SAOIRSE32

Sunday Independent

THE political career of Sir Cecil Walker, who has died aged 82, could serve as illustration in microcosm of the eclipse of the Ulster Unionist party by Ian Paisley’s DUP. He served as Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast North from 1983 to 2001, when he lost the seat to the Democratic Unionist Party candidate Nigel Dodds, after a disastrous TV interview in which he appeared not to understand even the simplest of questions put to him.

CECIL WALKER: United Ireland ‘no bad thing’ quote

Walker, who admitted he was “mortified” by his performance, later explained that his hearing aid had not been working properly. But a few days later he compounded his, and his party’s, problems by expressing the view that a united Ireland in 30 years time would be “no bad thing”. Though he claimed the remark was a “throwaway line that had been taken out of context”, it served only to bolster DUP claims that David Trimble’s UUP was completely out of touch with unionist opinion.

A transparently decent man who acquired a reputation during his 18 years as MP as one of the nicest people in the House of Commons (albeit with one of the lowest attendance records), Walker offered to stand down during the 2001 election campaign after his dismal television performance. But David Trimble persuaded him to fight on, and Walker claimed to have been “overwhelmed” by messages of support from well-wishers. None the less, his vote collapsed from 21,000 in 1997 to an almost humiliating total of just 4,000.

Alfred Cecil Walker was born in Belfast on December 17, 1924. After education at the city’s Methodist College, he joined James P Corry, the Belfast timber traders, where he was promoted to departmental manager in 1952.

Walker became involved in Ulster Unionist politics in the Seventies, being elected to Belfast City Council in 1977. He ran unsuccessfully for the Belfast North constituency in 1979, narrowly losing to John McQuade of the DUP. When he won the seat four years later, he resigned from his job in the timber trade.

In December 1985, Walker was one of the MPs to resign their seats in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement, though he held the seat at a by-election a month later. In 1998, however, he was one of only two UUP MPs to give their unequivocal backing to the Belfast Agreement, and he remained staunchly loyal to David Trimble.

Even for a moderate unionist, Walker was unusually broad-minded in his approach to sectarian issues. In 1988, when a series of tit-for-tat killings brought demands for a return of internment, he called for the policy to be imposed equally on loyalist as well as republican extremists. In 1996, he was one of only two UUP MPs who said they would have no difficulty supporting moves to amend the 1701 Act of Settlement which bars heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics. Such a move, he felt, would enhance the standing of the monarchy by showing that the “crown would be seen as representing everyone”.

In the late Nineties, he successfully fought off deselection attempts by hardline unionists who wanted to replace him as a candidate in the 1997 general election with the Protestant fundamentalist Nelson McCausland.

Though Walker rarely spoke in the House of Commons (a newspaper survey in 2000 found that he had not spoken once in the chamber since the 1997 election), he travelled widely to promote the interests of his constituency, which has high rates of unemployment.

Walker, who enjoyed sailing and sea angling, was knighted in 2002. He married, in 1953, Ann Verrant, who survives him with their two sons.

Guardian

Gaelic is the first official language of Ireland, with 25% of the population claiming to speak it. But can that true? To put it to the test, Manchán Magan set off round the country with one self-imposed handicap - to never utter a word of English

(*English translation: Where are all the Gaelic speakers?)

Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

There is something absurd and rather tragic about setting out on a journey around a country, knowing that if you speak the language of that country you will not be understood. It is even more absurd when the country is your native one and you are speaking its native language.

Irish (Gaelic) is the first official language of Ireland. We have been speaking it for 2,500 years, right up until the British decided it would be easier to govern us if we spoke their language (and then outlawed the use of Gaelic in schools) in the 19th century. We, in turn, soon realised that our only hope of advancement was through English, and we - or at least the half of the population that survived the Famine - jettisoned Irish in a matter of decades. Had it not been for the Celtic Revival that accompanied Ireland’s fi ght for independence in the early 20th century, the language would have probably died out by now. Today, a quarter of the population claim they speak it regularly. I have always suspected this figure and to test its accuracy I decided to travel around the country speaking only Irish to see how I would get on.

I chose Dublin as a starting point, confident in the knowledge that in a city of 1.2 million people I was bound to find at least a few Irish speakers. I went first to the Ordnance Survey Office to get a map of the country. (As a semi-state organisation it has a duty to provide certain services in Irish.) “Would you speak English maybe?” the sales assistant said to me. I replied in Irish. “Would you speak English?!” he repeated impatiently. I tried explaining once again what I was looking for. “Do you speak English?” he asked in a cold, threatening tone. “Sea,” I said, nodding meekly. “Well, can you speak English to me now?” I told him as simply as I could that I was trying to get by with Irish.

“I’m not talking to you any more,” he said. “Go away.”

I really needed a map for the journey ahead; it would be hard enough to get by without having to ask for directions constantly. I tried addressing the man one last time, using the simplest schoolroom Irish that he must have learned during the 10 years of compulsory Irish that every schoolchild undergoes, but he covered his ears, and I was left with no choice but to leave.

It was not a good start. Although it was still early I decided I needed a drink and headed to an elegant Victorian bar off Grafton Street. “I don’t speak Irish mate, sorry,” replied the barman when I ordered a pint. I tried simplifying the order - although how much simpler can you make, “I’d like a drink, please”? “I don’t speak Irish mate,” he said again. I have managed to get drinks in bars from Cameroon to Kazakhstan without any problem; if I had been speaking any other language I doubt it would have been an issue. I tried pointing at what I wanted - the taps were lined up along the bar - but I made the mistake of talking as I pointed.

“Did you not hear me, no?” the barman said menacingly.

I thought it safer to get one of the customers to translate for me, but they stared resolutely into their pints when I turned to them. Eventually, one young lad, taking pity on me, advised me to go to a cafe on Kildare Street.

“A cafe?” I said. “I’m looking for a drink.” “Just go there,” he said, and so, following his directions I found myself in a murky cellar beneath the offices of the Irish language development agency. They had no beer licence, but I got a cup of coffee and the owner told me in rich, mellifluous Irish how the place was normally teeming with Gaeilgeoirí (Irish speakers) but because it was a sunny day no one wanted to be skulking underground and so I was the only customer. The city’s Victorian plumbing was struggling to cope with the July heat and the place stank of sewage. I could not help thinking it was a sort of ghetto, a sanctuary for a beleaguered minority.

I knew the journey was going to prove difficult, just not this difficult. Language experts claim that the figure of fluent Irish speakers is closer to 3% than the aspirational 25% who tick the language box on the census, and most of these are concentrated on the western seaboard, in remote, inaccessible areas where one would not naturally find oneself. What I had not factored for was the animosity. Part of it, I felt, stemmed from guilt - we feel inadequate that we cannot speak our own language.

I decided to contact a talk radio show in Dublin to ask the listeners what they thought. A few phoned to say that they had no idea what I was talking about. “Is the language dead? I asked in Irish, over and over again. “Sorry?” most of them replied, or: “You what? Are you speaking the Irish?” Some of the callers wanted me and my bog language pulled off the airwaves, others talked of their shame at not being able to understand me and of how much they admired me for speaking out. This in turn made me feel guilty: the only reason I speak Irish is because my grandmother went to the trouble of learning it 90 years ago as a weapon in the struggle for an Irish republic. She then bribed me as a child with sweets and treats to go on speaking it when I realised that none of my friends did. In fact, I had almost discarded it, regarding it as a dead weight around my neck, until TG4, the Irish-language television station, was set up in 1996 and I started making travel documentaries for it.

After the radio show, I decided to visit the tourist office which, presumably, was used to dealing with different languages. The man at the counter looked at me quizzically when I inquired about a city tour. “Huh?” he said, his eyes widening. I repeated myself. “You don’t speak English, do you?” he asked coldly. I was beginning to hate this moment - the point at which the fear and frustration spread across their faces. They were just trying to get through the day, after all. They did not need to be confronted by an unbending foot soldier of the Irish Taliban.

I explained what I was trying to do. “Well, mate, I don’t actually speak Irish, so … ” he paused menacingly and I tried to smile encouragingly, “so, If you speak English, I’ll be able to understand what you’re saying.”

“Béarla only - English only,” said his supervisor, standing sternly behind him, repeating it a second time in case I was slow. I asked if there was any other language I could use and they pointed to a list of seven flags on the wall. To be honest, I could speak five of them but I had promised myself not to, not unless it was absolutely necessary. Eventually they located a charming young woman who spoke perfect Irish and was able to tell me everything I needed to know, but she was terribly nervous, believing her vocabulary to be inadequate. It was not; it was wonderful. It is an odd tendency that people often have an erroneous view of their ability to speak Irish, either over- or underestimating their ability - possibly a convoluted psychological legacy of the stigma attached from days when it was a sign of poverty and backwardness.

I might have been tempted to give up the journey entirely had it not been for something that happened during the radio phone-in. I was rapidly approaching a point of despair when some children came on the line. I found they spoke clear and fluent Irish in a new and modern urban dialect. They told me how they spoke the language all the time, as did all their friends. They loved it, and they were outraged that I could suggest it was dead. These were the children of the new Gaelscoileanna - the all-Irish schools that are springing up throughout the country in increasing numbers every year. While old schools are being closed down or struggling to find pupils, the Gaelscoileanna are having to turn people away. The phenomenon is as popular among the affluent middle classes as it is in working-class estates, largely due to the excellence of the education: Irish-speaking secondary schools often score higher in state exams than the most elite fee-paying schools. The students come away unburdened with the sense of inferiority that every previous generation had been instilled with since the days in which the British first labelled Irish as backward.

These children were reared on Irish versions of SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby-Doo on TG4 . They had invented Irish words for X-Box and hip-hop, for Jackass and blog. They were fluent in Irish text-speak and had moulded the ancient pronunciations and syntax in accordance with the latest styles of Buffy-speak and Londonstani slang. I realised it was they I should have turned to for help on the streets. The children filled me with renewed confidence as I left Dublin and took to the road, boosted further by my first experience in a petrol station where a Polish attendant had no problem deciphering the complicated mechanical query I had about my borrowed vintage Jaguar. For him, every day involved a struggle to understand a foreign language, and whether I was speaking Irish or English made little difference. In fact, everyone I met over the course of the next 1,000 miles driving around the country were more approachable and considerate than those first few Dubliners. Not that I am claiming they all had fluent Irish - far from it - but they were willing to engage with me, to string together the few stray words of school Irish that arose from the darkest recesses of their minds, or else to try to decipher my miming and mad gesticulation.

None the less, the journey was still a strain for most of the time. I got given the wrong directions, and served the wrong food, and given the wrong haircut, but I was rarely threatened or made to feel foolish again. Even on the staunchly loyalist Shankill Road in Belfast I was treated with civility, though warned that if I persisted in speaking the language I was liable to end up in hospital. In Galway, I went out busking on the streets, singing the filthiest, most debauched lyrics I could think of to see if anyone would understand. No one did - old women smiled, tapping their feet merrily, as I serenaded them with filth. In Killarney, I stood outside a bank promising passers-by huge sums of money if they helped me rob it, but again no one understood.

I know that by the end of the trip I should have reached some conclusion, but in fact I was more confused than ever. In parts of Northern Ireland, where Irish was effectively banned until the early 1990s, I found a tremendous resurgence taking place. The Good Friday agreement recognised its status and now the North has its own daily Irish-language newspaper, a daily BBC Radio programme and a brand new local radio station. In Galway, I met Irishspeaking immigrants who have formed a lobby group to promote the language. I met publishers who are churning out ever more Irish novels, biographies and poetry each year.

From a purely regulatory perspective, the language has recently won some important (though possibly Pyrrhic) victories - the Official Languages Act guarantees the right to communicate in Irish with all state and semi-state organisations (although whenever I tried sending Irish emails to government bodies during the journey they were ignored).

Possibly the language’s most significant moment of the past few centuries occurred on Monday this week when Irish became an official working language of the EU. It is a huge vote of confidence by our European neighbours, and it seems appropriate that Irish people should decide at this time once and for all what we want to do with our mother tongue. Should we stick a do-not-resuscitate sign around its neck and unplug the machine, or else get over our silly inferiority complex and start using the bloody thing?

As the Gaelscoileanna children might say: “Athbhreith agus cuir diot é!” (Just rebirth and get over it!).

· The TV series based on Manchán’s journey, No Béarla, begins on Sunday at 9.30pm on TG4.

Know your Gaelic: A brief guide

Yes Sea

No Ni hea

Hello Dia Duit

Goodbye Slán

English Béarla

Irish Gaeilge

He’s a total schmuck Is gamal ceart é!

What an old rust bucket! A leithéid do gliogramáin meirgeach!

Incense Bata túise

Lipstick Béaldath

Shut your mouth! Dún do chlab!

Crazed Guardian readers Lucht baoth léite an Ghuardian

Night of boozing Oíche diúgaireachta Drunk Ar meisce Moronic Uascánta

Can you recommend a hotel, darling? An féidir óstán a mholadh dom, a thaisce?

Can you direct me to a sympathetic priest? An féidir leat mé a dhíriú i dtreo sagart tuiscineach?

Sunday Business Post

By Colm Heatley
07 January 2007

When Sinn Fein called an ard comhairle in Christmas week calling on its members to support the PSNI, the ongoing policing debate, which has dogged the peace process, was supposed to have taken a quantum leap forward.

When Sinn Fein called an ard comhairle in Christmas week calling on its members to support the PSNI, the ongoing policing debate, which has dogged the peace process, was supposed to have taken a quantum leap forward.

For the first time in the history of the North, republicans were clearing a path to support the police.

Events last week, however, have thrown that progress into doubt, with the DUP insisting that even if a specially convened Sinn Fein ard fheis gave full approval for the PSNI later this month, it would not be enough to satisfy unionists.

Instead, the DUP is insisting upon an unspecified time frame to assess whether republicans are ‘‘genuine in their intentions’’.

Late on Friday evening Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator, said it was clear that the DUP were not on board for policing, and that they did not agree with Tony Blair’s assessment of the situation. Blair had earlier interpreted the DUP’s position as being positive.

McGuinness’ comments throw serious doubt on whether the special ard fheis will be called later this month. If the ard fheis is not called, agreement on policing would appear impossible, and the planned elections to be held in March would be scrapped.

Within the DUP there was discord, with leading sceptic Nigel Dodds insisting that the party would not agree to the May 2008 timeframe for policing powers to be transferred to a devolved assembly.

It appears that, in the meantime, hardline elements within the DUP are in the ascendancy. However, intensive negotiations between the British government, Sinn Fein and the DUP will take place over the next fortnight, in a bid to salvage the situation.

The transfer of policing powers is a key Sinn Fein demand and the party feels that it can go no further on the policing issue without a positive response from the DUP. The DUP’s response is made more difficult by an increasingly obvious split within its own ranks, between those who favour sharing power with Sinn Fein and the fundamentalist wing which opposes any compromise with republicans.

Last week the more moderate elements of the party, including Jeffrey Donaldson, issued statements which did not rule out support for the May 2008 transfer of policing powers. Donaldson said that ‘‘no words must discourage Sinn Fein’’.

At the same time the hardliners, such as Dodds and David Simpson, were making uncompromising statements explicitly ruling out any recognition of Sinn Fein’s changed stance on policing.

Simpson said the May 2008 deadline was ‘‘hopelessly unrealistic and no unionist will listen to imposed timeframes’’.

Sinn Fein’s movement on policing has widened the divide within the DUP and the self-inflicted wounds which the DUP experienced in November, when Ian Paisley agreed to enter a power-sharing government, have worsened still further.

Senior DUP sources admitted that they were surprised by the suddenness of Sinn Fein’s ard comhairle meeting and had expected republican support for policing to be ‘‘some way down the track’’.

For his part, Paisley, said that the DUP would only move when Sinn Fein had ‘‘fully delivered’’ on policing.

Although the statement was interpreted positively by the British government and Northern Ireland Office, it is less than clear.

DUP sources were suggesting last week that if a specially convened Sinn Fein ard fheis gave absolute support to the police, a DUP statement recognising that commitment could be made shortly afterwards.

But given the internal divisions within the DUP it is difficult to determine what weight such sentiments hold for the party as a whole.

This Tuesday, a meeting of Sinn Fein’s party officers will take place, at the top of the agenda will be the policing issue. The board of officers has the power to call a second ard comhairle to discuss policing, something Sinn Fein hasn’t ruled out.

However, in the light of McGuinness’ comments, the calling of an ard fheis appears unlikely.

‘‘This process is something that has been going on for five or six weeks and it has been intense with no let up, even through Christmas,” said one republican. ‘‘So the party is going to reflect on developments over the weekend and it will come to a measured response.”

Contacts with the British government are ongoing and are expected to continue in the run-up to Tuesday’s meeting.

However, even a last minute intervention by Tony Blair last Thursday failed to bring clarity to the current situation. Blair, who cut short his Christmas holiday in Florida, to try and ease the situation, said that unless agreement was reached between the DUP and Sinn Fein, the elections, planned for early March, would not go ahead.

Ironically, Blair’s comments were taken as an endorsement of Sinn Fein and the DUP position by Adams and Paisley. However, the fact that Blair cut short his Christmas break and made a direct intervention underlines the importance with which the British government views the latest stage of the peace process.

For once in the peace process, time is running out. The process has been punctuated by a seemingly never-ending series of missed deadlines and last minute fudges.

But with Sinn Fein willing to endorse the police, the British government is aware that failure to restore a power-sharing assembly by April, would be politically disastrous. In terms of concessions, there is little more that the Sinn Fein leadership can give to the process, and the future of the peace process now hinges on the DUP’s response.

Sinn Fein has already faced internal criticism for its imminent endorsement of the PSNI, and last week there were indications that Philip McGuigan, the party’s North Antrim MLA, will resign in protest.

Part of McGuigan’s constituency takes in Ahoghill, the small Co Antrim hamlet where the last remaining Catholic families were burned from their houses by loyalists in the summer of 2005.

Infamously the PSNI issued fire blankets to the Catholic residents while a loyalist mob banged drums outside the families’ homes. Policing is not only deeply emotive for republicans, but also a practical day-to-day issue, and it would be a major political folly for Sinn Fein to endorse fully the PSNI without guarantees that power-sharing and the transfer of policing powers will take place.

Sinn Fein’s mid-Ulster MLA, Geraldine Dougan, has already resigned from the party over the policing issue.

Ultimately though Sinn Fein’s mind is already made up on policing and Gerry Adams said last week that Blair’s statement, which called for unequivocal support for the police, accurately reflected his party’s position.

In the coming days there will be further intensive negotiations between the British government, Sinn Fein and the DUP. Much will rest on how successful the British government is in pushing the DUP across the line and how well the DUP can manage its own internal divisions.

It is unlikely that Adams could muster support within Sinn Fein to go any further with policing without a reciprocal DUP gesture. However, it is unlikely that the British government, and Blair in particular, will be prepared to let a gilt-edged opportunity for resolving the peace process pass by.

Guardian

Mr Blair’s desire to find a lasting solution before leaving office once seemed possible but is now as far away as ever, writes Henry McDonald

Sunday January 7, 2007
The Observer

Perhaps it was destiny that Tony Blair happened to be spending his post-Christmas break at the luxury Florida home of Robin Gibb when news filtered across the Atlantic that the Northern Ireland political process was entering yet another crisis. As the Prime Minister packed his bags at Chez Gibb in preparation for an unexpected earlier flight back to the UK, his co-host could have briefed him on the many reasons why the leaders of unionism and nationalism find it next to impossible to reach that final settlement of the Irish Question.

By a bizarre co-incidence, the wife of Robin Gibb, Dwina Murphy, gave an interview on Friday about life with the ex-Bee Gee and her memories of growing up in the north of Ireland. One of her earliest recollections was of B-Specials shooting at targets at the back of her local community hall in Fermanagh. Mrs Gibb remembered she and her brothers using the B-Men’s targets as makeshift snow boards for sliding down a nearby hill in winter.

Last week, on a local talk-show debating the policing issue, an elderly man from west Belfast offered a far less bucolic memory of life with the B-Specials on his doorstep. The Falls Road pensioner recalled B-Men drunk at weekends coming out of Hastings Street barracks and firing shots up Catholic streets, closing down Catholic pubs at random and roughing up anyone that objected to their boorish antics.

Both divergent memories serve to illuminate why policing remains mired in Northern Ireland’s violent and troubled past, stretching back even beyond 1969 to the very inception of the state in 1921.

Such folklore in the republican community has been exploited for decades as reason why Catholics and nationalists cannot support any police force in the north of Ireland. Insidiously, this was abused to justify the unjustifiable murder of RUC officers during the last and longest outbreak of northern Troubles. In the unionist memory, the collective psyche recalls police officers as their final line of defence against a violent 80-year campaign to force them into a unitary state against their wishes.

With apologies to James Joyce, history is still a nightmare from which the majority in Northern Ireland have not woken up.

Anthony Seldon, Blair’s biographer, inadvertently gave the game away before Christmas. In an article in the Guardian, Seldon concluded that, at the very least, the Prime Minister could exit the stage in 2007 in the knowledge that unlike Gladstone, Lloyd George, Harold Wilson or John Major (all Prime Ministers who put enormous efforts into solving the Irish Question), he had finally settled that most troublesome island. The master of British political biography may have to revise that assessment before going to print. Someone in Downing Street, too, should wake Tony Blair up to the nightmare of history.

The reason for the unprecedented convulsions in Sinn Fein, with up to six Assembly members either resigning or forced out for not toeing the party line, is historical. For three-and-a-half decades, Sinn Fein demonised the police as the armed wing of unionism.

Then in a twist of fate reminiscent of that final scene of Orwell’s Animal Farm, that same party’s leadership tells its members to embrace the very same concept of policing that republicans were told was unacceptable; one that upholds British law in a state still connected umbilically to the UK. In fact, Sinn Fein’s anti-police subculture has exploded in its face as its high command seeks (at any price, its critics say) power-sharing in Northern Ireland.

Conversely, the memory of so many deaths and injuries inflicted on police officers and their families acts as a brake on the ambitions of those inside the Democratic Unionist Party desperate to take over and run Northern Ireland, albeit with republican consent and co-operation.

The British government’s indecent haste towards the 26 March deadline for devolution’s restoration also reflects a desperation of its own. It’s to award Blair at least one trophy before he walks off on to the global after-dinner speaker circuit. Given his troubles elsewhere - Iraq, NHS reform, alleged corruption of the honours system etc - Northern Ireland may be his only glittering prize.

No one can deny that Tony Blair, alongside Bertie Ahern, has invested enormous amounts of energy and time into achieving a final, historic accord in Northern Ireland. The bitter irony is that the Prime Minister risks his legacy by imposing a final, final deadline on a process that will require even more time.

It now appears Tony Blair will reach the top of the mountain, but will never get to walk in the Promised Land. Both Sinn Fein and the DUP leaderships’ respective internal difficulties mean it’s highly unlikely a deal will be reached in time for the outgoing Prime Minister to call it his own.

Guardian

· An ex-IRA activist is ready to stand against
· Adams policy in a protest over policing pledges

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday January 7, 2007
The Observer

A former IRA gunrunner has been approached to stand against Sinn Fein in the next Assembly elections.

Gerry McGeough, who served three years in a United States prison for conspiracy to purchase and export SAM missiles, told The Observer he was ‘giving very serious consideration’ to stepping forward as a candidate in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone constituency.

The former IRA activist’s intervention is yet another headache for Gerry Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership. The party has been hit by a series of resignations over Adams’s move to get the republican movement to support the police in Northern Ireland.

McGeough said that, while he has not fully made up his mind, he has received messages of support and encouragement from both inside and outside the republican movement to stand.

‘I have never run away from my patriotic duty,’ he said. ‘I have never refused to do what I thought was right for my country. There is intense disillusionment both inside Sinn Fein and outside in the wider republican community. I am picking this up all over the north of Ireland and it’s all to do with the policing issue.’

McGeough claimed that traditional republican loyalty to the leadership throughout the peace process ‘had been the draught that sent republicans to sleep’.

He added: ‘Policing and the idea that republicans should embrace a British police force has finally woken many up from their stupor. There is some free thinking at last emerging.’

Under the deal hammered out at St Andrews last October, Sinn Fein can only enter a power-sharing executive with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists when the republican party swears an oath of allegiance to the PSNI and the judicial system.

‘The present battle over policing is a struggle for the heart and soul of republicanism,’ said McGeough.’

Sinn Fein has dismissed republican dissenters as being unrepresentative. McGeough, however, is unconcerned about pulling in few votes if, as seems likely, he stands for election.

‘This is a principled stand and it would be a greater shame if no one stood up finally and took on this leadership at the polls than the so-called shame of polling badly.’

The ex-IRA man, who was first arrested back in 1977 by SAS soldiers while on South Armagh Provo boss Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy’s farm, said the feedback from grassroots republicans was ‘very encouraging’.

‘I was in west Belfast on Wednesday last week speaking to people who were loyal for so long to the leadership. These people were the backbone of the movement through thick and thin. Even they are saying they don’t trust the leadership any more, which in republican terms is like a Catholic saying that they don’t believe in God.’

Asked why he took so long to speak out against the present Sinn Fein strategy, McGeough said: ‘Being honest I had my epiphany while in the United States in prison. I was just reticent then to talk about my concerns, out of blind loyalty to the leadership. I suppose I believed as late as 2001 there was hope, a forlorn hope in the end, that I and others like me could influence things and change the movement’s direction.’

Despite being outside Sinn Fein, he is senior figure in northern republicanism. A member of the IRA’s feared East Tyrone Brigade, McGeough was a personal friend of Jim Lynagh, the IRA leader shot dead, along with seven other Provisionals, in the SAS Loughgall ambush twenty years ago.