SAOIRSE32

Derry Journal
12 September 2008

Dissident republicans have made a chilling threat to execute a Derry career criminal and his cross-border gang.

Hardliners have told the ‘Journal’ that the time for talking is over as Derry hoods continue to terrorise businesses and communities in Inishowen, escaping back across the border to avoid the clutches of Gardai.

The statement was made this week amid growing fears that the burglars are planning to ‘up the ante’ in their cross-border crime campaign.

A dissident republican source sent the following sinister warning to the hoods: “People will be executed if these activities continue. Everything else has been tried and failed.

“We must look at the trauma they are causing to the community and business people from Muff to Moville - they have tortured them in recent years.

“The time for talking is over. No one wants to go down this road but if it’s needed, it’ll be done.”

The source said the criminals must choose one of two “simple options” to stay alive - either down tools or leave the area altogether.

“The wider republican community is coming under increasing pressure to finish this gang once and for all. The ball is now in their court - they will either have to move out or cease their activities. They should be advised that we are watching the situation very closely.”

BBC
12 Sept 2008

A rally was held on Thursday night by the anti-abortion group Precious Life at the Europa Hotel in Belfast.

It said it was to raise awareness of the threat of abortion being made legal in NI though an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act.

If passed in the House of Commons, it would mean women would have the same right to abortion as those in the rest of the UK.

Precious Life’s Bernadette Smyth said there was “no need for any change”.

“We value life here - the UK needs to look to Northern Ireland to see how many women in crisis are supported and helped.

“I think the UK must change their law to come in line with Northern Ireland to ensure that all unborn children in the UK are protected.”

BBC
11 Sept 2008

Harold Wilson drew up a secret plan - codenamed Doomsday - to end British rule of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, the BBC has learned.

It was previously assumed the Labour PM was fully committed to rescuing a power sharing deal in April and May 1974.

But papers unearthed by Radio 4’s Document programme suggest he was working on a more radical alternative.

He wanted to cut all constitutional ties with Northern Ireland and turn it into an independent dominion territory.

Northern Ireland residents would still be subjects of the Queen but - unlike other dominion territories around the world - the independent state would not be a member of the Commonwealth.

The Doomsday Document
Listen again to the full programme on the Document website
Presenter: Mike Thomson Producer: Patrick Gregory - >>GO HERE

The plan was detailed in the so-called “Doomsday document” - drawn up by Wilson after the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement - an attempt to end the Troubles by forcing unionists to share power with nationalists.

Secret committee

It would have been the most radical and controversial solution to The Troubles ever attempted by a British prime minister and, the programme suggests, Wilson was serious about making it a reality.

“The prime minister set up a small secret committee of officials, on which I sat, in order to pursue this idea,” said Lord Donoughue, head of Number 10’s policy unit at the time.

“It was also certainly talked of - I don’t know if they met - a small secret group of Cabinet ministers to discuss this. I remember him saying that unfortunately we couldn’t include the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, because the details would leak to the press. Wilson was always obsessed with the fact of leaks, which was very odd because the home secretary was responsible for security and IRA activity.”

Lord Donoughue said the plan showed a “radicalism that you would not normally associate with Harold Wilson” who probably saw it as part of his policy legacy.

Mr Wilson was angry about the Loyalist paramilitary-led strike crippling the Province, aimed at sinking the Sunningdale Agreement.

‘Invasion’

He was later criticised for not using the army to break the two-week Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike and rescue the agreement, bringing an end to hopes of peace for a generation.

It was assumed at the time that he was committed to saving the power-sharing Executive, despite having inherited Sunningdale from the previous Conservative government and being privately convinced it was doomed.

But the programme reveals that in the weeks leading up to and during the two-week strike - which brought the power sharing Executive down - Mr Wilson was working on his secret plan.

A leading Loyalist from the time Glen Barr, who helped lead the UWC strike, insists there would have been civil war had Mr Wilson gone ahead with it because Loyalists would have assumed there would be a take-over by Dublin.

“It would have been civil war - no doubt. Because there would have been such a chorus from the Unionists…and we probably would have had an invasion from the Irish side,” he tells the programme.

‘Inadequate army’

Garret Fitzgerald, the then Irish foreign minister who would go on to be prime minister, says if that had that happened the 12,000 strong Irish army would not have been able to deal with the resulting backlash from avenging Loyalists.

“We guessed that it would lead to chaos but we had a difficulty - if we tried to prepare for that by increasing the size of our inadequate army to protect us from that chaos, that action would have been seen by Unionists as threatening to them,” Mr Fitzgerald told the programme.

He said the Irish government had not been aware of the secret Wilson plan, but he was worried he was planning something like it.

“I think our state was more at risk then at any time since our formation,” he added.

The plan eventually faded from the picture in 1976, helped by a 1975 meeting between the Irish leadership and British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan alerting him to the potential dangers.

News Letter
12 Sept 2008

THE father of Northern Bank clerk Christopher Ward accused of being behind the million pound robbery has broken down and wept as he dismissed the prosecution case “as ludicrous”.

On Thursday, Mr Gerard Ward told Belfast Crown Court that his 26-year-old son would never have set his family up to be held captive in their own Colinmill home in Poleglass nor put his mother through such an ordeal.

His son Christopher denies the December 20 robbery four years ago and to kidnapping his bank boss Kevin McMullan and his wife Kyran.

Mr Ward snr described the men who held his family hostage for 24 hours and took away his son as “criminals, gangsters” who would stop at nothing and that he “just felt like a puppet to them”.

He also rejected a suggestion that the family had “a cosy relationship” with their captives.

“That’s completely wrong. It definitely wasn’t relaxing - it was very, very frightening,” he added.

At one stage Mr Ward broke down and wept as he recalled “trying to keep it together” for the sake of his “distraught” family.

Later he added, almost in a whisper, that his son Christopher would have known the “distress, the anguish and the heartbreak” his family were suffering at the hands of their captors.

Christopher Ward has pleaded ‘not guilty’ to a total of three charges.

The accused denies charges of robbing the bank in Belfast city centre and of imprisioning bank employee Kevin McMullan and his wife.

The robbery in 2004 was one of the biggest in British banking history and caused a furore in the political process.

PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde claimed the robbery was carried out by the IRA - which is still denied to this day by Sinn Fein.

The trial - expected to be lengthy - is being held under the Diplock system where the judge sits without a jury.

Henry McDonald
Guardian
12 Sept 2008

Tribalism makes it perilous for politicians to even float the idea of a voluntary cross-community coalition in Northern Ireland

Just to the left of one of north Belfast’s many sectarian flashpoints a new private housing estate is being built. Beside the estate off the Crumlin Road, not far from the Ardoyne shops, there is also a wall.

Henry McDonald

It is the newest of the city’s gloriously misnamed “peace walls”. This latest wall brings the number of seemingly permanent barriers dividing Protestant and Catholic communities, now lower middle class ones as well as traditional working class areas, close to 30.

The prevalence and endurance of sectarianism is not, however, reflected only in the walls that cut across streets, avenues and roads in north, west and east Belfast. At Stormont the political architecture of the current devolved assembly is also shaped almost entirely by sectarian division.

Government in Belfast is run on the lines of mandatory coalition, which forces unionist and nationalist parties to share power. In this political version of a shotgun marriage each governing party has to “designate” themselves as unionist or nationalist, orange or green. The power-sharing executive only runs if there is an equal proportion of green and orange parties sitting around the cabinet table.

This system was designed principally to assuage nationalist fears about a return to the bad old days of unionist political dominance when majority rule pre-1969 was equated with discrimination.

Because power could not be exercised without the participation of either power bloc it ensured there would be no going back to majoritarian and thus unionist rule.

Last weekend the leader of the party that originally insisted on this form of government, the SDLP, suggested that in the long run the parties at Stormont might be allowed to move away from this model.

Mark Durkan told the annual British-Irish Association meeting in Oxford that in time, perhaps, the “ugly scaffolding” (his words) could be removed. Designation could eventually be “biodegradable” as trust built up and new relations were forged across the assembly floor, Durkan said.

His words, even though he later stressed were misinterpreted, led to speculation that the SDLP saw a future where we would move from “compulsory” to “voluntary” coalition.

The Foyle MP most certainly did not say that the atmosphere or time was right now to ditch the mandatory coalition concept (born of the Good Friday agreement) but nonetheless his political opponents and some former friends in the media seized upon his remarks.

Sinn Féin pointed out that this was a retreat from the original Belfast agreement. There was even blind panic within Durkan’s own party. Some party officials expressed dismay that Durkan even dared to raise the prospect of a future where unionist and nationalist parties chose each of their partners on a voluntary basis.

Durkan’s internal critics (albeit unlike him in private rather than in full view) were furious that he had exposed a weakness in the SDLP flank that could be easily attacked by Sinn Féin.

In essence, the criticism, much of it venomous, directed at Durkan illuminates the power of tribal politics in Northern Ireland. By merely daring to gaze into the future and hint that perhaps one day there could be sufficient respect and trust to produce a government of volunteer parties Durkan faced accusations that he was not only naive but in addition disloyal to his own tribe.

The tidal pull of tribalism makes it perilous for politicians to even float the idea of a voluntary cross-community coalition. Because they will inevitably face charges from cynics and sceptics within their own tribe that you could never trust the other side to willingly enter into a power sharing arrangement without compulsion.

In that sense leaders such as Durkan are as much prisoners of history and memory as those residents on either side of the so-called “peace walls” who have consistently said in opinion polls that they would like the barriers to come down but are so fearful of the “other” that they will remain huddled behind them for decades to come.