The march is an annual event
About 800 people have taken part in the annual James Connolly march through the centre of Edinburgh.
The event ended with a rally in the capital’s King Stables Road on Saturday afternoon.
The procession commemorates the life of the socialist and Irish Republican, who was born in Edinburgh in 1868, the son of Irish parents.
Connolly was court-martialled and then executed for his part in the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916.
The distraught parents of young asthma victim Jim McMillan have spoken of how they want to raise awareness of the medical condition after it tragically claimed his life at the tender age of 16.
The New Lodge teenager was extremely popular in the area and at his funeral on Tuesday hundreds of young people turned out to pay their respects at a packed St Patrick’s Church.
Jim’s mother Michelle McMillan said she wanted other parents to know the dangers surrounding asthma.
“I just want other parents out there to know that it can kill.
“We knew he had a bit of bother breathing, like when he played football. But never did we think in a million years, it would take his life,” she said.
Jim’s early death has shocked the local community, but it has also shocked the health profession following his death and that of three other young people who died the same way.
West Belfast teenager Bronagh Kelly died last Thursday (May 25) after an asthma attack as did 14-year-old County Down youngster Victoria Warneck who died from an asthma attack on May 22.
This follows hard on the heels from the tragic death of 30-year-old Scott Wasson who died from an asthma attack as he and his new bride waited at the airport to fly home from their honeymoon in Barbados.
An Irish asthma expert has called for health professionals to increase awareness of the potentially lethal respiratory condition.
Patrick McKeown, founder of Asthma Care Ireland said more needed to be done to highlight the severity of the condition.
“I would agree to a large extent that more needs to be done to highlight asthma. It’s very rarely the condition flares up with no warning signs and leads to a chronic attack,” he said.
Respiratory nurse consultant at the Mater Hospital Anne Marie McGurk said the recent tragic events served as a reminder that asthma can be a serious and potentially life threatening condition.
“It raises the awareness of how important it is to comply with prescribed medications and be aware of signs of deteriorating and worsening asthma and know how and where to seek the appropriate medical intervention,” she said.
The youngster’s parents Michelle and PJ said they were told by the pathologist that asthma was responsible for their son’s early death.
PJ McMillan said he never thought his son’s health was so fragile.
“He was a strong boy, we thought how could he not pull through an asthma attack? At that age you’re fit and young. We’re completely baffled. We don’t understand how it happened,” he said.
Jim was a popular young man in the area and he was known for his love of football.
His school friends from St Patrick’s College organised a touching farewell to him as part of his funeral Mass.
The teenager was named after his mother’s brother Jim Meighan who was murdered in cold blood by the UVF in 1987. He was 22-years-old.
Jim’s heartbroken mum said friends and family could not help but remember her brother’s death nearly 20 years later.
“It’s like history repeating itself. My mother had three boys and a girl. Jim, my brother was the second eldest. My son Jim was the second eldest of the family as well. It’s just heartbreaking.”
Asthma is the most widespread long-term condition among children affecting 35,000 children in the North. There are on average three children in every classroom who have asthma. Figures show every year 44 people die from the condition in the North and there are over 2,445 people admitted to hospital every year suffering from its symptoms.
Journalist:: Staff Journalist
Nationalist politicians have called for loyalist flags to be removed from outside a Catholic school in North Belfast.
Last Friday a number of UVF flags were put on lampposts outside Our Lady of Mercy secondary school on the Bilston Road in the heart of the loyalist Ballysillan area.
This comes a year after the Housing Executive and PSNI launched an initiative to ensure that the flags issue was addressed. Called the Flags Protocol, it said it wanted to see interfaces and schools kept clear of bunting. Calling on those with influence to do what they could to get the flags removed, the SDLP’s Alban Maginness said the issue had to be resolved.
“I would call on the organisation responsible to take down flags that are really a provocation to people. These flags should be removed and everybody should use their good offices in order to resolve the matter and resolve it quickly.”
Echoing the call was Sinn Féin’s Danny Lavery who said he would be taking steps to ensure they are removed.
“I am calling for these flags to be taken down because schools are for education and people should be free to learn in an environment that is free from politics.
“I will work towards getting them removed as the pupils and staff of the school should not have to put up with such displays.”
A spokesman for the UUP said the party would back any initiative that stopped paramilitary flags from being flown.
“It is wrong that communities across Northern Ireland should have to endure the intimidation and triumphalist displays associated with the flags erected by paramilitary organisations. A number of local initiatives have provided alternative and much more constructive, non-sectarian ways of allowing communities to celebrate their cultural heritage. The UUP will continue to support such initiatives, and will use our every influence to ensure that such paramilitary displays become a thing of the past.”
Journalist:: Staff Journalist
In the next few weeks the Historical Enquiries Team will begin its investigation into the McGurk’s Bar bombing which claimed the lives of 15 people over 35 years ago.
Relatives of the families have been contacted by the team to advise them the case will be reopened by the police team based in Lisburn.
Pat Irvine who was a teenager when her mother Kathleen was killed in the attack on North Queen Street said she was confident that the information would prove the innocence of the victims.
“The information we have passed onto the HET unequivocably proves the innocence of the 15 people,” Pat Irvine said.
“The evidence is there, in fact the evidence was always there to support this. We are quietly confident that the case which is being looked into by the HET will bring to the families and the public, the truth and nothing but the truth as promised.”
Evidence supplied to the HET team from the families includes a statement from the State Pathologist’s Department to the RUC in March 1972 stating ‘unfortunately we are not able to help…. there were no injuries identifiable as specifically due to the bomb’.
The families are convinced this piece of evidence, and others puts holes in the original claims that those killed were involved in the planting of the bomb.
The families widely believe that collusion between loyalists and the security forces created the conditions and opportunity for the bombers to plant their deadly device.
It is widely believed that loyalists who carried out the McGurk’s bombing orchestrated by sections of the security forces were in fact targeting the nearby Gem bar in an attempt to create a feud between republicans.
However because of bystanders outside the Gem the bombers attacked McGurk’s and slaughtered 15 people including two children.
The case is also being investigating by the Police Ombudsman which was revealed in the North Belfast News last September.
The December 1971 atrocity was the largest loss of life before the Omagh bomb and the families hope the Ombudsman can uncover why no investigation took place into the outrage.
Relatives say it was one of the earliest cases of security force collusion in the conflict.
Only one man who confessed seven years later to his part in the atrocity has ever served a sentence for the mass murder.
Journalist:: Áine McEntee
**Via Newshound
**See also Police hunt Shergar’s kidnapper’s
We should recall the marvel of 1981 for his greatness, not his unfortunate and mysterious disappearance, writes Sean Magee
Saturday June 3, 2006
Twenty-five years ago today the Aga Khan’s white-faced colt Shergar scampered up the Epsom straight to win the Derby by 10 lengths, the longest winning margin in the race’s 226-year history. Less than two years later he was snatched by masked gunmen from the Ballymany Stud, near Newbridge in County Kildare, and disappeared off the face of the earth, spawning a mini-industry of books, documentaries, a ludicrous feature film and limitless employment for sleuths, hoaxers, clairvoyants and water-diviners.
Into the void left by an almost complete lack of evidence as to his fate poured a range of theories, most fingering the IRA, some involving Colonel Gaddafi, the New Orleans mafia or a vengeful bloodstock dealer wronged by the Aga Khan. Not to mention the story that Shergar had swum to a boat lurking off the Waterford coast, from where he was taken to Saudi Arabia to cover mares for a mega-rich potentate.
The generally accepted account is that Shergar was abducted by an IRA unit who killed him a few days later when negotiations for a £2m ransom had gone nowhere and the horse was becoming uncontrollable. His remains have never been found, though in 1991 the Sun located him in a field in the Channel Islands, and the Sunday Sport reported a definite sighting of Shergar being ridden by Lord Lucan.
Shergar’s disappearance brought him a place in the public consciousness rare for any racehorse but the anniversary of his astonishing Derby victory is the moment to celebrate him for what he really was: one of the all-time greats.
Bred by his owner in County Kildare, close to the stud from which he was snatched, Shergar went into training with Michael Stoute at Newmarket. His debut race in 1981, was the Guardian Classic Trial at Sandown Park, the first ever sponsored by this paper at the behest of the Guardian and Observer racing correspondent Richard Baerlein, who after seeing the colt sluice home by 10 lengths famously advised punters that “at 8-1 Shergar for the Derby, now is the time to bet like men”.
Baerlein’s followers were handsomely rewarded. After winning the Chester Vase by 12 lengths, Shergar started odds-on favourite at Epsom, ridden by the 19-year-old Walter Swinburn, by then Stoute’s stable jockey. Recalling the “dream ride” of his first Derby, Swinburn tells how early in the race Shergar “found his own pace and lobbed along as the leaders went off at a million miles an hour, with me just putting my hands down on his withers and letting him travel at his own speed”.
Early in the straight Shergar pulled his way to the front and went further and further clear, so far that John Matthias on the runner-up Glint Of Gold thought he had won: “I told myself I’d achieved my life’s ambition. Only then did I discover there was another horse on the horizon.”
Swinburn was suspended for Shergar’s next race in the Irish Derby, the ride reverting to Piggott, who produced a masterclass in how to win a Classic without moving a muscle. “He used to take quite a good hold” is Piggott’s matter-of-fact recollection, jockey-speak for saying the rider’s best tactic was to let the horse find his rhythm and go at his own pace.
The way Piggott and Shergar sauntered past their flat-to-the-boards opponents, as if two films were being played at different speeds, propelled the commentator Peter O’Sullevan into raptures - “He’s only in an exercise canter!” - and Shergar into the equine stratosphere.
Before he raced again Shergar was syndicated for breeding, £250,000 buying one-fortieth of his reproductive timesheet to produce a valuation of £10m, then a record for a stallion standing in Europe.
The King George at Ascot followed, with the older generation trounced before the wheels came off in the St Leger at Doncaster. Swinburn was sending out distress signals with two furlongs to go, and Shergar could finish only fourth behind Cut Above, a horse he had beaten comprehensively in the Irish Derby. Piggott’s view is that “he must have been over the top by then” but, whatever the explanation, Shergar’s racing career was over.
A new one beckoned and in October 1981 the rookie stallion arrived in Newbridge. To the oompah of the town band and the cheers of schoolchildren waving flags in the Aga Khan’s green and red racing colours, he was paraded up the main street. The Aga Khan, whose decision to stand Shergar in Ireland defied those who had gloomily expected his removal to the United States, was there to greet his hero.
Shergar produced 35 foals from his single season at stud, the best turning out to be the 1986 Irish St Leger winner Authaal, but only one had been born by February 8, 1983. That evening, one week before Shergar was due to resume covering duties, a horse trailer rumbled up the drive and past the paddocks towards the stud buildings and he was transmuted from celebrity racehorse to cause célèbre.
This Derby Day forget Lord Lucan, Colonel Gaddafi and visions of the IRA shooting a panicking racehorse and instead remember Shergar coasting up to the Epsom winning post with that enormous tongue lolling out as if in defiance of the grisly fate that awaited him. Wherever he may lie, his epitaph should be Swinburn’s simple declaration: “That horse could gallop.”
By Ashleigh Wallace
awallace@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
03 June 2006
SIX men caught wearing loyalist paramilitary uniforms in a disused shop on the Monkstown estate were yesterday jailed after admitting professing to belong to the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force.
The six men and two others were arrested after police using CS gas stormed the empty shop on January 18, 2003. All eight told police they were in the premises for a photo shoot which Mr Justice Girvan yesterday said was to show the UVF was “still in business” with “willing volunteers”.
Once inside the disused shop, police officers discovered an array of weapons on show including an Uzi sub-machine gun, a replica sub-machine gun and a Chinese assault rifle. Also on display was UVF paraphernalia.
A total of eight men appeared in the dock of Belfast Crown Court, charged in connection with the raid on the premises.
Six Larne men admitted professing to belong to the UVF and each were handed a prison sentence.
Seven of the eight men in the dock also admitted possession of articles for a purpose connected to terrorism and of possessing intimidation firearms with intent to cause fear of violence, while an eighth man admitted aiding and abetting the two possession charges.
Joseph Crawford (34) from Fairway in Larne was handed a two and a half years concurrent sentence on each of the three charges, and also agreed to a 12 month period of post-custodial supervision.
Larne men Richard Morrow (27) from Lynn Road, 24-year old Dale Magill of Inverview Park and Philip Clarke (24) from Cairngorm Drive were also jailed for two and a half years and agreed to 12 months post-custodial supervision.
John Rolston (32) from Alexander Crescent in Armagh was ordered to serve two years and three months in jail on the three charges while Ian Davidson (27) from Waterfall Road in Larne was handed a two years and two months sentence.
Colin Greer (35) from Ards Park in Monkstown - the keyholder of the disused store - was handed a 12 month concurrent sentence for the two possession charges.
And 25-year-old Robert Anderson, who drove the men from Larne to Monkstown and who admitted aiding and abetting the two possession charges, was handed an 11 month jail term.
(Jim Gibney, Irish News)
Long Kesh has been at the centre of the Irish political conflict for most of its 30 years as a prison. Opened in late 1971 and closed in 2000, 25,000 republican and loyalists were held there, tens of thousands of relatives visited them, 15,000 prison warders and thousands of British soldiers detained them.
The International Red Cross said few prisons in the world had links to the community like Long Kesh.
The prison became a microcosm of the conflict beyond its two-mile perimeter wall.
Treatment of the prisoners inside the prison reflected government policy, whether unionist or British.
In late 1971 hundreds of republicans were interned there as the last unionist government tried but failed to suppress the nationalist uprising and the IRA’s armed struggle.
Thirteen people protesting against internees being held at Long Kesh were shot dead on Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972.
This atrocity ended unionist domination for ever.
Long Kesh was a major embarrassment to the British government. It was a notorious prison. Its lasting image is that of a concentration camp.
The British government tried to alter this image by changing its name to the Maze and using ‘detainee’ instead of ‘internee’ to describe those it held captive.
As the intensity of the conflict grew the numbers of prisoners dramatically increased to a point in 1974 where more than 1,000 internees and sentenced republican and loyalist prisoners were held there.
The prison was flattened in October 1974 when republican prisoners burnt it in protest at harassment by warders. As part of a ceasefire deal with the IRA in late ‘74/early ‘75 the British government released the internees and introduced 50 per cent remission for sentenced prisoners.
Behind these peace moves the British government was duplicitously planning its criminalisation policy. This policy had a major impact on Long Kesh, those who were held there in the newly built H-Blocks and the struggle for freedom.
The British government hoped the H-Blocks would end the prison’s ‘concentration’ camp image and criminalisation would isolate, weaken and defeat the IRA. They could not have been more wrong.
These moves sparked off the protest by hundreds of republican prisoners for political status at Long Kesh and Armagh Women’s prison which resulted in 10 young men dying agonisingly on hunger strike 25 years ago this year, while on the streets 60 people died.
The prison was never too far away from national and international media attention.
Tens of thousands took to the streets in support of the prisoners. The prison protest gave the freedom struggle a much-needed boost.
I did time in the prison on three occasions. I met some of the finest people you could meet anywhere.
They had great energy, were industrious and inventive.
Many inmates spent their time trying to escape, digging tunnels. Some pulled off spectacular escapes. Hugh Coney from Coalisand was shot dead trying. Others educated themselves politically and militarily to return to the freedom struggle on release. Many did and subsequently paid with their lives.
Teenagers lost their youth there. Individuals served 10, 15 and more years. Some never came home alive, dying of natural causes or medical neglect. Almost 30 prison warders were killed by republicans and loyalists.
Most of the leadership of Sinn Féin and loyalist organisations served time there.
Gerry Adams was released from Long Kesh in 1972 to take part in negotiations with the British government.
Sinn Féin’s electoral strategy, which helped build the party into what it is today, came out of Long Kesh and the decision to stand hunger strikers, two of whom were elected, Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty.
Long Kesh is a place apart. Inside and outside its walls it generated great pain, loss and heroism.
It shaped those it held and they shaped the war and peace as we know it today.
On Tuesday the British government unveiled a new and bold vision for the future use of the Long Kesh site.
Gone as a place of conflict.
It will now be a place of pilgrimage for those who want to experience its history or to cheer on their Gaelic, soccer or rugby teams in the proposed new stadium.
A fitting memorial for an island at peace.
June 2, 2006
________________
This article appeared first in the June 1, 2006 edition of the Irish News.
Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here
