26 February 2006 13:13
The PSNI is investigating an incident in which a policewoman was kicked and punched by a gang of men during a riot in Portadown in Co Armagh in the early hours of this morning.
Five other PSNI officers were hurt including one who suffered severe facial injuries.
Two police vehicles and a number of cars were damaged.
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Two men were arrested and another has been charged with assault and disorderly behaviour.
Inmate is moved after row
**Via Newshound
by Ciarán Barnes
25/02/2006
A criminal who assaulted former Real IRA leader, Liam Campbell, in Portlaoise Prison on Tuesday has been removed from a republican landing for his own safety.
The Limerick man is serving three years for possession of a firearm. He was being held last night in the jail basement alongside members of the gang involved in the murder of the journalist Veronica Guerin.
Mr Campbell, who is being sued by the relatives of those killed in the 1998 Omagh bombing, spent two nights in hospital following the assault.
On Wednesday, his attacker was thrown off the E2 republican landing, which is controlled by Real IRA leader Mickey McKevitt.
A prison source said the inmate had been removed for his own safety because tension was high. A Real IRA source said: “The man is now in what prisoners call the Portlaoise bunker. The man who assaulted Campbell has had a death threat issued against him. He is also being targeted by a friend of Campbell’s from Dublin who is serving a life sentence for murder. Campbell and the Dublin man are close friends. He [Campbell] even let him use a republican visiting box before Christmas. This annoyed Real IRA prisoners in the jail, who have fallen out with Campbell.”
Last month, the attacker was subjected to prison disciplinary procedures after being caught with 200 ecstasy tablets and steroids.
(Seamus McKinney, Irish News)
Parades Commission criticism of a planned republican commemoration march in Strabane does not bode well for this year’s marching season, according to Sinn Féin.
Sunday’s march is held annually to commemorate the deaths of IRA members, Michael Devine (22), his brother David (17) and Charles Breslin (20) who were shot dead in Strabane by the SAS in 1985.
In its determination on this year’s parade, the commission expressed disappointment at the presence of an IRA colour party at last year’s march and cautioned the organisers over pro-IRA chants at the event.
The commission’s comments have provoked an angry reaction from Sinn Féin in Strabane.
Town councillor Jarlath McNulty said the commission’s stance did not bode well for this year’s marching season.
“In all the years that this parade has been going on there has never been any local objections and the fact that thousands of local people turned out to support last year’s 20th anniversary parade shows the massive sense of hurt and anger that still exists within this community about the terrible events of February 23 1985,” he said.
“This annual commemoration has never been controversial to the Parades Commission before so the question has to be asked why now?”
He said people in Strabane believed the two Orange Order members and an SDLP member on the commission had a bearing on the decision.
Strabane SDLP assembly member Eugene McMenamin said he believed the commission determination was fair.
He said it put the onus on the organisers to control the parade although he conceded that it was “practically impossible” to stop people from chanting.
“I know that in recent times, in the past years, this parade has passed off peacefully and I can’t see any problems come this Sunday,” he said.
But Ulster Unionist assembly member for West Tyrone, Derek Hussey claimed that last year there was “irrefutable evidence of the wearing of paramilitary attire and the chanting of IRA slogans”.
“The event is abhorrent to all unionists in this area,” he said.
“Event organisers have a responsibility to control their parades in accordance with the commission’s requirements therefore if it is the case that the organisers of this republican ’show of strength’ cannot meet the Parades Commission’s res-trictions, the commission has a duty to ban the parade,” he said.
February 26, 2006
________________
This article appeared first in the February 24, 2006 edition of the Irish News.
26/02/2006 - 12:43:56
The Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has said that republicans responsible for yesterday’s riots in Dublin have put back their political agenda by five years.
Speaking on radio this morning, the Minister said that all the riots did was prove that at the heart of what masquerades as Republicanism is actually a “sectarian hate-filled force”.
He said the blame for the rioting in Dublin lies solely with the republican movement.
The security services’ determination to protect informers cost innocent lives, and has shocked the victims’ relatives
Liam Clarke
26 February 2006
Sam Kinkaid, Northern Ireland’s most senior police detective, read carefully from a typed sheet to the group of bereaved relatives gathered around the boardroom of Omagh library last Wednesday.
“I was sitting directly opposite, looking him in the eye, and I could hardly believe it,” said Michael Gallagher, whose son Aidan was one of 29 people (including a woman pregnant with twins) murdered in the August 1998 Real IRA bombing. Kinkaid was saying that gardai and MI5 had withheld intelligence from two informers.
One of the sources was Dave Rupert, an American trucker who infiltrated the Real and Continuity IRAs for MI5 and the FBI. The second source was Paddy Dixon, a crooked motor dealer who supplied stolen cars to terrorists and kept the gardai informed.
Kinkaid, an assistant chief constable, retires tomorrow. In his final months of service he has delivered a series of shocks to the political system. It was he who pinned the Northern Bank robbery on the Provisional IRA; he who revealed to the Northern Ireland policing board that IRA decommissioning was incomplete. Sinn Fein branded him an old-style securocrat, but this time it is the security establishment, north and south, that will be embarrassed by his claims.
Yet this is no solo run. Peter Sheridan, Kinkaid’s successor as assistant chief constable, sat beside him in Omagh library last week, nodding in agreement. So did Superintendent Norman Baxter, who heads the Omagh investigation on a day-to-day basis, and Colin Monteith, his No 2. All three agreed that MI5 had known five months in advance of a plot to bomb either Omagh or Londonderry with a Vauxhall Cavalier car, and knew that one of the suspects lived in Omagh.
They passed on details of the plot to gardai, but never told the RUC, as the Northern Ireland police force was then known. Meanwhile, the gardai knew from Dixon that a car had been stolen for an attack on Northern Ireland, but had not intervened for fear of blowing his cover.
The result, as Sheridan told the grieving relatives, was that both Omagh and Derry were on a low state of alert when the bombers struck in August, using a Vauxhall Cavalier. An anonymous telephone warning on August 4 saying a gun and rocket attack on Omagh was planned for August 15 was discounted as a crank call by Special Branch. Even after the attack, the gardai and MI5 withheld the information.
Stanley McComb, whose wife Ann died in the bombing, said: “We are trying to get on with our lives and something like that brings it all back and it makes us frustrated, mad . . .
“We want to meet Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, and Michael McDowell, the Irish justice minister, and we want straight answers.”
THE evidence behind Kinkaid’s claims comes from two main sources: e-mails sent by Rupert to his MI5 handlers while he worked in Ireland between 1996 and 2001, and notes kept by John White, a garda detective who handled Dixon under the direction of Detective Chief Superintendent Dermot Jennings.
Rupert, from upstate New York, had moved to Chicago, where he was mixing with the hardline Irish Freedom Committee (IFC) when an FBI agent, Ed Buckley, recruited him in about 1995.
Rupert’s business was failing, so his motive for co-operating with the FBI was at first financial. According to Lou Stephens, a financial investigator who formerly headed Irish operations in the FBI, Rupert had been “heavily financed and probably defaulted”.
Rupert headed for Bundoran, Co Donegal, where he befriended Joe O’Neill, a veteran republican who owned a pub in the town. Later Rupert rented a bar of his own, the Drowse Inn, in Leitrim, which he loaned to the Continuity IRA for meetings. It is thought the premises were bugged.
Working under MI5 direction, but without the knowledge of the gardai, Rupert presented himself as a wealthy American who could bring money and guns from across the Atlantic to the dissidents. He insinuated himself into the confidence of Michael McKevitt, the Provisional IRA’s former quartermaster general in charge of weaponry. McKevitt was attempting to set up a new IRA to supplant the Provisionals, who were on ceasefire. The fast-talking Rupert seemed heaven-sent and McKevitt appointed him head of the Real IRA in America.
In 2003 Rupert gave evidence against McKevitt on charges of directing terrorism and some, but not all, of the e-mails he sent to his MI5 handlers were revealed in court in a heavily edited form. One e-mail from Rupert to his handlers claimed Jennings had said gardai “did not care what happened in the north, only what happened in the 26 counties”. Jennings denied this.
On April 11, 1998, Rupert told his handlers that republican dissidents were planning to bomb “Derry or Omagh” and that he had taken part in a scouting operation. MI5 informed the gardai and three suspects were arrested, including a man from Omagh, but later released.
In a later e-mail, MI5 confirmed that the terrorist plot had only been delayed. It wrote to Rupert: “We disrupted the intention to use the car bomb, but maybe not for long . . . Mr (Tony) Blair owes you a beer.”
Amazingly, this information was never passed to the PSNI. Nor was it given to Nuala O’Loan, the Northern Ireland police ombudsman, when she conducted an investigation into the intelligence background to the Omagh bombing. Neither was it made available to Mike Tonge, now chief constable of Gwent, who conducted an independent inquiry on behalf of the Northern Ireland policing board. Senior security sources say that Tonge’s team specifically asked MI5 if it had any relevant intelligence and were told that it had none.
Rupert’s role was not disclosed to the gardai until 2000, when the e-mails were handed over for the purpose of prosecuting McKevitt. Jennings was therefore not in a position to cross-reference them with the intelligence he was receiving from Dixon through White.
Dixon had allowed the gardai to bug a number of vehicles he had stolen for the Real IRA. On March 21, 1998, a bomb was seized in Dundalk and two terrorists arrested with 1,200lb of explosives in one of Dixon’s cars. A few days later, a red BMW 318 stolen by Dixon’s gang and filled with explosives was caught at Dun Laoghaire, where it was being put aboard a ferry en route to London.
On May 19, Dixon received IR£10,000 after two 500lb car bombs were stopped by the gardai near the border and two terrorist suspects arrested.
A British security source said: “The pattern seemed to be that if the gardai could make a seizure in the republic they did so, but they were not so good at passing on information to the British authorities.”
The problem was that each garda success increased the chances that the Real IRA would make the link with Dixon. The PSNI told the Omagh families that, based on White’s testimony, four bombs were let go through by gardai to protect Dixon’s cover. The first was a mortar attack on Moira RUC station in February 1998 in which several police officers and civilians were injured. The second vehicle, a Fiat Punto stolen in Hartstown, was used in an unsuccessful rocket attack in Beleek in May. On May 13, a vehicle containing home-made explosives was, according to White, let through and later found burnt out.
The last one was the Omagh bomb, contained in a maroon Vauxhall Cavalier, precisely the type of vehicle Rupert had warned was likely to be used in Omagh or Derry. This time Dixon did not steal the vehicle. The Real IRA asked him to, but at the last moment said it had found one elsewhere.
White says a senior garda officer told him: “I think we will let this one go through.” The garda’s reasoning was that Dixon was under suspicion and being tested by the Real IRA. The gardai have denied that White met this officer in a bar in Castleknock, but the PSNI suspect he did because White has supplied them with expense forms signed by the senior officer, showing he had been in the bar that day.
According to White, after the bombing the senior officer told him not to write a report on the incident. To avoid suspicion, Dixon was arrested but warned not to make any statement or reveal his role.
In 2002, Dixon was resettled in Britain under a false identity with the help of MI5. On January 10, 2002, three days before Dixon entered a witness protection programme, he had a last meeting with White and, according to a tape-recording of the conversation now in the hands of the PSNI, he predicted: “They (the Real IRA) had got a car and (gardai) . . . knew it was moving within 24 hours at that stage. The Omagh investigation is going to blow up in their faces.”
HUGH ORDE, the PSNI chief constable, will shortly write to Tony Blair, the prime minister, and Noel Conroy, the garda commissioner, outlining the findings of his force’s inquiry. He is likely to say that the PSNI wants to interview Dixon as a matter of urgency.
For the Irish authorities, the matter is closed. A tribunal headed by Dermot Nally has found White’s allegations to be baseless. But its detailed findings were never made public. That tribunal never interviewed Dixon, Baxter or Kinkaid, who wrote three times offering his assistance.
MI5 also considers the matter to be at an end. Last night a Home Office source said: “There is nothing to substantiate the allegation that there was accurate intelligence about any plot against Omagh.” Asked about the resettlement of Dixon he said: “We don’t normally comment on the actions of the security service and we won’t in this case.”
The Omagh families are not prepared to accept that the case is closed.
It was the worst atrocity of the Troubles, and the most stunning because Northern Ireland was thought to be at peace. The notion that it could have been prevented seems certain to haunt the police and security services in Ireland and Britain for years to come.
Photo from >>here
Dearbhail McDonald and Enda Leahy
February 26, 2006
ONE Welshman, visiting the city for today’s rugby clash, wondered aloud if they were shooting a movie at Trinity College. But for those who witnessed yesterday’s protests, the action was all too real.
“For God’s sake lads, stay together, hold the f*****g line.” The panic was real, but nobody knew who the battle cry was aimed at. The instruction came from a senior officer leading columns of gardai clad in riot gear as they inched their way down Nassau Street.
Saturday afternoon shoppers and tourists cowered in shop doorways and laneways off the pavement, searching for safe havens as they sought to escape the mayhem erupting just yards from Leinster House.
It was shortly after midday when the violence erupted. It started at the Parnell Monument at the top of O’Connell Street, just yards from where the Love Ulster marchers were waiting patiently to begin their march from Parnell Square to Leinster House.
Growing concerned at the size of the crowd, gardai in O’Connell Street stalled the parade, scheduled to begin at 12:30pm.
“Most of the crowd were peaceful,” said a sergeant on the line, “but one or two started throwing stones, then others joined in and it suddenly got out of hand. It wouldn’t have happened if the street wasn’t like a building site and material wasn’t there.”
After 20 minutes the gardai managed to separate the crowd, but as the atmosphere became more tense it was clear the parade might not happen.
Des Dalton, the vice-president of Republican Sinn Fein, was surrounded by a group of men waving banners and chanting IRA slogans.
“This is a city that lost 34 people at the hands of a loyalist death squad in the last 30 years,” said Dalton, “Our fellow citizens in the six counties live with this daily and at times feel besieged in their own community.”
Minutes later shouts of “we won” went up from the crowd as word spread that the Love Ulster paraders had boarded their buses to leave.
As rumours began to circulate that a delegation from the parade was to speak at Leinster House, the crowd turned from Parnell Square back down O’Connell Street.
Hundreds of protesters, forced into side streets by garda lines around the initial riot scene at the Parnell Monument, began racing towards the city centre, searching for ways to avoid the garda barriers onto O’Connell Street.
Screams echoed across Abbey Street as shoppers and protesters broke into a panicked run. Fireworks exploded, setting bins alight outside Easons. Gardai in riot gear began advancing down the street but stopped to re-establish their lines as masonry and bottles rained down on them from a hard core of protesters.
O’Connell Street, the birthplace of the 1916 rising, was ransacked. The updated version had an international flair: at least three Lithuanians were arrested for looting after lending their support to the Irish insurgents.
“This is what Bertie gets for letting them march in our city,” hollered one rioter, wielding canisters of petrol, as he swaggered towards the Millennium wing of the National Gallery on Nassau Street. One, two, three then four cars were set alight. Panic erupted as shouts went up that someone had been shot. It wasn’t gunfire, just the sound of petrol tanks exploding.
“We were under siege from a bunch of madmen,” said one manager of a Nassau Street cafe. “One guy with a 4ft metal pole came tearing toward the window and smashed the front glass. I called 999 but the operator couldn’t get me in touch with a station. We were about to take everyone downstairs and lock ourselves in the cellar but the crowd moved up the street. Afterwards we broke out an emergency bottle of Baileys and some cigarettes, but don’t tell the health inspectors.”
It was the same story a few doors away in Kilkenny Design, where customers were locked in for 40 minutes. “Customers hit the ground when the window broke, they didn’t know what was happening,” said one witness. “Then we saw guards coming down the street with alsatians but the mob started taking steel bars and concrete out of a skip and throwing it at them. The guards did nothing — they were completely outnumbered.”
For more than four hours hordes of youths chanting “up the ra” led gardai on a cat-and-mouse chase across the capital. It was the worst rioting in 30 years and they were making up for lost time. As soon as the gardai put down one pocket of disturbance another replaced it.
“This mob is not fighting in my name,” said John Molloy, who was injured in the Dublin bombing of 1974. “I just feel disgust. There were banners calling for people to remember the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, but not one victim was there. I just feel so angry at the whole anger and bitterness that has spilled out onto the streets.”
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor in Dublin
Sunday February 26, 2006
The Observer
The first loyalist march in Dublin since Partition had to be rerouted after thousands of republican protesters rioted in the centre of the Irish capital yesterday, with several Irish police among 40 people injured.
The main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, became a battle zone as up to 2,000 rioters tore up building materials being used in major renovation work in the road and hurled them at Irish police. Shops and hotels closed their doors, and at least three Irish police were taken to hospital as rioters hurled scaffolding poles, bricks, slates and rocks at their lines. (Click photo to view)
Violence raged throughout the afternoon as protesters opposed to the Love Ulster rally, involving Orangemen and relatives of IRA murder victims, fought running battles with Irish police. Cars were set alight and fireworks thrown at police. Shops near O’Connell Bridge were looted as the riot squad combined with a mounted unit initially prevented demonstrators, some of whom were chanting ‘IRA, IRA’, from crossing the river Liffey.
Among those injured in the clashes was veteran Irish television reporter Charlie Bird. There were reports the RTE journalist was attacked by a mob outside a hotel in O’Connell Street. A photographer was also set upon by a gang on the steps of the Gresham Hotel.
The chaotic scenes took place during a weekend when Dublin was meant to be showcasing itself as a world tourist destination. Thousands of tourists were in the city for today’s Six Nations rugby international between Ireland and Wales, and for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
After an hour-long stand-off, the march headed by unionist victims’ spokesman Willie Frazer was stopped from its proposed route along O’Connell Street. Unable to clear the area of demonstrators, Irish police ordered loyalist marchers and their three bands onto buses and made them drive over to the Dail.
Irish police tried several times to remove the protesters, many of whom hid their faces with Celtic scarves, from O’Connell Street, but they reassembled in side streets. As the rioting continued on the northern side of the Liffey, the loyalists protested outside the Dail gates at around 2pm, the tunes of the Orange bands echoing to empty streets that the police had cordoned off.
By 3pm the rioters had forced their way across O’Connell Bridge where there were further clashes with riot officers. A car was set alight in the middle of Nassau Street while a small group of rioters smashed up the headquarters of the Progressive Democrats, the junior partner in the ruling coalition. During the attack on the party office the rioters used wheelie bins to smash windows and damage the front door. Rioting also erupted in Temple Bar, the city’s main tourist quarter.
A spokesman for An Garda Siochana said that by early afternoon six people had been taken to hospital, including the three Irish police, and 12 people arrested. But the final injury figure was potentially much higher. The chaos was largely due to demonstrators vastly outnumbering those deployed to police the rally.
Ruairi O’Bradaigh, president of republican party Sinn Fein, which organised the protest against the Love Ulster rally, compared the scenes to riots outside the British Embassy in 1981 over the republican hunger strike at the Maze. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this for 25 years, in fact this is much worse. They (the authorities) underestimated the depth of resistance to this march,’ said the veteran republican leader, as fireworks exploded and bottles smashed at garda lines beside the statue of protestant nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.
One of those protesting against the loyalist march, Sean Fallon, who described himself as an ordinary GAA-supporting non-political Dubliner, said: ‘If the loyalists had just come down and laid a wreath somewhere and then met a government minister, I wouldn’t have minded. But to try and walk down our main street waving the Union Jack, playing Orange tunes and generally rubbing our noses in it is going too far. That’s why I’m here.’
The Love Ulster rally was organised by the South Armagh-based Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR). One speaker, the Democratic Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson, said that the trip to Dublin had been worth it because people exercised their civil rights.
The U.S. has adopted the practice of force-feeding detainees who hunger strike
Keith Barratt (”Welshman”)
February 25, 2006
Information from Occupied Irag
The United States and Iran share an expression of public opinion, one that still causes considerable distress to the majority of British:
[In 1997] the people of Hartford, Connecticut, dedicated a monument to Bobby Sands and the other Irish Republican Army hunger strikers…. The monument stands in a traffic circle known as “Bobby Sands Circle,” at the bottom of Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park. The Iranian government named a street in Tehran after Bobby Sands. (It was formerly Winston Churchill Street.) It runs alongside the British embassy.
Readers may or may not be familiar with this part of Northern Ireland’s history, involving the death through a hunger strike of the IRA detainee. Bobby Sands was 27 years old when he died, 5 May 1981, after 66 days without food. Nine other IRA prisoners died following him in the same strike. Sands and his fellow strikers were protesting their reassignment from political prisoner status back to criminal status; poltical status was won the previous year through a hunger strike. Sands was elected to Parliament several days after he began his protest. The British government’s unwillingness to concede to the prisoner’s demands during the second strike, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and the other detainees, resulted in much greater sympathy for the IRA from Irish nationalists and greatly strengthened the movement as well as earned recognition from people around the world. A further brief summary is given by CAIN.
Before discussing the aspect of force-feeding that is taking place now in U.S. prisons, I want to step back a bit further into British history. I first became aware of the question of force-feeding through an excellent BBC docudrama many years ago about suffragettes, who employed civil disobedience in the UK from 1900 to 1920 in order to achieve the vote for women.
Many were imprisoned and used hunger strikes to further their cause. The authorities could not let these women, many of whom were connected to leading families in the country, die and become martyrs. They were forcibly fed.
The BBC did not hide what this meant in their dramatization of the events. They showed the women being bound to chairs, their heads pulled back by their hair, and the rough-handed prison warders thrusting large-diameter rubber tubes down their throats and pouring in a food mixture through a funnel.
So that you take what follows as seriously as you take all other acts now being done in our name, I ask you to sense the ugliness of the abuse, your mouth being forced open, the taste of that tube, and the abomination of the act. For surely we have become so accustomed to these atrocities that our newspapers can discuss them calmly and objectively. But you can no more be objective about these horrors than you can calmly debate in Congress where and when torture might be acceptable.
Yet what follows is classified not as torture but as “prisoner welfare.” Constance Lytton was force-fed in October 1909. Her book Prison and Prisoners included an account of her experiences:
Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. (Click photo to view forcefeeding image) The doctor leant on my knees as he stooped over my chest to get at my mouth. I shut my mouth and clenched my teeth…. The doctor seemed annoyed at my resistance and he broke into a temper as he pried my teeth with the steel implement. The pain was intense and at last I must have given way, for he got the gap between my teeth, when he proceeded to turn it until my jaws were fastened wide apart. Then he put down my throat a tube, which seemed to me much too wide and something like four feet in length. I choked the moment it touched my throat. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down. I was sick all over the doctor and wardresses. As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek. Presently the wardresses left me. Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howley. When the ghastly process was over and all quiet. I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, “No Surrender,” and then came the answer in Elsie’s voice, “No Surrender.”
As is happening now in Guantánamo Bay, nasal insertion was also employed. Mary Leigh, a member of the WSPU, was forced-fed in September 1909:
On Saturday afternoon the wardress forced me onto the bed and two doctors came in. While I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long, with a funnel at the end; there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up the right and left nostril on alternative days. The sensation is most painful — the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and there is a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I am on the bed pinned down by wardresses, one doctor holds the funnel end, and the other doctor forces the other end up the nostrils. The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down — about a pint of milk… egg and milk is sometimes used.
Emmeline Pankhurst, who was then in her fifties, endured 10 hunger strikes. Kitty Marion underwent at least 200 force-feedings in prison while on hunger strike. Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clarke, was taken ill at her home in Brighton soon after release from prison and died of a broken blood vessel, probably as a result of being forced-fed in Holloway Prison.
In Parliament James Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour Party, said:
In reply to a question of mine today, Mr. Masterman, speaking on behalf of the Home Secretary, admitted that some of the nine prisoners now in Winston Green Gaol, Birmingham, had been subjected to “hospital treatment,” and admitted that this euphemism meant administering food by force. The process employed was the insertion of a tube down the throat into the stomach and pumping the food down. To do this, I am advised, a gag has to be used to keep the mouth open.
That there is difference of opinion concerning the horrible brutality of this proceeding! Women worn and weak by hunger, are seized upon, held down by brute force, gagged, a tube inserted down the throat, and food poured or pumped into the stomach. Let British men think over the spectacle.
In 1913 the British Government sought a better way to treat such prisoners. The Prisoner’s (Temporary Discharge of Ill Health) Act came into force. Suffragettes were now allowed to go on hunger strike, but as soon as they became ill they were released. Once the women had recovered, the police rearrested them and returned them to prison where they completed their sentences. This successful means of dealing with hunger strikes became known as the Cat and Mouse Act.
Now step forward in time to the 1970s and ’80s. Prisoners detained for terrorism in Northern Ireland undertook hunger strikes in support of demands that were unacceptable to British public opinion. In words so terribly familiar today, the Cat and Mouse Act could not be employed, on the grounds that alleged IRA gunmen could not be let loose on the streets. At the same time, the British government could not countenance creating martyrs by letting them die.
Debate on force-feeding came to a head in the UK in the 1970s when two Irish prisoners, Dolours and Marian Price, legally challenged the Home Office’s right to force-feed in any case other than where refusal of food arose from a medical or psychiatric condition. It caused a furor, and the prison policy of involuntary feeding that earlier IRA prisoners had experienced was overturned. In 1981 the wishes of hunger strikers were respected and doctors supervised death-fasts in Northern Ireland. The death of Bobby Sands came as a result. The policy was subsequently refined, so that when prisoners became too weak to communicate effectively, the prisoner’s priest met with family members so that a final decision on intervention could be taken.
The hunger strikes came to an end, in part because of the realization that each of the families of the strikers would ask for medical intervention whenever the strikers lapsed into unconsciousness. At the same time, on 6 October 1981 James Prior, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, announced a series of measures that went a long way toward meeting many aspects of the prisoners’ five demands.
The relevance of this history to Guantánamo Bay will become clear.
The New York Times of February 9, 2006, includes this information:
United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into “restraint chairs,” sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward.
Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.
Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out “in a humane and compassionate manner” and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. He said in a statement that “a restraint system to aid detainee feeding” was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.
The Times quotes lawyers representing six of the prisoners:
“It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment,” said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. “It is a disgrace.”
The extent of this disgrace is indicated in the article:
The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.
Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.
These words are chilling: “‘This is just a reality of long-term detention,’ a Pentagon official said. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing.’”
We do not know the exact methods adopted to force-feed these prisoners, not least because the Pentagon is reluctant to go into details and some of its statements conflict:
Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.
Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.
In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Mr. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.
In the absence of more information, our sources can only be those quoted in The Times:
…a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told [his lawyer] last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.
Mr. Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers’ throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Mr. Wilner said.
On Jan. 9, Mr. Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.
Mr. Odah said he heard “screams of pain” from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee’s urging, Mr. Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day.
This description echoes the words of one of those IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, before the British government was made to face its inhumanity in 1981. Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly, in an interview with the North Belfast News in 2004, said:
“They press their knuckles into your jaws and press in hard. The way they finally did force feed me was getting forceps and running them up and down my gums,” he said.
“I opened my mouth, but I was able to resist after that,” said the Sinn Féin man in the interview.
“Then they tried — there’s a part of your nose, like a membrane and it’s very tender — and they started on that. It’s hard to describe the pain. It’s like someone pushing a knitting needle into the side of your eye. As soon as I opened my mouth they put in this wooden bit with a hole in the middle for the tube. They rammed it between my teeth and then tied it with cord around my head.
“Then they got paraffin and forced it down the tube. The danger is that every time it happens you think you’re going to die. The only things that move are your eyes.
“They get a funnel and put the stuff down.”
The New York Times quotes a government official:
“There is a moral question,” the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. “Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?”
There is indeed a moral question — one that the international community has answered, and it reaches very different conclusions from those apparently reached by the United States.
The World Medical Association, which includes support from the British Medical Association, has deemed the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive and provides an alternative route. Its statement, adopted by the 43rd World Medical Assembly in Malta in November 1991 and editorially revised at the 44th World Medical Assembly at Marbella, Spain, in September 1992 can be read here. The preamble is below:
1. The doctor treating hunger strikers is faced with the following conflicting values:
a. There is a moral obligation on every human being to respect the sanctity of life. This is especially evident in the case of a doctor, who exercises his skills to save life and also acts in the best interests of his patients (Beneficence).
b. It is the duty of the doctor to respect the autonomy which the patient has over his person. A doctor requires informed consent from his patients before applying any of his skills to assist them, unless emergency circumstances have arisen in which case the doctor has to act in what is perceived to be the patient’s best interests.
2. This conflict is apparent where a hunger striker who has issued clear instructions not to be resuscitated lapses into a coma and is about to die. Moral obligation urges the doctor to resuscitate the patient even though it is against the patient’s wishes. On the other hand, duty urges the doctor to respect the autonomy of the patient.
a. Ruling in favour of intervention may undermine the autonomy which the patient has over himself.
b. Ruling in favour of non-intervention may result in a doctor having to face the tragedy of an avoidable death.
3. A doctor/patient relationship is said to be in existence whenever a doctor is duty bound, by virtue of his obligation to the patient, to apply his skills to any person, be it in the form of advice or treatment.
This relationship can exist in spite of the fact that the patient might not consent to certain forms of treatment or intervention.
Once the doctor agrees to attend to a hunger striker, that person becomes the doctor’s patient. This has all the implication and responsibilities inherent in the doctor/patient relationship, including consent and confidentiality.
4. The ultimate decision on intervention or non-intervention should be left with the individual doctor without the intervention of third parties whose primary interest is not the patient’s welfare. However, the doctor should clearly state to the patient whether or not he is able to accept the patient’s decision to refuse treatment or, in case of coma, artificial feeding, thereby risking death. If the doctor cannot accept the patient’s decision to refuse such aid, the patient would then be entitled to be attended by another physician.
The excellent New York Times report came and went with little remark in the mainstream press. The treatment of prisoners on hunger strike by forcible feeding continues.
“Saving” prisoners from their hunger strike is a deceptive distortion of a cruel and unacceptable coercion that needs our urgent attention to bring to an immediate end. If we dare not allow prisoners to seek death as a means of escaping their circumstance or because they want to make martyrs of themselves, and yet we cannot meet any of their demands for the promise of a fair trial or some relief from their seemingly endless imprisonment, why cannot we follow the procedures demanded by the World Medical Association? If this is not acceptable, why cannot we adopt the British measures in Northern Ireland, which respected prisoners’ wishes until the point when imams and families can be involved in the decision-making regarding medical intervention?
Our answer at the moment is to revert to a practice that was discredited as cruel and barbaric a hundred years ago.
Please show the mercy to these people that seems absent in our lawmakers and bring this issue to the attention of Congress through your representatives. I shall be doing so in the United Kingdom. Perhaps our Canadian and European friends can also raise questions on this treatment of detainees with representatives of their own government to increase international pressure.
Saturday February 25, 2006 21:55 by Susan McKay, Irish Times
Article lays out the background of one of the main organisers of the FAIR/LoveUlster march (Wille Frazer) as associated with loyalist paramilitaries. It also details how a relative of another sectarian massacre was smeared by the FAIR group.
25/02/2006
The organisers of today’s event have every right to come to Dublin to express their grief and anger at being bereaved by the IRA. But they must face some unpalatable truths, writes Susan McKay.
As soon as he heard that the Rev Ian Paisley had stood up in the House of Commons and said Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmills massacre, Alan Black went straight to the Reaveys’ house in Whitecross, south Armagh. He told Reavey that he knew he was innocent.
This was in 1999. Black was the sole survivor of the sectarian massacre, which saw up to a dozen IRA gunmen ambush a bus carrying workmen home in January 1976. They lined the men up and raked them with automatic gunfire. Ten men died. Black was hit 18 times.
Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (Fair) is to hold a rally in Dublin today to draw attention to the suffering of the victims of terrorism. However, this is an organisation which has effectively branded an innocent Catholic man the mass murderer of his Protestant neighbours, causing him intense anguish and, inevitably, putting his life at risk.
The PSNI has stated that it had no reason to suspect Reavey of any crime, let alone of masterminding one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles. But Fair defiantly continues to carry the allegation through a link to Paisley’s speech on its website, despite repeated demands by the police for it to be removed.
Reavey witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre, which took place near his home. He was driving to Newry and happened upon it. He and his family were on their way to Daisy Hill hospital to collect the bodies of two of his brothers, John (24) and Brian (22).
They had been shot dead the previous night when loyalist gunmen burst into the family home. Three members of another local Catholic family were also murdered that night.
Reavey was also going to visit his younger brother, Anthony, who had been badly injured in the attack. The bodies of the murdered workmen were being brought into the mortuary when he arrived. He went into the room where the shattered families were gathering, and wept with them. Alan Black and Anthony Reavey shared a hospital room. Black lived. Reavey died.
Black has said that earlier on the day they met their deaths, the men on the bus had spoken with horror about the murders of the young Reaveys. He has remained a close friend of the Reavey family since the events of those terrible days.
Paisley’s Westminster claim, that Reavey was a “well-known Republican” who had “set up” the massacre, was made under parliamentary privilege.
He spoke of the “wild men” of the IRA who were free because the British government had not been ruthless enough in putting down terrorism. He said his information came from police files.
The deputy first minister, the SDLP’s Séamus Mallon, expressed outrage. Reavey went to the chief constable of the RUC, Ronnie Flanagan. Flanagan said he had “absolutely no evidence whatsoever” to connect him with the massacre, and that no police file contained any such allegation.
Paisley has not retracted it, and on the 30th anniversary of the massacre this January, Willie Frazer, Fair’s leading spokesman, and DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson claimed once again to know the perpetrators.
The Reavey murders were carried out by a gang which included men who were dual members of the illegal UVF and the British security forces. This gang was responsible for multiple sectarian murders, including the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombs, which killed 33 people.
Evidence including the testimony of a former member of the gang suggests that Robert McConnell, a UDR soldier, was a member. Before he died, Anthony Reavey described one of the gunmen who shot him. It was an accurate description of McConnell.
He was murdered by the IRA later in 1976. When Fair was set up in 1998, to remember what “Irish republican death squads” had done to south Armagh Protestants, “without justification or reprisal”, his nephew, Brian, became a prominent member.
Willie Frazer is open about his belief that the loyalist paramilitaries were a necessary part of the war against the IRA. During a protest against the release of republican prisoners as part of the Good Friday agreement, he was asked about loyalist prisoners. “They should never have been locked up in the first place,” he replied.
He told me once that, while he didn’t condone the murder of “innocent Catholics”, he had “a lot of time for Billy Wright”, who “called a spade a spade”. The notorious loyalist broke away from the UVF to form the Loyalist Volunteer Force in 1996 to kill Catholics in support of the Orange Order’s right to march through the Catholic part of Portadown.
Another Drumcree supporter said of Wright, “He may be a psychopath, but he’s our psychopath”. Since 1996 at least 12 people, including three children, have been murdered in parades-related violence.
Frazer, who is an Orangeman and an Apprentice Boy, said he understood why soldiers and police passed information about republicans to loyalists. He applied for a weapon for his personal protection and was turned down in 2003 because, according to police, of “reliable intelligence” that he “associated with loyalist terrorist organisations”. He denied it and sought a judicial review - it was refused in 2004.
The Orange Order welcomed the UDA leader, Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair to the Portadown protest in 2000.
Last summer, after the Parades Commission put restrictions on the Order’s Whiterock Road parade, Paisley declared: “This could be the spark that kindles a fire there will be no putting out.” The UVF offered to force the march along the order’s preferred route (past Catholic homes).
The order called the people out to support it. Days and nights of violence followed. Orangemen lunged with pikes and ceremonial swords at policemen. There were shouts of: “Are youse Fenians in disguise?”
Today’s event is billed as a Love Ulster rally. This campaign was launched last July with the symbolic landing at Larne harbour of bales of newspapers, bearing the title “Love Ulster”. This recalled 1914 when the UVF ran guns to Larne to arm unionists against Home Rule. At least one loyalist paramilitary leader was among those unloading the papers, smiling cheerfully for the invited cameras.
The July publication is full of harrowing accounts by victims and survivors of IRA atrocities, including Bloody Friday, La Mon, Kingsmills, Enniskillen and Shankill.
There are photographs of carnage. Alan McBride, whose wife died in the Shankill bomb in 1993, said of the paper: “Blood was pouring from it”.
However, it saddened him that there was no acknowledgment that the unionist community had “caused pain and grief as well”.
Catholics feature in “Love Ulster” as IRA killers. Paisley declared at an Independent Orange Order gathering in 1997 that “the entire pan-nationalist front is united behind the beast of fascism, the IRA”.
Love Ulster warns that Ulster is at “crisis point” and on the verge of being “sold out” into a United Ireland. It calls on Protestants to unite. This call for ethnic solidarity and militancy is the core of DUP politics. It was also a founding principle of the Orange Order.
Soon after its formation at the end of the 18th century, an Armagh squire wrote of his reliance on the local “Bleary Boys”. These were “stout Protestants of a character somewhat lawless”, but loyal.
Fair and the DUP insist the war is not over and that the enemy can still be defeated. A previous effort led by Drumcree stalwarts to rally Protestants around a new Ulster covenant was launched in Ballymena in 2001 with calls from one speaker for “B52 bombers over Dublin”.
Willie Frazer is a hurt man. The IRA murdered his father and four of his relations. Michelle Williamson, whose parents were killed in the Shankill bomb, expressed the intensity of this pain when she said of the surviving bomber, Seán Kelly: “You are like a disease in my bones, and the only cure is justice. To say I hate you doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.”
Robert McConnell may have murdered the Reaveys but to his family he was the man who looked after his sick brother and disabled sister.
The families bereaved by the IRA have every right to their grief and their anger, and every right to come to Dublin to express it. The news that the bands which will accompany today’s parade will not play as they pass the sites of the Dublin bombs is welcome.
Fair, Frazer admitted to a House of Commons select committee hearing last year, is controversial. “We are seen as the bad boys within the victims sector,” he said.
This is largely because of its aggressive insistence that there are “innocent” and “genuine” and “real” victims, and there are others who have no right to call themselves victims at all.
According to Fair and the DUP, Eugene Reavey is in the latter category. It is an appalling lie.
Stephen Breen and Ciaran McGuigan
26 February 2006
Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair has been moved to tears . . . by his lack of “puppy love”.
But the man who saved the terror chief’s Alsatians when they were abandoned at the height of the UDA feud has now warned the ousted UFF leader: “Try to take your dogs back and I’ll KILL you!”
Adair’s dogs, Rebel and Shane, were left behind when his family and cronies fled Belfast three years ago. Pictures of the pooches outside Adair’s Shankill home prompted dozens of calls from dog lovers to the USPCA.
They were eventually claimed by gay supergrass Dessie Truesdale, who says he paid Gina Adair £1,000 for the two pedigree dogs.
Truesdale has since gone into hiding after giving police statements about Adair and the rest of his gang.
But he continues to be involved in a bitter war of words with Adair and his cronies - and now Rebel and Shane have become pawns in the tit-for-tat row.
Adair last night told Sunday Life he was desperate to reclaim his dogs.
“I love these dogs and I haven’t seen them for a few years now. They are my best friends in the world”, he said.
“Not having the dogs by my side is affecting my health and all I’ve been doing recently is worrying about them. I think about them all the time.
“That b****** Truesdale has been taunting me about my dogs by phoning me up and telling me he’s beating them.
“I was almost crying one time when he phoned and I could hear the dogs screaming. He should not be anywhere near these dogs.”
He added: “He claims he paid money for the dogs, but he didn’t hand over a penny. He took them when I was put back in prison and my family were exiled.
“I have drawn up a plan to get them back and this is very much active. I hope to have them back where they belong very soon.”
Truesdale, who denied cruelty towards the dogs, warned Adair that if he tried to track down his dogs he would kill him.
He said: “He hears the dogs barking on the phone and it makes him sentimental, well that’s too bad.”
“They’re my dogs now. I would not even take the money back for them.
“As far as I am concerned, when I put that money into the bank account for them, the dogs were sold.
“If Adair came down here to get these dogs, I would kill him.
“He says he has a plan, but it is probably to have me killed so that him and (brother) Ian, as my next-of-kin, get into my flat and go through my stuff and take my dogs.”
Ciaran McGuigan
26 February 2006
A drugs runner who was caught transporting dope belonging to the LVF was last night back behind bars after going on the run from an Ulster jail.
Redmond Dougherty was returned to Maghaberry Prison last Thursday night by police, more than five months after he went on the run.
Dad-of-five Dougherty (39), of Glenlea Park in Belfast, had been serving a two-year sentence after being caught with £50,000 worth of cannabis in a car at Garnerville in June 2004.
He admitted possessing the cannabis with the intention of supplying it to others and of possessing a quantity of Ecstasy.
He claimed that he had been forced to collect the drugs by a paramilitary organisation that he refused to name.
At the time the Garnerville area was an LVF stronghold, where drugs rackets were being controlled by close associates of murdered LVF commander Stephen Warnock.
Dougherty absconded from jail last October after been granted temporary release.
His re-capture came just hours after convicted murderer Stephen Jeffrey Wilson (38), was returned to jail after giving two prison guards and a probation officer the slip.
Wilson had been allowed out of Maghaberry Prison for six hours to visit his elderly father and his mother’s grave when he gave two prison guards and a probation officer the slip.
He is serving a life sentence for the murder of Brendan Kevin Kelly in Brighton in 1987.
There are currently 12 other prisoners on the run from Ulster’s jails, several of whom have evaded capture for a number of years.
Johnston Brown
26 February 2006
The revelation that Johnny Adair’s right hand man, John White, was a Special Branch agent did not come as a complete surprise to me - but it did make very angry.
It angered me because Special Branch never relayed any warnings to me that Adair was plotting revenge attacks against my family and myself for my role in having the UFF boss jailed in 1995.
My home in Ballyclare was bombed by Adair’s UDA C company in October, 2000, and he also set in motion a sick plan to kidnap one of my teenage sons. I find it impossible to believe that double-killer John White was not giving Special Branch information about these events.
Why? Because I know for a fact that White tried to protect me from Adair, if only for his only selfish reasons - to concentrate on raking in money from crime.
White went to a senior police officer (not a Branch man) at Tennent Street in 2000 and warned Adair was obsessed with taking revenge against me.
I believe White did this because he was frustrated that Special Branch were not acting on his warnings.
White had actually gone with Adair to Tennent Street to discuss arrangements for the Shankill festival in August, 2000, which, as it turned out, was to trigger a bloody loyalist feud.
On the way out, White stopped on the stairs and said something like: “Oh! there is one other thing I meant to say. You go on Johnny, I’ll see you in a minute.”
White then told the officer: “The wee man can’t sleep for scheming up ways of getting back at Jonty Brown. He’s obsessed. Every 10 minutes it’s Brown, Brown, Brown. You’ve got to get that man out of his house.”
After the officer passed the warning to me, my wife and I set about making arrangements to move house.
I was getting similar warnings from my own informants, But, I repeat, I got no such warnings from Special Branch.
In fact, I got no assistance at all from Special Branch from the moment in 1999 when I co-operated with the Stevens Inquiry into the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane. I was shunned.
The revelation that White was working for Special Branch also adds weight to another serious concern I have about the UFF bomb attack on my home, which was fitted with all the latest security measures.
The only security measure one that failed was the Hawkeye radio alarm system, which was run by Special Branch’s Technical Services Unit.
The reliable ‘Hawkeye’ alarm system was linked to all local police vehicles. But it mysteriously failed that night, helping the UFF bombers to make their escape.
Johnny Adair has rubbished claims White was a Branch agent but I believe a lot of things will start to make sense to him now.
::Johnston Brown is the author of Into The Dark: 30 Years In The RUC.
Alan Murray
26 February 2006
The unmasking of John White as a Special Branch agent underlines just how deeply loyalist terrorists were penetrated by the intelligence services.
Reliable sources have suggested that murdered east Belfast UDA boss JIM GRAY was also a Branch agent.
One security source said ‘Doris Day’ was “extremely difficult to handle” because his drug habit made him volatile.
Some loyalist informants like the first ’supergrass’ witnesses in the early 1980s - JOSEPH BENNETT, CLIFFORD McKEOWN and WILLIAM ‘Budgie’ ALLEN provided information to save their own skins when they faced charges.
Many others were compromised and “persuaded” to help after they committed minor offences, or because they held grudges against associates.
One former Special Branch officer who handled a number of agents said blackmail or threats were not the favoured method of recruitment.
“Many did it simply for the money, although the Branch could never match the cash the Army’s Force Research Unit or MI5 could provide. But we did recruit many top informants and they contributed to the defeat of terrorism,” he said.
But he was scathing about the disclosure that White had worked for the Branch since 1994.
“Whoever disclosed that to the media is an absolute moral and professional disgrace and should hang his head in shame.
“I would suspect that the character who did it didn’t serve in the Special Branch for all his career, but was seconded, learned some secrets, and is now prepared to trade them for cash, or ramble about them in his cups.”
White follows a long line of UDA terrorists who became moles and were then unmasked.
The most notorious, BRIAN NELSON, an agent for the FRU, which allowed him to plot many terrorist attacks before his involvement in the murder of Pat Finucane in 1989 provoked the Stevens Inquiry.
Nelson died in Wales after his release from jail, but fellow UDA informer WILLIAM STOBIE was murdered by the terror group in 2000 after calling for an independent inquiry into the Finucane murder.
Another informant killed by the UDA was notorious racketeer JIM CRAIG who provided details on loyalist terrorists to both the IRA and RUC. He was shot dead months after UDA leader John McMichael was killed by an IRA under-car bomb in 1987.
Fellow UDA leader TOMMY ‘Tucker’ LYTTLE was was also branded an informer after his death.
In the ranks of the UVF, the most recent allegations concern North Belfast loyalist MARK HADDOCK, who was named as a Special Branch agent in the Dail by TD Pat Rabbitte.
Stephen Breen
26 February 2006
Caged lottery lout Michael Carroll has presented ousted terror boss Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair with a £100,000 gift.
Sunday Life can reveal Carroll, who sports UDA bling jewellery, handed over the cash to his hero shortly before he was sent to prison.
Carroll received a nine-month jail term last month after pleading guilty to causing affray at a Christian rock concert in Downham Market, Norfolk, in May 2004.
It is believed Carroll - who has blown almost all of the £9.7m he won on the National Lottery - decided to give Adair the cash after meeting him and his cronies.
Adair, who was last week giving after-dinner speeches to football hooligans in Huddersfield, refused to say what he would be spending the cash on.
It is understood he could use the cash to fund a possible return to Northern Ireland and to attend functions with neo-Nazi groups in Europe.
The Shankill loyalist, who last night attended the Amir Khan fight, also described thug Carroll as a “good man”.
Said Adair: “It’s his decision what to do with the money and I’m not going to go into too much detail about Michael Carroll giving me £100,000.
“I still have a lot of supporters out there. I am now trying to make a living from speaking to different people about my role in the conflict.
“If people want to give me money, it’s up to them. My war is now over and I don’t have to discuss with anyone what my personal business is.
“People say Michael Carroll is not the brightest, but he is well-versed in the role of loyalism in Northern Ireland.”
Carroll has been signed-up to write his life story by the publisher who was behind glamour model Jordan’s best-selling book.
His life has been dogged with controversy since winning the Lottery in November 2002 - aged 19.
Carroll has been a regular in his local magistrates court for disorderly behaviour and drugs offences.
He is also infamous for building a banger-racing track in his backyard, to the fury of his posh neighbours.
Like Adair, Carroll has also hired a manager and vowed to turn his life around by putting his efforts into charity work.
His decision to gave Adair a huge amount of cash is sure to anger victims of loyalist violence.
Stephen Breen
25 February 2006
One the notorious Shankill Butchers has discovered a new hobby - writing pen letters!
Security sources told Sunday Life that cut-throat killer Sam McAllister has been continuing his behind bars hobby in recent weeks.
McAllister - part of the ruthless UVF gang that tortured, mutilated and slaughtered Catholics between 1975 and 1982 - has been keeping a low profile, after he was attacked with a hatchet in 2000.
It is understood the evil killer has become a paranoid recluse and spends his time writing letters to people from around the world.
He was left infuriated last month when an Australian woman, known as ‘Jeannie’, refused to return his letters.
‘Jeannie’ told how she had initially accepted McAllister’s views that he only joined the Shankill Butchers to defend his community against the IRA.
But she later changed her mind when she read about the horrific torture the gang had inflicted on Catholics.
She also stopped writing to the killer when he sent her hate-mail after she told him she would not be writing to him because she was going on holiday.
“I received many letters from people in Northern Ireland and one of these was from a man called Sam who told me he was once in the Maze, but that meant nothing to me.
“I only selected him because he had nice handwriting and in one of the letters he told me about the Shankill Butchers.
“He explained he was in it because of the IRA and I accepted this. But when I did some research, I was jolted big-time. This was a group of vile people,” she said.
“He is a different being as to what I thought. I do not want contact with him because he sent me a scathing letter just because I told him I was going on holiday and would not be able to write.
“He was very angry with me, but I suppose I am a bit curious as to how he’s getting on because of all the attention on terrorism at the minute.”
McAllister has been living in Lisburn since his release from the Maze in 1995.”
BY DAVID LYNCH
25/02/2006
The political role that the Easter Rising martyr, James Connolly, played between 1914 and 1916 will be debated in Dublin next week.
As discussions intensify in the run-up to the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, a series of lectures on the period is planned for Dublin.
The James Connolly Education Trust is to organise a series of meetings, with the first one taking place next week. The speaker will be Manus O’Riordan, the head of research of the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union. He will address the topic of Connolly, the World War, and 1916.
Eugene McCartan, an organiser of the lecture series, said: “The series will deal with the 1916 Rising. They will be of interest and should provide a good antidote to the ongoing attacks on the Rising in the national media.
“The first talk will deal with the attitude of James Connolly to World War I and the reason why he felt the Rising should take place.
“With talk radio and newspaper column inches raising questions about the Rising, the reasons for it, questions about poppies, [and claims] that it was a stab in the back to the Irish fighting in Europe for the freedom of small nations, the series will culminate with a weekend of events on the 12 to 14 May in Liberty Hall, Ireland Institute and Arbour Hill Cemetery.”
The role of James Connolly in the Rising is beginning to be addressed in a number of forums this year. The Labour Party is to hold a series of meetings under the banner of the Liberty Project this year to discuss the role that the labour movement played in the Rising.
Rascal Films is working on a film about the life and times of the Edinburgh-born socialist republican.
• Manus O’Riordan’s lecture on Connolly, the World War, and 1916 will begin at 8pm on Tuesday at the Ireland Institute, 27 Pearse Street, Dublin.
Sinead McCavana
26 February 2006
The ‘Love Ulster’ rally in Dublin descended in total anarchy yesterday as republican rioters went on the rampage in protest at the loyalist parade.
The city’s prestigious O’Connell Street - teeming with Saturday shoppers - was plunged into chaos as gardai fought running battles with protestors.
The sheer scale of the riot - which lasted for more than two hours - shocked television viewers around the globe.
Gardai in riot gear were drafted in as youths threw literally everything they could get their hands on at police lines.
The anarchy was fuelled by a ready-made arsenal of weapons in the form of building materials from construction sites lining the thoroughfare - the widest street in the Republic.
Everything from bricks, steel fences, pieces of machinery and fireworks were hurled at members of the gardai.
Dozens of empty soft-drink bottles - looted from a nearby pub - were also hurled at cops and journalists covering the mayhem.
Earlier, the ‘Love Ulster’ parade - which was due to start at 12.30pm - looked like it would pass off peacefully.
Around 50 Republican Sinn Fein protestors holding placards had gathered, but just 30 minutes later, thousands had gathered and completely blocked the road. From that moment on, the future of the loyalist march was in doubt.
Lagan Valley DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson - one of the rally organisers - told marchers: “It’s a sad day when, in the 21st century, republicans can’t stand to have a unionist about the place.”
After gardai told organisers they could not guarantee the parade’s safety, bandsmen played the Sash before re-boarding their buses with the Union Flag.
As they climbed onto the coaches, protestors chanted, “Cheerio, cheerio” and “Where’s your march now, Jeffrey?”
Said one onlooker: “What did they expect?
“They think they can come here and march past the spot where loyalists killed dozens of Irish people?
“Emotions are running very high. Would republicans get to march up the Shankill? No, I don’t think so.”
However, even after republican protesters left the area, the riot on O’Connell Street still gathered pace.
Shopkeepers had - perhaps wisely - shut up for the day.
But that didn’t stop a few looters chancing their arm and smashing windows in two shoe shops - but gardai pinned them against a wall before they could make good their escape.
One middle-aged Dublin woman said: “What was (Republic justice minister) Michael McDowell thinking, having this parade on a building site?
“Sure, everything they need for a riot is sitting right here.
“Look at the state of our beautiful new (O’Connell) street.
“How far is this going to set us all back just when we thought we were making progress.”
She added: “People are going to watch this on TV and think we’re all bigots down here.
“No one expected this.
“But feelings still run very deep.
“I think it’s still too sensitive to have a parade like this.
“If the march just involved the victims’ relatives, that would be different. But it’s not.
“It’s the bandsmen and the Union Jack that infuriate people.”
Following behind gardai - holding their shields above their heads to protect themselves - people were stepping over blood-splattered pavements and bricks.
Another local man was clearly stunned at the trail of devastation.
He said: “Thugs. That’s all they are.
“This is disgraceful - absolutely disgusting. Look at the Jim Larkin statue and all the madness that’s going on at his feet - he’s holding his hands up as if to say, ‘Why?’”
Riot police kept forcing the rioters back in strategically planned charges until the mob had been pushed off O’Connell Street.
Although the trouble eased, a tense stand off continued on O’Connell Bridge.
Late last night, gardai reported the city-centre to be quiet.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands
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