SAOIRSE32

BN.ie

02/04/2006 - 13:16:02

A sister of murdered Belfast father-of-two Robert McCartney has given birth to a baby boy named after her dead brother, it emerged today.

Paula McCartney, who was thrust along with her four sisters and her brother’s partner Bridgeen Hagans into the international media spotlight following her brother’s murder last year, gave birth to Robert junior on Thursday.

He was born 10 days prematurely.

Details of the pregnancy were kept hidden as the family campaigned last year for justice in their brother’s case.

Robert McCartney was savagely beaten and stabbed outside a Belfast city centre bar in January last year.

Following pressure from the family, the IRA expelled three members and Sinn Féin also took action against a number of party members who were present in the bar at the time of the attack.

A friend of Robert McCartney was also stabbed during the incident.

Last month Robert’s sister Catherine and his mother Kathleen travelled to the White House and met senior US politicians including Senator Edward Kennedy in Washington to urge them to apply more pressure on Sinn Féin to help them achieve justice.

The family has been critical of Sinn Féin’s refusal to encourage republicans who were present in the bar to give information directly to the Police Service of Northern Ireland team investigating the murder.

In addition to playing a prominent role in the campaign to secure justice for Robert’s murder, Paula McCartney has been raising five other children and also pursuing a women’s studies degree at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Following threats from republicans, she and her family were forced to leave their home last October in the nationalist Short Strand.

BBC

DUP leader Ian Paisley has said it is nonsense to say the NI executive will be formed before the summer.

This follows speculation the British and Irish prime ministers will set a deadline for efforts to restore the assembly later this week.

Political sources have told the BBC assembly members are to be called to Stormont on 15 May for a six-week period to try to form an executive.

Mr Paisley said the foundations for such decisions had not been laid.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do, ” he told the BBC’s Sunday Sequence programme.

“I have read the papers, I have read all the conflicting reports from various politicians who think they know, and to say that they’re going to call the assembly together to try to get an executive set up is absolutely nonsense.

“They can’t do that, and it’s not going to happen because the foundation for such a decision is not even laid and the foundation, of course, must be the end of terrorism.”

Mr Paisley, whose party has suggested the formation of a shadow assembly, is due to meet Tony Blair on Tuesday.

“I think we are not going to have an executive but why do they not turn the assembly into a body that has power to consider important matters?” he said.

‘Veto’

However, SDLP leader Mark Durkan has said the DUP should not have a veto over devolved institutions.

Speaking at the Irish Labour Party’s annual conference in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Durkan said: “The DUP have rights under the agreement. They do not have rights over it.”

He added: “I would love to be able to say that I see more positive potential in the latest proposals from the two governments than I currently do.

“The SDLP encourages them to be firmer and go further.

“We have to hope that what the taoiseach and prime minister announce on Thursday will not just be the source of shadowy assembly that would be right up the DUP’s street because that could only lead to a dead end.”

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly reiterated his party’s opposition to a “shadow assembly”.

He said Sinn Fein would not take part in such body as the DUP would be able to dominate its committees.

Earlier this week, BBC Northern Ireland political editor Mark Devenport said the assembly would break for summer before being recalled in September for 12 weeks until the end of November.

He also said the political parties have been told the British and Irish governments are considering holding more talks at a stately home during the summer recess to deal with outstanding problems.

An emergency bill is expected to be put through Westminster to change some of the Stormont rules.

News of the deadline followed a series of talks between the Irish premier and some of Northern Ireland’s political parties in Dublin on Thursday.

Devolved government at Stormont was suspended in October 2002 following allegations of a republican spy ring at the Northern Ireland Office.

BN.ie

02/04/2006 - 10:38:09

Far more people should be charged with the Omagh bomb outrage, victims claimed today.

On the eve of their first formal meeting with Northern Ireland Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde, relatives demanded prosecutions on the same scale as in the London and Madrid atrocities.

Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was among 29 murdered in the dissident republican strike on Omagh, also revealed his fears that the British and Irish governments may cut a deal with the terrorists.

He said: “Will they do something with the Real IRA and then find themselves in the embarrassing position of having to release those responsible for the bombing?”

So far only south Armagh electrician Sean Hoey, 36, has been charged with killing those caught up in the August 1998 blast. He is due to go on trial in September.

Mr Gallagher and other relatives will meet Sir Hugh and Chief Superintendent Norman Baxter, the detective in charge of the investigation, weeks after failing in their bid to have talks with the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

They wanted to meet her to discuss allegations that the security service withheld intelligence months before the bombing that either Omagh or Derry were to be possible targets.

Dame Elizabeth told the families she had nothing to add to Sir Hugh’s statement that no relevant intelligence which could have progressed the inquiry was kept back.

But at PSNI headquarters in Belfast on Monday they are expected to urge police to go after more suspects.

Their frustration has been intensified by the criminal offensive against the Islamic militants who murdered 191 people in the March 2004 Madrid train bombings.

More than 100 people have been held in connection with the attacks, with at least 20 still in custody.

Charges have also been brought against several men accused of involvement in the London bomb plot weeks after 52 people died in the July 7 2005 suicide attacks on the England capital.

“More people north and south of the border should be charged with Omagh,” Mr Gallagher said.

“I don’t think there’s been the degree of co-operation between the police forces which the families have been led to believe, and that’s for political reasons.

“The greatest fear the families have is that both Governments will come to an arrangement which legitimises these terrorist crimes.

“The victims’ haven’t been listened to.”

Belfast Telegraph

**Via Newshound

It is a family dispute which has escalated into brutal killing and tit-for-tat attacks. Reporters Ashleigh Wallace and Lisa Smyth hear both sides of the story of the Ballymurphy feud

By Ashleigh Wallace and Lisa Smyth
newsdesk@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
01 April 2006

Family describes long list of brutal attacks: The Devlins

By Lisa Smyth

Gerard Devlin was stabbed to death in a street fight as a feud between the two west Belfast families reached a bloody culmination in February this year.

In a candid interview with the Belfast Telegraph, his wife, Aine Devlin, and aunt, Bernadette O’Rawe, detailed the violence and intimidation they claim their family suffered for almost three years before the murder.

And they strongly condemned petrol bomb attacks on a number of homes in recent months, with Bernadette saying: “We don’t want these burnings because it takes away from the fact that we have someone lying dead and we also don’t want to see someone else dead.

“God forbid anyone should be burnt in their bed but we don’t have any influence or control over the community and the people carrying out these attacks.”

According to the two women, Gerard was targeted because he refused to be intimidated by the Notorantonio family and the matter came to a head on May 16, 2003, when the father-of-six was attacked as he returned home from the pub.

“There had been words before but nothing more than a fist lifted until this point,” explained Bernadette.

“Gerard was stabbed in the head and his throat was cut an eighth of an inch from his jugular vein for which he needed 32 stitches.”

Aine and Bernadette claim this was the beginning of a series of violent attacks prior to the death of Gerard some 34 months later.

“After the stabbing, Gerard was constantly being threatened and his kids were being taunted and that’s very hard for any mummy or daddy to put up with,” said Bernadette.

“Every time Gerard was provoked, we would get the Community Restorative Justice organisation involved - Gerard went to every meeting he was asked to attend, he worked with the police and the CRJ, he even got involved in mediation with priests, but nothing seemed to work.”

Bernadette said the next significant incident occurred two years later on August 29, 2005, when Gerard, who she said had moved away from his Whiterock Parade home in an effort to defuse the tensions, was allegedly attacked as he came to collect some of his children.

“Gerard stayed out of the area which was very tough, but it showed the man in him and how far he was prepared to go for his family but when he came to take one of the kids to hospital, he was deliberately rammed by another car when he had three of his children in the car,” she explained.

“He got out of the car and they came at him with a pitchfork and when he put his hands up to protect himself he was hit and his finger was almost severed.”

As Gerard tried to flee the scene, both women claim the youngster’s lives were put in danger when a spade was thrown through the back window of the car, prompting Gerard to press for a police investigation into the stabbing incident two years earlier.

The women also claim the violence continued later the same day when Gerard returned home to see his children and during a confrontation, a gun was pointed at his chest.

“The next day Gary and I were walking down the street and the same person who put the gun to Gerard’s chest shouted at us, ‘your dad is dead later on’,” Aine claimed, adding that in October last year, the Devlin family discovered there was a £10,000 bounty on the life of the father-of-six.

Recalling the frantic moments after Gerard was stabbed in February, Aine went on to describe the devastating effect her husband’s murder has had on her and their children.

“After Gerard was stabbed I was trying to hold him up because he had fallen over the car bonnet, he knew he was dying - he even told me so and he blessed himself.

“You could see the blood leaving him, he was turning grey and once the blood came out of his mouth, we knew there was no hope.

“He was awfully good to his children. He was a family man who loved his kids and this is something we will never come to terms with.”

Bernadette continued: “Aine has a really hard time, her youngest child is disabled and another of her sons was brain damaged last August but it’s more dangerous now than it was before Gerard was murdered.”

Ballymurphy family tells of constant fear: The Notorantonios

By Ashleigh Wallace

SINCE the death of Gerard Devlin, most of the Notorantonio family have been petrol bombed out of their homes on the Ballymurphy estate.

The eldest member of the family, 77-year old Edith Notorantonio, ended up in hospital as a result of the attacks on her family. Now, the grandmother is unable to return to her home of 53 years and is living in constant fear for her life.

Her son, Francis, had an angina attack after the house he was staying at in Whitecliff Parade was pelted front and back with petrol bombs.

And, as a result of the same incident, another family member broke her ankle jumping from an upstairs bedroom window to escape the flames.

Since the Devlin murder, around ten homes - including a holiday home in Donegal - have been attacked, rendering families with young children homeless. Cars have been burned out, businesses have been forced to close, threats have been issued and family pets have been butchered.

Some of the younger members of the family are afraid to go to school, while their mothers are too scared to use the local shops.

But, according to Victor Notorantonio (56), reports the tensions are down to a family feud are wrong.

Instead, he claims, the IRA is behind the attacks and is using a group of local teenagers - which the Notorantonio’s have nicknamed ‘the rugrats’ - to carry out its work.

Victor said: “This is not a family feud, which is a mistake the media are making. This is the IRA trying to get my family out of the area, root and branch.

“The IRA leadership could stop this in a heartbeat. They used Gerard Devlin the same way they are using his family.

“I believe prominent members of the republican movement are behind the whole thing. “Whether they have the backing of the leadership, I don’t know, but I know the only one that can stop this trouble is Gerry Adams himself.”

He does admit that tensions between his family and the Devlins go back to around three-and-a-half years ago when his son and nephew were involved in a street fight with Gerard Devlin.

Gerard ended up with stab wounds, but Victor claims his son was acting in self defence as he was being attacked by a “local hard man with a history of violence.”

As for Gerard’s murder, three members of the Notorantonio family have been arrested and charged. All three have since been released on bail and are living in England.

Victor said: “At the end of the day, the truth about what happened that day is going to come out in court, so I would say to the Loughrans and the Devlins, tell the truth about exactly what happened.”

In October 1987, Victor’s father Francisco was shot dead by loyalists as he slept in his bed beside his wife.

Speculation remains that the murder was set up by the state to protect Freddie Scappaticci, who was last year unmasked as an IRA informer.

In recent weeks, graffiti has appeared in and around Ballymurphy, accusing the family of being ‘MI5 touts’.

And Victor’s reaction? “My brother wanted to go down and wash it off but I told him to leave it. We have nothing to hide.”

His sister, Charlotte Burns, added: “It’s rubbish. Why would I highlight my father’s case if I or any of my family were touts.

“They’re trying to put the onus back on us. My father was sacrificed for Scappaticci and by talking publicly about it, I’ve obviously rattled a few cages.”

Charlotte’s daughter, Gerardette Burns (18), said she is living in constant fear. Since tensions on the estate have boiled over, she has lost lifelong friends who she believes have been ordered not to talk to her.

She said: “I’m scared to go to sleep at night in case I don’t wake up. We take shifts at night to keep awake and try and keep ourselves safe but we don’t know when the next petrol bombing will be.”

Some family members have installed CCTV to try and catch on camera those responsible for attacking their homes.

One incident which was captured on camera clearly shows a group of teenagers pelting a house with missiles and issuing threats in broad daylight.

When asked about claims that the IRA was behind the attacks on the Notorantonio family, a spokesman for Sinn Fein said: “That is absolute nonsense.

“No republicans have been involved in killing people in Ballymurphy, no republicans have been involved in shooting people in Ballymurphy and no republicans have been involved in petrol bombing people either.

“In fact, republicans have been up front in calling for all that activity to cease.”

Sunday Life

02 April 2006

NORTHERN Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has been accused of trying to hand himself powers which could undermine the Agreement.

Yesterday, SDLP leader Mark Durkan claimed there were plans for new legislation which would enable Mr Hain to change the way institutions under the Good Friday Agreement operated.

He told the Irish Labour Party’s annual conference in Dublin: “Their proposals will involve new legislation.

“The British Government have some plans for that bill to include powers for the Secretary of State to alter aspects of the institutions and change working principles of the Agreement by Order-in-Council.

“The Good Friday Agreement is not the property of the British Government to chop and change at their own will or the whim of those opposed to it.”

The two governments are expected to recall the Assembly in May to give it six weeks to form an executive. But if it proves impossible, new legislation is expected to park the Assembly through the marching season and recall Stormont in September with new rules.

Sunday Life

02 April 2006

PLANS by Sinn Fein councillors in Belfast to honour republican hero James Connolly seem doomed to failure.

The party wants to create a stained glass window in the City Hall in memory of the controversial socialist figure who was executed after the 1916 Easter Rising.

The issue has divided nationalists and unionists ahead of tomorrow night’s monthly council meeting.

But we can reveal that the Alliance Party - whose four members hold the balance of power on the 51-strong council - will vote AGAINST the proposed memorial.

Born in Dublin, Connolly lived in Scotland until 1910 when he came to Belfast to work alongside trade union leader James Larkin.

His role in the dock workers strike led to him becoming a key figure in the Irish labour movement, going on to be a founder of the Irish Labour Party.

In 1916 he moved to Dublin to lead the Irish Citizens Army in the GPO during the rising.

After the insurgency was quashed, the wounded Connolly was strapped to a chair to be executed.

Sinn Fein’s Fra McCann said the erection of a memorial to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising was an essential part of being a shared city.

“Belfast City Hall has been filled with the symbolism of unionism and the British Army since it was opened,” he said.

“There is little or no sign that nationalists make up half of the population of this city.

“A stained glass window dedicated to Connolly would be a sign that both traditions can be equally respected.”

The DUP’s Nelson McCausland vowed unionists would oppose the motion, claiming: “1916 was directly responsible for poisoning and polluting Irish political life for the past century.”

The move to honour Connolly with a memorial was passed last month by the council’s policy and resources committee.

But committee member Mervyn Jones told Sunday Life last night: “There was some confusion over that vote and we as a party would not be supporting a memorial when it comes before the full council on Monday.”

He added: “I do not think a stained glass window in memory of Connolly is appropriate, particularly as it is not the 100th anniversary of this event.

“My party would, I believe, support some form of commemoration, perhaps a lecture and exhibition putting the Easter Rising in its historical context, without any political point scoring.”

Sunday Life

By Ciaran McGuigan
cmcguigan@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
02 April 2006

RELATIVES of a taxi driver gunned down outside a Co Tyrone snooker club four years ago believe his killers are still free because an informer is being protected.

And after learning that phone records that could have provided crucial clues in the investigation into the slaying of Barney McDonald have been destroyed, they fear the killers may never be brought to justice.

The 52-year-old dad-of-eight was blasted to his death in April 2002 as he arrived to pick up a fare outside a snooker club in Donaghmore.

As he sat outside the club, two gunmen emerged from bushes and fired four shotgun blasts into the car, killing him instantly.

A number of people have been arrested in connection with the murder, but as the fourth anniversary approaches no one has ever been charged.

Mr McDonald’s brother-in-law Kieran O’Donnell believes that the killers continue to escape justice to protect an informer.

His suspicions were heightened recently when cops wrote to him to tell him that the mobile phone records of a crucial witness had been destroyed (though not by police) and were no longer available to them.

Mr O’Donnell told Sunday Life: “Barney was shot that night and died within half a second of the trigger being pulled, but his family’s worries were only just beginning.

“I have watched the family trying to cope with this and that’s continuing four years after.

“I just want these people to be caught and to go to jail and do their time.

“The people who pulled the trigger were probably paid. It’s the people that have set it up, and then covered it up, who have put us through hell.”

“My main question is why kill Barney?

“He was of no political significance, killing him solved no problem, no one could have benefitted and nothing was gained. So why?

“This I do know: There are shadowy elements in the security services who knew that night that Barney was getting murdered. They have assisted in the people getting away.”

He added:”After four years the police tell me now that the mobile phone records (of a major witness) have been destroyed.

“My first question at the time of the murder is as relevant now as it was then -how was it that Barney ended up in Donaghmore that night?

“Who was this mystery taxi fare that he arrived to collect?”

The investigation has already been probed by the Police Ombudsman, who found that “no evidence that the police had not conducted a proper and thorough investigation”.

And the case is currently being investigated by the Serious Crime Review Team.

Sunday Life

by Stephen Breen
sbreen@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
02 April 2006

THE young Ulster man who was left blinded and wheelchair bound after a barbaric gun attack will get the keys to his new home tomorrow.

Brave David Hanley (21) - who was just two millimetres from death after being cut down in a hail of bullets by an LVF gunman - will move into his specially-adapted bungalow in Bangor on Wednesday.

And once settled in his new home, Sunday Life can reveal he is planning to set up his own personal website.

David, who spoke exclusively to us last week about his amazing fight for life, hopes his remarkable story can inspire people around the world.

He is also hoping to join a local church group over the coming weeks.

Since his release from hospital earlier this year, David has been staying with friends.

But the former Belfast Royal Academy pupil, who suffered serious internal injuries and underwent a series of major operations, is looking forward to moving into his own place.

Said David: “I’m beginning to get my full memory back and Belfast doesn’t hold many happy memories for me now.

“I have good friends in Bangor and that’s why I decided to move away from Belfast. I think being in the seaside town will help my recovery.

“I can’t wait to move in because I was always independent before this happened to me and I just want to show people that I still have the confidence to live on my own.

“My recovery has been miraculous and I don’t know of any other person who suffered the same injuries I suffered moving into their own home just eight months later.

“I will have special tiles for my wheelchair and I also want to have a voice-activated computer so am able to communicate with people.

“I just want to continue giving hope and inspiration to others.”

David was just three days away from his 21st birthday when he was shot.

He was walking his dogs when an LVF gunman jumped from an alleyway on the Upper Crumlin Road and shot him in the head.

The evil terrorist then stood over his prone body, pumping five more bullets into his stomach.

Sunday Life

By Alan Murray
02 April 2006

TENSION is growing between two UDA units over the fining of a drug dealer in west Belfast.

Convicted killer Paul ‘Gull’ Hamilton has told UDA friends in north Belfast that he handed over £25,000 to three senior figures in the organisation in the Shankill Road area.

But the Shankill trio, Jim Spence, Eric McKee and Matt Kinkaid have denied that they got £25,000 from Hamilton two weeks ago and are seething at the claim.

It’s not disputed that the former life sentence prisoner was ‘fined’ £50,000 when he was summoned to a meeting with the three UDA figures at a Shankill club three weeks ago.

Hamilton was told that the fine was for selling large quantities of hard drugs in Belfast.

He protested he was selling the drugs in the university area and not in their patch but was told it didn’t matter, he was using the UDA’s name and that wasn’t acceptable.

He was also told that if the organisation hadn’t been observing a ceasefire, he would have been shot for his drug peddling activities.

Spence, McKee and Kinkaid have said that no money was handed over and they’re angry that they’re being accused of pocketing the cash.

“People are very angry at what this man has claimed and they also suspect that some figures in the north Belfast brigade are giving this drug dealer support and that could lead to trouble,” one source in the west Belfast brigade said.

But the UDA’s north Belfast brigade is denying that Hamilton is being given any support.

Said one north Belfast UDA source: “Nobody in the north Belfast brigade is supporting his drug dealing or anybody else’s but he has claimed that he handed over £25,000 to three leading figures in the west Belfast brigade. We can’t stop him saying that - it’s for west Belfast to sort out.

“Gull knows people in north Belfast but the brigade has no position on it or him.”

Other UDA sources say two figures in the terror group’s south Belfast brigade are major drug dealers.

Said one source: “Nobody’s shedding any tears for Hamilton but there are two serious dealers in south Belfast that the rest of the organisation is talking about. When are they going to be put out of business?

“The organisation can’t say it’s cleaning up its act on one side of the river while in another brigade, they’re cracking away at drug dealing under the nose of a brigadier.”

Sunday Life

Superspy’s solicitor contacts tribunal

by Alan Murray
02 April 2006

IRA SUPERSPY Freddie ‘Stakeknife’ Scappaticci has been in contact with the inquiry set up to probe the IRA killings of two senior RUC officers in 1989.

A solicitor acting for Scappaticci has approached officials acting for the Smithwick Tribunal in Dublin to seek legal representation for his client.

It is believed the tribunal is likely to hear evidence from another former British spy inside the IRA, linking Scappaticci to the brutal murder of a farmer.

Scappaticci, formerly a senior figure in the IRA’s ruthless internal security unit, fled his west Belfast home in 2003, after being outed as a British spy and exposed for spilling the beans of leading republicans to TV journalists.

Judge Peter Smithwick will conduct the inquiry into the IRA murders of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Robert Buchanan, who were ambushed near the border shortly after leaving a meeting at Dundalk Garda station.

A former Army agent who uses the pseudonym Kevin Fulton has alleged that a retired Garda passed the IRA details of the two RUC men’s movements.

It’s understood that Fulton, who also worked for MI5, has also alleged that the same former Garda passed information to the IRA which led to the terrorists abducting and killing Cooley Peninsula farmer Tom Oliver in July 1991, for allegedly being a police informant.

Fulton is expected to allege that Scappaticci was involved in Mr Oliver’s murder.

Last week Fulton would only say: “I know details about a number of incidents and I have already informed the tribunal that I am prepared to go to Dublin to reveal what I know.”

The Smithwick Tribunal confirmed to Sunday Life that a lawyer for Scappaticci had been in verbal contact with the inquiry about possible legal representation at the proceedings.

Sunday Independent

JEROME REILLY
2 April 2006

BRITISH spies believed the Sisters of Mercy nuns who ran Dublin’s Mater Hospital were active volunteers or avowed republican sympathisers during the 1916 Rebellion.

And other secret files compiled by the Royal Irish Constabulary up to 1920 suggest that the wards of the famous Dublin hospital continued to be a hotbed of intrigue and clandestine operations.

“The community of nuns who manage this hospital, the majority of medical staff, the nurses and practically all the students are Sinn Feiners or Sinn Fein sympathisers,” intelligence files from the period assert.

The revolutionary ardour of the Congregation founded by Catherine McAuley will come as no surprise to generations of students who learnt to respect the intellectual rigour and fierce independence of the Mercy Sisters.

Catherine McAuley’s original House of Mercy for Women was established at Baggot Street in the 1820s - not far from some of the fiercest fighting 100 years later when Ireland struck for her freedom.

The secret files reveal the inability of the RIC to meet the republican challenge, according to Dr Fearghal McGarry of Queens University.

He has written the introduction for a fascinating newly-released batch of material from those turbulent days which offers a new and easily accessible insight into the birth of our Nation and the fiercely fought intelligence battle at its heart.

To coincide with the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, Eneclann Ltd, the award-winning campus company based at Trinity College, are publishing the Dublin Castle RIC special branch intelligence files on individual Sinn Fein and republican suspects between 1899 and 1921.

Also known as the ‘Personalities Files’, these documents contain secret intelligence on more than 450 individuals who were under surveillance, including Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, James Connolly, Roger Casement and Maud Gonne.

The publication, in conjunction with the Public Records Office London, is a reproduction (on DVD or CD) of over 19,000 folios. But what is most fascinating are the accounts of ordinary members of the republican movement all over the country.

Many of the files relate to public servants, demonstrating that teachers, clerks, telephonists, excise officers and even postmen were viewed by the regime as a potentially dangerous enemy within.

Michael Thornton, a national school teacher from Spiddal, Co Galway, is first mentioned in the special branch files in January 1915, when local RIC officers reported that he was “doing all he can to spread the Sinn Fein and pro-German movement.”

The special branch was informed that “respectable people” in the Spiddal area thought that it was “too bad” that a man like Thornton should hold the position of a paid government servant. Thornton was kept under surveillance and was arrested for complicity in the Easter Rising on April 25, 1916.

Though released in December 1916, he was dismissed from his job due to his “complicity in the rebellion”, and after SF literature had been found in his possession he was deported to England.

After being repatriated to Ireland, Thornton continued teaching in Spiddal, his salary supposedly being met by the central executive of the Teachers’ Association and not the British Department of Education.

The case-file contains a letter from an angry parent of a child being taught by Thornton in Furbough [Furbo], Co Galway.

The parent complained that the children were not allowed to speak English and Thornton cursed the English and their language at every opportunity.

The parent pointed out that if this was allowed to continue the children of Furbough would be “taught nothing but ideas of revolution”.

On September 23, 1918, British military authorities were informed that “if ever there was a case which clearly justified internment under order of the Chief Secretary” it was Thornton’s.

Despite being described as the most “devilish ruffian in Galway”, Thornton was appointed by the National Education Board as the permanent teacher of Furbough National School in April 1920.

The files also contain details of other fascinating men and women who did some service in the battle for nationhood. A mapping officer at the Ordinance Survey, Allen Michael Ashe, was dismissed from his employment after being reported for making “a dangerous and disloyal speech at a meeting of the Loughrea branch of the Irish Volunteers”. Ashe was reported to hold “strong SF views” and to be publicly expressing “anti-recruiting opinions”.

In another file the Strabane postman, Cornelius Boyle, was reported because “on his travels . . . he is stirring up revolts in the minds of the young men on his walk everyday”.

Dr McGarry says the files represent a rich source of information about the social unrest of the last decades of British rule in Ireland.

“They provide valuable and often vivid insights into the challenges facing the British administration and the background and activities of the young men and women who had fought Britain’s crown forces to a stalemate by the summer of 1921,” he said.

‘Sinn Fein and Republican Suspects 1899-1921′ is available on DVD and CD (€49.90). Contact Brian Donovan or Cathy McCartney at (01) 6710338 or email brian.donovan@eneclann.ie

Sunday Business Post

By Tom McGurk
02 April 2006

It is extraordinary how sometimes in history tiny moments can, in retrospect, be seen as enormous and defining moments.

Take 1964 in Mississippi when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and the American Civil Rights movement was born. Or 1968 in Caledon, Co Tyrone, when a squat in a contested local government council house began Ireland’s civil rights movement. Or 1965, when The Dark, a novel by an emerging young Irish writer called John McGahern, was banned by the Censorship of Publications Board.

Of course, a book being banned was nothing new - practically every major Irish writer had a book on the list. But somehow this was different. This was the newly-confident Ireland of Sean Lemass, with radio and television already reshaping popular culture and with growing numbers emerging from second-level education.

Could it be that the country was still in the clutch of the old ayatollahs, and that a new generation of Irish writers would join their predecessors on the banned index?

Worldwide, the mid-1960s was a seminal time, defining what was to follow in the next half century. In Ireland, it was no different.

The McGahern ban made the papers. It was not without its truly Irish comic possibilities, because, to make matters worse, the writer was then relieved of his National School teaching post on the instructions of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.

That McGahern had married a ‘‘divorced foreign women’’ served as sublime subtext to the plot. In the Ireland of 1965, at the beginning of a major social revolution, Christ and Caesar were not merely, as Joyce put it, ‘‘hand in glove’’; they had a stranglehold on Irish life, private and public.

In retrospect then, it was indeed a defining moment. Although McGahern was the unwitting - and, indeed, unwilling - victim of it all, that moment marked his career and opened a gap between Ireland past and Ireland present, that in time grew as though split by an earthquake.

The society of 1965 that banned McGahern and all the others was the same society out of which so much of McGahern’s own ‘Dark’ was conceived. The Catholic hierarchy and conservative politicians still presided over the widespread poverty that had existed at the creation of the state. The winners in Ireland’s unequal society simply bought into that system. The losers were exported. In fact, the exporting business had become the defining instrument for maintaining social cohesion.

All sorts of losers were exported. The unemployed went to Britain, the illegitimate children and the unmarried mothers to Church institutions, the post-civil war republicans to America, and the writers onto censorship lists or exile. Post-independence Ireland, having utterly failed to deliver on the revolutionary dream of a republic that would cherish ‘‘all the children of the nation equally’’, set about a complex and subtle process of exclusion as a method of social and intellectual containment.

Of course, it had none of the excesses of totalitarian state power visible elsewhere in Europe, but make no mistake, the new Irish state knew who its friends and its enemies were. At its core was a powerful political class aided by an ever-present and secure civil service. Later, when the concept of semi-state employment developed, the power of the new Irish state became immense. It had signalled as much in its earliest years. The methods employed to win the Civil War by a resurgent ‘Redmondite’ middle class - in the form of the first pro-treaty government - had blooded the new rulers of Ireland. Critical to the cementing of their authority was their relationship with the Catholic Church which, following the departure of the ruling colonial class, was the only establishment remaining in post-colonial Ireland.

Even when de Valera limped back into power in 1932 with the remnants of the defeated republicans, he quickly learned that Maynooth was an indispensable ally.

There was no safer political place in the new Free State than behind the big backsides of the bishops. The notion of state censorship of ideas was central to postcolonial Ireland and in this, Church and state could hold hands publicly. Critically, political and literary censorship were two sides of the same coin. What was conventionally served up as dealing with ‘‘dirty’’ books was not actually about moral censorship but, more importantly, about the containment of the imagination. For some, Ireland had dreamed too dangerously as the century began, and that should never be allowed to happen again.

No wonder then that, during the first 50 years of this independent 26-county Irish state, the writer became the subversive. As subversives go, John McGahern was the most unlikely, but when the history of the time is written, he will probably be seen as the most influential. He became the bleakest and most powerful of the South’s social historians. Art was his object, of course, but his resonance is truly that of post-colonial Free State Ireland with all its darkness.

Importantly and interestingly, like the land itself, his work is partitioned off from his fellow grand-masters Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney and their Northern experience. While they write out of a moment that has never come, he writes out of the moment that has come, but has singularly failed. His is the tale of lost opportunities, theirs the tale of opportunities still only imagined. Their purgatories are the same, only different you might say.

McGahern became a quite magnificent stylist of Hiberno-English with a prose style Mozartian in the subtlety of its elegance and diminuendo. It is earth, fire, air and water rooted in the topsoil of the imaginative hinterland of his rural childhood.

Like Patrick Kavanagh before him, ‘‘naming these things is the love act and its pledge.” There is majesty in the big books, including Amongst Women and That They May Face The Rising Sun but for me, his short story mastery is unforgettable. The form in itself strikes out for that place where prose and poetry intersect and, as a platform for McGahern’s unique signature of effortless music and rhythmic balance, their power is magical.

The sublime example of his prose mastery was so infectious that a whole new generation of Irish writers could do little else but gather up their pens and sprint joyfully after him. To be Chekhov, Flaubert and Solzhenitsyn at the same time is a remarkable achievement and, yet somehow, McGahern managed it all, adding magnificent modesty and a wicked sense of humour.

Some years ago, while I was filming a television interview with him, he showed me what he jokingly called his ‘‘writing room’’. He took me down to a bedroom and there in one corner, piled with ballpoints and loose-leaf pads - like you would buy in the local corner-shop - was what looked like a large school desk. Here was the ‘‘cradle of genius’’ and I was overwhelmed by the ordinariness and modesty of it all. He lived long enough to witness the Ireland he was born into slowly disappear.

Finger by finger, the clasping fist McGahern felt throughout his writing has finally been removed, though quite what has rushed in to replace its grip on all of us is another day’s work. Whether in the end we have exchanged one form of domination for another remains to be seen.

With his life’s opus now at an end, McGahern’s reputation is complete. As the state fell over itself this weekend to share in his mystique, his revenge and his triumph - not that he wanted either - were complete also. In the long history of an ancient people, none of this is new. McGahern followed a well-beaten path across the fields. Forever, it seems, the druids and the poets have been in competition for our affections. Who we fall for defines who, and what, we are.

Sunday Business Post

By Eunan O’Halpin
02 April 2006

Today’s Sunday Business Post opinion poll indicates that a large majority (80 per cent) of respondents agree that the Easter Rising was a ‘‘positive event in recent Irish history’’, a noteworthy and legitimate act of national self determination. It also shows that 71 per cent agreed that Ireland ‘‘owes a debt to the leaders’’ of the rebellion. Yet only 50 per cent of respondents thought that it was appropriate to ‘‘celebrate the 1916 Rising with a military parade’’, and 32 per cent definitely disagreed.

Eight years after the Good Friday agreement, a year after IRA decommissioning, the Irish public remains equivocal about any reminders of the role of physical force in the establishment of Irish independence.

In recent years, state commemoration of historical events in Ireland has often attracted criticism, or ridicule, or sometimes both. Officially-supported commemorative activities marking the bicentenary of 1798 inspired torrents of condemnation from critics.

They argued that these activities glossed over sectarian elements of the rebellion, and generally represented a deplorable dumbing down of historical complexities. The 150th anniversary of the Famine brought some clumsy official gestures, and the vastly expensive famine ship, the Jeanie Johnstone, became a farcically mismanaged essay in historical reconstruction.

There was intense press criticism in 2001, particularly in The Irish Times, of the state funeral and reinterment of the ten men executed in Mountjoy jail during the War of Independence.

I helped to carry the coffin of my mother’s uncle, Kevin Barry, and I was more impressed by the dignified public response to the occasion than by the shrieks of outrage from D’Olier Street.

A disjuncture between public commentators, and the public who attend and thereby participate in commemorative events, will probably again be apparent at Easter, when the state will organise ceremonies to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

No doubt the former will thunder against the remilitarisation of commemoration - it is reported that about 2,500 members of the Defence Forces will be involved - and the necessarily one-sided nature of the occasion (although it is hard to see what consolation unionism could draw from the proceedings).

The government will make conscious efforts to acknowledge the fate of all who died in the Rising, on either side or on none, as well as of the very much larger number of Irishmen who served and died in British colours on the battlefield or at sea. The critics will not be satisfied, but the public will probably not mind. Who is right?

This is not the first occasion in recent years when national commemorations have proved problematic.

In the spring of 1994 I attended a commemorative function to mark the 75th anniversary of the first meeting of Dail Eireann in the Mansion House. Why, I asked an official, had the event not been organised for 21 January 1994, the actual anniversary date? Apparently, no one had realised this in time.

Instead the state hosted a reception in late April, the centrepiece of which was a brief and historically inaccurate video documentary, and speeches by the Taoiseach and other dignitaries in descending order of importance. Albert Reynolds was listened to in respectful silence, but as the speeches went on the volume of chatter rose as people turned their attention away from reflections on history and towards the more immediate issue of getting more drink - no expense had been spared, and spirits were available as well as beer and wine. Everyone also received a little commemorative badge to bring away.

The 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State was commemorated in similarly amiable style with a reception in Dublin Castle, the leaders of the smaller parties baying plaintively into the microphone as the herd strayed away towards the refreshments, and everyone got a set of stamps from An Post on the way out.

These fairly low-key commemorations escaped the wrath of commentators, perhaps because they were held behind closed doors. This in turn meant that they had virtually no public impact. The forthcoming official commemorations of 1916 around Ireland will, however, be very public events.

Whether one believes that the Rising was an entirely legitimate act of self-determination, or an anti-democratic and unrepresentative coup, or a mixture of the justifiable and the unjustifiable, aspects of it remain morally problematic.

The first person killed during the rebellion was a police constable standing alone and unarmed at the gates of Dublin Castle, shot without compunction by a member of the Irish Citizen Army when he could easily have been captured or brushed aside. This brutal and unnecessary act was scarcely consonant with the aspirations of the 1916 proclamation, in which the signatories ‘‘pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity or rapine’’.

More civilians than rebels or Crown forces died during the fighting in Dublin, and the decision to centre the rebellion in a densely populated area of the city indicates at best a reckless disregard for the safety of the ordinary Irish men and women in whose name the Rising was launched.

A few civilians were killed deliberately in cold blood, most notoriously the pacifist Owen Sheehy Skeffington, shot by a firing squad in Portobello Barracks on the orders of a fellow Irishman, the deranged Captain Bowen Colthurst.

Others were shot in their dwellings by soldiers during confused fighting in North King Street. Most, however, died incidentally in cross fire or as a result of bombardment.

How are these people to be commemorated?

There is one straightforward and inexpensive measure that the government could take which would cause no controversy and which would greatly increase our understanding of the events of 1916 and the following years.

For decades the most reliable and detailed sources on the Irish revolution were British official records, including police and military documents as well as cabinet documents and the papers of key political figures. I and many others have used these extensively for research purposes, and they remain enormously valuable.

The problem is that such sources of necessity tend to present the British perspective on unfolding events and politics. In the last three years, however, research on the Irish revolution has been transformed by the release of more than 1,700 ‘‘witness statements’’ collected by the government’s Bureau of Military History in the 1940s and 1950s from participants in the events that led to Irish independence.

These were released on the initiative of the Taoiseach after years of bureaucratic bumble.

They contain the detailed recollections of men and women caught up in the independence struggle, and often constitute the only record of what individuals did, felt and thought. Some are self-justifying, some are formulaic, but many are highly informative and deeply personal.

The value of this recently-released material can be seen in the extensive use made of it in such excellent new work as Charles Townshend’s Easter 1916: the Irish rebellion and John Borganovo’s edition of Florence and Josephine O’Donoghue’s War of Independence.

Yet the state still keeps secret two other equally invaluable sets of records.

These are the military service pensions files, and the 1916-1923 medals files, of the Department of Defence, which remain sealed, almost a hundred years after the events for which they hold vital evidence, largely through administrative inertia.

Does anyone in government know or care about them?

By way of illustration, the military service pension file of my grandfather James Moloney contains a wealth of detail on his service from 1919 to 1923, including the IRA units in which he served and as a member of the anti-treaty IRA leader Liam Lynch’s staff, which neither family memory nor other documents can provide.

There are no good reasons for continuing to withhold such invaluable historical material, only lame excuses and the Department of Defence’s unwillingness to provide the necessary staff for the Military Archives.

It is ironic that an Irish government which in 2000 publicly beseeched Tony Blair to open all the British records on Roger Casement, executed for treason in 1916, remains content to sit on many thousands of Irish files which would deepen our understanding of the nature and complexity of the Irish revolution and cast fresh light on the men and women involved in the independence struggle.

What better moment to change such an indefensible policy than Easter 2006?

Eunan O’Halpin is Bank of Ireland Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin.

Sunday Business Post

By Pat Leahy
02 April 2006

An overwhelming majority of voters are in favour of a united Ireland, but most are in no hurry to see it, according to the latest Sunday Business Post/Red C opinion poll.

Almost four out of five voters say they want to see a united Ireland, but most of those believe ‘‘other things should have priority’’, according to the survey, conducted among over 1,000 voters.

The picture that emerges from the poll is one which shows that the large middle ground of Irish people are nationalist and avowedly but not fervently in favour of Irish unity. The poll shows that public attitudes to the 1916 Rising are overwhelmingly positive.

Those committed to a united Ireland above all else and those opposed or indifferent to unity with the North are present in roughly equal amounts.

Almost a quarter of voters (22 per cent) said that achieving a united Ireland should be the first priority of the government.

However, more than half the electorate (55 per cent) said they would like to see a united Ireland, but not as the first priority of government.

On 1916, a similar proportion to those who favour Irish unity (80 per cent) believe that the 1916 Rising was ‘‘a positive event’’ in Irish history.

Sunday Times

**I disagree intensely with this article but am including it for reading

Liam Clarke
2 April 2006

BRITISH soldiers killed in the Easter Rising should be included in Ireland’s 90th anniversary commemorations, according to a Conservative party MP.

Patrick Mercer, the Tories’ frontbench spokesman on homeland security, is encouraging relatives of the 134 British soldiers killed in the rising to travel to Dublin to visit their graves and to see sites linked to the rising. He says such trips would be similar to those made by American veterans to Vietnam.

Mercer is a former commanding officer of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, which suffered most casualties in the rising. The regiment also supplied the firing squads that executed Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and other insurgent leaders afterwards.

The MP pointed this out to authorities at Kilmainham prison, when he visited Dublin in 1999, and the fact is now included in the narrative there.

Last Friday, Mercer tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons welcoming the attendance of Stewart Eldon, the British ambassador to Ireland, at the official 1916 commemoration in Dublin. The motion praises the move as a sign of reconciliation, but also calls for British graves to be honoured.

During Easter week the revolutionary forces, made up of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, suffered 64 fatalities compared to 134 from the crown forces, 35 of them from Irish regiments. Civilians suffered the highest casualties of all, with at least 220 killed and more than 600 wounded. About 17 police officers also died, some during an ambush in Ashbourne, Co Meath.

The current plans are for a minute’s silence for all who died in Easter week, with no specific mention of British casualties. Relatives of the 1916 leaders and volunteers who were killed in action will be asked to join dignitaries on a reviewing stand in O’Connell Street for a military parade on Easter Sunday. Later there will be a wreath-laying ceremony at Kilmainham.

The Irish government also plans to hold a commemoration in July of Irish men who died in British regiments at the Battle of the Somme. The ceremony, at Islandbridge War memorial, is seen as a way of balancing the huge event marking the 90th anniversary of the rising.

Mercer wants wreathes to be laid in Grangegorman military cemetery, where a number of the British casualties are buried. “The ceremony should not neglect the graves of the soldiers, policemen and crown servants who died in April and May 1916. If there is no official gesture, then the British ambassador should himself visit some of these graves,” the MP said.

“I would like the opportunity to take some of my constituents, who are descended from the men of the Sherwood Foresters, and to sound the Last Post and pay our respects at Grangegorman, where a number are buried. The Vietnamese welcome American veterans and their families back to the scenes of past battles from a much more recent war, so what is the problem?”

On April 29, Mercer is organising a ceremony in Balderton cemetery in his own constituency of Newark at the graves of three Sherwood Foresters who were killed by Irish Volunteers.

They and regimental comrades had been destined for the battlefields of France, but were diverted to Ireland.

Mercer said: “Whatever your feelings about the events of 1916, if we are reconciling Britain and Ireland then we have got to recognise the dead from all sides,” the MP said.

“In the same way that the Irish government is going to be celebrating the anniversary of the Somme, and bearing in mind the casualties from both southern and northern Ireland divisions, we should also be remembering the crown forces who died in Ireland itself.”

Sunday Timesl

Liam Clarke
2 April 2006

ALMOST three out of four Northern Ireland parents would like their children’s schools to become religiously mixed.

According to an opinion poll to be published this week, fewer than 6% of people in the province now actively prefer single-religion schools. Only 18,000 out of 387,000 schoolchildren attend integrated schools, however, despite the demand for religiously mixed education that the poll reveals.

Stephen Young of Millward Brown, which carried out the research, said the responses to questions about integrated education were similar among Protestants and Catholics.

“Active opposition is confined to 6% of the population,” Young said. “The interest is there, but choice is restricted because there aren’t enough schools available. It is hard to think of any other policy area with that degree of support.”

Deborah Girvan, of the Northern Ireland Council of Integrated Education (NICIE), which commissioned the survey, said understanding of difference is built into the curriculum of mixed schools.

“In our primaries, children are prepared for the sacraments and the Protestant children can be invited along to watch First Communion as a celebration,” she said. “That should be the norm — Catholic and Protestant children sitting side by side in a classroom building friendships and knowing about each other.”

The survey shows that nearly half of parents (46%) who do not send their children to an integrated school said it was because there wasn’t one in the area. Only 2% preferred single-denomination schools and 3% were opposed to integrated education.

Last month the government refused funding to four new integrated schools, citing falling school-rolls overall. It argued that it could not build new schools while many existing ones were empty. The Integrated Education Fund has now funded two of the schools.

The surplus places are in schools that are largely segregated. While the province’s 58 integrated schools turned away 5,000 pupils due to lack of space last year, the mainly Catholic and Protestant schools had 50,000 spare places and some are faced with closure or amalgamation. Official figures suggest the number of empty desks in largely segregated schools will soon rise to 80,000.

NICIE and the Integrated Education Fund are planning to launch a drive to encourage parents at Catholic and Protestant schools to change their ethos and become integrated.

Michael Wardlow, the chief executive of NICIE, said: “These findings are in line with other survey evidence that most parents want the province’s schools to be religiously integrated with a Christian ethos.”

When the state of Northern Ireland was set up, Lord Londonderry, the education minister, planned a system of secular education, but government resolve buckled under opposition from churches, especially the Catholic church, which retained control of its schools. The predominantly Protestant schools were transferred into the state sector, but Protestant churches retained representation on the board of governors. With the exception of a few grammar schools, which pay 15% of their own capital costs, both sets of schools are now given their running costs by the government.

David Ford, the leader of the Alliance party, estimates that £1 billion a year is wasted on providing segregated facilities in Northern Ireland, about 30% of that on education. “It’s a scandalous waste of scarce resources, especially when it is not what people want,” he said.

Under new regulations, Northern Ireland schools must offer pupils a choice of 24 GCSEs and 27 A-levels. In most cases this can only be done by pooling resources.

Sir George Bain, the former vice-chancellor of Queen’s University, is carrying out a review of schools for the government. In a review of the health service he recommended swingeing rationalisations and the closure of a number of hospitals. He is expected to take a similar approach to education.

Sunday Times

John Burns
April 02, 2006

THE American wife of Erskine Childers is likely to have spied on Sinn Fein for the British government, according to a book to be published this week.

Michael Foy, a historian, says he has discovered papers suggesting British intelligence had a spy “at the very top of Sinn Fein” during the war of independence. During 1920 and 1921 its agent reported regularly on Eamon De Valera, Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.

The spy, who was privy to sensitive information, was not identified in the papers, but Foy believes it is Molly Childers, whose son was president in the 1970s.

He bases the controversial claim in part on an analysis of the agent’s reports, which included American-sounding turns of phrase.

“That Molly Childers had the qualities to carry off such a dangerous role is not in doubt,” Foy writes in Michael Collins’s Intelligence War. “Throughout her life this remarkable woman displayed intelligence, courage, decisiveness and single-minded determination.”

The spy knew the terrible gamble she was taking. “I am risking my sanguinary neck every day, and all day,” she complained to her spymaster. “I wouldn’t get 10 minutes’ grace if they had the slightest suspicion.” Several British spies were executed by Collins’s men during the Anglo-Irish war.

The spy was close to a Sinn Fein leader she called Bob. Foy says this was either Erskine Childers himself, whose first name was Robert, or Robert Barton, a family friend.

Other clues are that she accumulated intelligence at informal gatherings where Sinn Fein leaders spoke unguardedly, while she had also participated in the British war effort between 1914 and 1918 and had fond memories of Britain.

“Only one prominent female Sinn Feiner fitted this profile,” says Foy, “and that was Erskine Childers’s wife, Molly.”

The daughter of a Boston doctor, Molly Osgood met Childers when his British army unit toured America. She had been crippled in a childhood skating accident and remained disabled throughout her life. They settled in London, and Childers was converted to the cause of Irish Home Rule.

Molly’s father had given her a 49ft ketch, the Asgard, which the couple used in 1914 to land arms at Howth for the Irish Volunteers. Childers served in the Royal Navy during the war, but in 1918 became a Sinn Fein politician. Foy says that Molly, who was awarded a CBE in recognition of her wartime work, was “distressed” by her husband’s decision to move to Ireland, and his Sinn Fein role put “considerable strain on their marriage”.

She agreed to move to Ireland with him in 1919, but Foy speculates that prior to that she volunteered “for British intelligence”.

The agent tells her handler that she took on the spying job “not for cash but to feel that I was really doing something to help”, adding: “I fell very strongly on this subject and I must let off steam or ‘bust’.”

Molly Childers certainly had access to senior Sinn Fein politicians, who regularly visited their home on Bushy Park Road in Terenure.

“As the hostess she provided hospitality and attentiveness while Sinn Fein leaders relaxed, socialised, gossiped and spoke more candidly than perhaps was wise,” said Foy.

While it is known from other sources that the British had high-level Irish spies at that time, other historians are likely to be sceptical that such an iconic figure was a British agent. “I would be willing to be convinced based on the evidence,” said Peter Hart, author of a recent biography of Collins. “There are two sides to it. She is often taken to be one of Childers’s great influences in being a staunch republican, which is blamed on her American background.

“But it sounds like Michael Foy has new information and has made an interesting find. If true, it was very well hidden.”

Another piece of Foy’s evidence is that Sir Hamar Greenwood, a British official who knew the identity of the spy, sent a copy of one of her reports to Lloyd George’s mistress, Frances Stevenson. Hinting that this was an Irish Mata Hari, he said the information was coming “straight from the cow”.

Childers took De Valera’s side in the civil war, but was captured by pro-Treaty forces at Glenalough House before he could use the small pistol Collins once gave him for personal protection. Sentenced to death for treason, he was executed.

Molly lived until 1964, and in 1973 their son Erskine Hamilton was elected president. He died in office a year later.

Guardian

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday April 2, 2006
The Observer

The father of one of the Omagh bomb victims last night backed demands that Real IRA terrorists be repatriated from English jails to prisons in Ireland.

Despite losing his son James in the 1998 Real IRA atrocity, Victor Barker this weekend called on the British government to transfer republican inmates from England to jails in either the Republic or Northern Ireland.

He described the relations and loved ones of Real IRA prisoners in England as ‘innocent parties’ who are punished by having to travel long distances for visits.

Barker made his call after supporters of the Real IRA staged a rally at Free Derry Corner yesterday afternoon demanding that several dissident republicans, including brothers Aiden and Robert Hulme, be transferred to jails near their families in Ireland. The Hulmes were convicted of a bomb attack on Ealing Broadway in London in 2001.

In response to the campaign by the Real IRA’s political allies, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, Barker said the British government was in danger of falling into a republican trap.

‘I fully agree that under no circumstances should prisoners be denied their human rights - they should be incarcerated for their crimes as near as possible to their families, provided that they serve their sentences in a properly supervised environment.

‘It is quite wrong that their families - who are innocent parties here - should have to travel huge distances to see their loved ones. If we treat others in an inhumane way, we give way to the terrorists and become more like them,’ he said.

Barker warned the British government that it is in danger of being manipulated via the prisoner-transfer issue. He said the same mistakes were being replicated by western nations in the global ‘war against terror’.

Victor Barker’s son James along with 28 other people and two unborn twins were killed in the bomb blast in the centre of Omagh eight years ago.

Barker is part of a group of Omagh relatives currently suing alleged Real IRA leaders through the civil courts in Northern Ireland.

Although the terror organisation quickly called a ceasefire following the Omagh massacre, the Real IRA later re-grouped and launched a fresh offensive against commercial and high-profile targets in London, including the BBC headquarters at White City, and Birmingham five years ago.

Its support organisation - the 32 County Sovereignty Committee - actively promotes the continuation of ‘armed struggle’ through its website.

Several individuals who lost loved ones in the Omagh bombing recently reported the site to police forces in Britain and Ireland. One regular contributor to the site even called for Michael Gallagher, a spokesman for the Omagh bomb victims, to be shot. However both New Scotland Yard and the Strathclyde Police refused to conduct any inquiries into the website.

The Real IRA was founded in late 1997 following a split inside the Provisional IRA. Leading dissidents, including its now jailed founder Michael McKevitt, set up the Real IRA in opposition to the peace strategy pursued by Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams.