SAOIRSE32

The New Republic

The Organizer
by Fintan O’Toole
Post date: 03.09.06
Issue date: 03.13.06

Mick: The Real Michael Collins
By Peter Hart
(Viking, 485 pp., $27.95)

On an Internet site dedicated solely to merchandise bearing the image of the early twentieth-century Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, you can buy a T-shirt imprinted with the hero’s face and the slogan “Rebel With a Cause.” Michael Collins is the James Dean of the Irish nationalist revolt against Britain. Peter Hart, in his new biography, describes Collins as “the first example of that twentieth century phenomenon: the guerrilla celebrity.” Young, good-looking, moody, and sexy, he also had the wit to die in 1922 at the age of thirty-one, before the banalities of peacetime government or the disappointments of middle age could turn him into a bore. Killed by some of his old comrades, who rejected the deal that he struck with the British, he could be admired for apparently contradictory reasons: as a ruthless terrorist leader and as a heroic compromiser.

On the one hand, Collins can be remembered as the father of twentieth-century asymmetric warfare, in which a small guerrilla gang takes on a lumbering imperial giant and wins. In an interview with the London Daily Telegraph in 1998, Yitzhak Shamir revealed that one of the great inspirations in his life was Michael Collins. Shamir said he admired Collins’s personal courage, and had studied his tactics. He chose the name “Michael” as his nom de guerre while leading the Lehi group (the so-called Stern Gang, a Jewish band of anti-British terrorists in Mandatory Palestine) as a tribute to Collins. As Shamir wrote in his memoirs, “The spirit and circumstances of [Collins’s] struggle against the British came to life for me in faraway Poland and remained with me.” The Collins who inspired Shamir was the hard, cold, clear-eyed leader of the Irish Republican Army, who was prepared to use violence as a political tool.

On the other hand, Collins can be remembered as a brave peacemaker. Shortly after the peace deal in 1998, which brought an end to thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland, David Trimble, the leader of the pro-British Ulster Unionist Party, was asked about the man who had been his greatest enemy–Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the present-day IRA. He confessed that he thought it “possible that Gerry Adams could be a Michael Collins.” What he meant was not that Adams was a cold-blooded mastermind of terror, but that he, like Collins, could lead the IRA into democratic politics by making a pragmatic deal, as Collins had done in 1921 when he negotiated an Anglo-Irish treaty that left Britain in control of Northern Ireland and created a state on the rest of the island whose independence fell short of the republican ideal for which he had fought.

Collins’s double image gives his memory a peculiar pliability. The original publicity poster for Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins, which came out in 1996, showed Liam Neeson as Collins leaping over a barricade with a rifle in his hand. It was scrapped in favor of a poster showing him making a speech from an election platform. The transformation of radical gunman into democratic politician was designed, of course, to resonate with the peace process in Northern Ireland, and the film broke Irish box-office records. As a result, Collins’s image was commodified through posters, t-shirts, phone cards, and kitschy bronze statuettes. In the village of Granard, home to Collins’s girlfriend Kitty Kiernan, the new Michael Collins Bar and Kitty Kiernan Restaurant did a roaring trade. Politicians made speeches about what Collins, had he lived, “would have” done and thought. All of it, remarkably enough, happened to coincide precisely with their own deeds and ideals. In his Michael Collins: A Life, published in 1996, James Mackay, typically of the Collins biographers, wrote that had he lived Collins “would have” peacefully re-united the island and created a thriving economy. The young revolutionary had become the patron saint of lost opportunities.

The malleability of Collins’s memory owes much to the facts of his astonishing life, but much, too, to the way his early death made his future a matter of pure possibility. The men who shot Collins in an ambush during the civil war between rival nationalist factions that followed British withdrawal from most of Ireland were partisans of the more hard-line Eamon de Valera, who went on to dominate the Irish state in the coming decades. De Valera still held the ceremonial office of president of the Irish Republic fifty years after Collins’s death, and is remembered now as ancient, decrepit, and half-blind. Collins stayed fresh in the imagination as the country boy who had humbled the greatest empire the world had ever known. Revelations that he had a foul tongue and an eye for women only made him seem more attractively contemporary. In the wars of memory, Collins has routed those who killed him.

The process of shaping an official memory began early. As Anne Dolan has shown in her brilliant book Commemorating the Irish Civil War, Collins was scarcely cold before the process of myth-making was under way. Less than a month after Collins’s death in August 1922, the embattled government of the new Irish state commissioned an official biography. A few weeks later, it agreed to purchase his death mask and a bronze bust. On the second anniversary of the killing, the Irish army unveiled a large stone cross, with an image of the crucified Christ, at the alleged site of the fatal ambush on a rural road in Collins’s native County Cork: a place now declared to be holy ground, “made sacred by the blood of General Collins.”

The identification of the hero’s blood sacrifice with that of Jesus was by no means accidental. Collins’s closest military acolytes had been known as “the Apostles,” and his own dying words were even reported as “Forgive them”–an echo of Christ’s words on the cross. And like the memory of all dead saints, the memory of the real Collins was being made to measure. The site of the monument, chosen for its capacity to accommodate large crowds of pilgrims, was in fact forty yards away from the real site. A cement cone that had marked the actual place of his death was moved so as to stand, as it still does, next to the cross. The tendency to shift the facts to shape a usable memory goes back a long way.

The subtitle of the new biography by Peter Hart, with its claim to reveal the “real Michael Collins,” is thus an open declaration of skepticism in the face of a deliberately constructed image. Collins, Hart notes in his introduction, has virtually disappeared into “the realm of the incredible, of Monte Cristo, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sherlock Holmes” through “innumerable tales of his miraculous feats, subterfuges and evasions of near-certain capture and death.” Hart’s aim, he writes, is not to debunk Collins, but simply to “start from scratch and from a new, forensic perspective,” one that is “analytical and systematic rather than heroic.” Hart is well fitted for the task. His great book The IRA and Its Enemies is a micro-study of the guerrilla campaign in Collins’s native Cork, and his collection of historical essays, The IRA at War 1916-1923, includes a groundbreaking study of the Irish nationalist underground in London, where Collins forged his political persona.

The delicious irony that emerges from Hart’s sober analysis of the available documentation is that Collins, the arch-enemy of British imperialism, was in fact the perfect product of Victorian Britain. He was upwardly mobile: born in 1890 as the third son of obscure farmers in rural Cork, by the age of thirty he had become chairman of, and minister for finance in, the government of a new state and commander-in-chief of its army, negotiating as an equal with Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. He achieved his ambitions, moreover, by embracing the very values that his imperial masters preached to their subjects: hard work, organization, relentless discipline. If the British ruling class developed a perverse regard for the young man who directed a dirty war against them, it was surely because they recognized him as their own creature.

Collins was not a born genius. When, at fifteen, he took the examinations for a job as clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank in London, he failed two of the four subjects and did not achieve the required grade of sixty-six. He got the job only because so many successful candidates did not accept their offers. Yet it was the Post Office Savings Bank that made him such a successful revolutionary. Irish nationalism had always had a surplus of dreamers, poets, visionaries, rhetoricians, and idealists. What it lacked was bureaucrats. Collins became the indispensable man of the Irish revolution because he knew how to run things.

The guerrilla chief who demanded that his subordinates supply reports “done in tabular form and furnished in duplicate” was simply a grown-up version of the boy in the Post Office Savings Bank, where hundreds of thousands of transactions had to be recorded accurately every day and clerical errors were not tolerated. The earnest, punctual Collins who earned a reputation as “the speediest young clerk in the Savings Bank” was, in embryo, the leader whose favorite terms of castigation were “lazy,” “inefficient,” and “unbusinesslike.” Obscured by the legend of the trickster-terrorist is the real Collins story: the literal treason of the clerk.

Collins’s pragmatism and aptitude for micro-management made him a perfect revolutionary bureaucrat. Very few guerrilla leaders can have devoted mental space to the question of dog licenses, as Collins did at the height of the IRA’s campaign in 1920, when he suggested that the issuing of licenses for dogs and illegal whiskey might be a good way to make up revenue lost to nationalist-controlled local councils by the withdrawal of British grants. This appetite for detail combined with an ability to survive without much sleep might seem merely the makings of a good middle manager. But the context of Irish revolutionary culture gave a special potency to Collins’s ethic of efficiency.

That culture was one of heroic failure. Its cardinal virtues were courage, self-sacrifice, and a noble death. After a decade in London, where he divided his time between respectable day jobs in banking and a burgeoning career in both open and conspiratorial Irish nationalist organizations, Collins returned to Dublin to take part in the most glorious failure of them all, the Easter Rising of 1916. He was in the revolutionary headquarters (appropriately enough, the General Post Office in Dublin) for most of the five days during which a few hundred armed rebels held out before their inevitable defeat by vastly superior British forces. The grand gesture reached its culmination with the cold-blooded (and, from the point of view of public opinion, catastrophically misjudged) execution of the leaders by the British. Collins emerged from a prison camp at the end of 1916 with all the élan of a man who had taken part in the bloody national sacrifice, but also with a contempt for heroic gestures. The revolution he would run would not be a grand opera; it would be a corporation.

In September 1917, when the prominent nationalist Thomas Ashe died as a result of being force-fed by British authorities attempting to end a hunger strike, Collins was given the job of making the funeral oration at his graveside in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. The funeral was staged as a grand exercise in political theater, and as a self-conscious reprise of the obsequies in 1915 for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a veteran of the militantly nationalist Fenian movement. On that occasion, Patrick Pearse, who went on to lead the Easter Rising, had made a famous speech whose rhetoric was powered by the romantic glamour of blood sacrifice: “The fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Pearse’s oration was the high point of a super-charged, ecstatic rhetoric that fused political militancy and religious mysticism into a deathly incantation. It captured, in the words of William Irwin Thompson, “the romance of the monumental grave, the mysticism of martyrdom, the desire for apotheosis in a tragic death.”

Thomas Ashe was buried a few yards from O’Donovan’s grave, and the crowds who gathered to hear Collins would undoubtedly have expected a rhetorical display along similar lines. What happened instead was that twelve men fired three volleys over the grave and, as the Irish Times reported the next day, “Mr. Michael Collins, after the firing, stepped forward and said there would be no oration. Nothing remained to be said, for the volley which had been fired was the only speech which it would be proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.” The silence was more dazzlingly eloquent than anything Collins might have said. It delivered an unmistakable message. Romantic rhetoric might sanitize or even substitute for violence, but Collins intended to get on with the dirty business itself. This time there would be no heroic and dramatic failures, just cold instrumental killing.

Late in 1921, when Collins’s celebrity had made him a great catch for society soirées, he attended a party at the house of the writer and surgeon Oliver St. John Gogarty (best known as the model for Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses) along with W.B. Yeats and the artist and mystic George Russell. The latter launched into a spiritual lecture on good, evil, and the soul. Collins listened intently for a while, then interrupted with the blunt question: “But what is your point, Mr. Russell?” It was a question that previous Irish nationalist leaders had tended not to ask. The struggle was its own point–merely to have fought was, in some mystical sense, to have won. For Collins, the point was simple enough: to force the British to negotiate their withdrawal from Ireland by any means necessary.

Violence was one of those means. Collins’s reputation as the father of modern guerrilla warfare is undeserved. As Hart convincingly argues, the IRA’s strength was that its attacks on the police, the army, and the irregular British force (known, from its uniform, as the Black and Tans) were locally directed and opportunistic. There was no central mastermind. Collins’s importance lay rather in his ability to maintain the supply of money and arms, to keep his eye simultaneously on the political and military dimensions of the struggle, and, above all, to coordinate intelligence. His success in the latter department was not just militarily useful, but also crucial to the morale of the fighters. In the long and woeful tale of Irish uprisings, every chapter had ended with a bitter acknowledgment that all the plans had been betrayed by enemy spies. By turning the tables, Collins helped to convince his own side that this time the ending could be different.

Again, as Hart shows, Collins was not the awesome spymaster of legend. At least two British agents managed to win his trust before they betrayed themselves by their own amateurism and were shot. Ned Broy, Collins’s most important agent, a senior clerk in the plainclothes section at police headquarters in Dublin Castle, contacted the IRA on his own initiative. But Collins’s efficiency was nonetheless crucial. He knew how to act quickly on the information that he was given, and his effective networks of communication carried the warnings of police and army raids in time for their intended targets to take evasive action.

Perhaps more importantly, Collins understood the psychological impact not so much of the intelligence itself as of the idea that he had it. The story, widely rumored but nonetheless true, that Collins had been able to sneak into Dublin Castle and examine his own file, gave his supporters a sense of almost magical invincibility. The operation in November 1920 in which twelve British agents were killed in their homes during eight separate but almost simultaneous IRA raids conveyed the same impression to the general public. It also provoked a vicious British backlash in which several civilian spectators at a football match were shot dead, further undermining the legitimacy of the British presence.

How could a man who used violence so ruthlessly become the pragmatic compromiser who negotiated with the British and settled for less than the sacred Republic for which the 1916 leaders had died? The contradiction is more apparent than real. The Collins who preferred gunshots to high-flown rhetoric was precisely the same utilitarian who preferred an acceptable deal to an interminable war. Unusual among his comrades, Collins was immune to Catholic mysticism and to the sectarian religious passions that infected so much of Irish nationalist ideology. Toward the end of the Easter Rising, when many of the rebels were resorting to their rosary beads, an angry Collins saw one of his comrades with his head in his hands and asked, “Are you fucking praying too?” He was strongly anti-clerical, and owned many of the works of the American freethinker Robert Ingersoll (known to contemporaries as “the Great Agnostic”).

Cut off from the hinterland of visceral faith, his nationalism was as pragmatic as it was passionate. The experience of running a guerrilla war, moreover, taught him not just about the uses of violence, but also about its limits. Those limits were the same for the IRA in the 1920s as they were for a later version of the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. The IRA could make Ireland ungovernable by Britain, but it could not actually defeat a vastly greater military power or force the large Protestant and pro-British population in the northeast of the island into an Irish state.

Still, Collins had built his reputation in the nationalist movement by always being on the more militant side of its various splits. It was a surprise to his fellow members of the team that negotiated with the British in London in 1921 when Collins abruptly announced that he would accept the draft treaty creating a Free State in twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, with the British king remaining as nominal head of state. As Hart puts it, “His personal history of siding with the militants in splits, his power base among conspirators and gunmen, and his fear of being blamed for compromise or failure should have predisposed him to say no.” His pragmatism, though, trumped everything else. As he explained to his revolutionary colleagues back home, “In a contest between a great Empire and a small nation this was as far as the small nation could get. Until the British Empire was destroyed, Ireland could get no more.” In this Collins was undoubtedly right, and we should recognize the moral courage that it took for a heavily mythologized figure to confront an unpalatable reality.

In the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty, Collins virtually embodied the new state, dominating its government and commanding its army against his former comrades. He operated again as organizer and manager, galvanizing his forces with his energy, efficiency, and intolerance of failure. Ironically, his death in the fateful ambush ought to have further demythologized him, for it showed the reputed gunman’s inexperience in combat. Collins needlessly exposed himself under fire in a way that reminded his colleagues that he had always been essentially a back-room boy. Emmet Dalton, who was beside Collins when he died, recalled that “Mick wouldn’t keep his head down. If he’d ever been in a scrap he’d have learned to stay down.” Such was Collins’s importance for the fragile new state, however, that he was immediately transfigured into a warrior-hero.

Peter Hart has done a remarkable job in recovering the ambitious, workaholic bureaucrat behind the legend of Michael Collins. His argument is always lucid and forceful, if sometimes disfigured by an unfortunate attempt at populist language whose lack of real conviction is conveyed by a plague of exclamation marks. By sticking rigorously to documentary sources, many of them not previously exploited, he has constructed an image of Collins that is more mundane than those that have gone before but still acknowledges his exceptional achievements. This is the book that will unquestionably be the starting point for all future reflections on Collins. But it should not be the last word.

There remains, after all, a sense in which a demythologized Collins is not quite as “real” as Hart would have it. For even before his death and apotheosis, “Michael Collins” meant far more to both his admirers and his enemies than the six feet of blood and bone who plotted his own advancement alongside his country’s freedom. When a university student in Dublin confided to her diary in 1921, after a skirmish between the IRA and British forces, the rumor that “Michael Collins was killed in the battle … while leading his men on a white charger,” she was imagining a fantasy figure who could not be further from the reality of Hart’s revolutionary bureaucrat. The ability to evoke such fantasies, however, was itself a part of Collins’s historical presence.

Collins’s mysterious glamour dazzled even his enemies at Dublin Castle. They came to regard him as at once maddeningly elusive and yet so intimately known that they habitually referred to him simply as “Michael.” The Irish historian Michael Laffan has noted such comments on the British files as that of the commander in chief Nevil Macready after a prison break allegedly masterminded by Collins: “It was cleverly done, and I rather admire Michael.” Other remarks on British intelligence files have the star-struck quality of fans gossiping about a movie actor or a pop singer: “M.C. has, I hear, grown a beard: he is the idol of the young men”; “Michael slept with a girl, address known, once a week”; “Michael is often disguised as a priest with a remarkably high collar.”

Even among the lower ranks of the British army, Collins acquired the status of a Houdini. In January 1921, a newly arrived English soldier named J.P. Swindlehurst noted in his diary (published recently in William Sheehan’s fascinating British Voices From the Irish War of Independence 1918-1921) that “We have two extremely fast cars with Rolls Royce engines, we had a talk to the drivers this morning, and were told they are kept in readiness to catch the elusive Michael Collins when news of his whereabouts comes to hand. He must be famous, £500 is being offered dead or alive for his capture, but all the Black and Tans … and CID [Criminal Investigation Department] men from Scotland Yard can’t get hold of him.” Six weeks later, he was still complaining that “night after night we have been ordered out, ‘Michael Collins had been located, he was imprisoned in such and such a house, the CID had him surrounded,’ and all sorts of rumours. At the time of writing, he is still at large.”

So Peter Hart’s forensic examination of the documents captures one part of Collins with a rigorous historian’s skill. But the elusive figure compounded of rumor and imagination was perhaps just as effective in convincing the British that they could not hold Ireland in their grasp. That Michael Collins is still at large.

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist for The Irish Times.

Belfast Telegraph

By Deborah McAleese
09 March 2006

The public inquiry into the murder of LVF boss Billy Wright - which has yet to begin - has already cost the Prison Service almost £500,000 in one year.

An average of around £40,000 a month has been paid out by the Prison Service to cover costs preparing for the inquiry, such as legal fees and staffing.

Figures obtained by the Belfast Telegraph from the Prison Service show that the probe, which is not due to begin until autumn, will have cost it an estimated £461,000 this financial year.

The Billy Wright Inquiry is being headed by retired Scottish Judge Lord Randal MacLean.

A High Court challenge has been launched over Secretary of State Peter Hain’s decision to convert the inquiry from the Prison (Northern Ireland) Act 1954 to the Inquiries Act 2005.

The Prison Service said it was unable to provide a total estimated cost of the inquiry for NIPS.

Wright (37) was shot dead in the Maze jail by the INLA in 1997.

Belfast Telegraph

By Gene McKenna
09 March 2006

US President George W Bush will next week be asked to allow up to 25,000 undocumented Irish regularise their status in the US.

Both Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern will raise the issue at the St Patrick’s Day ceremonies in the White House tomorrow week as they did on the same occasion at the ceremonies last year.

Irish-American campaign have now formed a major group, the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, which had a rally in New York’s Gaelic Park on Sunday and yesterday organised a march to Capitol Hill in Washington. During eight visits to the US last year, Dermot Ahern held a series of top-level meetings with Senators and Congressmen in New York, Washington and Boston to press for a breakthrough which would help bring about a resolution to the problem.

He is expected to meet the leader of the Irish lobby group, Niall O’Dowd, again in Washington next week.

Many emigrants have found themselves in traumatic situations in having to decide whether to stay in the US or return home to visit sick relatives with the risk that they would not be allowed back into the US.

The Kennedy-McCain Bill put forward by Senators Ted Kennedy (Democrats) and John McCain (Republican) is still believed to be a long way from being approved.

Under this Bill, undocumented people could regularise their status by applying for a temporary residency visa.

They would receive work and travel authorisation, which would provide them with greater protection in the work place and allow them to travel to and from Ireland without fear of being refused re-entry to the US.

What distinguishes the Kennedy/McCain Bill from other proposals is that it includes a path to permaHnent residency. Official estimates here of the number of undocumented Irish living in the US range from 20,000 to 25,000.

Guardian

James Sturcke and agencies
Thursday March 9, 2006

An image dated March 1990 of Thomas “Slab” Murphy. Photograph: PA

One of the most enigmatic and powerful figures in the republican movement was at the centre of a series of police raids today linked to a major inquiry into organised crime on both sides of the Irish border.

More than 300 officers were involved in around dozen dawn operations in so-called “bandit country” around the border between south Armagh and north County Louth.

The farm of Thomas “Slab” Murphy, widely believed to be the IRA’s one-time chief-of-staff, was sealed off. Mr Murphy, whose 38-acre property straddles the border, has been the subject of persistent claims of smuggling operations between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Police said they arrested three people, including two men in a car that sped through a security checkpoint on the south side of the border. A Republic of Ireland police helicopter helped authorities on the Northern Ireland side to intercept and arrest the men.

“It doesn’t get any bigger than this,” one source in Northern Ireland said, while another claimed that a top IRA member who has made millions from smuggling had been the main target.

An detective told the Associated Press that the raids were conducted in the hope of identifying links to a £30m portfolio of properties in Manchester that were investigated last October on the suspicion they had been purchased with IRA proceeds.

One of Mr Murphy’s brothers has acknowledged he owns some of the properties in question but denies any link to the IRA.

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) welcomed the raids as a sign of close cooperation between both police forces on the island and the two countries’ anti-racketeering agencies, which have the power to impound criminals’ property and other assets.

“The threat of organised crime recognises no borders, and efforts against any gangs or individuals involved can be maximised with cooperation and integration,” said the party’s policing spokesman, Alex Attwood. “Any crime boss or foot soldier must know there is no hiding place for them on the island.”

A Sinn Féin spokesman declined to comment.

In the October raids, officials from the Assets Recovery Agency stormed homes and properties around Greater Manchester as part of an investigation into 250 properties worth £30m.

The agency said the properties, with an equity value of £9m, had been acquired “over a period of time” and were held by individuals and property management companies.

Following the raids, a property developer whose offices and home were searched by police confirmed he had done business with Mr Murphy’s brother, Frank. Dermot Craven said he believed he had been duped and had not realised Frank Murphy’s relationship to Thomas Murphy.

After the Manchester operations, Thomas Murphy, who has never been convicted of any crime, claimed he made his money from farming. However, anti-terrorist police and several published histories of the IRA identify him as the outlawed group’s long-time chief-of-staff.

He was named in 2004 in the BBC’s criminal rich list as the richest smuggler in the UK, with an estimated fortune of £35-40m from cross-border cigarette and fuel smuggling.

In 1985, the Sunday Times published an investigation of Mr Murphy that identified him as a millionaire smuggler and a pivotal figure in plotting bomb attacks. Mr Murphy sued for libel but lost twice.

Eight months later, the pivotal witness against Mr Murphy, former IRA member Eamon Collins, was murdered. No one was charged with the killing. In 1998, a Dublin jury ruled Mr Murphy was an IRA commander and a smuggler.

Irelandclick

by Damian McCarney

Gaeilgeoirí at a Twinbrook Irish medium primary school are celebrating having been given the green light to trade in their mobile huts for a brand new school.

Scoil na Fuiseoige in Summerhill are to be one of the schools across the North to benefit from the release of £380million for school building investment announced by Education Minister Angela Smith last week.

Delighted with the announcement that Scoil na Fuiseoige will receive £1.9million in the scheme, Príomhoide Eilís Uí Néill said that it will provide much needed permanent accommodation.

“We are ecstatic at this news. Everyone has worked very hard to reach this point and we are delighted that we have secured a new brick building for the school.

“The mobile huts that we have for our school have meant that our accommodation fell short of modern standards.

“This has been unfair for the children and parents in this area who choose Irish medium education for their children,” said Eilís Uí Néill.

She also commended the contribution of parents who have sent their children to Scoil na Fuiseoige since the school opened in 1994.

“Without their dedication to the Irish language medium, our class numbers would not be big enough to qualify for this grant. I hope that they share in this great news,” said Eilís Uí Néill.

It is understood that in addition to the new building, the children will also benefit from new play areas.

“We will hopefully have good play facilities included in the project as we own a large area of land where the school is presently sited.

“This gives us scope for an excellent play area alongside the school building,” said Eilís Uí Néill.

On a previous occasion, Scoil na Fuiseoige had believed that they would receive a new school building, and in preparation had plans and surveys conducted in preparation.

The project never materialised but they hope that with this preparatory work already completed, the development of their seven classroom school can swiftly get underway.

Journalist:: Damien McCarney

Irelandclick

Call in the experts

As we speak the Trevors are in Kent giving the bobbies there the benefit of their experience in handling major robbery inquiries. This is not a joke.
Kent Chief Constable Michael Fuller said the Trevors would carry out a review of the Tonbridge investigation to date in order to ensure that the English cops have “identified and exploited all possible lines of inquiry” and that the investigation was professional and thorough. This is recognised good practice in the police service and we value the opportunity to learn from our colleagues. This review allows experienced investigators independent of our inquiry to look at what we have done and what we plan to do and to help us take stock.”
Working quickly, the Trevors have already compiled a preliminary report which, thanks to his extensive contacts within the force, Squinter can share with you today. Some minor corrections made by Kent police to the PSNI report have been added in brackets.
“The Chief Constable of Kent has asked us to carry out a review of his force’s handling of the robbery of the Securicor (Securitas) depot in Sadlers Wells (Tonbridge Wells) on Thursday (Wednesday) January (February) 21 (22).
Can we first of all apologise to the Chief Constable for the fact that our report is 24 hours late, but review team officers, unfamiliar with the local terrain, were unable to locate the Kent police HQ and were forced to wander around for several hours before somebody thought to ask a policeman.
Even in the short term that we have thus far spent on examining Kent police practice, a number of glaring omissions and errors have become apparent.
• No search of the Kent police social club has been carried out.
Given that the only money that we have recovered thus far was found in the PSNI social club, this is an embarrassing oversight on the part of our Kent colleagues.
• The white van was found too quickly.
We are firmly of the opinion that in the early days the investigation was too focused on finding the van that the robbers drove the money away in. The huge amount of resources spent on finding the van within 48 hours took vital resources away from the crucial work of briefing journalists and bugging the homes of people kidnapped by the robbers.
• The Kent police kept their options open.
We have recommended that the Chief Constable of Kent follow standard practice by saying the IRA did it and ignoring all other possibilities. It is our experience that it is at this point that the media takes over the investigation.
• TV cameras not present at searches.
We have been disturbed to note that no television cameras were present during the searches of the white van, the farm and the lock-up garages. We refer the Chief Constable to section 28 paragraph 4 of the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act which reads: “All police operations must be filmed for the teatime news and an officer will be delegated to ensure that local media outlets are present. More vehicles and officers than are needed must be used so that cameras can get good pictures outside the premises of long lines of vehicles and officers rummaging in gardens and wheelie bins.”
• People have been arrested and charged.
Bringing people in for questioning and subsequently charging some of them was an act of extreme naivety. The Kent police have again been negligent – criminally so, in our view – in their approach to this matter. Information gleaned by police officers in the course of their inquiries has no place in a court of law, but should be filtered into the public domain by way of friendly journalists and the Sunday papers. And suspects should not be arrested and interrogated, instead their names and details should be leaked to the media, with officers taking great pains to ensure that the people named have served long terms of imprisonment and can’t sue.

MIRROR MIRROR

Staff at the Irish Daily Mirror offices in Dublin will this morning be thanking their lucky stars that the three strikes and you’re out rule doesn’t apply to journalists.
On Tuesday morning the paper reported in best shock-horror fashion that a member of the Provisional IRA had murdered 22-year-old Donna Cleary, the mother of one who was shot dead at a house party in Coolock, north Dublin, in the early hours of Monday morning. Clearly, this was both a big story and a worrying development. What does it mean for the IRA’s so-called ceasefire? Is this the end of the peace process? Is the Sinn Féin electoral ball in the free state up in the slates? Do we have to put the security shutters back up and start taping the windows again?
Well, even as bundles of Irish Daily Mirrors were thudding on to the pavement in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning, events were overtaking the paper. Turned out that a man arrested in connection with the murder had died in custody. Turned out 24-year-old Dwayne Foster was a heroin addict with throat cancer who had fallen off a motorbike and badly injured himself during an attempted armed robbery last year. Turned out Gardaí believe he fired the fatal shot and aren’t looking for anyone else.
Now you can say many things about Dwayne Foster, but it’s clear that one thing you could not say about him was that he was an IRA gunman. Not surprisingly, by Wednesday the Mirror had cooled on the IRA hitman theory. It’s unfortunate that this latest gaff has come so quickly after the Mirror got it wrong about the Dublin ‘Love Ulster’ riot. The Mirror didn’t blame it on ‘republican scumbags’ as most of the other papers did, it laid the blame squarely at the door of Sinn Féin who, it emerged, had no more to do with the violence than the Mirror did.
Be nice to think that a third screw-up would mean that someone might be asked to do some explaining, but Irish journalism is a funny business. Whereas if a doctor makes mistakes like that somebody ends up on a slab, and if a lawyer makes a mistake like that someone ends up in jail, the punishment in the newspaper industry for getting something wrong is pretty feeble. No, let’s face it, the punishment is non-existent. The good news for the company that the Holywood headquarters of the paper’s Northern edition is equipped with state-of-the-art anti-claptrap software and the boys up here weren’t having any of it.
The Dublin edition of the Mirror more anti-republican than the Ulster edition – would you Adam and Eve it?

Can’t we have a quiet pint anymore?

And there’s you thinking that the UDA men in combat uniforms milling around upstairs in the Alexandra bar (above) were there for a night at the races. In fact, it now emerges that the UDA was about to announce that it had jacked in all criminality. All criminality, of course, except putting on paramilitary uniforms and assembling illegally. Either that, or they were practising for the next Love Ulster parade in Dublin.
Ihab Shoukri claimed that he didn’t know there were any UDA men on the premises and that he was having a quiet pint downstairs when all the bad boys were upstairs playing toy soldiers. This has the ring of truth, Squinter feels, and attempts to put him back in the slammer for breaking the terms of his bail by associating with bad boys were pure mischief-making on the part of the Trevors. Ihab told arresting officers on the night: “Out of all the gin joints in all the world, they had to go and walk into mine.”
UDA veteran Sammy Duddy, meanwhile, hasn’t been as upset since Johnny Adair’s men shot his chihuahua, Bambi. “Bursting through doors and shooting up bars indiscriminately is our job,” he said. Unionist politicians, meanwhile, are outraged and are demanding answers. Not about what the UDA was up to, but about why they fired CS gas into a pub full of half-cut paramilitaries. This press release is fairly typical of the depth of their anger.
Chief Constable Hugh Orde has a lot of questions to answer after Thursday night’s disgraceful scenes. For heavily armed officers to fire into a crowd of innocent thugs, killers and drug dealers in camouflage gear is an affront to civilised standards of behaviour. The fact that no-one was killed or injured was down to the will of God, sheer good luck, the military training of the loyalists, the anaesthetising effects of large amounts of vodka and the fact that no live rounds were fired.
We have no doubt that had this been an IRA show of strength of the kind we have seen all too often in recent months and years, the PSNI would have signed the members’ book and had a few drinks in the committee room before going in.
At last night’s meeting of the Parades Forum, the DUP demanded answers from the UDA representative to a number of questions:
• Are you all right?
• Did they give you your gear back?
• Who’s the tout?
• Did they let you finish your pint?
• Are you putting in a claim?

For his part, Chief Constable Hugh Orde said that what was going on in the bar that night when his men burst in was “no teddy bears’ picnic.” Indeed not.

If you go down to the pub today
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go out for a swall today
You’d better go in disguise.

For every cop that ever there was
Will gather there for certain, because
Today’s the day the UDA have their thicks nicked.

If you go down to the pub today,
You’d better not go alone.
It’s lovely down in the pub today,
Except for the forces of Rome.

For every cop that ever there was
Will gather there with teargas, because
Today’s the day the UDA smicks are pig sick.

IAIS

03/09/06 11:55 EST

Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator Martin McGuinness has said nationalists would be very sceptical of a statement issued today by the UDA in which it claimed it would move away from violence.

The statement, issued by the inner council of the North’s largest loyalist paramilitary organisation also denied reports that it was using a cover name to launch a fresh wave of sectarian attacks.

Fears that the grouping may be about to embark on a new campaign against Catholics heightened when a taxi passenger’s gun jammed after it was pointed at the driver in North Belfast at the weekend. The attack was claimed by the Red Hand Defenders, a pseudonym employed in the past by the UDA.

Martin McGuinness said: “Given that the UDA over recent years have made a number of positive statements only for them to be contradicted by actions on the ground, people will be totally sceptical about this statement, particularly in light of events in recent days.”

He added: “We need to hear and see from the UDA evidence that their violent sectarian campaign against Catholics is over. We need to hear that their guns and bombs will not be used again and that they want to move forward peacefully with the rest of us. Along with most people I hope that this statement will take us forward.”

BN.ie

09/03/2006 - 14:47:23

The Ulster Defence Association today pledged to complete a planned transformation away from violence.

A statement issued by the inner council of the North’s biggest loyalist paramilitary organisation also denied reports that it was using a cover name to launch a fresh wave of sectarian attacks.

Fears that the grouping may be about to embark on a new campaign against Catholics heightened when a taxi passenger’s gun jammed after it was pointed at the driver in north Belfast at the weekend.

The attack was claimed by the Red Hand Defenders, a pseudonym employed in the past by the UDA.

But the organisation rejected any link to the apparent murder bid.

Its statement said: “Within recent days the name of the so-called Red Hand Defenders has emerged once again.

“We wish to state categorically that there is no Red Hand Defenders and they do not exist.

“The individuals using this cover name are criminals who are motivated by self gain. Those who use that name were stood down and that is a matter of public record.”

The UDA has come under intense scrutiny following a police raid on a North Belfast pub where its members were believed to be in dress rehearsals for a paramilitary show of strength.

Seventeen men were arrested by the specialist unit that stormed the Alexandra Bar in the Tiger’s Bay district, including top loyalist Ihab Shoukri.

Eleven of them were later charged with helping to set up a meeting of the outlawed terrorist group, although Shoukri was released and fought off a police attempt to have him sent back to jail.

A judge ruled on Wednesday that he was not in breach of bale conditions imposed while he waits to go on trial for UDA membership by being in the pub when police swooped.

The paramilitary organisation’s statement insisted: “The UDA carry out the wishes of its entire membership.

“That membership is saying quite clearly that they are committed to a process of change and will not be deterred from that path.

“We are confident that our current policy will see us through any attempt to derail this process.

“None shall separate us.”

Daily Ireland

By Connla Young
09/03/2006

Solicitors representing a man accused of involvement in the Omagh bomb have made a request to interview former Federal Bureau of Investigation and alleged MI5 agent David Rupert.
Peter Corrigan, from Kevin Winters and Company, confirmed last night he has informed the British Public Prosecution Service that he wants to interview the man who helped put former Real IRA leader, Michael McKevitt, behind bars for 20 years.
Mr Corrigan believes information held by Mr Rupert will prove that his client Sean Hoey did not make the Omagh bomb which killed 29 people in the Co Tyrone town in August 1998.
David Rupert was recruited by the FBI as an agent in the 1990s and encouraged to infiltrate the pro-republican organisations in the US. Information supplied by him later led to Mr McKevitt being sentenced to 20 years in 2003 for ‘directing terrorism’ and membership of an illegal organisation.
Earlier this month, it was claimed that Mr Rupert later also worked for MI5. The British intelligence agency has been accused of failing to pass on information to RUC Special Branch that the Real IRA was planning to place devices in Omagh and Derry city in 1998.
Mr Hoey’s solicitors say they want to meet Mr Rupert after it was claimed that he provided the security forces with the identities of the Real IRA Omagh bomb-makers.
Mr Hoey’s legal team maintain questions remain unanswered in respect of the information supplied by Mr Rupert. Mr Hoey denies all the charges against him.

Daily Ireland

**Published 1 March 2006

Danny Morrison
01/03/2006

When recalling the 1981 hunger strike, people often preface their memories by saying: “You wouldn’t think it was 25 years ago. It seems like only yesterday.”
Even thirtysomethings who were just five or six in 1981 have vivid recollections of mass funerals and street rioting or of their distraught parents in front of television screens, watching with feelings of helplessness. Or they sensed the anger, the palpable anger of people at the injustice inflicted on the prisoners over so many years and at British double standards even within the same prison.
The hunger strike seems as if it happened just yesterday because those seven months from March to October were of such a magnitude — emotionally, historically, and politically — that they are seared in the memory.
Twenty-five years is a long, long time. For the families of the hunger strikers, it represents a continuum of constant, unmitigated pain, desolation and longing. Their sons experienced not instant death but death stretched out over weeks while they and the families were teased with empty promises and taunted.
I was trying to put an expanse of 25 years into perspective, into an alternative perspective by thinking that, when I was born, my mother was 28 — the same age I was during the hunger strike. Twenty-five years before that, when she was a child, what had been happening in the world around her, in the year 1929? The Wall Street Crash triggered the Great Depression. Penicillin was first used to fight infection. Bingo was invented. The restored GPO in Dublin was officially opened. And the unionist government in the North, not content with its gerrymandering of local government, abolished proportional representation in parliamentary elections.
Twenty-five years has the appearance of being an instant only when it is behind you. Imagine serving a sentence of that length.
There were among our prisoners men and women serving 25 years, 20 years, 14 years, and they were mostly young people. Had they been born into a democracy or normality, they would have established careers, travelled, married, built homes and raised families. In all probability, they would have had long and fulfilling lives.
The real crime was that all of this was stolen from them by a power that does not belong here and has no right to be here.
Under the most liberal prison conditions, even two or three years in jail can crush and represent a lifetime to the alienated social offender. However, it has often been said of political prisoners that they serve time more easily because of their beliefs, because of their selflessness and with the knowledge that they have the support of their community. Strength of conviction, the right of one’s cause, solidarity, sympathy do all offer a degree of succour. But in the end, each individual must draw deep upon personal resources to face the enemy seen and unseen, day and night.
Prison is meant to punish and does punish, and all prisoners suffer, regardless of their status.
In the H-blocks and Armagh women’s prison, we had something especially cruel at work. In the prisons where there was political status, there was little friction between warders and the political prisoners. No prison officers were targets or lost their lives.
However, new standards and no standards applied to the criminalisation programme. Many prison officers were ex-service personnel and had a political axe to grind. Other elements of the prison service, mostly unionist in outlook, became fanatical and behaved as if they were on a crusade. All of them were paid large bounties for working in the protesting blocks and wings of the jails.
They were empowered to break the law, were encouraged to use thuggery in order to capture the big prize — the defeat and humiliation of Irish republicanism.
Their work was showered in lies by British ministers and administration officials, words and propaganda that suited those in society who didn’t want to know or who knew but didn’t let on.
Each time the door of a cell opened, the protesting prisoner faced the threat of a beating if not a battle, and it went on for years and years until the prisoners had had enough and decided to go on hunger strike in support of their demands.
I know that Bobby Sands — who began his hunger strike one quarter of a century ago today, two weeks in front of the other hunger strikers — tends to overshadow his nine comrades. That can be explained by the fact that he was the first to die at a time when the international coverage was at its height. He was a jail veteran, already a well-established leader and prison spokesman. He devised the strategy of the staggered hunger strike. He was elected to the British parliament, and his name has been immortalised by his prose and poetry.
But go to the counties, the local areas, the home places, the townlands of the other hunger strikers; go to Camlough, Galbally, Bellaghy, Dungiven, Derry or Andersonstown, and there you will find each local hunger striker immortalised on the lips of old and young alike, and a fierce pride in the memory of each man and the detail of each man’s life passed down the generations.
So, it began 25 years ago today. The seven-month-long 1981 hunger strike.
At the end of it, Britain took the lives of the hunger strikers but not their spirits.
At the end of it, the jurors of world opinion knew who the real criminals were and the heroes.
At the end of it, there tower ten incredibly courageous Irish men.
Bobby Sands, Frankie Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Tom McElwee and Mickey Devine.
Now and forever.

IAIS

03/09/06 10:10 EST

Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain was today accused of insulting the Irish parliament after he and his officials criticised a debate on the murder of human rights attorney Pat Finucane.

The Irish Government and Opposition parties in the Dail (Irish parliament) united last night behind a motion accusing the British Government of going back on a pledge to hold an independent inquiry into allegations of British security force collusion in the 1989 murder by loyalists of the Belfast attorney.

As the debate took place, Mr Hain and his officials claimed the motion was flawed and misleading, because it suggested the inquiry the British Government agreed to at Weston Park in 2001 would be held under the terms of the 1921 Act.

A Northern Ireland Office statement said: “The new legislation replacing the seldom-used 1921 Act - described by judges as `restrictive` and `cumbersome` - was introduced not because of the Finucane case, but because the whole system for inquiries was in dire need of reform,” he said.

“Judge Cory said that the inquiry should be `public to the extent possible`. The Government is in complete agreement with that.”

An investigation by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens found evidence of collusion between members of the British security forces and the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters.

Retired Canadian Judge Peter Cory also recommended a public inquiry into the murder and has joined Mr Finucane`s relatives, the Irish Government, Opposition parties, nationalists in Northern Ireland and human rights organisations in criticising the British Government for passing a new Inquiries Act last year.

They believe the legislation gives the British Government too much of a say over what evidence would be made available to the Finucane inquiry and what could be heard in public.

The NIO insisted this was wrong.

“Ministers will have no say in who the inquiry calls or what evidence it sees. It will see absolutely everything that is relevant and it will have full powers to compel all documents and evidence to be produced and, crucially, witnesses to attend,” its statement said.

“The inquiry report will be published and anything that is held back - redacted - will be the bare minimum necessary to protect national security and fulfil the Government`s legal obligations.”

“The inquiry`s conclusions - that is what happened and whether or not there was collusion - will certainly be made public.”

Nationalist SDLP leader Mark Durkan insisted today the Dail had got its facts right and accused the NIO of spin and distortion.

The Foyle MP also said he would be raising concerns about the NIO`s briefing with Mr Hain and also politicians in the Irish Republic and United States.

“The Dail got it right. What was wrong was the NIO`s slick spin,” he said.

“What was wrong was Peter Hain`s suggestion that the Dail did not know what it was on about. That was an insult to the Irish parliament and to all of us. The Dail got it right in calling on the British government to hold a full public inquiry into the Finucane murder, as it promised it would do at Weston Park.”

“The NIO got it absolutely wrong when it said the British government is fully in agreement with Judge Peter Cory. It is not - and Peter Cory has made that clear as recently as a few weeks ago.”

“The Dail is right when it says any inquiry under the new Inquiries Act would be limited. The NIO is wrong when it suggests otherwise. The fact is that Peter Hain and other ministers would be able to determine what evidence from security sources could be made public at the inquiry.”

“As if that wasn`t enough, they could go back for a second bite and censor the final report of the inquiry. That is what the British Government`s Inquiries Act allows for. And it stands the Judge Cory`s requirement for an independent public inquiry on its head. State censored inquiries cannot be independent.”

An Phoblacht

The National Hunger Strike Commemoration Committee has called on people to light a candle on the 26 March to commemorate the anniversaries of the 1981 hunger strikers, as well as Michael Gaughan, Frank Stagg and also in solidarity with their families.

Light a candle on the anniversaries of the death of each hunger striker. A special commemorative candle has been produced bearing the names of each of the 12 Hunger strikers. This candle is now available from the Sinn Féin Bookshop. All proceeds will go to the National Hunger Strike Commemoration Committee.

The Names and anniversaries of the Hunger Strikers are:

* Michael Gaughan 3 June 1974 Parkhurst
* Frank Stagg 12 February 1976 Wakefield
* Bobby Sands 5 May 1981 H-Blocks
* Francis Hughes 12 May 1981 H-Blocks
* Raymond McCreesh 21 May 1981 H-Blocks
* Patsy O’Hara 21 May 1981 H-Blocks
* Joe McDonnell 8 July 1981 H-Blocks
* Martin Hurson 13 July 1981 H-Blocks
* Kieran Doherty 2 August 1981 H-Blocks
* Thomas McElwee 8 August 1981 H-Blocks
* Kevin Lynch 1 August 1981 H-Blocks
* Mickey Devine 20 August 1981 H-Blocks

An Phoblacht

BY SHANE Mac THOMÁIS

Photo: Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Seán Savage

On the 6 March 1988, three unarmed Irish citizens were shot dead at close range by undercover operatives of the notorious British SAS, as they walked along a public street on the island of Gibraltar. This summary execution of three IRA Volunteers spawned a series of tragic incidents, the reverberations of which continued long after the event.

The three Volunteers- Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Seán Savage were unarmed and had been under surveillance for some time by both the British secret services and Spanish. It is clear from all the evidence that they were lulled into a carefully-laid trap with the aim of killing them.

Mairéad Farrell was born in Belfast in 1957. She was a brilliant student who excelled at her exams. But she had already thought deeply on her future and at the age of 18 she joined the Irish Republcan Army.

It wasn’t long before Farrell was imprisoned at Armagh Jail. She went on to become Officer Commanding sentenced republican women prisoners. On 1 December 1980 Mairéad Farrell, Mary Doyle and Mary Nugent went on Hunger Strike, alongside their fellow prisoners in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. It was while in the hospital wing on the night of 18 December that Farrell and her comrades first heard that the Hunger Strike in the H-Blocks was over. Only after confirmation from their O/C on 19 December, Mairéad Farrell and her comrades decided to call off their Hunger Strike.

Dan McCann was born on 30 November 1957. He was first imprisoned in 1973 and on three subsequent occasions. From 1979 to 1981 he was in prison ‘on the blanket’ during the campaign for political status. He was the target of British Army death threats and an assassination attempt by unionist paramilitaries.

Seán Savage was born on the 26 January 1965. A dedicated IRA volunteer he was known for his solitary nature. He was studying for his A levels when imprisoned on remand in 1982 on the word of an informer who subsequently retracted. He joined Oglaigh na hÉireann at the age of 17.

The killings on Gibraltar were immediately followed by a massive cover-up, with lies from the British Ministry of Defence falsely stating that a suspected bomb had been found in Gibraltar. The SAS claimed that all three reached for hidden detonators when challenged to surrender and that only minimum force had been used. However, the wounds received by the three spoke for themselves. Mairéad Farrell was shot five times, twice in the head, three times in the body. The bullets to the head were fired into her face and exited under her left ear and at the back of her neck. The three bullets that were fired into the middle of her back exited in the region of her left breast. Her heart and liver were pulped, her spinal column fractured and her chest cavity was awash with two litres of blood. Dan McCann was shot four times, twice in the head and twice in the back. The two shots to his back caused damage to his liver, heart and left lung. The two shots to his head caused multiple fractures, laceration of the left cerebral hemisphere and extensive brain damage.

Seán Savage was shot at least 16 times. He suffered 29 separate injuries. His arm was broken and he had various wounds on his torso. Five bullets entered his back and his lung was severely damaged. Four bullets entered his head and he had multiple damage to the brain and skull.

Following the killing, a process of disinformation and demonisation began with British tabloids attempting to discredit an independent witnesse to the shootings, Carmen Proetta. Of all the civilian eyewitnesses to the Gibraltar assassinations, Proetta’s evidence was some of the most damning for the British government and the SAS.

Proetta said she had seen McCann and Farrell shot without warning with their hands in the air. As soon as her evidence became publicly known, she was subjected to a campaign of threats and a barrage of media lies. The pressure on her was so enormous, that despite being one of the most strongly determined of the witnesses to speak out, she told the inquest: “Let me tell you one thing, sir, if this had happened again I would not be here to give evidence.”

For no other reason than that she had inconvenient testimony, the press, particularly the Murdoch-owned press, viciously attacked her. The Sunday Times launched a series of articles purporting to show that her story was untrue and saying that other witnesses had called her testimony ridiculous. This, like virtually every word published by The Sunday Times about Gibraltar, was a pack of lies.

On the 27 September 1995, the European Court of Human Rights found the British government guilty of violating the right to life of Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Seán Savage. The long legal battle waged by the families of the Gibraltar Three, which began on that fateful Sunday afternoon, culminated in a judgment delivered seven years later. It was the first time the Court had found a violation of Article 2 of the Convention. The British government cannot escape, said the Belfast-based Committee for the Administration of Justice, “the fact that the oldest human rights court in the world has found the state shot to death three unarmed people at a time when they posed no threat to anyone.'’

For eight days, the bodies of three unarmed IRA Volunteers, Mairéad Farrell, Dan McCann and Seán Savage, shot dead by the British SAS, lay in Gibraltar until their fateful journey home.

Next week: The Gibraltar Three funerals

BN.ie

09/03/2006 - 10:48:11

A £250m (€364.3m)-plus British government redundancy package for more than 3,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland should have been allocated to improving public services, a Sinn Féin MP claimed today.

Michelle Gildernew said families whose relatives had been victims of alleged collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and members of the Ulster Defence Regiment and Royal Irish Regiment were angry at the pay-off.

She said they would have preferred the money, which is being given to full-time and part-time soldiers affected by plans to phase out three Northern Ireland-based battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment (RIR), to be spent on improving roads, schools and boosting the economy.

“Unionist arguments about the economic implications resulting from the scrapping of the RIR expose the truth about their opposition to progress on demilitarisation,” the Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP argued.

“It is based on unionist self-interest, not the interests of the peace process or the demilitarisation of our society.

“Sinn Féin have argued that demilitarisation should and could release millions of pounds for use on frontline services such as health and education, and to tackle decades of under-investment and neglect, particularly west of the Bann.

“Rather than seek a British Exchequer subvention of millions for the exclusive benefit of the unionist population, I believe that many people in places like Fermanagh and Tyrone would prefer to see this money spent on improving the roads infrastructure, improving local schools and in developing the local economy to the benefit of everyone.”

Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram will announce in the House of Commons today details of financial settlements for troops affected by the disbandment of the Royal Irish Regiment’s three Home Service battalions in August next year.

The battalions are being axed as part of a major security scaledown in the wake of the IRA’s declaration last July that its armed campaign is over.

Redundancy deals worth up to £100,000 (€145,500) in some cases are believed to have been negotiated.

Sources also claimed today full-time members would walk away with at least £40,000 (€58,300).

It is understood the full-time package will comprise redundancy, pension and ex-gratia government payments.

A payment scale will be used based on rank and length of service.

Part-time troops will be given tax-free lump sums.

Sources also said the severance arrangements were comparable with what police officers received as a result of policing reforms in the North and in some cases were better.

Mr Ingram, British Defence Secretary John Reid and Northern Secretary Peter Hain have all been involved in the severance talks.

Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley met British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss the package in London yesterday.

The North Antrim MP and his colleague Jeffrey Donaldson had warned the British government a generous package recognising the role of the UDR and RIR was essential to restore unionist confidence in the political process.

BN.ie

09/03/2006 - 11:42:31

The Supreme Court today cleared the way for a parliamentary committee to investigate the alleged misbehaviour of Judge Brian Curtin.

The Circuit Court judge was acquitted of charges of possessing child pornography in 2004 after the warrant used to search his house was found to have been out of date.

He had challenged the constitutionality of an Oireachtas committee that was set up to investigate his behaviour in the wake of the verdict.

At the Supreme Court in Dublin, Chief Justice John L Murray said he was satisfied that the committee would be able to accord the judge his full rights to justice and fair procedures.

“Having found against the appellant (Judge Curtin) on all issues, the court dismisses the appeal,” he said.

Judge Curtin had argued on three separate grounds that he could not be forced to hand over his computer, which allegedly contained child pornographic images.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the Oireachtas committee had a right to examine the computer, which is currently being held by gardaí.