Vatican is a “murderess, the Antichrist” and the papacy is “the seed of the serpent, the offspring of Belial and the progeny of hell. Her eye gleams with the serpent’s light. Her clothes reek of the brimstone of the pit.”
“There is no night as dark as papal midnight. No dungeon so loathsome as that of the Woman of Babylon. No chains so fettering as the chains of the Antichrist of the Seven Hills. No slavery so degrading as the slavery of the Mother of Harlots.”
“The dog will return to its vomit. The washed sow will return to its wallowing in the mire, but by God’s grace we will never return to Popery.”
Let’s come right up to date. On May 24 this year, Mr Paisley referred to the SDLP leader, Mark Durkan, as “another apologist for terrorists. He has mixed so long with the fascists of Sinn Féin, built up into their present strength by the helping hand of the SDLP, that he is blotched with fascism himself.”
Any apology sought for or given to Mr Durkan? Not as far as I know. Or to David Trimble, of whom Paisley said in a 2001 annual conference speech: “If David Trimble is a unionist, then Bin Laden is an American patriot.”
Fascism, Paisley once said, is the “child of Romanism”. Knows a lot about fascism, does our Ian.

Anne Cadwallader is a freelance journalist, broadcaster and author of Holy Cross – The Untold Story published by The Brehon Press.

RTE

18 October 2005 18:08

The father of a 14-year-old schoolboy who died after a night in garda custody has said that the family cannot afford to co-operate with the inquiry into his arrest and detention.

Pat Rossiter, father of Brian Rossiter, was attending a preliminary meeting of the inquiry in Dublin today.

He said it was not that the family did not want to co-operate, but that they did not have a choice.

The inquiry, which intends to sit in Dublin, will not pay expenses to the Rossiter family. Legal teams have complained that the proposed costs will not cover their preliminary work and involvement with the hearings.

The Rossiters and their solicitor, Cian O’Carroll, have also complained that the inquiry’s terms of reference are too narrow and will be unable to answer the question of why Brian Rossiter died.

The teenager had been arrested on suspicion of public order offences in Clonmel on 10 September 2002, and was held overnight with the consent of his father.

The next morning he was found to be in a coma and was transferred to hospital, but died two days later.

Irish Examiner

18 October 2005
By Ann Cahill, Europe Correspondent

THE Government has agreed to end the Shannon stopover with the US authorities, it confirmed last night.

Talks to decide a phasing out period ended without agreement yesterday but will continue over the next few weeks.

“We are meeting specifically to discuss a phasing out period as we do not want to pull the carpet out on day one,” said a spokesperson for Transport Minister Martin Cullen. The Government wants a phasing out period of between two to three years to begin when the EU completes negotiations with the US on a new open skies agreement.

Reaction from airport and business groups lobbying to maintain the stopover was muted last night as they waited for details. “We are very much in the dark about developments but we would be very concerned at any change in the status of Shannon,” said Pat Fitzgerald of the Signal workers group at the airport.

The ending of the stopover was accepted as inevitable, however, by the Shannon Chamber of Commerce. Its president, Edmund Jennings, said they had to be pragmatic and the essential task now was to ensure the Government agreed a phasing out time of between three to five years.

“Business, in general, is taking a pragmatic approach to this but will insist that the infrastructural deficits in the region are improved and that approval for the new Shannon Airport Authority comes through as quickly as possible,” he said.

The ending of the arrangement, where 50% of Ireland-US flights must originate or terminate in Shannon, has been signalled for some time.

Yesterday’s bilateral talks between Ireland and the US coincided with the opening of negotiations between the EU on behalf of all 25 member states and the US on a new deal for airlines.

The open skies agreement will end the US dictating to individual EU countries where airlines can fly and should also end the US ban on European airlines picking up passengers for onward flights within the US.

Irish Examiner

18 October 2005
By Michael Brennan

THE Government has delayed the introduction of random breath testing for two years due to its close links with publicans, opposition TDs said today.

The technique is widely used by police forces across Europe, but gardaí are only allowed to breathalyse drivers involved in accidents or when they have a reasonable suspicion that they are over the limit.

Labour Transport spokeswoman Róisín Shortall said the Government was frightened of offending publicans.

“You can’t blame people for being cynical for the Government’s failure to act on this, because of the fact there are so many publicans in the Dáil and because of the close ties in particular between Fianna Fáil and publicans,” she said.

“They have already got flak in relation to the smoking ban, and it would be particularly unpopular in rural Ireland.”

Yesterday, 15-year-old Kathy Byrne was killed in Bunclody, Co Wexford, while waiting for a lift home from a disco.

The driver of the car that struck her is expected to be charged with drink driving later this week.

“The road deaths speak for themselves and there’s an onus for politicians to introduce random breath testing as soon as possible,” said Ms Shortall.

The introduction of random breath testing was first promised by former Transport Minister Seamus Brennan in 2003.

It is a key recommendation of the Government’s 2004-2006 Road Safety Strategy and also the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol.

According to research by the National Safety Council, about 40% of all road deaths are alcohol-related.

It found that 86% of the public would support random breath testing.

However, Ms Shortall said there was still an ambivalent attitude to drink driving in Ireland.

“All you have to do is look at the car park of any pub on a Saturday night.

It’s full and the people driving those cars aren’t drinking lemonade for thenight,” she said.

Last year, the Government shot down a Labour Party amendment to its Road Traffic Bill which would have provided for random breath testing.

Transport Minister Martin Cullen said in the Dáil last week that there were constitutional difficulties with the introduction of the testing and added that he had legal advice to this effect from the Attorney General.

Ms Shortall has called on him to publish this advice.

BreakingNews.ie

18/10/2005 - 11:44:49

Frank McBrearty Jr has been awarded the costs of his action against the State arising from his wrongful treatment at the hands of gardaí in Donegal.

The High Court struck out his applications today following a settlement reached in September between the Raphoe man and the gardaí for €1.5m.

Mr McBrearty was arrested in 1996 on suspicion of being involved with the death of cattle dealer Richie Barron, but he was never charged.

Speaking outside court today, he said he had other cases pending against the State.

Mr McBrearty said the biggest task now facing him was to find out why the State kept it from him and from another suspect, Martin O’Connell, for three years that they were no longer suspects in the case.

He said he was consistently cross-examined at the Morris Tribunal even when they were aware he was no longer a suspect.

Belfast Telegraph

Parents take to streets to help kids

By Kathryn Torney
18 October 2005

Two Belfast mums have received training so they can act as lollipop women while attempts continue to resolve a row over the axing of their children’s school crossing patrol, it emerged today.

Joanne Patton and Gillian McCartney were given training by the South Eastern Education and Library Board and have also been given full uniforms to wear, complete with bright lollipop stick.

The mothers plan to man the morning and after school crossing at Brooklands Primary in Dundonald for two weeks while they continue with their battle to have the crossing patrol reinstated by the board.

The SEELB decided to axe the patrol when the school’s lollipop man retired earlier this month.

Since then the parents have been holding daily peaceful protests at the school and have also handed in a petition to the education board.

The board claims the school does not meet criteria relating to the number of unaccompanied children crossing the road and the volume of traffic.

However, it has agreed to carry out a further survey to make sure that this is the case.

Temporary lollipop woman and mum of two Joanne Patton, said: “We felt it was really important to get the training to be able to take the children across the road safely and it also means that we are fully insured.

“We are giving the board two weeks breathing space to carry out another survey at the school.

“We will also be carrying out our own survey so will have our own figures to compare with the board’s.

“We will not give up. We will not stop fighting until we get a patrolman.”

More than 600 children attend the primary, nursery unit and toy and book lending library.