SAOIRSE32

Sunday Independent

JIM CUSACK
14 January 2007

IRA criminals in south Armagh knew that the North’s Assets Recovery Agency was to be abolished, days before it was officially announced, the Sunday Independent can reveal.

The agency had been set up - after the success of CAB in the south - to trace the millions laundered by crime gangs and paramilitaries. It has specifically tageted cross-border smuggling and illegal diesel washing by IRA members.

This has led to the belief that the surprise move was part of a deal between the British government and Sinn Fein, to secure Sinn Fein/IRA support for policing in the North. When the agency is abolished, it will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to investigate the financial affairs of senior IRA figures, like Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy.

The support of Murphy, who was under active investigation, and of other terrorists-turned-criminals, is seen as essential in getting Sinn Fein/IRA figures in south Armagh to sign up to policing.

It is now likely that Murphy will be saved from further investigation.

The official announcement of the abolition of the agency came a day after Prime Minister Blair issued a statement on the role of the intelligence service, MI5, in the North. Sinn Fein hailed the statement as a “major victory”.

The announcement that the Assets Recovery Agency was to be “merged” with the Serious Organised Crime Agency in London was a surprise to other political parties.

However, according to well placed sources in south Armagh, news of the imminent closure, announced on Thursday, spread throughout the area last weekend.

Yesterday, the Fine Gael Senator Brian Hayes called on the Government to say if the closure was part of a “desperate deal” to get Sinn Fein to recognise the PSNI and enter government with the DUP.

He said: “I cannot understand why both governments seem to be playing such a high-wire strategy with the Provisionals. For the British government in particular, this news points to wanting to do a deal at any cost. It sends out wrong signals and is a sign of weakness.

“Any dilution of the Assets Recovery Agency or any merger with a UK agency would not only be damaging to the fight against organised crime in Northern Ireland, it would be damaging to the fight against organised crime on the island of Ireland. We need closer co-operation between the ARA and CAB. Both governments are trying to do this desperate deal which will compromise our security and damage efforts to take on organised crime.”

The ARA had been hugely successful. It hit border smugglers, including leading republicans, and loyalist drug dealers, seizing houses, pubs, businesses and other assets linked to crime.

Last autumn, the agency seized over €2m worth of houses in Manchester, which it said were bought from the proceeds of fuel smuggling.

The ARA in the North has accounted for almost half the entire proceeds seized in the UK, since it was set up two years ago.

Its chief Alan McQuillan is hated by the Sinn Fein/IRA. A former senior officer in the RUC’s Special Branch, he was previously involved in many high-profile cases against the IRA.

In an extraordinary week, Sinn Fein indicated it was set to recognise the PSNI - and apparently accept MI5 holding the role of intelligence gathering in the North - policies which are to be ratified at a special ard fheis at the end of this month.

This, both governments hope, will be a prelude to getting the DUP to share power with their former enemies. The deal was announced on the front page of Sinn Fein’s weekly paper, An Phoblacht, under the headline: Major victor on issue of MI5.

Officially, the British government position on the Assets Recovery Agency is that it is not being shut but merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

The North’s other political parties were informed of the “merger” in a letter from Northern Secretary Peter Hain on Thursday. He said the ARA’s 50 staff in Belfast will transfer to SOCA, which is based in London, but that this would not cause a “reduction of ARA’s current levels of activity”.

The move was criticised by the North’s largest business organisation, the Federation of Small Businesses, which pointed out that small businesses in the North face the highest extortion and racketeering levels in the UK, most of it coming from paramilitaries. The DUP described it as a “retrograde step”.

BN.ie

13/01/2007 - 09:11:21

A memorial plaque in honour of one of the forgotten women of 1916 will be unveiled today in Dublin’s south inner city.

Elizabeth O’Farrell, a member of Cumman na mBan who played a full and active role in the Rising of 1916, will be remembered in a special ceremony.

Nurse Mrs O’Farrell accompanied Padraig Pearse when the official surrender was handed over to the British forces at Moore Lane.

Her role during the historic event will be etched in the memory of all who visit the tribute bestowed by Dublin City Council.

The plaque, in City Quay Park, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2, will be unveiled at 11am by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr Vincent Jackson.

BBC

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams is recommending that his party’s special conference on whether to back policing should take place on 28 January.

Senior party officials are meeting in Dublin to discuss the issue.

In recent weeks, the conference has been in doubt as Sinn Fein accused the DUP of not responding positively to calls for its ard fheis on policing.

The DUP denies Sinn Fein claims it has reneged on a deal on devolving policing and justice powers by May 2008.

Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Premier Bertie Ahern have identified Sinn Fein support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) as being crucial to persuading the DUP to share power in a devolved government with Sinn Fein by 26 March.

Mr Adams needs two-thirds of the 46 voting members to agree to hold the conference at the end of the month.

Last month, Sinn Fein backed calls for the ard fheis to be held, on the basis of a positive response from the British and Irish governments and DUP leader Ian Paisley.

When the words of approval they expected from the DUP leader did not materialise, republicans began to cast doubt on whether the special Sinn Fein conference on policing would take place.

Mr Paisley said he had made no commitment which went beyond recent public statements.

However, as he prepared for Saturday’s meeting, Mr Adams accused the DUP leader of reneging on a deal which would have seen him use an agreed form of words in his New Year statement responding to Sinn Fein’s national executive decision.

“We still need civic policing, we still need to have an accountable police service and we still need to get the power-sharing institutions in place.”
Gerry Adams
Sinn Fein leader

The DUP denied that it had made any commitment to Mr Blair and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, particularly on the issue of the transfer of policing and justice powers by May 2008.

‘Move ahead’

“I am not in the business of saying one thing in private and another in public,” Mr Paisley said.

Mr Adams said he would be urging his national executive to judge everything in the round.

“In my presentation I will put to people that we still need civic policing, we still need to have an accountable police service and we still need to get the power-sharing institutions in place,” the West Belfast MP said.

“We cannot allow others to dictate the pace of change.”

Meanwhile, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has accused some DUP politicians of showing “begrudgery” over recent developments in the peace process.

Mr Hain said he hoped the Sinn Fein Ard Comhairle meeting on Saturday would schedule a special party conference on policing.

In an interview for Radio Ulster’s Inside Politics programme, Mr Hain insisted that the time had come for both Sinn Fein and the DUP to move forward.

“I think this is make your mind up time and I hope we can get clarity from Sinn Fein on policing,” he said.

“I hope that the DUP will be a little more encouraging of that as well, rather than the begrudging attitude you get from too many DUP politicians, most of them backbenchers, which doesn’t create the kind of climate (where) everybody’s trying to move forward together rather than to snipe at each other.”

Sunday Business Post

By Tom McGurk
14 January 2007

Whatever the developments in the North in the next couple of weeks, the long-term prospects for devolved power-sharing look grim. While Sinn Fein, particularly at leadership level, has been desperate to deliver something after the long journey away from paramilitarism, the crisis of political definition within the DUP remains unresolved.

To date the DUP has simply being doing just enough to keep the peace process alive and to avoid being blamed for its demise, but who can remember when they have shown any genuine enthusiasm for the road ahead. Cynics might ask why, if over a generation ago they wrecked the prospects for sharing power with the SDLP, they should now be in the business of sharing power with a newly politicised IRA?

Significantly, since its inception, the DUP has been a political movement determined to maintain the old majoritarian status quo, the principal casualty of the peace process.

Much has been dismantled - the old Stormont, then political majoritarianism and the entire security apparatus built over the years by unionism. Direct rule has ended the unionist hegemony forever and in future unionists can exercise political power only in a power-sharing arrangement.

Ironically, the measure of the DUP’s very failure to sustain the old political status quo has been that the DUP’s vote has simply emasculated that of the UUP.

Astonishingly, more and more unionists have voted for the DUP, despite the party’s abject failure to halt the political tide.

Paisley has simply failed to deliver on anything he has promised down the years.

Ian Paisley, a political King Canute, has had to go on pretending his massive unionist vote is somehow a vindication of his long-held position.

The political reality is starkly different.

Paisley’s choices are now either to accept the half-a-loaf available or plunge another unionist generation into a future without the exercise of political power in their own place.

In many ways, Paisley from a unionist political point of view, must be seen as a cock crowing on the dung-heap of his own failure.

Of course, the North can continue in direct-rule mode if the March experiment comes to nothing, but let there be no disguising the cost. The North is a failed political entity and the knock-on effects have damaged everything else. This political instability has created a symbiotic economic crisis; entrepreneurial instincts are stymied by the uncertainty, and the Northern economy continues as a basket-case.

Meanwhile, south of the border, one of the most successful economies in Europe is poised to spread its dynamism northward, but will this ever happen if everything turns to political failure in March?

So as the DUP weighs up its various options, its confusion is exemplified by the tactic of simply using the peace process as a means of putting Sinn Fein through more and more political hoops, while it procrastinates about the ‘big decision’.

The big decision is about accepting the new situation in the North, a non-sectarian society based on equality. That is the formula for the way ahead. Every party to the process has accepted it except the DUP.

What complicates the matter even further is the political succession stakes.

The tragedy is that the peace process and the DUP’s participation in it has become a casualty of that gathering crisis. The word on the street is that Paisley hopes his son Ian will succeed him, but there are other names in the pot, not least Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds.

Since its inception, and until very recently, the DUP was a one-party, one-voice institution. The annual party conferences were more like religious gatherings with no dissent - and with everything else dwarfed by Paisley’s closing address.

All of the party’s attempts at modernisation - recently bringing in public relations executives, spin-doctors and media image practitioners - have not disguised the fundamental unchanged and unchanging nature of the party. The DUP is essentially a sectarian-based, reactionary political force, exercising its political power by its sole ability to stymie political agreement. In this, the DUP is actually a consequence of the institutionalisation of sectarian politics by the partition settlement.

Even if we get elections in March and the creation of a power-sharing devolved administration, there is a considerable risk that when the Paisley succession race begins for real, it will wreck any arrangement in which the DUP is involved.

Essentially, the party’s only politics are about degrees of resistance to nationalist equality. In a post-Paisley scenario it is difficult to believe that the succession stakes will not unleash the sectarian instincts that are the party’s continuing political subtext.

There is no credible evidence that, even if the DUP finds itself in a devolved government with Sinn Fein, its members will not continue to follow their fundamental instinct and try to use devolution against the very purpose for which it was designed.

The Good Friday Agreement was about designing a political architecture that would encourage civic and cultural equality, cross border institutions and anti-sectarianism.

Sadly those are the very things the DUP, since its inception, has been dedicated to opposing.

Sinn Fein should, of course, get on with it and support the new civic police. But even if that were to bring us to an assembly in March, it is difficult to see how such an arrangement can become workable. Paisley has gone on for years pretending that he is the panacea for all of unionism’s wrongs; that if he was trusted he could deliver and ‘save Ulster’.

Even now it seems unimaginable that he can continue to dress up the creation of a devolved government with the republican movement as anything other than what it is - the very antithesis of all he has stood for.

And how long will it be before the next wave of reactionary unionism fastens onto that fact when the succession stakes begin?