SAOIRSE32

By Ed Carty
Belfast Telegraph
December 27, 2007

*Official Joe Dolan website

Legendary showband singer Joe Dolan died yesterday after falling ill on Christmas Day.

The 68-year-old sold millions of records and had a string of hits around the world in a career which spanned four decades.

The singer’s management team said he had been with his family in Dublin yesterday when he was rushed to the Mater Private Hospital where he died just after 3pm.

Dolan had suffered an illness in the autumn and was forced to cancel tours on the advice of doctors due to exhaustion.

At one gig in November, Dolan was forced to stop after four songs. A string of other sell-out shows in Ireland had to be cancelled as a result.

Dolan was born in Mullingar, Co Westmeath. His first job was with the local newspaper, the Westmeath Examiner, but after completing his apprenticeship he let his passion for music take over.

A string of hits followed in the showband era of the 1960s and ’70s as he entertained fans across Europe and as far afield as Argentina and Brazil.

Dolan was also earned fame for being the first western pop singer to play in Moscow at the height of the Cold War in 1978. He toured Russia extensively as the Iron Curtain was coming down.

His biggest hit, Make Me An Island, went as high as number three in the UK chart in 1969, and reached number one in 14 other countries.

The song Such A Good Looking Woman remained a regular feature on Irish radio, plugging his gigs until his recent illness.

In a glowing tribute, Dolan’s long-serving manager Seamus Casey described him as one of Ireland’s greatest musical ambassadors.

“A most charitable and unassuming man, Joe often gave of his time and undoubted talent to support those less fortunate than himself,” a statement issued on behalf of the Dolan family and Mr Casey said.

The singer took ill on Christmas night and after being rushed to hospital he suffered a brain haemorrhage and slipped into a coma. He died with his family by his bedside.

One of a family of seven, Dolan is survived by his brothers, Ben who played in his band The Drifters, Paddy and Vincent and sisters Dympna and Imelda. His brother James is dead.

The Dolan family and Mr Casey added they have been overwhelmed with expressions of sympathy and support and requested privacy.

Dolan kicked off his career in the early 1960s with his brother Ben, in Joe and the Drifters, and the pair quickly became household names across Ireland. His lifelong manager was also at his side from the beginning.

Dolan followed up his early success at home with the massive European hit, Lady Blue, which sold over 1m copies in France alone.

It was the launch pad for a 40-year career which brought Dolan’s popular style to every continent, with gold discs in a number of countries.

His fan base stretched the length of Europe to Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Argentina.

In the 1990s, Dolan’s career underwent a renaissance with the release of a covers album of contemporary hits bringing his voice to a new audience.

The management team added that he was in the middle of one of his most successful tours when he took ill.

By BECKY SHEAVES
Daily Mail
26th December 2007

At the beginning of last week, Michael Gallagher visited his son Aidan’s grave.

Before he set off, he checked under his car as he does every day, for a bomb. Just in case.

He went to the churchyard where Aidan is buried and placed a small Christmas tree and model of Santa in front of the headstone.

Then it was time for a few quiet words to his boy who was killed at the age of 21, just as he was becoming a man, someone Michael could rely on.

To lose a child is surely the hardest thing for any parent to bear.

But for Michael, 58, and his wife Patsy, the intense grief has been mingled with a sense of outrage and injustice ever since their son died. For he was murdered in the notorious Omagh bomb attack nine and a half years ago.

“He’s still very much here with us and part of our family,” says Michael.

“It’s important for me to visit his grave often. He was full of life and laughter, our middle child and such a joker, always up to something. I remember him with love as well as sorrow.”

Sadly, last week saw Michael’s last hope of criminal justice for Aidan expire.

Sean Hoey, 38 - the only man accused in a British court of setting the bomb - was released on Thursday due to what the judge called “flawed” DNA evidence and a “slapdash” police investigation.

It’s been a huge blow for the man who lost his only son - a 6ft 2in, 14-stone “gentle giant” - in the bombing.

Back then, Aidan lived at home and worked alongside Michael in the family car repair business.

Of course, they will never forget him. Indeed, Michael and Patsy, also 58, talk about him often, with love and affection.

Although they’ve moved house, they still have a bedroom for him in their house, filled with his clothes, posters and CDs.

“He loved cars and had restored several classic ones,” says his proud father.

“Motorbikes were a passion too. He had joined me in the family business and brought so much energy and enthusiasm to his work.

“If we ever worried for him it was that he’d have a crash by driving too fast, as young men do. It never occurred to us that, just as the Northern Ireland Troubles were winding down, he’d be killed by a bomb when he went into town to buy some trousers.”

On a Saturday afternoon, August 15, 1998, the 500lb car bomb exploded in the centre of the bustling market town of Omagh.

It had been placed by an IRA splinter group calling itself the Real IRA, extremists determined to derail the Northern Ireland peace talks.

Sean Hoey was cleared of all charges relating to the Omagh bombing

Five men, 14 women, nine children and unborn twins died in the worst single terrorist attack in the 30 years of the Troubles. One of the victims was Aidan.

His family’s one source of comfort - that someone was facing trial for their son’s senseless murder - has now been taken from them.

A judge ruled that the police had so bungled the case, particularly the DNA evidence, that it could not stand up in court. As a consequence, Hoey, who had served four-and-a-half years for other terrorist offences and had been charged with 56 counts of terrorism and 29 murders, was freed.

“We’re very upset,” Michael says.

“I was sitting there, listening to the judge. He talked about the unreliable evidence, the mishandling by the police and I kept waiting for a ‘but’ which never came.”

In his summing up, Mr Justice Weir accused the Royal Ulster Constabulary of a “cavalier disregard” for key evidence.

He was critical of the process of bagging, labelling and recording of exhibits and hit out at the “slapdash approach” the police and some forensic experts had for the integrity of forensic items.

“Hoey’s supporters say this proves he was innocent. I think of it as a case not proved,” says Michael.

“The DNA and forensic evidence was flawed but that does not mean he was not one of the bombers.

“I’ve always been very supportive of the police’s work on the case. But it does seem that we have been very let down by them.”

Disappointment at the decision was made worse by the reaction of Hoey’s Republican supporters, who cheered at the “not guilty” verdict.

“For them to cheer is very disrespectful, very cruel,” says Michael.

As a final slap in the face, Hoey has announced he is considering suing one of the other parents of a victim, Victor Barker, whose son James, aged 12, was killed.

Lawyers for Hoey said they were studying remarks made about him in the press by Mr Barker.

“I think Hoey should just be glad he is free and able to be with his family,” says Michael.

“He should try not to cause the families who lost loved ones in the bomb any more anguish than they have had already.”

It is nothing short of scandalous that it has proved somehow impossible to bring a single terrorist to justice for Omagh.

In 2003, Michael McKevitt, understood to be the leader of the Real IRA, was jailed by a Dublin court for 20 years for “directing terrorism” but the trial judge was explicit that the charges were unrelated to the Omagh bombing.

The brutal truth is that, with politicians desperate for peace in Northern Ireland and convicted terrorist killers being freed from jail early under the Good Friday Agreement, there hasn’t been the political will to pursue the bombers.

So the victims’ families have been forced to launch a civil action against five named members of the Real IRA and the organisation itself.

The action has been financed by a £1.2 million fund to which many generous Daily Mail readers contributed.

The case, after long delays, will finally come to court in April 2008.

The families hope they will succeed, as a civil case requires a less stringent standard of proof than a criminal one.

The three-page writ is the first time any suspected terrorists have been sued by their victims.

It demands £14 million damages for “the intentional infliction of harm, trespass to the person and/or conspiracy to commit trespass to the person and/or conspiracy to injure.”

For the families, it’s not about the money. It’s about getting legal recognition that the alleged bombers are indeed guilty of mass murder.

Michael says: “This happened in the UKjust under ten years ago. There are plenty in the Republican community who know exactly who did it. And yet nobody wants to do anything to bring the killers to justice.

“You’ve got people tracking down Nazi war criminals 60 years after the Holocaust and that’s considered heroic.

“But we’re expected to just accept that the Omagh bombers can’t be found and to get on with our lives.

“I’ve been told that up to 18 terrorists were directly involved with stealing, preparing and placing the car filled with explosives in Omagh. And yet, there is now not one single successful conviction for the atrocity.

“Our only hope of getting some sort of justice is through this civil action.”

Michael’s fight has made him, too, a target for the terrorists.

He always checks his car for devices. But he is a brave man and will not be silenced. Indeed, he leads the Omagh Self Help and Support Group which has fought hard for justice for the bomb victims.

He is also, remarkably, not a bitter man, nor a parent so locked in mourning the past that he cannot enjoy the present. He adores his two daughters Sharon, 34, and Kathy, 30, who are both happily married, and dotes on his five grandchildren.

Indeed, he combines giving this interview with babysitting his grandson Fynn, just three months old, so that Kathy and her husband can go out for their wedding anniversary.

Life in the Gallagher family goes on.

Nearly ten years ago, such a thing seemed inconceivable. Back on that sunny Saturday in August, Michael and Aidan were working together on a car at the family garage.

After lunch, Aidan decided to pop into Omagh town centre with a friend to go shopping. Michael carried on working and he heard the huge explosion.

“I knew it was a bomb,” he says.

“I went straight home and I could see a pall of smoke rising from the town centre. Patsy and Kathy were there, very agitated and worried about Aidan.”

Worry turned to panic as Aidan did not return home.

There followed an afternoon of nightmarish searching, the family desperately clutching at any possible hope that their son might not be among the dead.

Michael rushed to the nearby hospital to see if Aidan was there.

A total of 240 casualties had arrived within 45 minutes of the explosion.

“It seemed like we were walking though blood,” Michael remembers.

“I saw a woman holding a baby in a blanket and I couldn’t tell if the baby was dead or alive. The noise and the crying were overwhelming.”

After frantic searching, Michael realised that Aidan wasn’t there.

He then went to the car park in the town which Aidan always used and to his horror saw that only two cars remained - and one was Aidan’s.

He made his way to a nearby Army camp which had been commandeered as a crisis centre. And there, finally, hope died.

Aidan’s body was brought out for identification.

“I had to go back to the house and tell my wife and two girls. They knew from my face. I said: ‘Aidan won’t be coming home.’”

Since then, the family has endured unimaginable agonies, and there have been times when Patsy has begged Michael to stop campaigning.

Every time he gives an interview, or Aidan’s picture is in the papers, it rakes up all the pain afresh.

“We’ve been through very difficult times,” admits Michael.

“Patsy sometimes wishes I wasn’t so involved with the cause of bringing the bombers to justice. But I can’t give up.”

One of the reasons Michael is so dogged in his determination is that, horrifically, this was not the first loss he had suffered due to the terrorism.

In 1984, his younger brother Hughie, a taxi driver, was lured to an address outside Omagh and killed by the IRA, at 26, leaving a wife and two children.

“It took me a good five years even to start getting over Hughie’s death. That was bad enough,” says Michael.

“But with Aidan, the heartbreak came right up to the front door of my house and stepped inside. It was in another league entirely to lose my own son.”

And the cruelty of the Real IRA still outrages him today. “They chose Omagh, why? I’ve never understood why people who want to get the English out of Ireland try to do so by killing Irish people.

“They deliberately put a bomb outside a shop that sold school uniform just before the end of the school holidays on a Saturday afternoon. It was filled with mothers and children.

“Then they gave a false warning which actually drove people towards the bomb. Aidan evacuated the department store where he was buying some trousers and went into the street after the warning.

“If he had not, he would have been saved. And that’s why so many children were killed.”

It is for those children, and the adults who died alongside them, that Michael now campaigns - even if it makes him a terrorist target.

“At the end of the day, all they can do is kill me,” he says.

“But they won’t stop me fighting for Aidan.”

Newshound

(Margaret Canning, Irish News)

The film cameras are rolling yet again in Belfast as the city turns its troubled past into a chance to look to the future. Margaret Canning reports

Dark days appear to have returned to Belfast’s Donegall Street, the scene of a number of bomb attacks during the Troubles.

But there was no permanent damage yesterday (Monday) when an imagined IRA attack on British soldiers socialising in a pub was filmed for a feature about a double agent.

Man on the Run stars Sir Ben Kingsley, below – who won an Oscar for the title role in Gandhi – as a Special Branch handler.

Written and directed by Kari Skogland, the film is loosely based on Fifty Dead Men Walking, an autobiography of the real-life informer Martin McGartland.

The book title came from a claim by Ballymurphy-born Mr McGartland – who is not involved in making the film – that his efforts as an agent saved 50 lives between 1987 and 1991.

Among those were British soldiers socialising in a nightclub in Bangor – McGartland has said he informed his handlers of a planned IRA attack on the premises and it never took place.

The special effects team of Man on the Run yesterday recreated what could have happened had Brendan, the film’s fictional informer played by Jim Sturgess, not foiled a similar plan.

McElhatton’s, the scene of yesterday’s filming, is a pub whose traditional appearance and ambience have consistently proved attractive to filmmakers, owner John McElhatton Jnr said.

“We had Mickybo and Me in 2003,” he said.

“Adrian Dunbar played Mickybo’s father and he was filmed inside the pub.

“There was also Billy Goat this year [part of a BBC series of reworked fairy tales] about a decadent and unpopular bar manager being attacked by a mob.

“I think the crew of Man on the Run picked it because it is a traditional bar with an old look to it, though they have changed some of the fittings of the pub, like the beer pumps.”

Part of Breakfast on Pluto, Neil Jordan’s film adaptation of Pat McCabe’s novel, was shot round the corner in the Frames restaurant and snooker complex on nearby Little Donegall Street in 2004.

Andre Graham, owner of a bar on Union Street and the Kremlin nightclub on Donegall Street, said filming felt like a “regular occurrence” in the area.

“It creates a real buzz and general excitement and enthusiasm among customers.

“It’s great to have stars of the calibre of Julie Walters, Liam Neeson – who also appeared in Mickybo and Me – and Sir Ben Kingsley milling around.”

Graham Longhurst, who is in charge of special effects on the set of Man on the Run, said yesterday’s filming had been a “gruesome” business.

“Four men and a woman died in the scenes we were filming today,” he said.

“Shots were also fired at tables full of glasses and bottles so it was mayhem.”

He described the scene as a “jump-forward, where the hero was imagining what might have happened if he had not compromised the IRA hit”.

In real life, McGartland’s cover was blown in 1991 when the IRA discovered his role in foiling the Bangor operation.

The IRA took him to a flat in Twinbrook, where he was bound and gagged.

His captors let him use the bathroom, where McGartland noted a bath full of cold water.

Believing that they intended to torture him by plunging him in and out of the water, he escaped by diving head first through a third-floor window.

The flat above McElhatton’s will not be the scene of a similar stunt, the pub owner confirmed.

However, it will be used for scenes featuring Brendan and his girlfriend Grace – played by Rose McGowan, who starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, part of the Grindhouse double bill.

Sir Ben is not expected on set but last month he visited Mountpottinger police station in east Belfast, the model for a police station in the film.

Back to the cages

McElhatton’s has been fitted with a security cage while Man on the Run is being filmed.

Security cages fitted to the front of a building were a feature of many licensed premises during the Troubles.

The cages were a safety measure against paramilitary attacks but John McElhatton jnr said the Donegall Street premises did not have one during the Troubles.

“We just used security cameras and monitors but we also had a pub at 61 Durham Street in west Belfast, where there was a security cage,” he said.

“There had been three bomb attacks at that premises.”

Brendan Murphy, retired picture editor of The Irish News, owned a pub on the Falls Road.

“We didn’t have a security cage but, like many pubs, we placed boulders around the pub to prevent car bombs,” he said.

December 27, 2007
________________

This article appeared first in the December 4, 2007 edition of the Irish News.

Irish Independent
By Chris Anderson
December 27 2007

THE Northern Ireland Prison Service (NIPS) has spent over £2m on work carried out for the inquiry into the murder of former LVF leader Billy Wright.

And Wright’s father, David, has again demanded the inquiry finds out the truth about how his son died.

“When Billy died I got as much hate mail as I did sympathy cards,” he said.

“I just want this matter laid to rest for once and for all.

“All I want is the truth about what happened on December 27, 1997. I don’t want anything more or less.”

Today is the 10th anniversary of Wright’s death at the hands of an INLA gunman inside the top security Maze prison. The LVF leader was sitting in a prison van in the forecourt of H Block 6 when he was shot seven times and died within seconds.

At the time of his death, Wright was despised and feared by nationalists.

Nicknamed ‘King Rat’ by the media, Wright is reputed to have been responsible for up to 30 murders, a claim his father David fiercely disputes.

“My son was the last person to be executed at Her Majesty’s Pleasure — executed, for that’s what he was,” Mr Wright said.

“I have never tried to change anyone’s view about Billy Wright. My son wasn’t a boy scout. He was a UVF man and he remained one till the day he died. I know that,” he said.

“If Billy had been murdered in the street I could have lived with that and got on with my life. But Billy was murdered while in the care of the state.”

Meanwhile, officials at NIPS headquarters in Dundonald House, Belfast, confirmed a massive £2,141,000 (€2.93m) had been spent since November 2005 on all work for the Wright Inquiry.

In 2005/2006, the NIPS spent £456,000 (€623,000) working for the Wright Inquiry.

The following year, a further £648,000 (€886,000) was added to the bill.

This year (up to November 2007) the prison service has spent another £1,037,000 (€1.42m) on work many people believed had already been completed last year.

Destroy

Although the NIPS did give an overall figure for all work carried out for the Wright Inquiry, it was unable to provide details of exactly where the costs had been incurred.

The NIPS was also unable to say how much it had cost to destroy prisoner security files belonging to the Prison Security Unit at the Maze prison which should have been retained for the Wright Inquiry.

When asked to justify expenditure, a NIPS spokesperson said in would be inappropriate to comment further while the Wright Inquiry is ongoing.

Last night, David Wright said the prison service must be held accountable for what he described as a “flagrant disregard for public money”.

- Chris Anderson

International Herald Tribune
Associated Press
December 28, 2007

DUBLIN, Ireland: Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was killed by the Irish Republican Army in 1979, supported unification of Ireland as the ultimate solution to sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, according to records released Friday by the National Archives.

The IRA’s violent campaign was intended to force the unification of the independent south of the island and British-ruled Northern Ireland.

Donal O’Sullivan, then the Irish ambassador in London, reported to the Department of Foreign Affairs about a meeting with Mountbatten at a banquet at Windsor Castle on April 11, 1972.

O’Sullivan said Mountbatten, an uncle of Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, had expressed hope that Prime Minister Edward Heath’s approach to the North would secure reunification.

“Lord Mountbatten said he wished me to know that he and many of his friends have been deeply impressed by the positive Dublin reaction to the Heath initiative,” O’Sullivan wrote.

“They hope that this can be developed into a ‘major advance towards the final solution.’ Reunification is the only eventual solution. If there is anything he can do to help he will be most happy to co-operate.”

Mountbatten, 79, was killed on Aug. 27, 1979, by the blast from a 50-pound (23-kilogram) bomb on board his fishing boat. Also killed were Lady Patricia Brabourne, 82, Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, and Paul Maxwell, 15.