SAOIRSE32

:::u.tv:::
15 Dec 2008

A High Court judge has dismissed a legal bid by the PSNI to be allowed to question witnesses at the inquiry into solicitor Rosemary Nelson`s murder.

The force was also seeking a ruling that any convictions or criminal associations they had should be considered by the tribunal as part of a test on their credibility.

Lawyers wanted permission to cross-examine up to nine witnesses, described as complainants, who have made allegations about police threats or abuse directed at Mrs Nelson before she was killed in a loyalist paramilitary bomb attack in March 1999.

Earlier this year the Inquiry, which was set up to examine claims of security force collusion, refused to allow any cross-examination by counsel for the PSNI.

It stressed that the proceedings were an inquisitorial - rather than adversarial - process aimed at establishing the truth.

Seeking a judicial review of that decision John Larkin QC, for the PSNI, had warned of the potentially serious consequences for officers` reputations if the claims made against them were backed by the tribunal.

But Lord Justice Girvan dismissed the application, arguing the court should not interfere with the Inquiry`s original decision.

Mrs Nelson, 40, who represented a number of high profile clients in the nationalist Garvaghy Road residents involved in the Drumcree marching dispute, died in a booby-trap car bomb explosion near her home in Lurgan, Co Armagh.

Retired judge Sir Michael Morland is chairing a three-member panel which must determine whether the then Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland Office, Army or other state agency facilitated the murder, or blocked attempts to investigate it.

BBC

A Rangers fan has been given two years probation and a football banning order for singing the ‘Famine Song’.

Walls committed the offence during Rangers’ away match to Kilmarnock

William Walls, 20, was found guilty of breach of the peace, aggravated by religious and racial prejudice, at Kilmarnock District Court.

The offence was committed at Rangers’ away match at Kilmarnock on 9 November.

Rangers have asked fans to not to sing the song, which refers to events that killed an estimated one million people in Ireland in the 1840s.

Speaking after sentence, Kilmarnock District Procurator Fiscal, Les Brown, said: “The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service takes all instances of racism and bigotry very seriously.

“We will prosecute in court all offences which are aggravated by racial or religious prejudice.

“In this case we worked closely with both police officers who were present at Rugby Park and senior officers to ensure that the full extent and impact of the accused’s conduct was put before the court.

“The key witnesses in this case were stewards employed by Rangers Football Club who brought Mr Walls’ conduct to the attention of the police. I would like to thank them for the fair and frank manner in which they gave their evidence.”

Assistant Chief Constable John Nielson, of Strathclyde Police, said: “We work closely with football clubs to eradicate any racist and/or sectarian behaviour in football - it will not be tolerated.

“Where any singing, chanting or other behaviour is perceived as being racist or sectarian in nature, we will take positive action.

“Over recent years, Strathclyde Police has made a significant number of arrests for sectarianism and racist behaviour at football matches and will continue to do so.”

BRIAN FEENEY
Irish Times
16 Dec 2008

BOOK OF THE DAY : Northern Ireland: A Triumph of Politics. Interviews and Analysis 1988-2008 By Frank Millar Irish Academic Press 230pp, €24.95.

A COUPLE of years before this collection of interviews begins Frank Millar was chief executive of the Ulster Unionist Party and widely acknowledged to be the sharpest brain in the party. He is one of the rare people who successfully negotiated the transition from politics to full-time journalism, a journey more usually made in the opposite direction.

During his career at The Irish Times Millar has made full use of his earlier connections in Northern Irish politics to illuminate the inner workings of the movement towards peace. In this role as a commentator he has played a greater part in bringing the main actors in the Irish political scene to an understanding of each other’s position than he could ever have done as a senior figure in the UUP. It is also a testimony to his fairness that politicians of every stripe have been willing to submit to his forensic probing.

This series of remarkable interviews covering the crucial 20 years from 1988 allowed the main contenders in Ireland and Britain to examine each other’s fundamental views at each stage in the long process which culminated in the Stormont executive of May 2007.

As each interview appeared in The Irish Times it became compulsory reading for governments in Dublin and London and for politicians on both sides of the Border especially because some of those politicians refused to speak to each other.

Millar introduces the book with an anecdote which illustrates the distance the participants had to travel. His first interview was in 1988 with John Hume. Millar did not know the way to Hume’s Co Donegal retreat and stopped to ask an RUC man at the checkpoint on the Derry-Donegal border. What direction should he take once over the Border? “I can’t help you, I’m afraid”, said the policeman. “I’ve never been over there.” The interview he got with Hume on that occasion laid out the theoretical basis for the terms of the Belfast Agreement a decade later. When Hume told him at the end of the interview in typically modest language that it “will be regarded as a seminal piece”, Millar looked at him quizzically. Yet so it was. Hume had laid out publicly for the first time a new concept of Irish unity elevating people over territory and a way of defining self-determination for the divided Irish people by referendums North and South to ratify any agreement just as happened in 1998.

Frank Millar did not know at the time of the interview in December 1988 that Hume was engaged in a lengthy pas de deux with Gerry Adams which would not become public until five years later and that a lot of his language about unity and self-determination was as much designed to attract republicans as to explain the position to unionists.

On the other side of the fence the most candid interview is with David Trimble who robustly defends what would be his undoing among unionists, his decision to accept the Belfast Agreement and go into an executive with Sinn Féin despite no IRA weapons being decommissioned and despite his promise to the unionist electorate of “no guns, no government”.

The series ends fittingly with Bertie Ahern who has yet to be given full credit for what Millar in understated terms describes as “the evolution of Irish policy”, in the case of the Fianna Fáil party the risky decision to give up Articles 2 and 3. It is a fitting tribute to Millar’s skill that he actually managed to extract straight answers from the former taoiseach.

Brian Feeney is a columnist with the Irish News and the author of Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years.

Breaking News.ie
16/12/2008

Work on a €110m signature project to commemorate the Titanic is set to get under way next month after Belfast City Council gave the project the green light today.

The backing of councillors means all stakeholders have now rubber-stamped plans for a five-storey tourist attraction on the derelict shipyard where the famous liner was built almost 100 years ago.

The council has pledged €11m toward the project, with the Northern Ireland Executive, Belfast Harbour Commissioners and a private developer providing the rest of the funding.

With all the partners keen to have the centre opened ahead of the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking in April 2012, engineers will go on site in the coming weeks to begin preparatory work.

The project will create 600 construction jobs, with the finished centre requiring 250 permanent staff.

Today’s decision by the council’s Strategic Policy and Resources committee will go before all councillors for ratification at the start of next month.

Red Orbit
Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Physicists at the University of Toronto have cracked the mystery behind the strange and uncannily well-ordered hexagonal columns found at such popular tourist sites as Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway and California’s Devil’s Postpile, using water, corn starch, and a heat lamp.

“The size of the columns, which varies from site to site between a few inches and a few yards, is primarily determined by the speed at which lava from a volcanic eruption cools,” says U of T physics professor Stephen Morris, who supervised the thesis project of PhD student Lucas Goehring. Cooling lava sometimes forms strange column-shaped formations with a remarkable degree of order. The most famous of these hexagonal columns are found at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, where they are said to be the work of Finn MacCool, an Irish giant.

Using a combination of field observation, experiments and mathematical theory provided by Harvard University professor L. Mahadevan, they have solved the problem of what decides the size of the columns. The key to understanding the size of the columns was to reproduce the phenomenon in the lab. Using a mixture of water and corn starch – which cracks as it dries out and forms very similar columns – they carefully controlled the drying process, and established a relationship between the size of the columns and speed with which the drying front moved.

Goehring also visited several sites around the world and measured certain markings on the sides of lava columns, which were used to deduce the speed with which they formed as the lava cooled. “Putting all of these pieces together showed that the columns are formed by the same process in starch as in lava,” says Morris. “We identified the special ratio of speed, column size and diffusion rate that is the same for all cases, finding that the slower the cooling process, the larger the resulting columns would be.”

Their results allow for the deduction of the cooling rate that produces these structures and the comparison of different sites. They also enable the prediction of the shapes of other fracture networks such as drying mud, cracking paint or the patterns of fracture in permafrost. “It’s always a delight to be able to think about a beautiful natural system and even nicer to solve an ancient problem with such a simple experiment,” says Morris.

The findings appear in the Dec. 16 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Details of the project with photos and movie demos can be found at www.physics.utoronto.ca/nonlinear/PNASpress/PNASpress.html. The project was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

By Claire Simpson
Irish News
15/12/08

PRESIDENT Mary McAleese has paid tribute to US involvement in the Irish peace process.

Speaking during a visit to the Irish Cultural Centre in Phoenix, Arizona, yesterday, Mrs McAleese said the US “shares the credit” for bringing peace to the north.

“Last year we saw the formation of inclusive power-sharing institutions headed by Dr Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness,” she said.

“It was a breathtaking step out of the paralysing undertow of history but it happened not just thanks to all the peacemakers at home in Ireland but thanks to the considerable help from our friends here in the United States.

“This country shares our pride in bringing peace to Ireland at last. It also shares the credit.”

Mrs McAleese, who was accompanied on the trip by her husband Martin, also thanked Irish-Americans for helping to create the ‘Celtic tiger’ economy.

She said family connections between the two countries “were a very important part of how we expanded our economy in the last 20 years, bringing widespread prosperity and opportunity to Ireland for the first time in her history”.

“With the help of US investors, we grew a new indigenous entrepreneurial culture and today Irish companies investing in America create almost as many jobs here as American companies do in Ireland,” she said.

“We have a great two-way partnership – one based on mutual trust and compatibility, tested and honed over centuries.”

Mrs McAleese also paid tribute to defeated presidential candidate John McCain, who has often spoken of his Scots-Irish ancestry.

She described him as “a staunch and faithful friend of Ireland over many years” and wished him “every fulfilment in his future endeavours which we know will include an ongoing friendship with the land of his ancestors”.

The McAleeses’ December 10-17 trip covers California, Oregon and Arizona.

By John Manley
Irish News
15/12/08

SOCIAL development minister Margaret Ritchie has warned that the SDLP could pull out of the power-sharing administration if she continues to be “bullied” at the executive table.

The SDLP minister said her party may reconsider its continued participation in government if she is prevented from doing her job by fellow ministers.

Ms Ritchie said there had been difficult scenes around the executive table over discussions of her proposals for tackling the issue of fuel poverty.

The minister – who has been under fire from the two largest parties in government, the DUP and Sinn Fein – insisted: “I won’t be bullied by anybody.”

She said she and her party were committed to doing a job in government and on the floor of the assembly.

But she added: “If there comes a time when executive colleagues

and others deliberately stop me from delivering, then that will give my party an opportunity and myself, to consider our role in government.

“But at this particular point we haven’t reached that point – we’re still in government.”

Ministers meet again today to put the final touches to a package of economic aid aimed at softening the effects of the credit crunch, to be announced by finance minister Nigel Dodds later in the day before Stormont packs its bags for the Christmas holidays.

However, it remains uncertain how many of the proposals put forward to the executive by a fuel poverty action group set up by Ms Ritchie will be included in the ministerial package.

“What I want to protect is that there is no smash-and-grab raid on my department to prevent those who are fuel-poor and homeless from getting what they are entitled to - simply to serve up a good PR day for others,” Ms Ritchie told BBC Radio Ulster’s Inside Politics.

Meanwhile, last week’s comments by SDLP leader and Foyle MP Mark Durkan predicting forthcoming cuts in energy prices has prompted greater Belfast gas supplier Phoenix to launch an investigation into leaked information.

“This is a matter of grave concern for Phoenix Supply and we have requested an investigation into the source of the leak,” a spokesperson for Phoenix Supply said.

Belfast Media
Andersonstown News Monday

Sinn Féin’s Paul Butler has welcomed Minister Conor Murphy’s promotion of the Irish language throughout his department by implementing the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages.

The Lagan Valley MLA said that is clear recognition of the rights of Irish language speakers in the North of Ireland.

“All Executive Ministers should look to the example set by Conor Murphy and implement the European Charter on Regional or Minority Langauges and give proper recognition to the Irish language,” said Mr Butler.

“The importance of the Irish language in the North of Ireland is reflected in international human rights legislation, the Good Friday Agreement and in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

“There has been a long history of hostility to Irish speakers and the Irish language in the North.

“Despite the adoption of the European Charter on Regional or Minority Languages by the British Government some Ministers are still not implementing its provisions for Irish speakers,” added Cllr Butler.

“Rather than viewing the language as something to be cherished and promoted, some Ministers seems to regard all things Irish as alien and to be discouraged and avoided,” he added.

BBC

Claims that more than 300 people have been killed by Taser guns in the USA have led to renewed concern about their use in Northern Ireland.

The weapon has been used twice this year

Amnesty International said it did not want any expansion of the use of the weapon which administers an electric shock to those targeted.

The charity’s comments come as a report shows that 334 people have died since 2001 as a result of being ‘tasered’.

NI police officers have had the option to use Tasers since January.

They have done so twice.

However, Amnesty said it was worried that use of the device would be expanded as in the USA.

The report analyses information from 98 autopsies taken from coroners and medical examiners reports.

The report claims that the device “is inherently open to abuse and is not always used in accordance with international standards”.

Amnesty said the report found that 90% of those who died after being struck with a Taser were unarmed, and many did not appear to present a serious threat.

Antrim Times
16 December 2008

ANTRIM Borough Council is offering dog owners the opportunity to beat the credit crunch by providing 50 vouchers for free dog neutering.
Paul Chapman, Borough Warden with Antrim Borough Council, said: “If you are put off having your dog neutered because of the expense involved then this offer is for you.

Firmount Vets in Antrim, Glenburn Vets in Crumlin and Caddy Vets in Randalstown are all taking part in this scheme.

“The first 50 people to contact the council will receive a voucher redeemable at any of these vets but you must hurry. The vouchers must be obtained from the council by Friday, December 19 and your dog must be neutered before the end of 2008.”

If you would like to receive a voucher, contact Paul Chapman or Judith Caldwell, on 028 9446 3113 ext 1466 or ext 1462.