SAOIRSE32

By Bernie Wright - Greyhound Action Ireland
Indymedia.ie
18 Oct 2008

Budget results: Old folks nil; Greyhounds 13mil.

13 million for Greyhound Industry while the old suffer more hardship

The IGB is and has been in receipt of Irish taxpayers funds through the Department of Finance’s exchequer since 2001.

Horse and Greyhound racing has been awarded these funds through the Horse & Greyhound fund which totalled 75million last year, of which the Greyhound sector received 13 million in this budget. (Of course BIFFO has been a regular visitor to the tracks.)
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Mutilated ears of unwanted greyhound
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The 2009 budget resulted in a cut of 9%, a slight reduction of 1.5 million. Yet this money if diverted would go a long way towards genuine needy causes.
Greyhound Racing has received 106 million of taxpayers money since 2001.A disgrace when you consider our Health Service or the cut in medical cards services for the over 70s.
‘We call on taxpayers to push for an end to greyhound Industry grants in Ireland, especially in light of the current financial crisis.

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The tragic fate of many greyhounds…IF they survive
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The Greyhound Racing Industry is not a national cultural institution, but an example of severe animal abuse. Thousands of animals are drugged, injured, mutilated or killed annually. Also the lack of an underage limit at tracks encourages underage gambling with children as young as seven years witnessed betting their Holy Communion money.
Greyhound racing is a shame to any modern state and should be abolished, not rewarded by tax-payer’s money.’ BernieWright,
spokesperson GAI.

Phone 087 2651720. Link: www.greyhoundaction.org.uk

Derry Journal
17 October 2008

An appeal has been made to open up a network of secret passages under Derry’s historic walls.

The fabled tunnels are said to have been used by Irish Chieftain, Owen Roe O’Neill to negotiate with the Parliamentarians during the ‘forgotten’ siege of Derry in 1649.

Now, centuries after the passages were sealed, there have been calls to open them up as a major tourism draw to the city.

Former Navy Commander Peter Campbell, of The Honourable The Irish Society - who can trace his family history to the architect of Derry’s walls in the 1620s (Peter Benson) - has appealed for the passages to be promoted as part of the city’s rich heritage.

“What I do think is we ought to open them up because everyone loves a secret passage. I think it would be terrific have it opened up - it would have great tourist potential.”

A spokesperson for the Northern Ireland Environment Agency’s Built Heritage department, which has guardianship of the walls, confirmed that there were many reports of “siege tunnels”.

However, she explained that many are in “private ownership and in variable condition”, making it “difficult” to open them to the public.

However, the NIEA is currently looking at making one tunnel more publicly accessible - the Sally-port which runs through the walls in the area of St. Columb’s Cathedral.

“NIEA and Derry City Council have recently been giving consideration as to how this important part of the history of the walls can be made more accessible for the public and would hope to address this issue in the near future.”

BBC

Anti-abortion campaigners are to gather at Stormont later for a rally against an attempt by some MPs to change the law on abortion in Northern Ireland.

An amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill would extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.

Alliance Party assembly member Anna Lo, who is pro-choice, told Inside Politics the amendment was “the last chance to liberalise the law on abortion”.

The abortion amendment is due to be debated in the Commons on Wednesday.

However, reports from Westminster suggest the government may use a procedural motion to push it to the back of the queue, in the hope that MPs will run out of time before voting on it.

Ms Lo said: “I think that would be very sad for Northern Ireland, I think this is the only chance for a long, long time for Northern Ireland to have this liberal law.”

The reason abortion law can be dealt with at Westminster rather than Stormont is that it is considered a matter of criminal justice.

MLA Dr Kieran Deeny, who opposes abortion, said this was another reason why justice powers should be devolved.

“If there ever was a medical reason for us to have police and justice powers devolved to Northern Ireland quickly, this is it,” he said.

“And we should have that done as quickly as possible for the sake of our unborn children.”

Saturday’s “Rally for Life” at Stormont is backed by anti-abortion campaigners, politicians and church leaders.

A smaller event organised by supporters of the Westminster amendment is expected to take place in the centre of Belfast.

IAIS
10/17/08

Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness have had separate meetings in Dublin with the Irish premier, Brian Cowen.

Afterwards both sides said they were working to resolve their differences over the devolution of policing and justice powers.

Mr Robinson denied there was any disagreement between himself and Nigel Dodds on the matter.

He said he suspected that “every member of the DUP was at one on this issue”.

“We are all being guided by the same policy document, our manifesto, and a second policy document that came out during the election which sets out very clearly what the party’s policy is on policing and justice matters,” he said.

The meeting was Mr Robinson’s first with Mr Cowen in Dublin since the two men became first minister and taoiseach respectively.

After his meeting with Mr Cowen, Mr McGuinness said: “We need to bring it to a final conclusion and we need to see a will on all sides to revolve the difficulties that lie at the heart of this problem.”

“For us, what lies at the heart of this problem is the need for people to sign up for it, a partnership approach based on equality.”

BBC
17 Oct 2008

BBC Radio Ulster looks back on the broadcasting ban brought in by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1988

William Crawley
BBC Radio Ulster

It began as a new counter-terrorism strategy aimed at silencing the apologists for terror and denying them the oxygen of publicity.

That, at least, is how the prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, and her home secretary, Douglas Hurd, defended their decision, in October 1988, to introduce some of the most stringent controls imposed on the broadcast media since World War Two.

The broadcasting ban, or ‘Restrictions’ as they were officially known, extended to 11 republican and loyalist organisations believed to support terrorism, but many believed that Sinn Féin and the IRA were the main targets.

At best, it could be said that it was a half-hearted censorship.

Newspapers would be permitted to carry statements from those organisations, and television news programmes would be permitted to show images of spokesmen at press conferences, but their voices would have to be removed.

With 20 years’ worth of hindsight, Douglas Hurd now says he accepts that the ban soon became enormously counter-productive.

Not least because broadcasters quickly found a way to subvert the terms of the new law by having actors re-voice the words spoken by Sinn Féin spokesmen.

‘Back door’

When a similar ban had been introduced by the Republic of Ireland in 1971, the Irish government saw to it that their prohibition could not be circumvented by this kind of dubbing.

Unaccountably, when the British government introduced its restrictions, in the wake of a major atrocity, it left a legislative back door open which journalists soon used as a route to get their story out.

Satirists lampooned the ban, free speech campaigners across the world questioned the Thatcher government’s commitment to democratic values, and even the reputation of the BBC, as a politically independent broadcaster, suffered.

Despite the legislations’ loopholes and the reaction against it, Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s former director of publicity, maintains that the ban, which remained in place for six years, seriously frustrated Sinn Féin’s media strategy at the time and ultimately harmed the party electorally.

In the BBC Radio Ulster programme The War Of The Words, I talk to some of the key players in this curious episode in history of the Troubles about how the ban came about and what effect it had on the emerging political peace process.

Did it eventually become a bargaining chip in the negotiations leading to the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993, and given the role of the media in the so-called ‘war on terror’, could such a ban should be re-introduced today?

• ‘The War Of The Words,’ presented by William Crawley and produced by Owen McFadden, is on BBC Radio Ulster on Saturday, 18 October at 1130 BST.

Belfast Telegraph
18 Oct 2008

The INLA has the Provisional IRA on the run - behind bars. An INLA leader delivered a vicious beating to the Provos’ last remaining inmate in Portlaoise, spy Kenny Donohoe.

The Provo was left so traumatised by the hiding that he has turned to the Continuity IRA in the maximum security jail for protection.

The PIRA leadership has threatened to kill the INLA man who carried out the assault but sources say “he is laughing the whole thing off”.

“They’re not the first or last people to threaten to kill him. He’s not a bit worried,” the source said.

Prison staff at Portlaoise maximum security jail are already on high alert following renewed tensions after the INLA and CIRA caused disturbances and threw human waste at the governor.

Meanwhile, sources said Kenny Donohoe is a worried man after the assault on him, which has caused huge embarrassment for the Provo leadership.

“It shows they can’t look after their own any more. That is a huge embarrassment to them,” said a source.

Donohoe (29) is a convicted IRA member and is believed to be the is the last remaining provisional prisoner at the midlands jail.

He was jailed for four years for membership of the IRA in 2004. He was also the subject of a garda investigation into a spy network set up targeting TD’s. During his trial along side his co-accused Niall Bennett (36) the court heard that gardai found a list of TDs, including three former Justice Ministers, at Bennett’s home.

Paramilitary prisoners from the Real IRA and INLA joined forces to challenge staff at Portlaoise in a dispute over the searching of cells.

The dirty-style protest involved full chamber pots being thrown at staff, forcing the closure of a food preparation.

And tensions at the prison were only brought under control when two inmates were released from segregation cells they were being held in.

The disturbance began on Sunday morning when the cells of a number of INLA inmates were searched on the E4 landing of the maximum security jail. A makeshift knife was found in one of the searched cells. The search and seizure led to tempers being flared.

The INLA inmates were unhappy that the searches had taken place claiming they had been singled out for “special treatment”.

A protest resulted in prisoners throwing the contents of their chamber pots on to the landing of their wing. When other prisoners were asked to clean the area, they were threatened by the INLA group.

A spokesman for the Irish Prison Service said the protest was “minor” and “non violent” and that it had been dealt with quickly and in a non-confrontational manner.

FINOLA MEREDITH
Irish Times
18 Oct 2008

There are no boundaries uncrossed in the Northern Ireland Political Collection’s fascinating exhibition

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FILCHED FROM lamp-posts and ripped from walls, the posters currently on display at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast offer a powerful snapshot guide to the Troubles. There are no nuances here - the words and imagery are blunt, harsh, and in your face.

Examples vary: a pile of human skulls and the bleak legend “Remember Derry”; a carbonised corpse from the 1978 La Mon restaurant bombing with the slogan “this is what the bombers did to a human being”; a loyalist prisoner’s head in silhouette, bowed before a watchtower, with the simple message “bring our prisoners home”.

On show to mark the 40th anniversary of the Northern Ireland Political Collection (NIPC) at the library, these posters - representing every political persuasion - were the visual frontline of the conflict: designed to evoke gut reactions and to inspire ideological fervour, they are essentially an evolved form of street art, a step up from the gable-end scrawl.

As Danny Morrison, former Sinn Féin publicity director, noted, posters had “a crucial role and a function in mobilising” during the Troubles, carrying an unparalleled visceral force and impact.

If many of these images have all the subtlety of a smack in the eye, others have a distinct aesthetic appeal. Anarchist John McGuffin’s 1969 poster of a red hand clenched in a fist, crushing Parliament Buildings to smithereens, with the slogan “Smash Stormont”, was the first of the Troubles to call for the overthrow of the Unionist state - anticipating what became a familiar Republican demand. Ironically, the image has a curious delicacy; it was produced using a silkscreen printing technique that McGuffin learned in Paris in May 1968.

Other posters are simply bizarre: one Northern Ireland Office poster shows children’s road-safety character Tufty incongruously toddling down a bombed-out street, with the message “don’t play in empty buildings - they could be very dangerous”.

While this extraordinary range of posters may be the most familiar outer face of the renowned Political Collection, true aficionados of the archive know that many more fascinating items lurk within. Begun in 1968, when the then librarian Jimmy Vitty decided to file away a civil-rights pamphlet he was handed in a bar, the collection now contains 300,000 documents, pamphlets and artefacts that provide a fantastically detailed insight into the Troubles. It numbers Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley among its avowed fans, not to mention Brad Pitt, who in 1995 popped in to read up on the hunger strikers. Countless researchers, politicians and academics have spent hours here, wading through the strange minutiae of the conflict.

Richard English, professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast, and author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, describes it as “invaluable - utterly unique as a comprehensive archive of the Troubles. Nowhere else holds contemporary archive material from all sides - from the INLA to the LVF and everything in between.” The scope of the collection is key to its appeal, agrees commentator Davy Adams: “The really impressive thing is the initiative to hang on to virtually everything”.

Sinn Féin’s Tom Hartley, Lord Mayor of Belfast, has been a friend to the collection for many years: “If there was a report, a poster, a leaflet or a pamphlet, I tried to get a copy to put in the collection. This stuff maps out our whole history: from civil rights to internment to the Anglo-Irish agreement and beyond.”

CURIOSITIES OF THE collection include babies’ propaganda bibs, emblazoned with “proud to be a Prod”, a lollipop in the shape of a foot, with the inscribed invitation to “Kick the Pope”, and a letter of support from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Bobby Sands. And, to mark the 40th anniversary, there are exhibits on display for the first time - a PSNI application pack, sent to Mr P O’Neill at 52 Falls Road (the address of Sinn Féin’s Belfast office), and a loyalist medal commemorating the “Siege of Drumcree” (closer inspection shows that the engravers mis-spelled it “seige”). One particularly striking item is the “comm”, or prison letter, that ended the 1981 Hunger Strike: a flimsy document, covered in tiny script.

The library’s independence has been a key factor in accumulating this store of peculiar treasure. Freedom from bureaucratic constraints, as well as what the NIPC librarian Yvonne Murphy calls a position of “engaged neutrality”, has allowed the library a free hand in documenting the conflict. But it’s easy to forget that collecting such controversial, seditious and sometimes illegal material could be quite a challenge.

One of the most fascinating items on display in the library is a signed note of authorisation from a British army general, dated 1977, giving permission for librarian “Miss Paula Howard” to “carry examples of political propaganda from Dublin to Belfast for the purposes of exhibition”.

Contacts in the Unionist establishment helped the library acquire a special dispensation, allowing it to circumvent the Special Powers Act, which made the possession of pro-paramilitary publications a prosecutable offence. There was little surprise when the collection quickly became known as the “illegal deposits library”.

As far as Dr Kris Brown, a researcher at the University of Ulster and former worker at the Political Collection, is concerned, it’s the lesser-known ephemera that is the greatest strength of the archive. The political collection has preserved the material culture of the conflict, much of which, as Brown points out, was never designed to have any kind of shelf life. “News sheets, bulletins that were little more than two or four sheets stapled together - this intensely creative ‘mosquito press’ offers a micro-level documentary of the conflict. It seems so cheap and ephemeral, but it really is life under a lens.”

Bleak humour, forceful propaganda, weird kitsch: the Political Collection holds a mirror up to Northern material culture in all its many moods.

• Troubled Images is at the Vertical Gallery, Linen Hall Library, Belfast until October 28th

Belfast Telegraph
Saturday, 18 October 2008

A top loyalist seeking to ban the media from disclosing his new identity and whereabouts has succeeded in his bid to be screened from public view when he gives evidence in court.

But a judge also ruled that a small number of people who may be called to testify about Mark Haddock’s alleged crime regime will be allowed to sit close enough to the witness box to view him.

Haddock, who was at the centre of a major police collusion case, is due to be freed from prison within months after serving a 10-year sentence for attacking a nightclub doorman.

Amid claims that he is under imminent death threat, he wants an injunction to stop the disclosure of any future address of him and his partner, photographs of the pair and any change of identity.

With the north Belfast man set to give evidence in person when his case is heard at the High Court next month, he applied to have himself shielded from public view when he attends.

His lawyers argued that he has attempted to disguise himself in a bid to escape identification by any would-be assassins.

They said an attempt on his life was inevitable if he stayed in Northern Ireland after his release, and disclosed that police warned him in June of a high level of threat to his life.

Haddock’s altered appearance — which does not involve cosmetic surgery — was partly due to the physical impact of injuries from a previous gun attack, the court was told. He is also in the process of changing his name by deed poll as part of his security arrangements.

But John Larkin QC, for the BBC and The Irish News, argued that his clients should be allowed to call people who may recognise Haddock by appearance and could identify him as being involved in serious crime.

Ruling on the screening application, Mr Justice Deeny said he was satisfied there was enough evidence to show Haddock will be at real risk of attack in the near future when released from prison.

The judge said: “If he appears in a public court to pursue his action, without special order, any member of the public, including persons bearing ill towards him, would be able to come in and study his appearance over a period of time while he was examined and cross-examined.

“I will grant the plaintiff the application sought that he be screened at the hearing of this civil action, save that he be visible not only to the judge and court officials but to the legal advisors on both sides and to a very small number of persons chosen by Mr Larkin QC on behalf of the defendants.” Mr Justice Deeny said this limited group could sit close enough to the witness box to see Haddock.

“At least one of them, and I do not specify more exactly, will be a potential witness against him but one or more of the mothers may not be,” he added.

“This addresses the point made by Mr Larkin that the plaintiff will be able to see these potential witnesses and that as he has been described as a dangerous man by Mr Justice Weatherup and convicted of a serious offence, the court should address the legitimate concerns of those witnesses.

Haddock was shot up to six times in Newtownabbey, Co Antrim while out on bail in 2006.