SAOIRSE32

Irish News
**Via Newshound
31/07/08

A Belfast man yesterday opted to be tried in Dublin under rarely used anti-terrorism laws for a Continuity IRA-linked murder carried out in Belfast.

Gerard Mackin opted to be tried on the murder and other charges at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin.

He was charged under the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act of 1976 which allows suspects to be tried in the Republic for offences committed in Northern Ireland or Britain.

Mr Justice Paul Butler, presiding at the three-judge non-jury court, told Mr Mackin that he had the option of being tried in Dublin or taken into custody for trial in Belfast.

“I’d like to be tried in the south,” the defendant said.

He was then arraigned on four charges.

Mr Mackin (25) is originally from the Whiterock area of west Belfast but has an address at Raheen Close, Tallaght, Dublin.

He pleaded not guilty to the murder of taxi driver Edward Burns (36) and the attempted murder of Damien O’Neill at the Bog Meadows nature

reserve near Belfast’s Falls Road on March 12 last year.

He also denied intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to Mr O’Neill and possession of a firearm with

intent to endanger life on the same date.

The body of Mr Burns was discovered after Mr O’Neill arrived at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and told police he had been shot close to the Bog Meadows.

Mr Burns, a father of five, had been shot once in the back of the head.

Police said they believed the murder was linked to a dispute inside the Continuity IRA.

On the same day in March last year Joseph Jones (38), of Poleglass on the outskirts of west Belfast, was found dead in an alleyway off Elmfield Street in north Belfast.

The two murders were believed to be linked.

After his arraignment Mr Mackin was remanded in continuing custody until October when his trial is expected to go ahead.

The first person to be tried under the 1976 anti-terrorism law was Gerard Tuite, the IRA prisoner who escaped from London’s Brixton Prison in 1980.

Tuite was jailed for 10 years by the Special Criminal Court in July 1982 for IRA offences committed in Britain.

The 1976 act was also used in 1992 when two Northern Ireland men, James Hughes and Conor O’Neill, were jailed by the Special Criminal Court for 12 years for the attempted murder of UDR soldier William Eric Glass in Belleek, Co Fermanagh, in February 1992.

The Government says it will get tough about loyalist guns if they are not |decommissioned in the next few months. Chris Thornton says that begs the question: Why aren’t they being tough now?

Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 1 August 2008

A decade ago, Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton capped off a night out among the bon viveurs of Portadown by waving a pistol at an off-duty RIR man in the street, and firing four shots in the air. As you do.

When Fulton, a moustachioed associate of LVF leader Billy Wright with a majestic spider’s web tattoo on his elbow, was arrested over the incident he had a novel defence: the decommissioning certificate he was carrying at the time.

Swinger tried to argue he was effectively licensed to carry the gun by the certificate, there being a chance he might have handed it over to General John de Chastelain if he’d run into him in Carleton Street.

It didn’t work.

Decommissioning legislation is very specific about the amnesties on offer: they refer mainly to the transportation of arms — so a legitimate decommissioner doesn’t get sent down for having a truckload of guns he’s driving to the General — and to what’s done to the arms afterwards. The weapons are supposed to be exempt from any forensic examination.

That was put in place to remove a potential incentive for holding on to the guns — that it might be safer to keep them than turn them over and risk a murder conviction because of a fingerprint on the trigger.

The impression is out there that the amnesty covers any weapons, even those currently in storage

Fulton was sentenced to four years for his escapade and later died in prison, apparently by his own hand.

Swinger’s defence is relevant these days because it has been exposed as remarkably unambitious. Now the impression is out there that the amnesty covers any weapons, even those currently in storage.

That impression has been fostered in part by the NIO’s attempts to put pressure on loyalists.

With decommissioning legislation due to expire in February, and renewal possibly subject to a parliamentary fight, Secretary of State Shaun Woodward and Justice Minister Paul Goggins have been warning that the UDA and UVF may only have months to cough up the guns.

But the suggestion they will get tough after that — Mr Woodward has been talking about clearing the prisons to make room for all the UDA men they’ll pick up — carries the implication that they’re not being tough now.

That notion was reinforced this week by an interview outgoing Assistant Chief Constable Peter Sheridan gave to the Irish News. Mr Sheridan was asked if police have intelligence in place to locate loyalist weapons.

“The short answer to that is yes,” he said. “And then if the opportunity to arrest and prosecute is there, we will.”

He didn’t say they know exactly where the guns are, but gave the impression the arms could be found with little effort.

Later that day Mr Goggins declined the chance to push for those weapons to be found, saying he wants loyalists to hand them in. Then, as questions were building about what Mr Sheridan meant, someone leaked news of a meeting between the UDA, Mr Goggins and Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde.

Would such an apparently relaxed impression be allowed to build about IRA arms, especially if they’d been used against police in the past year, as loyalist guns have?

Some people don’t think so.

“I think that if someone’s killed with one of these loyalist weapons, then the British government is culpable because of their inactivity,” said Mark Thompson of Relativesfor Justice, a group which works with many victims of loyalist violence.

“There’s another question: why aren’t they going after weapons now, when they might have evidence relevant to a murder case? I think the PSNI is left completely open to legal action on this.”

Breaking News.ie
01/08/2008 - 09:01:23

Gardaí in Co Monaghan have arrested a fourth man in connection with the murder of south Armagh man Paul Quinn last October.

The man was detained this morning and is being held at Monaghan Garda Station under section 30 of the Offences against the State Act.

Three other men arrested on Tuesday as part of the murder investigation have been released without charge, while three more remain in PSNI custody in Antrim after being arrested in south Armagh yesterday.

Mr Quinn, 21, was beaten to death by a gang of men after being lured to a remote farmhouse in Co Monaghan last October.

His family claim the killing was organised by Provisional IRA members in south Armagh.

Lord Maginnis described the meeting as ‘idiotic’

By Noel McAdam
Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 1 August 2008

The PSNI has rebuffed criticism of Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde from former Ulster Unionist security spokesman Lord Maginnis over talks between the Government and the UDA.

The peer complained it was “patently idiotic” for Sir Hugh to have attended the meeting, revealed earlier this week, but the PSNI said he had been invited by Security Minister Paul Goggins.

The former Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP, a previous adviser to the RUC Federation, nevertheless described the Chief Constables’ involvement in the discussions which included loyalist decommissioning as “unbridled arrogance”.

“We once had a police service that, despite sectarian conflict and horrific terrorism, sought to keep itself free of political bias and partisan involvement — not an easy task in a near civil war situation,” Lord Maginnis argued.

“Now we have a Police Command structure whose chief officer reportedly sits down to ‘negotiate’ — to do deals — with those in possession of illegal arms— with terrorists and with criminals.

“I don’t care which tradition these people come from — disarmament is a political issue and no community should be left feeling that its Chief Constable and police service is compromised by involvement in a deal.

“That was why we agreed to General de Chastelain’s role (in the Decommissioning Commission) and the relevant legislation.

“Such indiscretion hasn’t occurred before and neither I nor my colleagues can have any confidence in a PSNI Command that is part of a deal, beneficial or otherwise, with those who live and act outside the Law,” he said.

The PSNI said Mr Goggins held a meeting with the Ulster Political Research Group, which says it provides political analysis for the UDA, and other leading loyalists and the chief constable attended at the invitation of the Northern Ireland Office.

“The police service’s record on dealing with loyalist paramilitaries and those involved in criminality is very clear. It will not be tolerated,” a police spokeswoman added.

So-called South Belfast UDA ‘brigadier’ Jackie McDonald and other members of the UDA’s six-strong inner council were reported to be present at the discussions, which appear to have produced no breakthrough on UDA disarmament.

BY MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA
An Phoblacht
24 July 2008

**See also ‘Uprising Medal Returns to Ireland’

The most prominent leader of the Dublin workers after Jim Larkin and James Connolly during the Great Lockout of 1913 was William Patrick Partridge. A staunch trade unionist and a skilful orator, Partridge served as a Dublin City Councillor and was a leader of the Irish Citizen Army.

Born in Sligo in 1874, Partridge was the son of an English train driver and an Irish mother. He was reared in County Mayo. At the age of 22 he came to Dublin where he took up employment at the Inchicore Railway Works. Here Partridge’s trade union activism began and he became a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
Inchicore was then one of the few truly industrialised districts outside North-East Ulster. Hundreds were employed in the railway works and ancillary industries. Partridge quickly took on a leadership position and was prominent in ASE-led strikes in 1887 and 1902.
These were the early years of Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League) and Partridge was treasurer of the Inchicore branch. He campaigned for improved housing, education and civic amenities for the working people of Inchicore and he was elected to Dublin City Council where he served as a Sinn Féin councillor.
Partridge’s trade union and political activities were frowned on by his employers, the Great Southern and Western Railway (GS&WR), and he was forced to resign his council seat in 1906. He continued as an active trade unionist and in 1912 and when he highlighted discrimination in the appointment of supervisors at the Inchicore Works, he was dismissed from his job.
Already though, Partridge had become an organiser of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union which had been founded in 1909. He worked closely with Jim Larkin in setting up branches of the union outside Dublin. He was based at the union’s Emmet Hall in Inchicore. In January 1913 he was re-elected to Dublin City Council as a Labour councillor.

1913 Lockout & Easter Rising

When the Great Lockout of 1913 came, Partridge was one of the main leaders of the struggle. He toured Britain seeking support for the Dublin workers and addressed the British Trade Union Congress. A devout Catholic himself, he had no qualms about publicly attacking the hypocrisy of Catholic clergy in Dublin who sided with the bosses and condemned the ITGWU while doing nothing themselves to combat the causes of dire poverty in the city.
Partridge took a leading role in the Irish Citizen Army from its foundation in November 1913. He was close to Connolly in the preparations for the 1916 Rising. Connolly sent Partridge to Kerry to supervise the landing of the expected German arms shipment at Fenit. Returning to Dublin with the news that Roger Casement had been arrested and no arms had been landed, Partridge met a young Volunteer officer, Fred Murray. He told Murray of Casement’s arrest but said: “It will make no difference to us in Dublin. We are going on in Dublin.”
Partridge fought in the College of Surgeons during Easter Week. Already ill before the Rising, after the surrender he was imprisoned in Dartmoor and Lewes prisons in England where his health deteriorated. He was released on health grounds in April 1917. He went to stay with his family in Ballaghadereen, County Roscommon where he died three months after his release. Constance Markievicz delivered his funeral oration in Ballaghadereen in which she described Partridge as “the purest-souled and noblest patriot Ireland ever had.” She then fired a salute over the grave with her own pistol.

William Partridge died on 26 July, 1917, 91 years ago this week.
• Further reading: Hugh Geraghty, William Patrick Partridge, Curlew Books (2003).

An Phoblacht
24 July 2008
BY LAURA FRIEL

MEMORIES of the British judicial system’s brutal treatment of Irish people came into sharp focus again this week with news of the death of Sarah Conlon.

Described as “a woman with no political interest” Sarah Conlon’s life had been turned upside-down in 1974 after members of her family were arrested, framed and imprisoned for life in a conspiracy which involved British policemen, forensic scientists, the judiciary and successive British governments.

Photo: FILM: Sarah Conlon with her son Gerry at the premier of In the Name of the Father in Dublin in 1993. The film exposed the callous treatment of Giueseppe Conlon in a British prison

Sarah’s son Gerry Conlon was one of four people arrested and charged in connection with the IRA’s bombing of pubs frequented by British soldiers in Guildford and Woolwich. Her husband Giuseppe was arrested and charged after he travelled to England to organise legal representation for his son.
Along with Giuseppe, Gerry Conlon’s aunt, Annie Maguire, her husband Paddy and their family were also arrested and charged. The Maguire Seven were convicted on the basis of dubious forensic evidence whose efficacy was questioned from the outset and was later exposed as fraudulent.
Sarah’s husband, Giuseppe, was convicted and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment after it was claimed that he helped to make bombs in the London home of his sister-in-law. Her son, Gerry was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Her sister Anne and brother-in-law Paddy were convicted and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Sarah’s nephew Vincent was jailed for five years and another nephew Pat was also detained as a juvenile.
Within months six more Irish people were being held by British police on trumped up charges following two bomb attacks in Birmingham. All six were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The methods employed to secure the convictions included media vilification, brutal interrogations, forced confessions and fabricated forensic ‘evidence’. Vital information was also withheld from the defence.
The Guildford Four, Maguire Seven and Birmingham Six became the victims of a British state determined to extract revenge for an IRA bombing campaign in Britain. Those arrested and charged were not only innocent but widely known to be innocent within the Irish community.
Their subsequent conviction was not only intended to strike fear into the heart of the Irish community living in Britain but also to ensure their silence in the face of ongoing atrocities being carried out by British soldiers in Ireland.
In this sense, while the Guildford Four, Maguires and Birmingham Six were neither republicans nor members of the IRA, they were inadvertently Irish political prisoners. All had been targeted because they were Irish or in the case of Carole Richardson because of an Irish connection, while the nature of their convictions met a specific political agenda.
From the outset there were glaring anomalies in the convictions but despite this the British judicial system refused to contemplate any notion that those convicted were innocent.
In 1980 Britain’s Lord Denning dismissed an appeal by the Birmingham Six on the grounds that to concede that the British police or courts had got it wrong would amount to “an appalling vista”. The appalling vista shunned by Judge Denning was in fact the terrible truth that all were innocent and all had been deliberately framed.
In the case of the Guildford Four, confirmation of their innocence emerged within months of their trial. In December 1975 an IRA unit captured in London’s Balcombe Street announced their responsibility for the Guildford bombings.
By the time of their appeal in 1977, it was becoming increasingly clear, based on declarations by the IRA unit backed up by further forensic evidence, that the Guildford Four were innocent. Furthermore, if the Four were innocent so were their alleged “accomplices” the Maguire Seven.
But the nature of the convictions were political not evidential and the British were keen to keep any emerging information that indicted their captives’ innocence under wraps. Forensic evidence was suppressed by the British Director of Public Prosecutions who, according to defence lawyers, “took the decision to disguise, bury and hide all forensic links to that linked Balcombe Street to Guildford and Woolwich bombings”.
During the appeal a trio of judges conceded that members of the IRA unit had been responsible for the bombing but insisted that the Guildford four were also guilty. They dismissed the IRA’s evidence as “a skillful and cunning plot to get the others off”.
And brutality at the hands of British interrogators, the manipulation of evidence and the indifference of British courts wasn’t the only injustice faced by the Conlon-Maguire family and their co-accused.
In jail they were often singled out for brutal treatment. Paul Hill one of the Guildford Four spent 1,462 days of his fourteen year sentence in solitary confinement.
Giuseppe Conlon suffered from tuberculosis and emphysema but was denied medical treatment while he was in jail. He died in prison in January 1980 at the age of 56. The callous treatment of Giuseppe was subsequently exposed in the film In the name of the Father.
International attention secured by years of campaigning finally forced the British state to run for cover by declaring a litany of “miscarriages of justice”. The notion of a judicial mistake masked the political nature of the injustice inflicted on those who had been selected as convenient scapegoats.
Rather than risk an embarrassing full Court of Appeal hearing, the convictions against the Guildford Four were swiftly quashed in October 1989. Emerging from the steps of London’s Old Bailey to greet the world media, Gerry Conlon famously announced “I served 15 years for a crime I did not commit”.
In March 1991 the convictions against the Birmingham Six were quashed and three months later the British Court of Appeal finally overturned the convictions of the Maguire family. By this time the surviving six of the original seven had already completed their sentences.
Speaking shortly after his mother Sarah’s death, Gerry Conlon described her steadfastness in the face of adversity.
“For a woman with no political interest to be suddenly challenging the British Government and British judiciary, it must have been daunting at times but she quietly went about with great dignity telling people what had happened to me and my father and the others,” said Gerry.

Received via email:

Comradai,

On behalf of Ceartais; I urge everyone to sign our online Petition to Brian Cowan T.D. Which calls on the Dublin Government to use its influence with the British Government in revealing the truth behind the protracted exposure of over a thousand political prisoners to CR Gas in Long Kesh on October 15, 1974.

The Petition can be accessed at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Ceartais/. So please visit the above address and sign your name to support the Ceartais Campaign!

Go Raibh Mhaith Agat,

Mairtin Og Meehan
Beal Feirste

Email: ceartais@hotmail.com

Website: http://ceartais.blogspot.com/