SAOIRSE32

Larkspirit

Thursday 12th

Fr Toner was in tonight, and brought me in some religious magazines.

My weight is 58.75 kgs. They did not take a blood sample because they want to incorporate other tests with it. So the doctor says they’ll do it next week.

Physically I have felt very tired today, between dinner time and later afternoon. I know I’m getting physically weaker. It is only to be expected. But I’m okay. I’m still getting the papers all right, but there’s nothing heartening in them. But again I expect that also and therefore I must depend entirely upon my own heart and resolve, which I will do.

I received three notes from the comrades in Armagh, God bless them again.

I heard of today’s announcement that Frank Hughes will be joining me on hunger-strike on Sunday. I have the greatest respect, admiration and confidence in Frank and I know that I am not alone. How could I ever be with comrades like those around me, in Armagh and outside.

I’ve been thinking of the comrades in Portlaoise, the visiting facilities there are inhuman. No doubt that hell-hole will also eventually explode in due time. I hope not, but Haughey’s compassion for the prisoners down there is no different from that of the Brits towards prisoners in the North and in English gaols.

I have come to understand, and with each passing day I understand increasingly more and in the most sad way, that awful fate and torture endured to the very bitter end by Frank Stagg and Michael Gaughan. Perhaps, — indeed yes! — I am more fortunate because those poor comrades were without comrades or a friendly face. They had not even the final consolation of dying in their own land. Irishmen alone and at the unmerciful ugly hands of a vindictive heartless enemy. Dear God, but I am so lucky in comparison.

I have poems in my mind, mediocre no doubt, poems of hunger strike and MacSwiney, and everything that this hunger-strike has stirred up in my heart and in my mind, but the weariness is slowly creeping in, and my heart is willing but my body wants to be lazy, so I have decided to mass all my energy and thoughts into consolidating my resistance.

That is most important. Nothing else seems to matter except that lingering constant reminding thought, ‘Never give up’. No matter how bad, how black, how painful, how heart-breaking, ‘Never give up’, ‘Never despair’, ‘Never lose hope’. Let them bastards laugh at you all they want, let them grin and jibe, allow them to persist in their humiliation, brutality, deprivations, vindictiveness, petty harassments, let them laugh now, because all of that is no longer important or worth a response.

I am making my last response to the whole vicious inhuman atrocity they call H-Block. But, unlike their laughs and jibes, our laughter will be the joy of victory and the joy of the people, our revenge will be the liberation of all and the final defeat of the oppressors of our aged nation.

Mural detail from >>CAIN

Derry Journal

**Via Newshound

By Michael McMonagle
Friday 10th March 2006

Nationalist politicians and human rights campaigners in Derry have united to criticise the PSNI’s plans to add electric Tasers to their weaponry.

On Wednesday the Chief Constable of the PSNI informed the Policing Board that he was planning to purchase 12 X-26 Tasers for the force. The Policing Board is to hold a two week consultation period to get the public’s views on the new weapon.

Paul O’Connor from the Derry based human rights organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre said that he was opposed to the PSNI’s plans and encouraged members of the public to register their objections during the consultation process. Mr O’Connor said that Amnesty International have said that Tasers have resulted in the deaths of 150 people world-wide.

Sinn Féin local government spokesperson on policing, Councillor Paul Fleming, said that the PSNI could not be trusted to use such a weapon responsibly.

“Tasers have been proven to have killed over 200 people across the globe and putting them in the hands of an unaccountable PSNI will only create the same problems that have arisen out of the PSNI being armed with CS spray and plastic bullets. The PSNI have enough lethal force weapons without arming them with another.

Although Tasers were designed for non-lethal force they have proven to be lethal in over 200 cases, just like plastic bullets,” he said. Councillor Fleming also said that arming the PSNI with Tasers does not conform with the recommendations made in the Patten Report.

“Under the Patten recommendations the PSNI were to be transformed into a routinely unarmed policing service, however, what we have actually seen is their rearming of them with an array of new lethal weaponry. Rather than give the PSNI Tasers to kill or injure people we should be seeking a new beginning with the development of nonlethal crowd control weapons,” he said.

SDLP Councillor Helen Quigley, said that her party is opposed to the introduction of Tasers and called for a longer consultation process. “The SDLP is totally opposed to the introduction of Tasers, even for the limited purposes that the PSNI wants them. The fact is that these weapons have killed at least 15 people in the US and Canada. There is also a dearth of proper research about their safety, especially their effects on children,” she said. Councillor Quigley said that the consultation period was not long enough and said that the SDLP will raise the matter with the Policing Board and the Children’s Commissioner.

“The SDLP questioned Home Office scientists who did a presentation on Tasers at the board. They admitted that there was no science on their effects on children but that when they were tested on smaller weighted animals they had a ‘disproportionate effect.’ So the bottom line is that we can expect the same if they are used against children too. The dangers of this are all too clear. SDLP policing Board members will be raising our concerns with the Children’s Commissioner and our Policing Board members will oppose their use.

“We are also concerned at what appears to be a headlong rush to adopt these weapons - with only a two and a half week consultation period. That is woefully insufficient and the SDLP will press for people to be given much more time to respond on what is such an important matter when the Board meets on 28 March to discuss this issue,” she said.

Paul O’Connor also criticised the shortness of the consultation period, which he described as “entirely inadequate”.

“We have invited by the Policing Board to make submissions on the possible introduction of the controversial Taser weapon. The closing date for submissions is March 23. In effect the Policing Board is making no serious attempt to consult. Two weeks is entirely inadequate and is probably intended to be inadequate.

The Policing Board facilitated a new generation of plastic bullets and the introduction of CS spray; the worry must be that the NIO, PSNI and Policing Board have already made up their minds. It is up to the wider community to convince them otherwise. The first step must be a dramatic extension of the consultation period,” he said.

Sunday Herald

**Via Newshound

By Paul Hutcheon, Scottish Political Editor
12 March 2006

A former IRA member who helped bomb the Tory conference in Brighton is to meet MSPs this week to learn about devolution. (Photo from An Phoblacht article >>here)

Martina Anderson, who served part of a life sentence for plotting a terror campaign in 12 English seaside resorts, will visit Holyrood on behalf of Sinn Fein.

The one-time “beauty queen bomber” plans to use her Scottish trip to get international support for a united Ireland.

Last night politicians slammed the visit. Lord Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was left paralysed by the Brighton bomb, compared Anderson with “al-Qaeda”. Tory MSP Phil Gallie said he was appalled that the “contemptible” Anderson was visiting the parliament.

The main purpose of the Sinn Fein trip is to promote their green paper on Irish unity. Party president Gerry Adams sent the publication to interest groups and MSPs recently and flagged up his colleague’s trip to Scotland.

Anderson, the party’s All Ireland co-ordinator, will use meetings with councillors and organisations from civic society to explain Sinn Fein’s policies.

But she will also visit MSPs at Holyrood on Wednesday to talk about Ireland and to learn lessons about Scottish devolution. The trip has not been officially sanctioned by the parliament.

She intends to meet a cross-party selection of MSPs and hold one-to-one discussions with other members. She also plans to watch First Minister’s questions on Thursday.

Sinn Fein’s Scottish spokesman, Jim Slaven, said he thought the discussions would be constructive. “We are meeting people across the political spectrum in the parliament. This is the beginning of a long-term engagement with Scotland,” he said.

He added that Sinn Fein were interested in learning about the powers of the parliament, particularly on justice, that have yet to be devolved to the Northern Ireland assembly.

“It’s a two-way process. Martina is coming over to talk to parties in Scotland about our view of what a united Ireland will look like. But also we will be listening to what people are saying about how devolution is working,” he said.

But Anderson’s trip to Holyrood will prove hugely controversial because of her past connection to republican terrorism. Recruited by the IRA as a teenager, she was convicted in 1985 of plotting a “bomb a day” terror campaign in London and 12 English holiday resorts.

Her most notorious involvement with terrorism was her part in the bombing of the Grand Hotel during the 1984 Conservative conference in Brighton.

The plot to kill the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher failed but the blast killed five people and injured 34 others. At Anderson’s trial at the Old Bailey, when she was just 23, the judge told her: “You are a hard, cynical young woman.”

Anderson spent 13 years in prison , and was the 200th prisoner to be released under the Good Friday Agreement. She has now renounced violence and instead tries to further her political goals through the ballot box.

However, Lord Tebbit said he did not believe she has changed. “These people should never have been released from prison. Life should have meant life. Put them in the same box as al-Qaeda,” he said. “Sinn Fein is the PR dept of the IRA – some are in PR, some are in bombs.”

Tory MSP Phil Gallie said he was shocked that Anderson was planning a visit to Edinburgh.

“I don’t think there’s any place in the parliament for people who break democracy. She is a criminal. It amazes me how individuals such as this can be brought into Holyrood.”

Independent MSP Brian Monteith also slammed Anderson’s Holyrood trip: “Just because someone has served their time doesn’t mean we have to forget and forgive. I have had personal friends, who were true democrats, executed by the IRA. I see no upside for the parliament from this visit and am highly suspicious of Sinn Fein’s motives and those involved in the meetings.”

A parliament spokesman said MSPs are allowed to make their own arrangements for inviting guests to Holyrood.

Sunday Times

**Via Newshound

March 12, 2006

THE former Provisional IRA bomb-maker suspected of manufacturing the M50 toll booth bomb fled his Dundalk home two weeks ago, writes Dearbhail McDonald. A leading suspect for the 1998 Omagh bombing, he is believed to be hiding in or near Newry, County Down.

Last year he was released from prison after being convicted in the Special Criminal Court of possession of ammunition. On his release, the convicted bomb-maker started selling his expertise as a freelance operative to dissident republicans and feuding drugs gangs in Dublin.

“He was high on a priority list of people to be lifted in connection with the M50 bomb,” said a garda. “He knew the net was closing in on him. He left home about two weeks ago, possibly afraid that he was going to be arrested, but also because he may be under threat from other republicans.”

Last December, gardai intercepted a primed bomb at the M50 near the Westlink toll bridge. It was recovered after detectives stopped a car.

The bomb-maker was identified following a detailed examination of the device, and gardai believe it was going to be used as part of an extortion racket involving the Continuity IRA.

Two weeks earlier gardai had seized a pipe bomb in a car near Dublin airport. The device was connected to magnets, which allowed it to be fitted to a targeted car. Containing a mercury tilt switch, it bore all the hallmarks of the bomb-making specialist.

He is believed to have handed over the bomb in a hotel car park in Drogheda. Police say it was intended for use against a former INLA leader in Dublin.

The dissident, a former regional officer of the IRA in the north, sought refuge in Dundalk, which has traditionally been a safe haven for republicans and on-the-runs (OTRs). The Newry native had previously gone into hiding in the republic in the 1980s after a fellow Newry and IRA man, Eamon Collins, became a supergrass for the former RUC special branch.

BBC

Seats in the church were daubed with excrement

Members of Protestant churches have attended Mass at a Catholic church in east Belfast which was vandalised in a suspected racist attack last week.

Racist slogans were daubed on the walls of St Colmcille’s Church on the Upper Newtownards Road and excrement was smeared on seats.

On Sunday, representatives of local Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Ireland congregations attended Mass.

A Presbyterian minister said it was a show of opposition to hate crimes.

Reverend Richard Hill from Garnerville Presbyterian Church said racism was a “very grave problem”.

He said the churches wanted to “show our solidarity with our friends and neighbours” in St Colmcilles “to say that racism is not acceptable”.

It’s wrong, it’s got to stop,” he said.

Parish mission

“We’re meeting together as a group of churches in the area during Lent, to look at hate crimes, to look at how we, as a church, can respond.”

The attack was reported to police at about 2000 GMT on Thursday.

The parish priest, Father Paddy Delargy, said the attack was racially motivated.

He said a small section of society seemed unable to accept those from other countries.

The church, which has Indian and Filipino members, is currently hosting a parish mission.

The attack was condemned by local politicians.

Belfast Telegraph

12 March 2006

A UVF unit behind some of the most savage killings of the Troubles will be stood down before the end of the month, loyalist sources have claimed.

Members of the UVF’s notorious mid-Ulster Brigade, based in Portadown, will be given their marching orders within days.

The move is understood to be the first steps towards an overall winding up of the loyalist terror gang later this summer.

It is understood senior UVF commanders from Belfast visited Portadown recently and told local leaders they were standing down the mid-Ulster brigade.

“There was no room for debate,” said a source.

“It was just, ‘thanks, lads, but you are no longer needed - so on your bikes’.

“Believe me, there is a lot of anger in certain quarters in Portadown about the move.”

Sources said one UVF officer would remain in place in mid-Ulster until July to oversee the return of weapons and other equipment to Belfast.

“By the end of March the UVF in Portadown will be nothing more than a one man band,” a loyalist source said. “The mid-Ulster Brigade is now the only UVF unit ever to have been stood down on two occasions.

“However, this time there will be no return.”

During its blood-drenched 30-year history, the mid-Ulster UVF has been involved in several high-profile attacks which claimed the lives of dozens of people. Under the command of Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson members of the mid-Ulster unit were involved in:

• The Dublin and Monaghan bomb attacks which claimed the lives of 33 people in May 1974;
• The murder of top IRA commander John Francis Green, at Tullyash, Co Monaghan, in January 1975;
• The shooting dead of six members of the O’Dowd and Reavey families in coordinated gun-attacks at Bleary and Whitecross and;
• The gun and bomb attack which claimed the lives of three members of the Miami Showband in August 1976.

Jackson’s successor Billy Wright was expelled by the UVF in August 1986 and ordered to leave the country. Wright defied the order and set up his own unit, the LVF.

Tensions between the UVF and LVF often boiled over into bouts of blood letting. However, a decision by the LVF to stand down last October helped bring an end to the long-simmering feud.

Belfast Telegraph

Ciaran McGuigan
12 March 2006

THE Police Ombudsman was last night examining claims that cops failed to act when loyalist hardman Ihab Shoukri battered a drug dealer-turned supergrass in his north Belfast home.

Shoukri - who walked free from court last week when a judge dismissed an application to revoke his bail in the wake of the police raid on the Alexandra Bar - was one of four men who attacked Dessie Truesdale in his north Belfast flat, the convicted drug dealer claims.

Truesdale claims that Shoukri’s brother Andre, and two other leading UDA man were with Ihab when they “interrogated” him and ordered him to hand over thousands of pounds held in a credit union account.

Truesdale fled the country after the attack in March 2003, and still lives in hiding in England, fearing that he will be killed by the UDA if he returns to Ulster.

Before he fled, he told cops about the incident at his home, but claims the police failed to act on his statements.

The claims are made in a lengthy dossier sent to Nuala O’Loan’s office last week.

A spokesman for the Police Ombudsman last night said: “We have received correspondence that sets out a number of allegations and are reviewing that correspondence.”

Truesdale believes at least one of the gang that attacked him was a Special Branch agent, and wants the alleged agent unmasked.

He told Sunday Life: “I risked my life identifying these four men to police and gave statements that would hopefully have put them in jail, and yet nothing is done.

“You have to ask yourself why that is.

“The reason I suspect, and I want the Police Ombudsman to investigate, is that at least one of the four who came into my flat that night was working for Special Branch.”

A police spokesman confirmed a report of the incident at the flat, but said no official complaint had been made at the time.

Truesdale added: “When I went to the police I felt that I was given the only option to flee the country. I want the Ombudsman to look into how the whole thing was handled.”

Belfast Telegraph

Too little, too late!

by Stephen Breen
12 March 2006

THE mother of a UVF murder victim last night hit out angrily at the terror group’s leaders after they appealed for anyone with information on her son’s killing to contact cops.

Ann Robb, whose son Andrew (19), along with pal David McIlwaine (18), was butchered in February, 2000, slammed the command staff of the UVF’s Mid-Ulster brigade for issuing a statement on the killings on Friday night.

The Portadown woman, who was only told about the statement when we contacted her yesterday morning, said the UVF’s appeal was too little, too late.

The statement read: “Over six years later, the families are still struggling in their quest for justice. Consequently, the command staff has taken the decision to release this statement in the hope that it some way it will assist in this pursuit.

“We state categorically that the killing of these two boys was not sanctioned by the UVF. Furthermore, we are appalled at the killings and the ferociousness of the attacks.

“We fully support the families in their campaign for justice and no-one should impede them in respect of that. We urge anyone with information, no matter how trivial, which may help the PSNI to come forward.”

But Mrs Robb said: “This statement is a load of rubbish. I am not going to change my mind about my son’s killing just because the UVF have issued statement after six years.

“The police told me it was the UVF who murdered Andrew and David and that it was sanctioned by a prominent UVF man from the Trandragee area.

“I have been speaking to ex-UVF men and they told me the killings were sanctioned in Armagh and not from Belfast. I have learned and experienced too much since my son’s killings to accept this statement.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

By Ed Moloney
12 March 2006

There is a great irony to the life and death of Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands; unfortunately, Denis O’Hearn only lightly touches upon it in Nothing but an Unfinished Song. Sands died in a bid to validate the IRA and its violence but in the long term, his death served only to bring both to an end.

He lived as an IRA bomber, but he died as the unwitting architect of the Irish peace process.

To understand that irony, we need to turn back to 1981, when Sands and nine other members of the IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army were jailed near Belfast for murders, shootings and bombings intended to end British rule of Northern Ireland. The 10 deployed an old Irish protest technique to put forward the claim that their violence was motivated by the age-old cause of Irish independence, not by criminality or personal gain. They died in the process, some of them agonizingly.

The hunger strikers had demanded they be treated as political prisoners and not felons — principally by being allowed to wear their own clothes and being exempt from prison work. They saw themselves as soldiers in a war against the British government, its troops and police, but things were never that straightforward.

The war in Northern Ireland was a dirty one that all too often degenerated into bloody and indiscriminate sectarian strife between the loyalists, who supported continued British rule of Northern Ireland and were mostly Protestant, and the mostly Catholic nationalists, many of whom sought to unite with the Irish republic to the south and regarded the IRA as their defenders. More often than not civilians, not soldiers, were the victims, and political motives for the carnage sometimes grew hard to discern.

Faced with the hunger strikers’ demands, the British government of Margaret Thatcher refused to budge. “Crime is crime is crime; it is not political,'’ the Iron Lady declared. The prisoners, led by the 27-year-old Sands, dug in their heels. The resulting deaths, including that of Sands, and political traumas shook Ireland to its roots.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of those awful months. Sands may have started his protest to vindicate republican violence, but the hunger strike’s paradoxical effect was to bring the armed struggle to an end — and, ultimately, to persuade the IRA to accept the legitimacy of Northern Ireland, the state that Sands and his dead comrades had dedicated their lives to destroying.

Sands’ protest enabled the IRA’s leaders to fast-forward plans to go political that they had nurtured for some time. Not long after he began his hunger strike, Sands was put forward as a candidate for a local seat in the British Parliament that had become vacant. Against all expectations, he won, and almost out of the blue, the IRA leadership — then, as now, dominated by Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing — was offered a political alternative to violence.

After Sands died, his “election agent'’ — the local Sinn Fein leader Owen Carron, a 26-year-old teacher who had served as Sands’ surrogate — won the seat; that winter, with a live and unimprisoned member of Parliament at his side, Adams was able to persuade the IRA and Sinn Fein to embrace electoral politics, alongside violence.

One can draw a straight line between the summer of 1981 and the current Irish peace process. The IRA’s new “ArmaLite and ballot box'’ strategy, as it was called, was superficially successful, but it suffered from an inherent long-term contradiction. Seeking votes and planting car bombs were deeply conflicting modes of behavior, and eventually one would have to prevail. Thanks in no small part to Adams’ wily ways, politics and negotiations ultimately won out.

The best part of O’Hearn’s biography is his often-moving account of Sands’ time in jail, his interactions with fellow prisoners, the songs and poetry he wrote behind bars, and finally the agonies of the hunger strike. But this story has been told many times before, not least by Sands’ prison comrades. What is lacking here is the sort of serious assessment of Sands’ sacrifice that decades of hindsight should bring.

Nor does O’Hearn acknowledge that the hunger strike is now the subject of a furious historical revision.

In his recent book “Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike,'’ Richard O’Rawe, the IRA prisoners’ public relations officer during the protest, claims that Sinn Fein’s leadership sabotaged a promising effort to resolve the protest — on secret terms offered by the British and accepted by the prisoners — because ending the fast before Owen Carron’s election would have threatened Adams’ political project.

(O’Rawe cites the IRA leadership’s insistence that Adams be present in the jail with Sands to endorse any deal — something no British government could accept, least of all one led by Thatcher, since it meant negotiating with the IRA’s best-known leader. This demand ensured that the hunger strike could have only one end.)

Thus six of the 10 hunger strikers may have died needlessly. If O’Rawe is right, one has to wonder: Was Sands’ death even more to further Adams’ agenda? After all, with his martyrdom, Ireland exploded in anger, thousands were radicalized, and the stage was set for the IRA’s transition to politics. Had his life been saved by a last-minute deal, none of this might have happened.

Today the hunger strike has become another battleground — this time for ownership of Sands’ political legacy. On one side are the current Sinn Fein and IRA leadership and their supporters, upon whom O’Hearn leans heavily for his account. They will welcome his book, not least because it does not challenge their claim that Sands, had he lived, would have supported his mentor, Adams, as he discarded armed struggle.

Among those against them are Sands’ family, many of whom profoundly disagree with the Adams strategy and broke with him years ago. They refused to cooperate in the writing of this book, but O’Hearn neglects to tell his readers this.

Bobby Sands’ song, like the fight for Irish independence, may well be unfinished; the struggle for possession of his political inheritance looks like it could be never-ending.

NOTHING BUT AN UNFINISHED SONG: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation By Denis O’Hearn
Nation, 434 pp., $28

Ed Moloney is the author of “A Secret History of the IRA.'’ He reviewed this for the Washington Post.

Sunday Times

PROFILE ‘Bic’ McFarlane
March 12, 2006

On the run immediately after the 1983 Maze prison break-out, Brendan “Bic” McFarlane and other IRA escapees took over an isolated farmhouse near Dromore, Co Down, and held its occupants hostage. After checking radio news bulletins for reports of the escape, McFarlane and his gang gathered a few useful items for their night-time trek on foot across the border.

Before he left, the IRA commanding officer in the Maze and the brains behind the break-out wrote and signed a list of the items he had taken — a map and a compass among them. McFarlane told the family to bring the list to Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast, where full compensation would be paid.

Earlier that day, the escapees had shot a prison officer in the eye and stabbed another in the chest. The man later suffered a heart attack and died. It was the biggest prison break-out in British history, but hadn’t gone entirely to McFarlane’s plan, although 38 IRA men had managed to break free from what was supposedly the most heavily fortified prison in Europe.

By the time McFarlane’s gang arrived at the Dromore farmhouse, roadblocks were being erected throughout Northern Ireland and RUC helicopters were circling overhead. It seemed almost farcical that McFarlane should fret over taking a few pounds worth of possessions belonging to his hostages, who included two small children and a baby, for whom the trauma of being held captive by terrorists surely vastly outweighed the loss of a map or compass.

McFarlane was in the Maze serving five life sentences for the 1975 bombing of the Bayardo bar on the Shankill Road, in which five Protestant civilians died. What made the attack particularly horrific was that those who had tried to escape the explosion had been machine-gunned by the terrorists.

Although the IRA has now stood down and decommissioned, McFarlane is facing more time. Last week the Supreme Court in Dublin decided that he should stand trial for the kidnapping of the supermarket executive Don Tidey in December 1983. Tidey was taking his 13-year-old daughter to school when he stopped at what he believed to be a garda checkpoint. A gun was put to his head and he was bundled into a waiting car. A few days later his photograph was sent to Associated British Foods, and this was followed by a phone call demanding a IR£5 million ransom.

The gardai eventually tracked Tidey and his kidnappers — four in all — to Derrada Wood in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim. In the subsequent shoot-out, a trainee garda and a soldier were killed. Tidey’s kidnappers escaped.

McFarlane was arrested in Amsterdam two years later, extradited to Northern Ireland and released on parole from the Maze in 1997. He was then charged with Tidey’s kidnapping, but challenged this on the basis that gardai had lost a number of exhibits containing fingerprints — the central evidence in the case. The Supreme Court ruled last week that the trial can proceed — paving the way for a fascinating case involving one of the IRA’s most notorious figures.

McFarlane was born in 1951 and grew up in the Catholic Ardoyne area of north Belfast. His family was deeply religious and he served as an altar boy at the local church. At 17 he joined a missionary school in Wales to begin his studies to become a priest.

According to Fr Aidan Troy of Holy Cross in Ardoyne, in another world he would indeed have been Fr McFarlane. Troy has worked with him on several occasions over the past few years since McFarlane’s release from prison.

“He’d be a big figure in the area, to put it mildly,” he said. “On a personal level I find him amazingly respectful to me. During the Holy Cross protest he was a very affirming presence. He was always very calm.”

Fr McFarlane never got to hear confessions, however. Returning home in the summer of 1969, McFarlane decided his community needed guns more than they needed God, and he joined the IRA.

For his role in the Bayardo bar bombing, McFarlane was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years. He earned the nickname Bic, after the pen maker, because he took notes during IRA meetings in the Maze. In 1978, McFarlane made his first attempt to escape, dressed, not surprisingly, as a priest. The bid failed, McFarlane’s “special category” status was withdrawn, and he joined the dirty protest in the H-blocks.

McFarlane’s cell was next to Bobby Sands’s, then officer commanding of the IRA in the prison. In March 1981, when Sands began his hunger strike, he gave his job to McFarlane. Asked why, Sands is said to have replied: “Because you will let me die.”

Last year Richard O’Rawe, another former prisoner, revealed that four days before the fifth of 10 hunger strikers died, the IRA was offered a deal by the British in which the “underlying substance” of their demands were conceded. In his book Blanketmen, O’Rawe suggests that the deal was rejected by the IRA leadership in order to ensure the victory for Owen Carron in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election caused by Sands’s death. O’Rawe’s book caused a huge spat with McFarlane, who said no such deal had been offered.

McFarlane’s role in the hunger strike brought him into contact with Gerry Adams, who was in charge of communicating IRA Army Council decisions to the prisoners. Since then McFarlane has been unwaveringly loyal to the Sinn Fein leader.

Two years after the hunger strikes ended, with no concessions and no deals, McFarlane was still the officer commanding at the Maze as the prisoners staged a mass break-out. He used a food delivery van to sneak 38 men out past 40 prison officers and 28 alarm systems. Fifteen were caught in the vicinity of the prison, four were captured the following day, 19 got away, with three never being recaptured.

McFarlane was arrested in Holland alongside Gerry Kelly, now a North Belfast MLA. They successfully fought extradition for more than a year, but were then sent back to Northern Ireland to serve the remainder of their sentences.

Just a month before his arrest in 1998 by gardai, McFarlane had been pictured shaking hands with the Irish president, Mary McAleese, also from Ardoyne. His capture was criticised by Sinn Fein, who described it as “deeply unhelpful”.

The gardai are basing the Tidey charges on items recovered from the kidnap site, including a milk carton and a plastic container, on which fingerprints were discovered. Although the items went missing from garda headquarters during renovation work, the fingerprints had been photographed and a forensic analysis done.

While the eight-year legal wrangling over the Tidey case proceeded, McFarlane returned to “civilian” life in Ardoyne. He is married with three children, and has formed a band, Tuan, which is a regular on the republican entertainment circuit.

Sinn Fein describes him as a voluntary worker, and he has been a vocal supporter of the party’s political stance, appearing beside both Adams and Kelly at rallies and reiterating former prisoners’ support for the direction the party is taking.

Still, many found McFarlane’s contribution to the 2001 Sinn Fein ard fheis revisionist, if not downright hypocritical. He made a rousing speech denouncing sectarian violence, without mentioning he had done time for bombing a Protestant bar and machine-gunning the customers as they tried to escape.

Anthony McIntyre, a vocal critic of the Sinn Fein leadership, praises McFarlane despite disagreeing with his politics. “He doesn’t ostracise you the way other people in the party do,” McIntyre said. Despite this popularity in his own community, McFarlane has never sought election. More than Kelly or Martin McGuinness, he would be a hate figure for most unionists.

Sinn Fein says that even if he’s convicted of the Tidey kidnapping, McFarlane is covered under the terms of the Good Friday agreement and should be released within two years. But despite his loyalty to the party, McFarlane must regret Sinn Fein’s recent rejection of an “on the run” amnesty offered by the British and Irish governments. If enacted, it would have meant McFarlane getting a presidential pardon, courtesy of the woman with whom he so controversially shook hands, Mary McAleese.
Kidnap finally catches up with Sinn Fein warrior priest

Sunday Times

Liam Clarke
March 12, 2006

THE officer board of the Democratic Unionist party will this week decide whether to meet the UDA, Northern Ireland’s largest paramilitary group, in an effort to persuade it to stand down and decommission weapons.

Last week Peter Robinson, the DUP deputy leader, met Rev Mervyn Gibson, the chairman of the Loyalist Commission, to discuss the issue in detail. The commission, which includes representatives of loyalist paramilitaries, clergymen and community leaders, aims to bring an end to loyalist violence.

Robinson said: “This is a job I was asked to do by the DUP executive and I will be reporting back to them on what Rev Gibson told me. Then they will take a view.”

It is understood that Gibson told him the UDA is unlikely to decommission its weapons in the foreseeable future. That option had been considered but no agreement had been reached.

The group is prepared to take a number of measures, including announcing an end to criminality and the winding-up of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the part of the organisation used to carry out murders.

A Loyalist Commission source said: “These measures may appear cosmetic to the outside world but they are significant to the UDA itself. I can already see a fall-off in extortion and there are big moves against drug dealing.”

Last week the UDA said it was moving towards peace after police raided the Alexander bar in north Belfast, during a Latino night. The PSNI arrested 17 people who were allegedly involved in a dress rehearsal for a loyalist show of strength. UDA sources say the display was part of a process of reassuring their members before making new peace overtures.

But last week the International Monitoring Commission (IMC) took a more nuanced view. It argued that “loyalist paramilitaries are heavily involved in organised and other crime” including drugs and have shown themselves capable of extreme violence. “We believe there are signs of a possible readiness to turn away from some of their present criminality,” the IMC said.

The UDA has been making peace overtures for some time. An announcement was expected by some loyalist sources after a meeting between 10 UDA leaders and Martin McAleese, husband of the Irish president, on February 8. The expected move failed to materialise.

Sunday Times

Enda Leahy and Nicola Tallant
March 12, 2006

MORE than €1m worth of cash and cheques was found in plastic bags hidden in a cowshed during the joint operation by gardai and the PSNI at Thomas “Slab” Murphy’s farm last week.

Gardai say officers only finished counting the cash and cheques yesterday, 48 hours after the raid. About €450,000 in sterling and euro notes, and cheques with a value in excess of €600,000 were seized.

The offices of two solicitors who had worked for Murphy — the former chief of staff of the Provisional IRA — were also searched during Thursday’s unprecedented operation.

Gardai say the Dundalk offices of Catherine Allison, a solicitor, were searched until late on Thursday night. In the north, local sources witnessed PSNI officers removing documents from the Newry office of Thomas Tiernan, a lawyer who has also represented Murphy in the past.

Tiernan refused to confirm or deny the reports this weekend.

Senior gardai say Murphy was on the premises when police converged from both sides of the border. Possibly having received a last-minute warning, he managed to disappear in only three minutes.

“Our information is that he was in the house. He had received no tip-off that we were coming and we believe he was sitting eating his breakfast,” said a senior officer. “The fry was half-eaten, the tea was poured and the seat was warm. But he was gone.

“He would have had about three minutes as we made our way up to the house. Within that time he disappeared. We believe he has a bunker on the farm and may have hid out in it. We turned the place upside down but we couldn’t find it.

“There’s a possibility he was in Michael Conlon’s house next door, which wasn’t subject to searches, and if that happened we had no great interest in going after him. The investigation will now continue, we’ll see whatever evidence is there, and it’ll go to the DPP.”

Murphy’s brothers Francis and Patrick, and Francis’s wife Judy, were all arrested on suspicion of committing revenue offences but were later released without charge.

As gardai approached from the south Judy Murphy tried to flee north by car, but was followed by the garda helicopter into British airspace at the request of the PSNI, to help police cut off her escape route.

Fifteen properties in total were raided In the republic, warrants were obtained to search nine premises under the Criminal Assets Bureau Act. About 400 officers of the PSNI, gardai, British Army, Revenue Commissioners and officials were involved.

Sunday Times

March 12, 2006

GOLF 40, a British Army observation tower on top of Crotlieve Mountain near Forkhill, is jokingly referred to as the Slab Murphy Memorial Watchtower. Long after the Troubles ended, it was kept open precisely with last Thursday’s series of raids on Murphy’s property a couple of miles away in mind.

Last year Golf 20 and Golf 30, its two companions, were decommissioned in a blaze of publicity. Both were closer than G40 to Murphy’s farm and smuggling complex in Ballybinaby, but it was G40, on elevated ground two miles away, that commanded the best view. So effective was its imaging equipment that car numbers going into the complex from either side of the border could be read.

During the IRA campaign Murphy, the organisation’s chief of staff, had studied carefully the areas of “dead ground” invisible from the three towers. He built a concrete wall and sheds to protect his smuggling empire, to facilitate the movement of explosives and to minimise the opportunities for surveillance.

At first light on Thursday, soldiers, who live in an underground chamber deep in the mountain, had an excellent view of Ballybinaby from G40. What they missed was picked up by a British Army Lynx helicopter hovering nearby. Under their watchful eyes, a huge security operation swung into place from 6am. It will probably be the last significant operation that G40 sees before it is demolished later this year.

From Newry and Armagh on the northern side of the border, more than 100 troops and a similar number of police and customs officers converged on Murphy’s estate. The 50- vehicle convoy paused at No 45 Larkin’s Road to search a derelict building and to establish a road block. “We want to seal off the area as a crime scene,” a police source said.

Soldiers fanned out into the fields to secure the area, while on the southern side of the border a smaller convoy of 30 vehicles with gardai, customs, army and Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) personnel swung into action, establishing its roadblock at Ballybinaby’s crossroads, just a short distance from the British operation. There were unmarked detectives’ cars and marked garda cars, Emergency Response Unit 4x4s, technical bureau staff in crime-scene vehicles and vans for taking away seizures.

The search used great sensitivity to the political boundary running through the farm. Members of the garda mapping division were present and a PSNI source said: “A lot of planning went into it. This was a joint operation so that we would both be able to search in our own jurisdiction. Any mistakes would have legal resonance.”

They searched all day but could not find “Slab” Murphy, who is believed to have slipped the cordon. Garda sources say his half-eaten fried breakfast was still on the table when they arrived, suggesting he had fled after getting a few minutes’ notice of their arrival.

The security forces on both sides of the border must now sift through a vast haul of documents, computers and disks that they recovered. Evidence will be compared with information seized by the CAB in the south and the Assets Recovery Agency in Manchester during raids last year in relation to a property portfolio linked to Francis Murphy, Slab’s brother. Up to 12 vehicles, about 30,000 cigarettes, a large quantity of fuel suspected of being illegally laundered and approximately €450,000 of cash in euro and sterling were seized, as well as £414,000 (€600,000) in cheques found in plastic bags in the hay shed.

There were also two shotguns and chemicals that could be used for laundering diesel.

The finds looked impressive as garda and PSNI officers drove them away that evening, but Murphy’s absence gave some cause for concern. Gardai and CAB believe the IRA commander may have hid himself, presumably in his night clothes, in a bunker. Another possibility is that after being warned by lookouts of approaching vehicles, he sat out the raid in the home of Michael Conlon, his friend and neighbour. Conlon’s house was not included in the search operation and consequently could not be entered.

Some sources in Irish customs suggest that the IRA leader had been tipped off well in advance and was able to remove the most incriminating material. They point to a break-in at Dundalk courthouse, where documents relating to the raids were held, on Wednesday evening. “I’m surprised Slab didn’t leave out a cake for us,” one officer said.

However, gardai have discounted any link between the Dundalk break-in and the raid. Their main concern on Thursday was seizing evidence. Arresting Murphy was not an objective, although he would have been lifted if he was there. On past form, gardai expect him to present himself in Dundalk station in the next few days.

If he did have advance warning, he did not share it with his brothers Francis and Patrick, or with Francis’s wife Judy, all of whom were caught in the dragnet. They were intercepted attempting to leave the secured area in a 4x4 and arrested on suspicion of revenue offences but released without charge.

The operation against the Murphy family’s financial interests has been dogged by problems. Last year the swoops in Manchester, directed at companies linked to Judy and Francis, had to be moved forward by several months because of leaks to the media.

It will take months of careful sifting to determine whether any evidence can be put before a court, and whether laptop computers found in Murphy’s barn contain financial secrets of the IRA.

This game is being played for high stakes. Noel Conroy, the garda commissioner, and Sir Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief constable, the next day promoted the raid as a showcase for a coming era of cross-border co-operation. In briefings afterwards the CAB, gardai and PSNI all scrambled for the honour of being portrayed as the lead agency in the operation.

Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, said he expected nothing would be proved against Murphy, who he embraced as one of his key supporters.

“Tom Murphy is not a criminal, he is a good republican,” said Adams. “He is also, very importantly, a key supporter of the Sinn Fein peace strategy and has been for a very long time.” Asked if he believed Murphy was just a farmer, Adams said: “If he denies being a member of the IRA, then I have to accept that.”

THE Sinn Fein leader’s endorsement of Murphy could come back to haunt him. Far from being an innocent man who made whatever few shillings he has from farming, as Adams claimed, Murphy is a rich smuggler who led the IRA in south Armagh throughout the Troubles but never served a jail sentence. Murphy’s unsavoury past was laid bare in a series of court cases that he took against The Sunday Times after this newspaper accused him of vetting terrorists to take part in a bombing campaign in Britain in the 1980s. A Dublin jury found him to be a man of worthless reputation who had plotted murder and other terrorist acts and was involved in smuggling and criminality.

Sean O’Callaghan, a former garda agent within the IRA, testified at one trial that he attended IRA meetings at which both Adams and Murphy were present. One was a Revolutionary Council meeting in 1983 and the second was an Army Council meeting in 1984 or 1985.

Eamon Collins, a former IRA intelligence officer from Newry, told a 1998 hearing that his unit had murdered a Catholic civilian in mistake for a police officer. After an IRA internal inquiry carried out by Freddie Scappaticci, who was himself a British agent, Collins was sent to meet Murphy who exonerated him. “He introduced himself,” Collins testified. “He said, ‘I am Tom Murphy and I am here as a representative of the Army Council’.”

Collins added that after hearing his explanation of the fatal mistake, Murphy “accepted that. He told me that I had been fully exonerated and I was fully reinstated. I was very impressed by his manner”.

Immediately after the libel case, a campaign of intimidation started against Collins, culminating in his murder on January 27, 1999. It was a frenzied attack in which he was beaten, stabbed and had a crowbar pushed through his face.

Despite his high-ranking role in the IRA, and Adams’s description of him as “no criminal and a good republican”, Murphy denounced IRA violence in an attempt to win the libel case against The Sunday Times. At one stage he claimed that he did not know where the Maze prison was or what an IRA funeral was like.

The juries heard clear evidence of his criminality. At one point he had difficulty in deciding his date of birth (August 26, 1949) because, he explained, different dates had appeared on a forged passport and driving licence that he sometimes used.

Murphy had used one of these forged passports to travel to Greece in 1986 to meet Nasser al-Ashour, a colonel in Libyan military intelligence, to arrange the importation of weapons. The arms importation came to an end with the seizure of the largest shipment, on the Eksund, in French waters in 1987. A statement given to the French authorities by Hopkins documents Murphy’s hands-on involvement in the traffic.

The court also heard how Murphy had thrown a breeze-block at Seamus Colgan and Mick McGill, two Irish customs officers, and how his complex had been a centre for smuggling and attacks on the British Army in the Troubles.

It was all a far cry from the life he portrayed of a small farmer who left school at 14 and earned a precarious living raising cattle on a smallholding straddling the border.

THE truth is that the end of the Troubles has been the undoing of Murphy. While friends, neighbours and employees died, went to prison or were exiled, he prospered, amassing a fortune estimated at £35m.

His control of the local IRA was essential to controlling these assets. During the terrorism campaign, security forces could watch from towers but could not enter the area except by helicopter. Larkin’s Road, which winds its way across the border beside the Murphy family home, could be regarded as “Slab’s Road” and other smugglers were charged a “tax” for driving contraband along it.

All deals could be settled on a handshake. Murphy could pay off his suppliers, as he paid Hopkins, with bundles of crumpled banknotes without fear of being ripped off because he had the deadly muscle of the IRA behind him. Anybody who complained to the police could be shot or exiled. Even sales of local land went through only on his say-so.

It was the power of a feudal warlord, but it receded as soon as the war was over. Any attempt to continue it in peacetime risked exposing Adams and Sinn Fein to ridicule. Now the prospect of Murphy’s criminal empire unravelling in court must be the Sinn Fein leadership’s worst nightmare.

Adams has begun uneasily to prepare a damage limitation exercise. He has defended Murphy, his old friend and ally in the IRA, by condemning the police for their actions and the media for their coverage of the raids. “The thrust is about demonising and vilifying,” according to Adams. “It is about setting aside the huge work that has been done to bring us all to the point where we are at the moment in terms of the peace process. And then to try and portray what’s going on as the dregs of a terrorist campaign which is being exploited by these super-duper godfathers.”

He did condemn smuggling as “wrong” and said “we support the pursuit of criminal assets. Anybody involved in criminality should face the full rigours of the law, and that includes the right to a fair trial”.

The message was this: if the mud sticks to Murphy, Adams will step aside. There will be no “free Slab” campaigns if the smuggler ends up behind bars.

As Sinn Fein prepares itself for the Irish general election in 2007, and a possible northern assembly election this year, it is desperate to present a clean image. It has been quick to decry past political corruption exposed in the Dublin tribunals and to exploit each revelation to score against Fianna Fail.

But in “Slab” Murphy, Adams faces his own sleaze factor and IRA corruption dwarfs anything that emerged from the Dublin planning system. The best option for Sinn Fein is if nothing is proved, but if it comes to a choice between electoral success and Murphy’s friendship, Adams may not find it that difficult a call to make.

Murphy: for the record

Thomas “Slab” Murphy owes The Sunday Times more than £600,000 (€870,000) for legal fees as a result of a disastrous 12-year libel battle he pursued. He lost and was branded by an Irish jury as a man of worthless reputation who plotted murder. The newspaper will hope to recover some of its costs from assets seized by the British or Irish authorities.

On June 30, 1985 The Sunday Times published an article entitled “Portrait of a check-in terrorist” in which Murphy was identified as head of the IRA’s northern command. The piece said that he had helped to select terrorists for a bombing campaign against 12 British seaside resorts.

Two years later Murphy sued for libel in Dublin. In 1990 the trial was abandoned on technical grounds. When it was reheard later that year, Murphy lost. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 1996 ordered a retrial. The retrial, in May 1998, lasted nine days. It took the jury less than one hour to conclude that the newspaper had established that Murphy was a terrorist who had directed bombings and murder. He appealed for a retrial but dropped his case in 1999.

Guardian

**This is just my opinion, but there is no need for this stunt as anyone with access to a computer and any interest in the matter has already seen these cartoons reproduced any number of places and can continue to see them as I write. Mostly, the ‘cartoons’ are just stupid, but Islamic people find them grossly offensive. Of course, that is no reason to riot and cause bloodshed etc., but why is it necessary for ‘The Blanket’ to go into this all over again at the risk of putting young children with no say in the matter in harm’s way and inviting sectarian and racist trouble in an already troubled area of the world? Sometimes a person’s principles get in the way of common sense.

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday March 12, 2006
The Observer

A former IRA prisoner plans to reopen the worldwide debate over cartoons depicting Muhammad by posting the controversial pictures on a website at around 10pm tonight.

The Blanket will be the first media outlet in the British Isles to reproduce the cartoons since their publication provoked violent disturbances, boycotts and death threats. Last night British Muslims warned the website’s editors that they were ‘fanning the flames of anger’. With 22 million hits since it was founded five years ago, The Blanket is read around the world. Usually it posts debates about the future of Irish Republicanism, and many of its writers are highly critical of the Sinn Fein leadership. However, The Blanket’s co-founder and former H-Block prisoner Anthony McIntyre said the site had decided to publish one cartoon of Muhammad per week for the next three months ‘in protest against totalitarianism’.

McIntyre said: ‘The spur for us was a manifesto against totalitarianism that writers such as Salman Rushdie signed up to in response to the violent reaction over the cartoons. We wanted to show solidarity with those writers who were prepared to stick their necks out in defence of free speech. We chose 12 weeks for each and every one of the writers who signed the anti-totalitarian declaration. ‘We also decided to publish because the liberal media in Britain and Ireland are guilty of total cowardice. None of them let the public see these images and make up their own minds about the debate. They [the mainstream media] buckled under fear and threats.’ There were, however, other reasons motivating McIntyre and his partner Carrie Twomey.

‘The Irish President told a sexually segregated audience in Saudi Arabia last month that the people of Ireland deplored the publication of the cartoons,’ McIntyre said. ‘Who did she think she was speaking for? I live in the north of Ireland and I don’t have the right to vote for her. And even if I did she doesn’t represent my views on the issue.’ Twomey and McIntyre, who have two young children and live in the republican Upper Springfield area of Belfast, said they were aware that publishing might put them at risk from fundamentalists. But they insist they have been under threat before, most notably from McIntyre’s former comrades in the IRA. Their home has been picketed by IRA supporters for speaking out against Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership in the past. A spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain accused The Blanket of trying to stir up fresh anger in the Islamic community.

Harris Bohkari, the MAB spokesman said: ‘All credit has to go to the British papers and broadcasters who took the sensible decision not to publish that material. So you have to question the motivation of these people in doing this now. Their timing is curious because the story has moved on. It seems clear that they are just stirring things up for the sake of it. Doing this will simply rekindle all the understandable anger in the Muslim community.’

Several fringe media organisations in Britain have considered printing the cartoons as part of opening the debate about free speech and fundamentalist beliefs. The London-based magazine The Liberal intended to publish the images in its 14 February edition. However, it said it received information on 8 February from senior officers at Scotland Yard who warned that police could not guarantee protection for staff.