SAOIRSE32

….or ‘A SWIM FOR EVERY COUNTY!’

**My friend Sharon over at 1169 and Counting… asked if I would post this from their site, and I am more than happy to do so. Please do what you can, and also please stop by Sharon’s site to say hello and to get your daily dose of Irish republican history. It’s important now more than ever.

1169 and Counting…

It began - properly structured and organised - in 1976,as a ‘fundraiser with a difference’ combined with the need to gain extra publicity for a situation which was then - as now - making world headlines. Those who sat down together in early September 1976 to tighten-up the then ‘hit-and-miss’ affair were a dedicated team who fully understood that to fail in their business would not only bring derision on them and the issue they sought to highlight, but would give their enemy a publicity coup which they would exploit to the fullest extent. With that in mind, the team persevered - favours were called-in, guarantees were secured, provisions obtained and word dispatched to like-minded individuals in the near-locale. At the appointed time on the agreed day - 12 Noon, Christmas Day 1976 - a soon-to-be 32-years-young event was ‘born’…

The CABHAIR Christmas Day Swim is, thankfully, still going strong and will be, as mentioned, 32-years-young on December 25th next!

Photographs of last years event can be viewed >>here and, if you can’t make it to the actual swim itself, you might consider posting a donation to the following address (please note that all monies raised go to the republican prisoners themselves and to their families - no expenses or admin fees etc are removed):

CABHAIR
Irish Republican Prisoners Dependants Fund
223 Parnell Street,
Dublin 1,
Ireland

Thank You,
Go Raibh Maith Agat,
Sharon

Tribune.ie
**Via Newshound
October 5, 2008

Forty years ago today (5th Oct), a Bogside demo sparked a huge campaign for equality. Suzanne Breen spoke to the movement’s unsung heroes

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Civil Rights leaders under the banner as it was carried through Derry, 40 years ago this week

He remembers them gathering on the streets of Derry, full of naïve optimism, their banners lighting up the dismal streets. ‘One man, one vote’, ‘Jobs and houses’, and ‘End the Special Powers Act’, they declared. They were a motley crew of students, housewives, workers and revolutionaries.

Those who knew the words were singing ‘We Shall Overcome’. The civil rights marchers were chatting about which team would win the Irish league match at the Brandywell when the police laid into them. “They baton-charged us,” says Willie Breslin. “Charlie Morrison, a bricklayer, was so badly beaten, he couldn’t work for a month.

————————————————————————————
Civil rights activists clash with police

“Matt Harkin’s back was a mess. A policeman made a go for my testicles but I raised my knee in time so he only got my thigh. Four police officers beat a wee man until he fell to the ground, then they picked him up and threw him over a wall. He suffered a broken leg and arm. But it didn’t deter us.

“There were only 400 marching – far more people were at the Brandywell for the football. But when we held the same demonstration six weeks later, 20,000 were there. People were saying, ‘We won’t accept this, enough is enough.’ They were giving two fingers, with both hands, to the government.”

It’s 40 years ago today since the Derry march which brought the blatant discrimination and oppression in the North to world attention. Civil rights leaders – Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann, Ivan Cooper and Michael Farrell – became household names. Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt were already well-known politicians and others, like John Hume, became so.

But it was ordinary men and women who were the backbone of the movement. Even today, they remain the unsung heroes and heroines. Willie Breslin, a 28-year-old teacher on 5 October, 1968, describes himself as a “hod carrier” of the civil rights movement.

“Derry was 73% Catholic but it was run by unionists. There were 2,400 families on the housing list but in two years they built only 22 new homes. There was a policy to keep Catholics homeless or in rented accommodation because only householders had the vote in local government elections,” Breslin says.

“The Wilson family lived in a caravan. They had no electricity, running water or toilet. Mrs Wilson gave birth to a baby who died eight hours later. The doctor blamed the awful living conditions. A group of us pulled the caravan onto the middle of the Lecky Road in protest.

“The police came and everybody was arrested except myself and another fellow. He was a civil servant and I was a teacher. Arresting us would have backfired: they wanted to give the impression that all the protestors were unemployed layabouts.”

Dermy McClenaghan was a 26-year-old dental technician and Derry Labour Party member who helped John Hume carry some of those injured on 5 October into Cassoni’s Italian restaurant. His civil rights passion was intense.

Dermy McClenaghan

“We lived in horrendous conditions in the Bogside,” he says. “Our house was riddled with damp and so badly wired that you got electric shock if you touched the wall. My father died of TB. I saw it as a family tragedy and as political – he wouldn’t have died had we decent housing.”

McClenaghan did what he could to help others who were living in slums or homeless. “I had my own housing list of the most desperate families. When I heard a house became available somewhere, I’d move a family in to squat. I’d an electrician, a joiner, a plumber, step-ladders and a bag of tools. We’d go along and do up the house to make it habitable.”

Despite the seriousness of the campaign, McClenaghan also remembers the crack and camaraderie: “Jan Palach burned himself to death in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in protest as Russian tanks rolled in. A man in Derry threatened to burn himself to death in Derry’s Guildhall Square if he didn’t get a decent house by a certain date. He was very hard to please. When the deadline day arrived, he woke up to find six cans of petrol placed by local people on his doorstep.”

Wrong

Inez McCormack, a 21-year-old Protestant with strong security-force family connections, was an unlikely civil rights activist. “A cousin in the B Specials was shot dead during the IRA’s border campaign. I had no active knowledge of meeting or speaking to a Catholic until I was a teenager. I had no sense anything was wrong with the place I lived,” she says.

After finishing college in 1968, she spent the summer in London. There, she met and fell in love with Vinnie, a Derry Catholic and civil rights activist, and became involved in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. “After what happened the Derry marchers on 5 October, I came home. There was no point in protesting about events in foreign countries while ignoring the situation in your own.”

The first demonstration she took part in was a protest in Belfast’s Shaftesbury Square: “I looked over to RUC lines and saw my cousin who was a policeman. Our eyes met but we both made the decision not to acknowledge each other. He didn’t want to know me and I didn’t want to know him.

“On the Burntollet march [in 1969], there were loyalist counter-demonstrators with nail-studded cudgels. I saw the police and thought they would act but they started chatting amicably to the counter-demonstrators. I was witnessing what later came to be called collusion.

“I remember when we reached Derry being hit with something and running into the doorway of a unionist-owned department store, screaming as the blood ran down my face, and the shop assistants laughing at my terror. They’d dehumanised me.”

McCormack, who later became president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, recalls individual acts of defiance: “I can still see my father-in-law putting on his good suit to go on a march. It was his way of dealing with the humiliation he met in his daily life, of asserting his dignity and that of his family.

“I remain in awe of women like Sadie Campbell who marched into the mayor’s parlour in Derry to demand better housing and was arrested. There was such courage from people who owned nothing, who had nothing in the world but themselves. Women who endured rather than enjoyed life, who washed the dishes, and went out to protest on the streets, and went home and washed more dishes.”

Cathy Harkin, who left school at 14 and worked in a shirt factory, was in the thick of the civil rights movement. Her son Terry, who was six years old on 5 October, 1968, recalls her coming home from the march badly bruised: “We lived with my granny. My mother sold the United Irishman newspaper. Before 5 October, I remember my mother having to sit on the street waiting for it to arrive because granny wouldn’t let it into the house.

Cathy Harkin

“After 5 October, my granny changed. All sorts of rebels and radicals were allowed to come and go from our house around the clock. Civil rights posters were made in our livingroom. The house was always full of the smell of ink and paint.

“Even though I was no age, I’d be carted to civil rights meetings in Dungannon, Strabane, and Belfast because there was no such thing as crèches or childminders. I remember making my first confession and then watching police drenching demonstrators with the water cannon.”

Bloodstains

Harkin was 10 when British paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civilians in Derry. “A few days later, my mother and I visited the home of civil rights activist Brigid Bond. I went to the bathroom and sitting there was one of the banners carried on Bloody Sunday. It was covered in bloodstains, and in the corner was a white goo which I later found out was part of the eye of one of those killed.

“I’d been an avid reader of British Commando comics. I went home, gathered them and my toy Action Men, put them into a biscuit tin and burned them all.”

Several months later, Harkin was hit with a rubber bullet while stoning the British army. While his mother went on to become one of the founder members of Women’s Aid and a staunch critic of the armed struggle, Harkin joined the INLA. Cathy Harkin died of cancer aged 45.

Her son is immensely proud of his mother and stresses that the civil rights movement wasn’t universally popular: “There were Uncle Toms in America and there were Castle Catholics here. There were plenty of fence-sitters and plenty who said the civil rights activists had brought all the trouble on themselves. But there were also more idealists than there are today. People have become less politicised and more complacent.”

Willie Breslin and Dermy McClenaghan acknowledge the North has changed significantly but insist there’s still more work to be done. “The PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) is an improvement on the RUC, there are more decent people in the force,” says Breslin. “But there remains an old Special Branch element which exerts a hold at a senior level, and crime in nationalist areas isn’t tackled adequately because some of the criminals are informers.”

Willie Breslin

Breslin regrets there is no cross-community, left-wing party. McClenaghan says “DUP antics” at Stormont show sectarianism still prevails. He believes the Belfast Agreement institutionalised sectarianism. He regrets that most jobs created in Derry are “low-paid, mind-numbing ones in call centres or the service industries.”

The establishment of the North’s Housing Executive ended most housing discrimination but there are still injustices. In north Belfast, 83% of those on the housing lists are nationalists.

Inez McCormack recently visited Catholic women living in the Seven Towers flats. “It felt like I was back in the Derry slums,” she says. “There was damp on the walls, pigeon waste on the landings, and sewage coming through the sinks.”

She is concerned about those remaining outside “the golden bubble of the new good times.” Nineteen of Northern Ireland’s top 20 most deprived areas are in north and west Belfast or Derry. Catholics make up 72% of those in the North’s 500 most deprived areas, and only 20% of those in the 500 most affluent.

McCormack’s civil rights days taught her much. “I learned when injustice exists, never accept the authorities saying ‘Now isn’t the right time for change’ or ‘We need to move slowly.’

“I discovered people can settle for reform when their own comfort is secured but you should never be satisfied until the most excluded in society get justice. I learned that injustice can provoke anger, and there’s nothing wrong with anger if used constructively. There is a great deal to be said for not knowing your place.”

Newshound
(by Liam Clarke, Sunday Times)

The Northern Ireland Policing Ombudsman is expected to clear two officers of a conspiracy to deceive the Omagh bomb trial.

Neitehr is to be prosecuted despite being accuse of perjury by Justice Weir last December when he cleared Sean Hoey of the murder of 29 people in the Real IRA’s 1998 Omagh bombing.

Prosecution lawyers alleged that Timer and Power Units (TPUs) used in 12 separate devices were so similar to the one used in the Omagh bomb that they must have been made by the same person. They argued that fibres and DNA samples found on these devices showed that the bombmaker was Hoey.

The judge dismissed this evidence, finding that forensic samples had not been properly stored and that the police had lied about wearing protective clothing. The two people accused of lying were Fiona Cooper, a civilian scenes of crimes officer who later joined the police and Philip Marshall, a detective sergeant, since promoted to the rank of Inspector.

The two examined an abandoned mortar in a van at Altmore Forest, Co Tyrone, on 12 April 2001. Cooper also examined the remains of amortar at Forkhill in 1998.

The judge suggested a wider conspiracy. “I find deliberate and calculated deception in which others concerned in the investigation and preparation of this case for trial beyond these two witnesses may also have played a part” he said. As a result, he dismissed their evidence on other points and referred matter to Al Hutchinson. the Policing Ombudsman.

Judge Weir’s comments were based on military intelligence photographs of Altmore obtained by Hoey’s defence team.

Michael Gallagher, whose son Aidan was killed in the Omagh bomb and who attended Hoey’s trial, said that the Altmore photograph showed Marshall leaning against the side of the bomb van in normal clothes. Cooper was also dressed normally. Both had told the court they used protective suits. In fact the army pictures were in fact taken after the crime scene had been closed.

In January, Brian Kerr, the chief justice of Northern Ireland, asked Weir to whom he was referring to when he said that others may have deliberately deceived the court. Weir said that he was not thinking of anyone in particular.

Earlier this year the Northern Ireland Policing Board conducted an independent inquiry. It concluded that Cooper and Marshall should not be suspended but moved to other duties pending the ombudsman’s report.

Gallagher said “if this means that a police officer and a forensic science officer had been dragged through the mire on a false premise that is an injustice … Any photographs at a crime scene should be timed and dated.” An ombudsman the report was and its findings should be released soon.”

October 6, 2008
________________

This article first appeared in the Sunday Times on October 5, 2008.

Newshound

(by Liam Clarke, Sunday Times)

A senior British civil servant reviewing Republican News – strictly in the line of duty – was surprised to see a picture of himself, hair a little longer, paunch a little shorter, being lifted bodily by the RUC from a civil rights demonstration in the late 60s. The man, who went on to join the police reserve and held many sensitive posts throughout the years of conflict, was proud to be reminded of his active role, generally seen as the launching pad for the Troubles.

Others now familiar in quite different contexts were also involved. Lord Bew, a former adviser to David Trimble and Professor of Politics at Queens University, has been prominent in the commemorations. Bew was one of forty members of the People’s Democracy movement whose march from Belfast to Londonderry was attacked by loyalist mobs and off duty police in January 1969.

Despite the diversity of the civil rights movement, which for a time caught the imagination of a generation, there is a determined effort by Sinn Féin to claim it as part of the pre-history of the Provisional IRA. A T-shirt on sale in Sinn Féin’s bookshop carries the slogan “1968-2008 The Struggle Continues” above the rising phoenix symbol of the IRA.

The precise date and time they are thinking of is 3.30 pm on October 5th 1968 and the place is Duke Street in Derry. There, a civil rights march which is frequently regarded as the starting point of the troubles took place. But was it inevitable? Or did a series of errors and wrong moves result in events that could not have been predicted?

In a pamphlet entitled “Civil Rights – Reform or Revolution” historian Ultan Gillen recently examined the period in the context of the republican movement’s “new direction” which was launched after the collapse of the border campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

After the campaign failed to attract sufficient support, the IRA and Sinn Féin concluded a non violent form of struggle which could build broad popular support for limited demands was the way forward. In co-operation with the Communist Party of Ireland and various local groups agitating on housing and human rights issues, they tried to create a broad alliance which would bring working people and the liberal left together on a reform programme.

The meeting which launched the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was held in Belfast’s International Hotel on January 29th 1967. Every political party in Northern Ireland was represented at the meeting and although Liam McMillan, the Officer Commanding the IRA in the city at the time, admitted he had enough members there to pack the executive, he held back to ensure that the movement remained broadly based.

The first executive included trades unionists, members of civil liberties groups like the Campaign for Social Justice, a representative of the Young Unionists, the Northern Ireland Labour Party, Gerry Fitt’s Republican Labour Party and the Ulster Liberals. Few of these groups are popularly remembered as founders of the civil rights movement, and a good many no longer exist.

Objectives agreed were irreproachably reformist and moderate in tone. They would defend the basic freedoms of all citizens, to protect the rights of the individual, highlight all possible abuses of power, demand guarantees for the freedom of speech, assembly and association and inform the public of their lawful rights.

Disaffected republicans – those who would soon form the Provos – regarded it with disdain and young radicals attempted to push the NICRA leadership into more radical action which would bring things to a head by confronting the Stormont government and exposing its shortcomings.

The organiser of the Duke Street march was Eamon Melaugh, later an Official republican but then a non aligned housing activist, who worked closely with Eamon McCann and the Derry Labour Party. They invited the Belfast-based NICRA leadership to sponsor the march and settled a route which would go through Derry’s walls, where normally only unionist parades were held.

NICRA, represented by communist trade union veterans like Berry Sinclair and Edwina Stewart, didn’t know Derry and missed the significance until the march was banned. Locally, John Hume advised against it and declined to attend.

NICRA tried to call it off but were forced to acquiesce when McCann and his colleagues said they would march regardless. Ivan Cooper, one of the organisers who had left the Unionist Party to join Labour, recalls that when he and McCann were briefly arrested that morning, the police warned them that they were determined to enforce the ban but then released them in time to attend.

At Duke Street, the RUC even handed Cooper a loud hailer which he used to read out the Civil Rights demands to the demonstrators. Betty Sinclair, a communist trade union official, jailed for sedition in the 40s for publicly supporting the IRA, congratulated the crowd on their good behaviour, said they had made their point and asked them to go home. Her remarks, which were echoed by other speakers including Cooper. Buit McCann says the strategy of some local activists was “to provoke the police into over reaction” and this was easily achieved.

After placards were hurled at police lines, the RUC responded with water cannons and baton charges. Melaugh remarked prophetically: “This is the end of Stormont”.

The episode was caught on film by Gay O’Brien, an RTE cameraman, whose images went round the world. Gerry Fitt, then an MP, was seen with his shirt covered in blood. Paddy Douglas, besuited Tyrone businessman, was shown being dug in the groin by an RUC baton moments after remonstrating with an officer.

Mickey Devine, who joined the INLA and eventually died on hunger strike in 1981, said his life was “turned upside down” by O’Brien’s images. “I didn’t even know there was a Civil Rights march; I saw it on television. But that night I was down the town smashing shop windows and stoning the RUC … Within a month everyone was a political activist. I had never had a political thought in my life but now we talked of nothing else.”

Martin McGuinness, now deputy first minister at Stormont and a strong supporter of the return of policing powers, concluded that reform was impossible and took the paramilitary path. He said he was soon convinced that “justice could only be achieved in the context of a 32 county united Ireland”. The unionist regime and loyalist paramilitaries, claiming that they faced an IRA and communist takeover, responded viciously. IRA dissidents seized their chance to recruit youths like McGuinness and Devine, and within months, the promising cross community alliance forged by NICRA had been replaced by sectarian paranoia and violence.

This outcome was neither inevitable nor even likely. Sinclair and Cooper might have been obeyed, the police might have held back and the Stormont government might have kept a cooler head in the months that followed. Nobody could have predicted that a movement for equal rights would spark 30 years of violence.

Ironically, NICRA was one of the most successful political movements in the history of Ireland. Its demands were all met by the mid 70s and now no party would suggest that measures it championed, such as equality of opportunity and one man one vote, should be rescinded.

Former members of NICRA are proud of their roles; many who poured scorn on it are now scrambling to claim its legacy.

Yet, thanks to a series of flukes and misjudgements, the short lived movement will always be remembered as the spark which lit the bonfire that claimed more than 3,000 lives.

The deepest irony of all is that the IRA campaign, far from being the culmination of the civil rights project turned out to be its grave-digger.

October 6, 2008
________________

This article first appeared in the Sunday Times on October 5, 2008.

Derry Journal
06 October 2008

The mother of the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has died.

Peggy McGuinness passed away peacefully earlier today at her home in Elmwood Street in Derry’s Bogside.

Mr McGuinness, MP for Mid-Ulster, and his mother were exceptionally close and were often pictured together. Earlier this year photos of the pair taken on Derry’s Walls featured in an exhibition celebrating family life.

Pre-deceased by her husband, William, Peggy is survived by her children Thomas, Martin, Paul, Geraldine, William, Declan and John.

Her funeral will take place on Wednesday at 11.15am in St. Columba’s Church, Longtower.

…but hardman denies he is behind smear campaign

By Ciaran McGuigan
Sunday Life
Sunday, 5 October 2008

A Loyalist quizzed in relation to a string of brutal murders has denied he is behind a XXX-rated smear campaign against his former lover.

Hardcore homemade movies featuring the former loyalist hardman and his beautician ex-lover, who runs a salon in Dungiven, were distributed to businesses throughout strongly nationalist Co Derry town.

Mark Fryer (46) leaving Limavady Court where he is accused of breaching a non-molestation order taken by his former partner Lisa Ferris.

The mucky DVDs were posted anonymously through the letterboxes of local firms after the couple went through a messy split.

The racy films — featuring Mark Fryer, a one-time close associate of the UDA’s ‘Brigadier of Bling’ Jim Gray, and Fryer’s ex Lisa Ferris — spread like wildfire after they were also posted on a string of internet websites and ‘bluetoothed’ between mobile phones.

Sunday Life understands that police have investigated the 100 minute-long film after a number of copies were recovered from Dungiven businesses, but no criminal offence was believed to have been committed.

Said a police spokeswoman: “Police were made aware of an incident, however a crime has not been detected.”

Fryer, who told Sunday Life that he had been quizzed by cops in relation to a number of UFF murders, denies he had anything to do with the hardcore sex films being made public in a bid to embarrass his former lover.

He has been the subject of a number of non-molestation orders granted by the courts.

Fryer was due before Limavady Magistrates Court last week to fight a charge of breaching the latest order against him. District Judge Eamonn King threw out the charge when Ms Ferris failed to turn up to give evidence to the case, which had been listed to be contested.

Fryer told a Sunday Life reporter outside the court: “We had planned to get married in Bali next year and were due to go to Turkey in July to get a ring.

“But I finished it (the relationship with Ms Ferris) on May 21. From that date, she has had me arrested several times.

“This time I allegedly rung her.

“But if she has not turned up to court, what chance have I to defend myself against her allegations?”

When we asked him about the sex-tapes, Fryer denied being behind the bid to smear his former lover.

He added: “She asked me to leave back a number of music CDs and some DVDs and I left them in her garage. Anyone could have taken them — I had nothing to do with it.”

When Sunday Life asked Ms Ferris why she had not turned up to court to give evidence, she said she had not known a hearing had been scheduled. And when we asked her about the tapes, Ms Ferris claimed: “That’s not the worst thing Mark has done — they’re fairly minor.”

Fryer told Sunday Life that he had fled to the North West after being interviewed by detectives investigating a number of loyalist murders. The east Belfast man, who was close to former UDA brigadier Gray, was interviewed about the horrific doorstep murder of Arthur Berryman.

Mr Berryman (46) was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack at his Imperial Street home on October 31, 2001.

Gray’s right-hand-man William ‘Spud’ Murphy was charged with his murder. Fryer had been expected to give evidence against him, but the case collapsed.

BBC
06 Oct 2008

Police in Fermanagh have described a device found near the border at the weekend as a “roadside bomb”.

The bomb was found at Wattlebridge near Newtownbutler on Saturday after two separate telephoned warnings to police.

Chief Inspector Alywin Barton said: “I believe police officers were the intended target, but roadside bombs are indiscriminate.”

A security alert is still ongoing in the area, as police and army bomb experts examine the scene.

Ulster Unionist MLA Tom Elliot said dissident republicans in Fermanagh may be getting help from “mainstream republicanism”.

“You just don’t carry these attacks out with a small group,” he said.

Mr Eliott called for “limited Army personnel” to support the police in the area.

“Obviously the dissidents are being blamed, however I just believe there’s a lot more of these people in the area in these operations than was maybe first envisaged by security forces,” he said.

BBC
06 Oct 2008

Taxi drivers in Belfast are campaigning to be allowed to carry pepper spray so they can defend themselves against violent passengers.

Public hire drivers say drastic action is needed to cut down on the number of attacks on drivers.

The drivers claim more and more drivers are being assaulted by passengers and say some are even being threatened with knives and guns.

They have also called for tougher laws to punish violent passengers.

BBC
06 Oct 2008

Friends of murdered schoolboy Michael McIlveen tried to save him from being assaulted by a gang but were held back by a youth wielding a baseball bat.

A witness told the jury at Antrim Crown Court that he saw a crowd of 10 to 15 people running down an alleyway, where the teenager was beaten and kicked.

The witness, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he and some other people locked themselves in a garden.

Michael McIlveen died after being attacked by a gang in May 2006

He said they tried to go back out but a “baseball bat came through (the gate).”

The witness told the jury he saw one of the defendants, 22-year-old Christopher Francis Kerr, of Carnduff Drive in Ballymena, in the alleyway and that he “sort of had his hand up his top” as if he was hiding something.

Shortly afterwards he heard someone shout “do it Merv.”

Mervyn Wilson Moon, 20, of Douglas Terrace in Ballymena, has already pleaded guilty to a charge of murder and will be sentenced at the end of the trial.

The witness told the court that after the attack, Michael McIlveen was sitting up against a wall with a bloodied face.

He also said he thought Michael had a bottom tooth missing.

The witness said the teenager did not want an ambulance and managed to pull himself up and walk away.

During a cross examination by Richard Weir, QC, who is defending 19-year-old Jeff Colin Lewis, of Rossdale in Ballymena, the witness confirmed he had not heard anyone in the attacking group making sectarian comments and that he had not seen any weapons, other than the baseball bat that was used to break the garden gate.

The lawyer also put it to him that a pathologist’s report would state that Mr McIlveen did not have any teeth knocked out adding: “It’s an example of you being prepared to state something that is perhaps not right.”

However, another witness, who can not be named for legal reasons, told the jury that he saw “a couple” of the gang carrying “pole shaped things… sticks and stuff”.

He also identified Mr Kerr as being part of this group, but confirmed he did not know who the accused was at the time.

During a cross examination by Laurence McCrudden QC, who is defending Mr Kerr, it was put to the witness that Ballymena was “alive” with talk about the incident and his evidence had been “formed and contaminated by talk, gossip and rumour”.

The witness rejected this stating: “It definitely has not.”

The case continues.

BBC
06 Oct 2008

The mother of Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has died at the age of 84.

Peggy McGuinness died at her Elmwood Street home in Derry on Monday, Sinn Fein announced.

First Minister Peter Robinson told the Assembly that anyone who spoke to Mr McGuinness would know how close he was to his mother.

SDLP leader and Foyle MP Mark Durkan said Mrs McGuinness was “a very kindly woman with real charm”.