SAOIRSE32

Breaking News.ie
19/10/2008

A cross-border parliamentary group is calling on the British government to release crucial information on the Omagh bombing.

The emergency motion, proposed by Fine Gael TD Brian Hayes, will be debated tomorrow at a meeting of the British-Irish inter-parliamentary body.

The group wants British authorities to disclose transcripts on the 1998 bombing to the families so that it can be used in their ongoing court action against five people.

Breaking News.ie
19/10/2008

Government Minister Eamon O Cuiv will today unveil a plaque in the New York church where his grandfather, Eamon de Valera, was baptised more than a century ago.

The former president and Taoiseach was christened in St Agnes’ Church near Grand Central Station in Manhattan in December 1887.

The building was nearly destroyed in a fire in 1992 but its baptismal font and entire stock of birth records survived.

New York-born de Valera stayed in contact with the Manhattan parish throughout his life.

Unveiling the plaque to his grandfather, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Minister Mr O Cuiv said today: “It is an honour for me and my family that this historic church in the centre of New York has chosen to pay tribute to my grandfather.”

The minister is in New York as part of an official three-state visit to the US.

The itinerary included a visit to Portland in Maine where the Galway TD opened the Maine Irish Heritage Centre and was awarded the keys of the city by Mayor Edward Suslovic.

Mr O Cuiv also attended the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Mayo County Association of Boston.

He followed in the footsteps of de Valera who visited Boston as Irish president in 1919 to seek support for Irish independence and addressed 60,000 people in Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox baseball team.

Mr O Cuiv also officiated at the Catholic Memorial High School in Boston where the Christian Brothers teach Irish as a regular curriculum subject.

During his US trip, Mr O Cuiv will brief representatives of Irish communities on issues such as immigration reform and his new role as chairman of the Government’s Irish Famine Commemoration Committee.

Breaking News.ie
19/10/2008 - 12:47:59

A rare first edition of the renowned WB Yeats poem ‘Easter 1916′ could fetch up to €4000 when it goes under the hammer this week.

It is one of just 25 copies privately published by an English journalist the year after the rising and distributed among only a select number of people for fear of its political impact.

Written between May and September 1916, the poem sets out Yeats’ mixed feelings on the tumultuous event.

Adam’s auctioneers in Dublin is holding the sale on Tuesday evening.

Director David Britton said the copy, which belongs to a private collector in the capital, will appeal to both Yeats enthusiasts and historians.

“There is a first edition copy in the National Library and one in the British Library but the whereabouts of the other 22 copies is unknown,” Mr Britton said.

“For these reasons, this copy is undoubtedly rare and will be sought-after by avid WB Yeats and Irish history enthusiasts alike and we expect it to sell well.”

The poem was completed by Yeats in September 1916 in Coole Park, Co Galway - the centre of the Irish literary revival in the early 20th century and once home to Lady Augusta Gregory, dramatist, folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.

Just 25 copies were privately published in 1917 by the English liberal journalist Clement Shorter, but it was not made available to the wider public until the New Statesman published it three years later.

Mr Britton added: “Yeats was in England during the Easter Rising and his initial reactions to the battle were undecided.

“He disapproved of violence as a means of securing home rule, and although he knew and respected many of the leaders he was mistrusting of their inclinations.

“When the surrender was followed by a wave of executions, deportations and imprisonments, he accurately foresaw what the effect would be on Irish public opinion and denoted it in this momentous poem.”

This particular first edition copy is signed by the publisher and is expected to net between €3000 and €4000 in Adam’s 19th and 20th Century Art and Literature Sale on Tuesday evening in Dublin.

The courts have found Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy to be a criminal with a mafia-style empire, writes Jim Cusack

By Jim Cusack
Sunday Independent
Sunday October 19 2008

**FYI - live links onsite

IF you use Google Earth to look at Ballybinaby and its environs in south Armagh where the “good republican” (as Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams described Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy) lives, you will see a countryside dotted with large sheds, many with a dozen or more trucks parked in their yards.

Once the home of small farmers scraping a living on the poor soil of south Armagh, the area has now become the personal fiefdom of Murphy, who has overseen its growth into a revenue black hole where wholesale smuggling and fuel laundering has created a part of Ireland which now deserves its once derided Fleet Street tag of “bandit country”.

Ask the family or friends of the young local man, Paul Quinn, who was beaten to death with iron bars in October last year, how they feel about living under the weight of the south Armagh IRA.

He was murdered because he had the temerity to confront one of Murphy’s lieutenants who had insulted Quinn’s younger sister.

No independent witness has come forward to further the case against the 12 main suspects who cornered Quinn and two friends in a shed near Hackballscross and beat him to death.

They are too afraid.

The oppression of people living in south Armagh is the same as that felt by Neopolitan Italians living under the yoke of the Camorra mafiosi. Stand up to them and they will kill you, or one of your family.

The south Armagh “brigade” who remained loyal to Murphy have become millionaires through the sharing of the millions of euros and sterling earned through the illicit trade that passes through the area. Beside the big sheds or on sites bought for their hillside views the local “good republicans” have built mansions — many with the gauche neo-classical ornamenture. Their wives drive top-of-the range 4X4s to do their shopping in that very English retail institution, Sainsburys in Newry, as every good Irish republican should.

In what may yet turn out to be an important moment in modern Irish history, last Friday, the High Court in Dublin and Manchester Crown Court found that the Good Republican was, in fact, a common criminal.

In Manchester, lawyers for Slab Murphy informed the court that he has agreed to hand over nine houses in the Trafford and Stretford areas of the city as part payment of a settlement of £1m (€1.28m), having agreed that the properties were criminal assets. The court heard the houses, in somewhat undesirable areas of Manchester, are worth in total only around £445,000 (€572,000).

The houses in Manchester were identified during two years of investigation involving the Criminal Assets Bureau and its counterpart, the Assets Recovery Agency in the UK, prior to raids at Murphy’s farm (along with its large sheds and busy yard) at Ballybinaby, straddling the Louth-Armagh border in March 2006.

The discoveries during the raid on Murphy’s farm surprised investigators from both the gardai and PSNI. They had expected to find relatively little evidence or assets of crime about the place. Instead they found some 20 bin bags containing cash, cheques, documents, two laptops and contraband. The sterling and euro cash, cheques and money orders totalled €630,000. For a non-smoking teetotaller, Murphy may have found it hard to explain why he had 30,000 cigarettes in one of his sheds. The bachelor could also have had no explanations as to why he needed 8,000 litres of diesel to run the machinery on his 70-acre farm.

The hearings in Dublin and Manchester last Friday were limited to deciding whether or not the assets seized in the simultaneous raids in England and Ireland were criminal assets under the terms of the 1997 Proceeds of Crime Act and its legal counterpart in the UK. Both courts so found. Murphy still faces trial for tax evasion.

At the time of the raids, RTE’s Tommy Gorman asked the Sinn Fein president what he thought of Slab Murphy and the various claims about his involvement in smuggling and crime. Adams replied: “Tom Murphy is not a criminal. He’s a good republican. I read his statement after the Manchester raids. I believe what he says. He’s also, and very importantly, a key supporter of the Sinn Fein peace strategy and has been for a very long time.” The property, cash and other items referred to in Friday’s hearings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the earnings made by the IRA in south Armagh, gardai and English police believe.

The English are understood to be looking at somewhere in the region of 250 properties across England, including apartments in top addresses in London. The residential properties were long-term, low-key investments. The Manchester properties are low-value but reasonably solid long-term investments.

An apartment identified in Knightsbridge in London was typical of the unobtrusive type of investments being made. Its market value was low because it had a long-term ageing tenant on a fixed rent. The buyer would have to wait for the woman’s death to recoup a profit on its re-sale or a new lease. The property investments in England were not for profit but good, safe way of laundering tens of millions of euros/pounds made from crime in south Armagh.

The core of the south Armagh business is cigarette and fuel smuggling. The actual IRA members themselves are no longer hands-on, hiring desperate eastern Europeans to drive lorries and do the heavy work. Most of the diesel entering the area is now bought legitimately from suppliers in Dublin Port and elsewhere with VAT paid.

The dye in the agricultural diesel bought in the Republic is “washed” using highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and then resold in the North and Britain. The by-product toxic sludge is dumped on their side of the Border, creating an environmental nightmare for local councils who are spending millions a year shipping the waste out to specialist processing plants in Germany.

The comparisons with the Camorra in Italy are sometimes striking. They too have turned part of the Naples regions into an ecological disaster by dumping toxic waste, including the same chemicals used to wash the diesel in south Armagh.

Over the past two decades Sinn Fein and other politicians in the Border area have fulminated about clusters of cancers which they have attributed to the Sellafield nuclear plant across the Irish Sea. The real cause may be closer to home, closer to the work of the good republicans around Slab Murphy.

Despite his reputation as a major IRA figure, Murphy has actually been low down in interest levels of the garda Special Branch. One former senior figure described him as having a purely “fund-raising” role in the organisation. He was, however, highly capable in this role and, with no obvious sign of self-enrichment, created the wealth which helped fuel the IRA’s terrorism into the mid-1990s.

He was never prosecuted for any serious offence. He was found to have visited Greece, former Yugoslavia and the US on at least one false passport. That passport, in the name of an unwitting elderly neighbour and stolen from the Embassy in London was signed by a corrupt garda who was subsequently prosecuted and sacked.

Murphy blew his own low profile in the early 1990s when he took a failed libel action, one of a series he had intended to pursue against newspapers that had named him as a senior IRA man. One of the witnesses that gave testimony about his position and role in the IRA subsequently turned up dead on a road outside Newry, Co Down in 1999.

Eamon Collins, himself a former IRA killer, was so badly beaten that one of the police officers who examined the scene commented to colleagues that his remains looked as though they had fallen from an airplane.

–Jim Cusack