SAOIRSE32

Natalie Hanman
Guardian
Monday September 01 2008

An Ulster Volunteer Force mural in north Belfast. (Photograph: Paul Faith/PA)

Wall art erected during, and inspired by, the Troubles in Northern Ireland is set to be removed.

Belfast City Council is expected to announce this week that paramilitary murals in Shankill Road are to be replaced with material relating to the area’s social, cultural and industrial heritage, the Independent reports today.

Large paintings, often depicting the actions of violent subversives, have long been a feature of the Falls Road and surrounding districts, with both republicans and loyalists using the medium to express resistance and stake out territory. Images include depictions of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and, more recently, drawings critical of George Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In recent years, the vivid art has attracted large numbers of tourists to the area, but following consultations with residents, artists and local politicians, the authorities have decided on a programme “to transform local communities by tackling the visible signs of sectarianism”.

A pilot scheme launched in east Belfast several years ago proved successful, with murals of gunmen replaced by paintings of those with local links, including CS Lewis and footballer David Healy scoring a winning goal in a victorious match against England.

International Herald Tribune
Associated Press
01 September 2008

The expert commission includes former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit. Since 2004, at the behest of Britain and Ireland, it has published reports that analyze the operations of Northern Ireland’s several underground groups.

The new report is not expected to identify by name any member of the IRA command, which the outlawed group calls the “army council.” Nor is it expected to deviate from the experts’ broadly upbeat findings since 2005, when the outlawed IRA fulfilled key peace demands by disarming and renouncing violence.

Protestant leaders have demanded that the IRA army council disband to demonstrate that the group has no intention of reviving its 1970-97 campaign to force Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom.

But previous reports have noted that IRA commanders are keeping their underlings in line — and that such control helps to deter defections to IRA splinter groups that continue to plot bomb and gun attacks in Northern Ireland.

The experts’ IRA report comes at a delicate moment for the power-sharing government.

Sinn Fein, the IRA-linked party that represents most of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, is threatening to withdraw from the power-sharing government if Protestants keep blocking a plan to form a new Justice Department. Protestants also are blocking Sinn Fein demands for a law to promote Gaelic, Ireland’s little-used traditional language.

Sinn Fein, in turn, has prevented Cabinet meetings since June, and has threatened to withdraw from the coalition if the Protestant side doesn’t meet its demands.

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On the Net:

Independent Monitoring Commission, http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org

Breaking News.ie
01/09/2008

A teenager has been arrested and charged after police were pelted with missiles in Belfast.

Stones, paint and other missiles were hurled at police vehicles in the Ormagh Road and Cromac Street areas of south Belfast, said a PSNI spokesman.

The trouble in the nationalist area simmered for a few hours before calm was restored.

The detained 15-year-old is expected to appear at Belfast Youth Court today changed with possession of an offensive weapon.

uk.news
01 September 2008

Paramilitary murals glorifying loyalist terror groups are to disappear from west Belfast’s Shankill Road.

Belfast City Council will confirm this week an agreement has been reached with local community groups for 10 of the murals in the Lower Shankill to be painted over.

The initiative is being funded with through the Arts Council’s Re-imaging Communities programme which has been helping to transform local communities across the North by tackling the visible signs of sectarianism and racism by creating a more welcoming environment for everyone.

The 10 murals going in the Shankill will be replaced with new ones charting the social, cultural and industrial heritage of the area.

Over recent months, artists have been consulting with a range of community groups, including the Lower Shankill Community Association, residents, and community workers, to identify possible themes for the new murals.

A public meeting will be held in a community centre in the area on Tuesday evening to outline preparation work and how the scheme will more to the next stage.

The meeting will be followed by a series of workshops to develop concepts for the replacement murals - which will use a combination of traditional mural skills and modern digital production techniques, said the council.

Funding from the Re-Imaging Communities scheme was used successfully in loyalist areas of east Belfast last year to remove a series of paramilitary murals.

They were replaced by paintings including portraits of soccer legend George Best and decorated war hero Blair Mayne, a picture of the building of the Titanic in Harland and Wolff shipyard and local footballer David Healy scoring a goal for Northern Ireland against England.

A UDA mural in the hard-line Tullycarnet area was replaced with one of Catholic war hero James Magennis who was awarded the Victoria Cross.

A Shankill resident said it was time for their area to follow on. “Times have changed, we are trying to move away from the past and this will help the area,” she said.

Tourists may not be of the same opinion - Belfast murals have been a big draw to the ever growing number flocking to the North.

Lisa McMurray, of the Belfast Visitor and Convention Bureau, said: “Visitors coming to Belfast do show a great interest in visiting murals, which are of course an interpretation of Belfast history.”

Scotsman
31 August 2008

The IRA outlasted generations. More than a decade into the peace process is it still a force, asks Stephen McGinty

WHILE alive, Brian Keenan had callously brought forward the funerals of dozens of men by bullet or bomb. As a member of the Army Council of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), he had planned “spectaculars” and pushed for the Kingsmill massacre in which ten Protestants were killed in a machine gun attack in January, 1976. Yet by the time of his own funeral, in May, Keenan was hailed as a vital architect of the Northern Ireland peace process.

In many ways, the funeral in Belfast was as much for the organisation he helped lead as for the man himself, and it illustrated that times had changed. While the black beret and dark leather gloves rested on the coffin lid, there were no men in black balaclavas firing handguns above a grave. Mourners favoured white shirts and black ties over army fatigues and included Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and a former comrade-in-arms.

Today, the Independent Monitoring Commission is expected to make a special report to the British and Irish governments on the current status of the Provisional IRA and to conclude, once again, that it is no longer a danger to the state. It is, however, unlikely to state that the seven-strong Army Council had been disbanded and it remains to be seen if this is enough to persuade the DUP to agree to the devolution to the Northern Ireland Assembly of Policing and Justice.

As Jeffrey Donaldson, of the DUP, said: “It remains our position that the Army Council must leave the stage and that the IRA should no longer function in any respect.” However, Mr McGuinness said last month: “The IRA have clearly gone off the stage since 2005, but attempts are still made by some people to drag them back on, and I think that’s silly.”

It is now more than three years since the Army Council announced an end to its armed campaign and stated that it would work using “purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means” and ordered that IRA “volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever”. This followed the final decommissioning of its weaponry, under the supervision of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD), and said to include the destruction of 1,000 rifles, three tonnes of Semtex, 20-30 heavy machine guns, seven surface-to-air missiles, seven flame throwers, 1,200 detonators, 20 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 100 handguns and more than 100 grenades.

So does the Provisional IRA no longer exist? The answer is complicated. The fact that the Army Council remains in operation indicates that there remain elements to control. The Army Council will not disband. However, members who die or resign are not being replaced, but it will still take years before it withers and dies.

Peter Sheridan, Assistant Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said he believed that vestiges of the IRA will be around for years. Across the border in the Irish Republic a senior intelligence source in the Garda recently said that the IRA had continued to recruit and that it still held weapons.

However, Adam Ingram, a former minister in the Northern Ireland office is optimistic. He said: “I would take the assurances that have been given both by the independent commission and by the government that the military activities of the PIRA have ceased. I saw enough during my time seven years ago to convince me that Sinn Fein were determined to put the gun behind them and use a democratic process. There is a worry from those dissident factions who still think that they can defeat the British government by terrorist means and achieve a united Ireland. They are a minority but remain dangerous.”

These include organisations such as the Continuity IRA, the INLA, the Real IRA and more recent splinter groups like Oglaigh na hEireann or Saoirse na hEireann.

“No. The IRA is not going to go away,” said Ed Moloney, the author of The Secret History of the IRA, who believes that Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein derive too much political power from the threat of renewed IRA violence to give it up completely. “The security forces, MI5 may go along with the lie for political expediency but ordinary people in Northern Ireland will know they will not go away.” He also said that even if the IMO said today that the Army Council had disbanded, it would not be the case as the IRA retains an investment portfolio, estimated to be worth £200 million, which requires management.

In 2002, the House of Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee estimated that the IRA’s annual running costs were £2.3 million but that through front companies and offshore accounts it earned £9 million. The IRA has invested heavily in bars, clubs, taxi-firms, shops and hotels and, according to John Horan, an expert on money-laundering and a former member of the PSNI, the organisation now operates bureau de changes in France and Britain. In the past few years IRA funds worth £40 million have been seized by the Garda’s Criminal Asset Bureau and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.

So are they now a criminal gang rather than a paramilitary force? What is the difference when people like Paul Quinn still die by their hands? Mr Quinn was said to have clashed physically and verbally with relatives of local IRA figures. He was lured to a farm in Co Monaghan where he was greeted by men in boilersuits, surgical gloves and armed with iron bars and nail-studded clubs. They broke almost every bone in his body then left him to die. The official government report into his death claimed that he was killed over a criminal dispute and that while some of his killers had associations with the IRA, the murder was contrary to the instructions of the organisation. Many doubt this.

Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA commander who served 18 years for murder, believes that while both the IRA and the Army Council are on their death beds, damage can still be done. He said: “I don’t believe Ireland has seen its last IRA murder.”

For some republicans the war for united Ireland goes on

The Continuity Irish Republican Army

The CIRA is an republican paramilitary organisation that emerged from a split in the Provisional IRA in 1986 whose supporters regard it as the national army of a 32-county Irish Republic. The CIRA continues to oppose the Belfast Agreement and, unlike the Provisional IRA the CIRA has failed to announce a ceasefire or agreed to participate in weapons decommissioning – nor is there any evidence that it will. In a recent report by the Independent Monitoring Commission the CIRA was labelled “active, dangerous and committed and … capable of a greater level of violent and other crime.”

The Real IRA

The RIRA was formed in 1997 following a split in the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The organisation has been responsible for a number of bombings in Northern Ireland and England, including the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people. The IMC report of May 2008 states that there are at least two factions within the RIRA. Furthermore, the RIRA was said to be active and dangerous. During the period covered by the report, it had tried to expand its capacity, and remained a threat that was “capable of extreme violence”. Despite this, the IMC said that there is reason to believe that some members realise the futility of violent action.

The Irish National Liberation Army

The INLA is an Irish Republican, left-wing paramilitary organisation which was formed in 1974 and was influential in the late 1970s and early 1980s and is now one of a number of small armed republican groups. In December 1997, three members of the INLA imprisoned in Long Kesh assassinated Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright. The INLA declared a ceasefire on 22 August, 1998 and went on to accept the massive vote in favour of the Good Friday Agreement – an arrangement it had opposed during the 1998 referendum – by the people of Ireland. Although the INLA does not support the Good Friday Agreement, it does not call for a return to armed struggle on behalf of republicans either.

· Dissident republicans ‘major threat to peace’
· Sinn Féin condemns fresh shootings and bombings

Henry McDonald
The Guardian
Monday September 1 2008

A fresh upsurge of dissident republican violence in Northern Ireland was orchestrated by a new nucleus of ex-IRA members who have defected from the Provisionals. Veterans of the Provisional IRA’s North Armagh brigade were behind the 24-hour wave of shootings, blast bomb attacks and riots that rocked the Craigavon area at the beginning of last week.

Senior security sources in Northern Ireland pointed this weekend to a small but dedicated number of ex-North Armagh brigade republicans who they say now pose a major threat to the peace process.

“They include one ex-prisoner who served life for murder and another responsible for a series of assassinations around North Armagh,” a police officer said. “This core cannot be dismissed as amateurs or newcomers to the dissident scene. They have experience and a track record behind them which makes them good recruiting sergeants for kids around them.”

The violence in Craigavon means that in almost every corner of Northern Ireland there have been short outbursts of dissident terrorist activity over the last six months. In August, dissidents linked to a Continuity IRA unit in Co Fermanagh fired an improvised rocket at a mobile patrol.

Although no one was killed or injured the murder bid was significant because it was the first time the dissidents had used semtex to set off a rocket-propelled grenade. Until then it appeared that the dissident groups did not have access to the Czech-made plastic explosive, which the Provisional IRA was meant to have destroyed in the arms decommissioning process two years ago.

Its presence is an indication that some of that explosive was taken from PIRA hides and handed over to the dissidents.

Attacks have taken place in Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh and now Armagh. Significantly, none of the republican groups opposed to the current power sharing government between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionists - the Real IRA, Continuity IRA or a new group known as Óglaigh na hÉireann - has mounted any major attacks in the Greater Belfast area.

Police patrols came under fire from a sniper, two blast bombs were thrown, police vehicles were attacked with petrol bombs and stones, and an SDLP assembly member was assaulted during 24 hours of disturbances in the Tullygally and Drumbeg areas of Armagh town.

By the end of last week some calm had been restored to the nationalist districts, although residents claimed there had been heavy-handed police raids on homes that had compounded the trouble. However, graffiti warn of more violence to come, with one message warning that anyone cooperating with police investigations into the disturbances would be shot.

Sinn Féin condemned the dissident violence and what it claimed was the overuse of force during police searches. The party’s local assembly man, John O’Dowd, a rising star, pointed out that the majority of republican voters still backed their peace strategy. Those behind the trouble “have no support in the area”, O’Dowd said. But on the Tullygally and Drumbeg estates, Sinn Féin faces a new political opposition led by some of its own local stalwarts.

Following last week’s disturbances local Lurgan republican Colin “Collie” Duffy rushed to Craigavon to support residents who he claimed had been at the sharp end of police raids.

Duffy, 41, left Sinn Féin and joined a political organisation known as éirígí, which was founded by disaffected Sinn Féin members who opposed the party’s decision to recognise and support the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He described the violence in Craigavon as a “symptom of the fact that people are not prepared to accept the British occupation of Ireland in the shape of the PSNI/RUC”.

The 41-year-old republican has been joined in éirígí by a famous republican face from the North Armagh area, ex-Sinn Féin councillor Brendan McKenna who fought for the rerouting of the annual loyalist Drumcree march in Portadown.

Éirígí supporters are alleged to be engaged in a graffiti campaign throughout republican redoubts in Northern Ireland. One encapsulates the disillusionment of some ex-Sinn Féin and former IRA activists over support for the police. Sprayed in silver paint, it says: “PSNI - 17% Catholic. 100% Unionist.”