SAOIRSE32

BBC

The Alexander Bar in York Street was searched

A number of people have been arrested following an operation in a loyalist area of north Belfast, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has said.

Those arrested, who are all males, were arrested following a search of the Alexander Bar in York Street in the Tiger’s Bay area.

Local DUP councillor Ian Crozier said there was a large police presence in the area.

“Local people are edgy and quite unsure about what is going on,” he said.

An Phoblacht

BY JIM GIBNEY
2 March 2006

Photo: Mickey O’ Donnell, Bobby Sands, Gerrard Rooney and Tomboy Loudon pictured in the Long Kesh cages

March memories

1 March marks the anniversary of the beginning of the 1981 Hunger Strike. Here Jim Gibney recalls the events leading up to that fateful anniversary.

In the dark in our hundreds we huddled close seeking warmth against the bitter cold and comfort from the awful news that Seán McKenna, close at hand was also close to death.

Outside the Royal Victoria Hospital on Belfast’s Falls Road, we had marched the few hundred yards from Sinn Féin’s offices in solidarity with Seán and in relief that none of the other prisoners had died on hunger strike.

The crowd was awash with rumours: Seán was dead, barely alive, hours to live, brought into intensive care, wrapped in a special bag made from tin foil to preserve his dropping body temperature, he would not last the night.

Outside the RVH were some of the people who had campaigned the length and breadth of Ireland in support of the prisoners. The people who visited them in the H-Blocks and Armagh Women’s prison. The people who at great risk to themselves smuggled them tobacco, radios, skins to write comms.

On the streets for five years they were tired from marching. Women did not know what it was like to spend a Saturday or Sunday at home with their families Like the prisoners, they had given it their all.

It was 19 December 1980, a week from Christmas. The previous day the first hunger strike ended. The precise circumstances had not reached supporters. There was confusion. We hoped a just resolution could be found to end the protest. I encouraged people around me to enjoy Christmas. No prisoner had died so Christmas was back on.

But inside me I knew another reality. Earlier Gerry Adams showed me a comm from Bobby Sands that had arrived from the prison the previous night. Few had read it. I was shocked by the comm, especially the sentence which starkly said a second hunger strike would start on 1 January and Bobby would lead it.

Arrangements had been made for me to visit Bobby the next day and tell him that the leadership did not want a second hunger strike and that another way had to be found to honourably end the protest.

Bobby bounded across the floor of the visits area, a smile on his face, his hand stretched out seeking mine, the ever present warders trailing a distance behind finding it hard to keep up with Bobby’s pace. I could see the years on the blanket and no wash protests had taken their toll on him. His bearded face was gaunt and his long Rod Stewart-like hair accentuated that look.

My instruction was simple. I had to convince him that a second hunger strike could not begin as he suggested. He had to hold the men together to allow time to further test the British and the prison authorities following the end of the hunger strike.

The negotiations during the hunger strike between Gerry Adams and the British government had produced a document which on paper had the potential to end the prison protests in the H-Blocks and Armagh Women’s prison. The document had to be explored to its outer limits. When that point was reached the question of a second hunger strike could be reviewed.

Bobby rehearsed some of the points made in his comm. About the H-Blocks being a breaker’s yard and the need to win political status to defend the struggle. He said he would try everything to prevent a second hunger strike but it would happen and someone would die.

We parted, Bobby returning to a prison where with hundreds of others he would spend Christmas, naked but for a blanket, in a freezing cell, with a urine soaked mattress on the floor for a bed, with the burden of planning a second and as it turned out fatal hunger strike.

Over the next three months he tried the way suggested by the leadership of the Movement, but the British government sought to humiliate the prisoners. They foolishly thought they could defeat the prisoners in the H-Blocks and Armagh women’s prison and in turn defeat the independence struggle.

The next time I saw Bobby he was in the prison hospital, over 20 days on hunger strike. I visited him several times with his mother and sister. We spoke for the last time when he was very close to death.

I also visited Francis Hughes, Raymond Mc Creesh and Tom Mc Elwee in the prison hospital. Once while in there, I saw Patsy O’Hara sitting in a wheel chair in a darkened cell. He smiled broadly showing his gleaming white teeth and waved his long arm as I passed by. So many times since I wished I had stopped a while and spoke with him.

I visited Joe Mc Donnell and Martin Hurson before their condition merited a move to the hospital.

As teenagers Kieran Doherty, Joe Mc Donnell and I were interned together in Cage 3. In the autumn of ‘76 Kieran and I were next door neighbours on the ‘Threes’ in the Crum’s C Wing. The following year I was released. Kieran never came home and I never saw him alive again.

These and many more memories from that time are flooding through my mind as 1 March passes, the 25th anniversary of the start of the second hunger strike, which claimed the ten lads.

Throughout those dark depressing eight months of the hunger strike I visited the prison hospital many times. I was always in the company of a relative of one of the hunger strikers. A prison warder was never too far away watching us. Men were dying behind closed cell doors as we walked along that single hospital corridor.

In recent times I have been back to the prison hospital. The company and the circumstances could not be more different. I stood in the cells where the hunger strikers died. I was with Raymond Mc Cartney MLA, who was on the first hunger strike, Sinn Féin Councillor Paul Butler who spent 15 years of a life sentence in the H-Blocks, Rosie Mc Corley who spent nine years in Magabherry Prison, Mike Ritchie and Ciaran Mackle, members of Coiste na nIarchimi, the body for former political prisoners.

As a result of efforts by Sinn Féin and Coiste na nIarchimí, the prison is preserved for future generations to visit. We were there inspecting the prison hospital to assess what maintenance work needs to be done to ensure it is properly preserved and ready for those who wish to visit it.

Armagh Women’s Prison, Crumlin Road Gaol, Long Kesh, the H-Blocks, the Prison Hospital, are now monuments, historical sites, where remarkable events, some epoch making, occurred.

The British government tried to use these prisons to break the spirit of republican prisoners. Instead republicans broke them and inspired a generation and more to follow them in the struggle for Irish freedom.

The dead hunger strikers are our generation’s 1916. In Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin you can find a museum to that great event. Now at Long Kesh you can visit the prison hospital, a site where we lost some of Ireland’s best. Do so. It is an experience second to none.

• To arrange visits to the prison contact, Coiste na Niarchimí, Belfast (028 90 200770).

An Phoblacht

2 March 2006

Bobby Sands was born in 1954 in the predominantly loyalist district of Rathcoole in North Belfast. The eldest of four children, he left school in 1969 and went to work, apprenticing as a coach maker. In 1972 his family moved to a nationalist housing development called Twinbrook, in West Belfast, having endured years of sectarian intimidation and harassment.

Bobby joined Oglaigh ha hÉireann in his young teens, and at the age of 18 he was arrested, subsequently spending three years in jail. Six months after his release, he was re-arrested on active service following a bomb attack. He was taken to Castlereagh and interrogated for seven days.

Refusing to talk or recognise the court, Bobby Sands was sentenced to five years in the cages of Long Kesh, being assigned to Cage 11.

Released in April of 1976, Sands was re-arrested in October of the same year. Now married, with a three-year-old son, he was sentenced to 14 years in Long Kesh.

In 1976, the British government had introduced legislation to phase out the special category status under which political prisoners in the North were detained and which had been achieved by a hunger strike by republican prisoners in 1972. The new legislation was the central policy plank of renewed British efforts to depict the IRA campaign as a ‘criminal conspiracy’. All political prisoners arrested after 1 March 1976, were now to be treated as ‘criminals’.

Bobby Sands gained a reputation for being particularly steadfast in his opposition to the increasingly brutal treatment from the guards. A number of guards during this time had a habit of drenching political prisoners with hoses, particularly in winter. The prisoners learned to stay clear of windows when they spotted these guards cleaning nearby. One day when the call went down from cell to cell, relaying a warning to stay clear of the windows because the screws were coming with the hose, Bobby, hearing the warning, stepped up to the window, deliberately making himself a target. While the guard turned the full force of the hose on him, he stood unmoving, refusing to back down as the water poured over him. Only when the guard had given up and moved on did he turn from the window. A cell check later found him lying hypothermic and semi-conscious in a flood of icy water on the floor of his cell.

On 27 October, 1980, following the breakdown of talks between British Direct Ruler Humphrey Atkins, and Cardinal O Fiaich, the Catholic primate of all Ireland, seven prisoners in the H-Blocks began a hunger-strike. Bobby Sands volunteered for the strike but when the then O/C of the prison Brendan Hughes, went on hunger strike he appointed Sands as O/C.

During the 1980 hunger-strike Bobby was given political recognition by the prison authorities. The day after a senior British official visited the hunger-strikers Bobby was brought half-a-mile in a prison van from H-3 to the prison hospital to visit them. Subsequently he was allowed several meetings with Brendan Hughes. He was not involved in the decision to end the hunger-strike, which was taken by the seven men alone. But later that night he was taken to meet them and was allowed to visit republican prison leaders in H-Blocks 4,5 and 6.

On 19 December 1980, Bobby Sands issued a statement that the prisoners would not wear prison-issue clothing nor do prison work. He then began negotiations with the prison governor, Stanley Hilditch, for a step-by-step de-escalation of the protest.

But the prisoners’ efforts were rebuffed by the authorities: “We discovered that our good will and flexibility were in vain”, wrote Bobby. “It was made abundantly clear during one of my ‘cooperation’ meetings with prisoner officials that strict conformity was required, which in essence meant acceptance of criminal status.”

In the H-Blocks the British saw what they thought was an opportunity to defeat the IRA by attempting to criminalise imprisoned republicans, but the blanketmen, perhaps more so than those on the outside, appreciated before anyone else the grave repercussions, and so they fought back.

Bobby Sands volunteered to lead a new hunger-strike.

The second Hunger Strike began on 1 March 1981 and was led by Bobby Sands. The Hunger Strikers had 5 demands. They were:

1. The right not to wear a prison uniform;
2. The right not to do prison work;
3. The right of free association with other prisoners;
4. The right to full remission;
5. The right to one visit, one letter, one parcel per week and organise their own educational and recreational facilities.

Unlike the previous hunger strike volunteers would join at different stages, thus slowly maximizing pressure on the British government. This staggered approach would also avoid a repeat situation where a number of volunteers might die at the same time. The prisoners thinking was that two or three hungerstrikers dying at once would have no more effect on the British than a single death.

Another tactical move came the day after the beginning of the fast when the 425 non-conforming prisoners in the H-Blocks called off their dirty protest, thus centralising public and media attention on the plight of the men on hunger strike.

Bobby Sands believed that his death could secure the five demands and save the lives of his fellow Hunger Strikers. For the first 17 days of the hunger-strike, he kept a secret diary in which he wrote his thoughts and views, mostly in English but occasionally breaking into Irish. On the first day of his hungerstrike he wrote:

Sunday 1st

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.

My heart is very sore because I know that I have broken my poor mother’s heart, and my home is struck with unbearable anxiety. But I have considered all the arguments and tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity.

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution. That is why I am incarcerated, naked and tortured.

Bobby Sands was to last 61 days on hunger strike, his sacrifice was to inspire a new generation of republicans and the whole world was to see how Britain behaved towards those who would not bow down to her will.

On the 1 March 1981, 25 years ago, Bobby Sands began the first day of his hunger strike.

Belfast Telegraph

02 March 2006

A married Portadown couple have had their luxury lifestyle disrupted after £3.6m of their assets were frozen as part of an investigations into drug, fuel and cigarette smuggling.

The Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) has seized assets from Mark and Beverley McKinney including property, the contents of more than 30 bank accounts and a helicopter.

The agency also seized 70 vehicles including articulated lorries, a Bentley Continental, a Jaguar X-Type and a Range Rover from the couple who own MMK International Transport.

The ARA stated in Belfast High Court that it believes Mr McKinney has used his company to smuggle drugs, fuel and cigarettes.

The agency also produced evidence that Mr McKinney has a criminal record which includes two convictions under terrorism legislation in respect of possessing and recording information likely to be of use to terrorists, and alleged in court that he has links to loyalist paramilitary organisations.

An Interim Receiver has now taken control of the assets of the McKinneys and MMK International Transport which include:

Property situated at Woodlands Manor, Portadown.

A commercial property situated at Carrickblacker Road, Portadown.

Property located at Lower Seagoe Industrial Estate, Portadown.

A caravan situated at a caravan park in Co. Down.

A large plot of land with planning permission for a substantial property at Moyallan Road, Portadown.

The contents of more than 30 bank accounts.

More than 70 vehicles, including articulated lorries, a Bentley Continental, a Jaguar X-Type, a Range Rover and a helicopter.

Under the same order, the assets of Anthony James McNeill of Selshion Parade, Portadown, were also frozen. These include property, which is valued at £60,000 gross.

In pursuing its action against McNeill, the ARA alleged in court that both he and the McKinneys were engaged in laundering in excess of £650,000, and that he has links to loyalist paramilitaries in the Portadown area.

ARA Assistant Director Alan McQuillan said: “This case was originally referred to ARA by PSNI. Our investigators have carried out a detailed examination of the affairs of the individuals involved.

“At the heart of these assets is a major road haulage business in Portadown.”

Giving evidence to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee last night, Alan McQuillan said the ARA had taken 29 cases linked to loyalist paramilitaries compared to 14 against republicans.

He said that loyalists tended to be “less sophisticated” and more motivated by personal gain.

“Among the republican paramilitaries I will find, pro rata, probably less of the assets are visible. The net overall assets may be greater but it is harder to find them,” he said.

“On the loyalist side it is much more fragmented and there are a lot of people out there flaunting their wealth much more so pro rata than we have seen in republican communities.”

Belfast Telegraph

By Jonathan McCambridge
02 March 2006

The Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing will be one of the first cases examined by Northern Ireland’s new Historical Enquiries Team, police have revealed.

Detectives have also recently uncovered new witnesses to the IRA massacre who have been interviewed.

The Historical Enquiries Team was set up earlier this year to investigate over 3,000 Troubles-related deaths between 1968 and 1998.

At a meeting of the Policing Board yesterday, Ulster Unionist Sam Foster asked police for an update on the police investigation into the IRA atrocity when a no-warning bomb exploded at the Cenotaph in Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday in 1987.

Eleven people were killed and 63 were injured in the bombing, which caused outrage across the world.

Mr Foster said he was very disappointed by the lack of police progress. He said the victims were suffering from “non-remembrance” by police.

Chief Superintendent Maggie Hunter said that the C2 department of Crime Operations was continuing to pursue lines of inquiry in the Enniskillen bombing.

She said: “Recently we identified new witnesses and they have been interviewed.

“When the new lines of inquiry have been examined, the case will be passed to the Historical Enquiries Team.

“Their governing principle will be maximum disclosure, subject to legal guidelines.

“I can assure you the Enniskillen case will be treated as a case already opened and will be dealt with whenever the inquiry team receive the papers.”

Irish Independent

Infectious disease clusters linked to inner-city pubs could herald epidemic, says expert

Eilish O’Regan
Health Correspondent

CLUSTERS of TB here could be a signal of an epidemic outbreak, an infectious disease expert warned yesterday.

Dr Margaret Hannan, head microbiologist at the Mater Hospital in Dublin said 300 cases of TB which were investigated recently involved mostly young Irish males from north inner-city Dublin.

She said many of these drank in local pubs in the north of the city and control measures are needed to ensure the disease does not spread.

Dr Hannan said the findings are a sign of a lack of TB control and they were not being picked up by the health system.

The problem has been exacerbated in the last year by the closure the TB unit in Peamount Hospital in Dublin, she told the ‘Irish Medical Times’.

Since then patients with the disease who need to be hospitalised are cared for in acute general hospitals. She said 26 cases of the infection were traced to one bar and another cluster of cases were linked to one family.

“These were young men in employment who were living in urban parts of Dublin.

We found that those infected with TB were all living in certain areas and drinking in certain pubs

“One of the things we found was that they were all living in certain areas and all drinking in certain pubs.

“That is indicative of poor TB control in the country and that could be the beginning of an epidemic outbreak,” she added.

The expert criticised the poor infrastructure in Ireland for the management, control and prevention of TB.

There were 437 cases of TB in 2004 while the previous year there were 407 cases, research into the disease showed.

Dr Hannan explained: “The research looked at all of north Dublin, and found people who had evidence of recently picking up the infection were young Irish-born males and not the usual suspects who are drug addicts, heavy-drug users, immigrants and the poor.”

She warned if TB becomes a problem, it takes about 10 to 15 years to get a handle on it and to treat it because it is very difficult to diagnose and it is very difficult to treat.

The closure of the Peamount unit has taken away a service that was essential and it was not just providing medical care.

“It was a social support for people who cannot afford housing and who cannot afford to take care of themselves.

“There is now a big gap in the service. These people are not sick enough to be in one of our acute hospital beds, but you want them looked after, you want them warm and dry and fed every day while they are getting over their TB,” added Dr Hannan.

Patients who have TB need to be monitored to ensure that they take a correct course of antibiotics otherwise resistance to the drugs will increase.

BN.ie

02/03/2006 - 08:29:59

The Democratic Unionist Party has defended its continued refusal to share power with Sinn Féin despite the IRA’s declaration of an end to its armed struggle.

Party spokesman Ian Paisley Jnr said yesterday that the IRA was still capable of returning to violence and, as long as that continued, his party would never share power with republicans.

Mr Paisley was speaking after PSNI chief constable Hugh Orde told the Policing Board in Belfast that there was no evidence of any violent intent by the IRA.

The DUP is refusing to accept that the IRA’s war is over, pointing to claims from unnamed security sources that the organisation retained some weapons despite saying it had decommissioned its entire arsenal last year.

Those claims have been rejected by the IRA, while the decommissioning body has also said it can find no evidence to back them up.

Despite this, Mr Paisley is continuing to insist that the IRA is “armed to the teeth” and has taken a tactical stance between violence, criminality and politics.

The DUP man’s comments come as a Sinn Féin delegation prepares to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair today to discuss the restoration of the power-sharing institutions in the North.

The Irish and British governments are planning to put their own proposals on the matter to the Northern political parties due to the DUP’s refusal to negotiate a power-sharing deal with Sinn Féin.

Mr Blair is then expected to recall the Assembly in shadow form and give the DUP one year to decide if the IRA is honouring its commitment to non-violence.

Sinn Féin is opposed to such a plan, believing it would encourage DUP hardliners to seek further concessions.

The party also says the IRA has done everything required of it and the DUP should not be allowed to hold up progress.

Larkspirit

Monday 2nd

Much to the distaste of the Screws we ended the no-wash protest this morning. We moved to ‘B’ wing, which was allegedly clean.

We have shown considerable tolerance today. Men are being searched coming back from the toilet. At one point men were waiting three hours to get out to the toilet, and only four or five got washed, which typifies the eagerness (sic) of the Screws to have us off the no-wash. There is a lot of petty vindictiveness from them.

I saw the doctor and I’m 64 kgs. I’ve no problems.

The priest, Fr John Murphy, was in tonight. We had a short talk. I heard that my mother spoke at a parade in Belfast yesterday and that Marcella cried. It gave me heart. I’m not worried about the numbers of the crowds. I was very annoyed last night when I heard Bishop Daly’s statement (issued on Sunday, condemning the hunger-strike). Again he is applying his double set of moral standards. He seems to forget that the people who murdered those innocent Irishmen on Derry’s Bloody Sunday are still as ever among us; and he knows perhaps better than anyone what has and is taking place in H-Block.

He understands why men are being tortured here — the reason for criminalisation. What makes it so disgusting, I believe, is that he agrees with that underlying reason. Only once has he spoken out, of the beatings and inhumanity that are commonplace in H-Block.

I once read an editorial, in late ‘78, following the then Archbishop O Fiaich’s ’sewer pipes of Calcutta’ statement. It said it was to the everlasting shame of the Irish people that the archbishop had to, and I paraphrase, stir the moral conscience of the people on the H-Block issue. A lot of time has passed since then, a lot of torture, in fact the following year was the worst we experienced.

Now I wonder who will stir the Cardinal’s moral conscience…

Bear witness to both right and wrong, stand up and speak out. But don’t we know that what has to be said is ‘political’, and it’s not that these people don’t want to become involved in politics, it’s simply that their politics are different, that is, British.

My dear friend Tomboy’s father died today. I was terribly annoyed, and it has upset me.

I received several notes from my family and friends. I have only read the one from my mother — it was what I needed. She has regained her fighting spirit — I am happy now.

My old friend Seanna (Walsh, a fellow blanket man) has also written.

I have an idea for a poem, perhaps tomorrow I will try to put it together.

Every time I feel down I think of Armagh, and James Connolly. They can never take those thoughts away from me.