Interview with Dixie Elliott

Peace Processing the Memory of the Conflict

No Choice But to Take It

Radio Free Éireann Interview with Richard O'Rawe

Take It Down From the Mast

A bit of Stick had at the recent Anti-Internment March in Belfast

Wiki-Dump

All correspondence in relation to Allison Morris' and Ciaran Barnes' complaints and the NUJ's handling of the issue.

True to Their Words

Disproportionate Coverage of NUJ case in the Irish News

What Price Justice?

For Irish News reporter Allison Morris, Celtic v Cliftonville in Glasgow

The Weird World

Journalists and Online Shenanigans: Double Standards Exposed

Dolours Price Archive

"I look forward to the freedom to lay bare my experiences unfettered by codes now redundant."

Irish Republican Movement Collection

Annoucing the Irish Republican Movement Collection online archive at IUPUI

The Belfast Project and Boston College

The Belfast Project and the Boston College Subpoena Case: The following paper was given at the Oral History Network of Ireland (OHNI) Second Annual Conference in Ennis, Co Clare on Saturday the 29th September 2012

Challenge and Change

Former hunger striker Gerard Hodgkins delivered the 2013 annual Brendan Hughes Memorial Lecture

Brendan Hughes: A Life in Themes

There is little to be gained in going from an A to Z chronological tour of the life of Brendan Hughes. The knowledge is out there. Instead a number of themes will covey to those who are interested what was the essence of the man.

55 HOURS

Day-by-day account of events of the 1981 Hunger Strike. A series in four parts:
July 5July 6July 7July 8

The Bell and the Blanket

Journals of Irish Republican Dissent: A study of the Bell and Blanket magazines by writers Niall Carson and Paddy Hoey

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Audible Voices

This is exile. You don’t know
Perhaps we create an identity unique for this climate?
Perhaps it is the homeland that
reaches into the soul of the exile
this morning –
chokes him

Mansur Muhammad Ahmad Rajih – Another Sky

Expac, the non aligned ex-prisoners assistance committee, has established something of a reputation for itself in the community and voluntary sector as a publisher of booklets, pamphlets or research reports which detail problems that former prisoners experience. Its commissioned report, No Sense of an Ending: The effects of long-term imprisonment amongst Republican prisoners and their families, was welcomed by considerable numbers as a pioneering work in the field. Expac, despite its genesis in the environs of the North’s political prisons, has to its credit refused to allow itself to be pigeon holed in that narrow bandwidth and has steadily advocated the cause of the marginalised and disadvantaged into which the ex-prisoner community readily fits.

Once travelling by bus to an Expac meeting, I happened to be reading another of the group’s publications, Coming Home, when I fell into conversation with the passenger beside me. In the cramped conditions of a fairly packed bus he could not help but glancing at what I was reading. He explained the difficulties he had experienced in his daily life trying to deal with agencies and layers of bureaucracy. He asked for a copy of the booklet to be sent to him as it was so packed with advice and information that red tape would in future not seem so daunting. I let him have the one I was reading.

Now Expac has produced a further addition to its already small but worthy collection. No Place Like Home is a collection of voices of those who have been displaced as a result of the conflict in the North. Part funded by the European Union’s Programme for Peace and Reconciliation and the Irish Government’ National Development Plan, the booklet ventures into territory that has much mining potential. Having written the forward to it I make no claim to be a disinterested party or impartial reviewer.

Displaced people, like ex-combatants as distinct from those combatants who were in prison, constitute one of the areas of silence in the vast range of quantifiable surface discourse that has flourished around the Northern conflict. Despite the widespread recognition of victims the displaced do no seem to figure on the radar. In the banks of victimology if you have no home address you cannot open an account.

No Place Like Home seeks to dig beneath the surface discourse and get to subaltern voices which are then allowed to speak on their own behalf. At one point an ex-prisoner details his difficulties holding down employment because of Gardai harassment. His delivery van, frequently delayed by police, made fewer runs over the course of time, his employer having lost confidence in his ability to meet the demands for punctual delivery from customers. Nor was the boss warm to the idea of his work vans being kept under Gardai surveillance. The former prisoner had come to realise ‘how difficult it was for northerners to get work in the south.’ In Monaghan 30 years he only slowly became part of the community.

Another former activist made the searing point that:

The experience of displacement leaves scars that are not visible to the naked eye … the early days of displacement were ones of having nowhere to call my home. Uncertainty, loneliness and coldness in body … there are times you wonder how you survived, and luck played a big part in it.

A former blanket man told of his inability to hold onto a flat. In what was eerily reminiscent of constantly shifting cell during the blanket protest this exile told of his flit from flat to flat as landlords were unwilling to put up with Gardai raids on their property. His closing words: ‘I am now in my mid 50’s, have no marketable qualifications and have no job and few prospects of finding one.’

Former activists or prisoners are not alone in facing displacement. Children whose parents were suspected of involvement in republican activity narrate how they came to discover that they ‘were somehow apart from other children in the street.’

Others showed that after a prolonged struggle against poverty and managing to overcome the harsh reality that in terms of entitlements the benefits system north and south were ‘poles apart,’ some turnaround in fortunes could occur. With the aid of a lifelong friend a state of self sufficiency through self-employment was attained. It brought to mind the words of an introduction to a chapter on exile in the book Another Sky: ‘for some the pain of exile never goes away. Others find a way of forging a new identity melded from the old and the new.’

Still others, with no political history, moved South because of an increase in sectarian hostility after the election of Bobby Sands in 1981. In the case of a young married couple ‘at first we were delighted with the peace and security that we enjoyed in Donegal, but gradually we came to realise that it was taking us some time to settle into the local community.’ Over time the community made them feel welcome but ‘my husband and I still see ourselves as outsiders.’

This booklet is to be complimented for bringing so many murmuring sounds to the surface and giving them the clear tone of audible voices. Problems that for long existed but which were ill defined or were mumbled rather than spoken are increasingly coming to be heard, if not yet listened to by officialdom.

No Place Like Home. Published by Expac. For a copy send Stamp Addressed Envelope to Expac, Unit 3, 14 Market Street, Monaghan.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh

Mina Mohammadian was executed on February 29, 1987, on political charges. She was held in solitary confinement for eleven months prior to her execution. During that period, she went through forty interrogation sessions, during which she was subjected to the most horrendous tortures. She was repeatedly raped by the regime's Guards. She was 22 at the time of her execution - Woman, Islam, & Equity

Having caught her husband, a drug addict, trying to rape her 14 year old daughter from an earlier marriage Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh killed him. Both her daughters testified to the accuracy of her version of the fatal incident. In the crazed male-centred theocracy of Iran where the word of women has little value, proving rape is almost impossible. Often the raped rather than the rapist is punished for the ‘morality crime’ of being raped.

Despite calls from her daughters to the International Committee against Executions to press for increased international support against the state decision to kill their mother, it ended in despair. While public pressure had on occasion in the past mobilised sufficiently to stop imminent executions, this time the government was not for turning. Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh was executed in Evin prison earlier this week.

In an act of gross insensitivity, the day before the state killed her, her daughter was instructed by prison authorities to bring the birth certificates of both her and her sister to the prison because their mother would be executed the following day.

On the day of her execution 9 other people were put to death by the Iranian state. Already this year the country has carried out 216 executions. According to Amnesty International’s figures for last year only China surpassed Iran in carrying out executions. Children as young as 12 have been sentenced to death in the country. There are currently 139 juveniles on death row. 17 alone were executed last year. People are often hanged in public from cranes mounted on lorries. These spectacles might well make the mullahs go rigid with excitement but the terror they infuse throughout society is considerable

Amongst the range of offences for which a person may be put to death is that of adultery, one of the country’s many ‘morality crimes.’ Gay people face a similar fate. Apostasy too leads to the noose. There is no god but god, our god, and if you believe in another, or worse none, we will kill you. Such are the deleterious effects of religion on the already rabid minds of the body politic. In its defence the government says it is carrying out Islamic law. Not the type of justification likely to win sympathy outside the ranks of religious maniacs.

In Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita In Tehran, a sense for the sickness of religion is acquired when the story is narrated of a woman in prison who told of the rape of a young girl by her male guards. The rationale of those who raped her was that only virgins go to Paradise. By depriving their victim of her presumed virginity they would decide her passage to the next world. Upstanding religious people no doubt who would have closed their eyes during the act and thought only of goats. The idea of deriving sexual pleasure from divinely assisted penetration would never have entered into the godly minds of such pious people.

Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh, the latest but not the last female victim of the hateful men of god.




Thursday, November 27, 2008

Every Child Matters

‘I am absolutely sure that, like me, every parent in the country is outraged and shocked by what has happened and angered about what happened to that infant’ - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

It would truly be dangerous if focus on the torture murder of Baby P were to the exclusion and detriment of the other children being murdered or grievously harmed with disquieting frequency in the UK. It would seriously compromise the eminently worthy principle that ‘every child matters.’ The death of Baby P continues to capture the public imagination. As Newsweek reported ‘the result has been an explosion of press coverage … and an even bigger explosion of Internet outrage …’ The Sun is close to having a million signatures supporting its call for social workers involved in mishandling the case to be sacked. Variance with the political slant of this particular redtop should not blind us to the deep emotional vein it has tapped into. Why it should be allowed to make the running is something the more serious print media might wish to consider.

With public anger said to have reached ‘boiling point’ there are some who seem to baulk at the coverage given to the torture murder of the 17 month old infant. Readers are subject to old mantras that parents kill their kids pretty frequently or that tragedy tales always increase sales of books, papers and magazines not to mention magnetising viewers to television screens. In a somewhat different context, using language which according to the Guardian turned ‘a powerless, real-life victim into a might-have-been offender’, it was suggested by the head of Barnardo’s that had Baby P survived until he was a teenager he probably would have become a ‘feral, parasitic yob.’ Elsewhere there was the stale old complaint ‘why – when millions are being killed and raped in DR Congo – is Baby P the universal headline?’

Not much new under the sun there. We have heard it all before. When the North of Ireland was consumed by armed conflict there were those who would highlight human rights concerns about far off exotic places. But on their own door step there was evidence only of uncomfortable silence. Oppose mass murder in Soweto but try to understand the context behind it in Derry; hit out at police torture in Buenos Aires but label those in custody in Belfast as self-harmers; champion war brutalised Congolese children but allude disparagingly to tortured working class English kids.

Dare we suggest that perhaps in the Haringey incident much of it amounts to good old fashioned political bias? The Congo carries a violent legacy of colonialism that undulates in rhythm with the beat of a left wing tom-tom. Championing children there makes for some good anti-imperialist posturing. In Haringey, which in some circles is a ‘Labour Party bastion with a reputation as a far-left refuge and some of the worst neighbourhoods in the city’, the objective interests of the proletariat are not best served by making too much noise over a little urchin.

We already know about the children killed in others part of the world including those who remained haunted by King Leopold’s ghost. They are not to be ignored. But if there is any substance behind the view that ‘every child matters’ then little white Londoners matter every bit as much as little black Brazzavillans. And if children can’t be made to matter closer to home then proclaimed concern about their awful fate in the Congo is pure waffle. A failure to address the issue more stringently in Britain and seek refuge in the children of the Congo will inevitably be followed by a failure to do anything at all. We will end up with a ridiculous sort of equality where all children don’t matter equally.

The public outcry and intense popular interest in Baby P’s short life and horrible death is an expression of pure angst that there was one child who did not matter enough to the professionals tasked with protecting his welfare. A voiceless baby who died in the midst of professional silence is now the public face of a noisy justice campaign fuelled by the unheard screams of the tortured infant. The public are doing what the professionals did not.

Chocolate was smeared over the wounds of Baby P by the hideous woman who helped kill him as a means to conceal the evidence of the wounds inflicted by her Nazi rutting mate. Some politically loaded commentary is using a different kind of smear for a scarcely different purpose. In the end it all amounts to concealment.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Radio Free Eireann discusses Gunsmoke and Mirrors, Good Friday

Henry McDonald and I appeared on Radio Free Eireann this weekend, discussing our books, Gunsmoke and Mirrors and Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism. The interview starts 29 minutes into the clip: Download (right click, save as).

WBAI's Radio Free Eireann

Good Friday Review: Political three-card shuffle or surrender by republicans?

In the News Letter, Liam Clarke compares Henry McDonald's Gunsmoke and Mirrors and Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism.

"Unionists will take great heart from two books which have hit the shelves just in time for Christmas. They are: Gunsmoke and Mirrors, by Henry McDonald, the Guardian's man in Belfast, and Good Friday: Death of Irish Republicanism, by Dr Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner. Between them, they give a convincing account of the final retreat of the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership from the ideals and aims for which they had fought for generations. McIntyre sees it as surrender, whereas McDonald regards it as the political equivalent of the three-card shuffle."

Political three-card shuffle or surrender by republicans?

Liam Clarke

Unionists will take great heart from two books which have hit the shelves just in time for Christmas.

They are: Gunsmoke and Mirrors, by Henry McDonald, the Guardian's man in Belfast, and Good Friday: Death of Irish Republicans, by Dr Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner.

Between them, they give a convincing account of the final retreat of the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership from the ideals and aims for which they had fought for generations. McIntyre sees it as surrender, whereas McDonald regards it as the political equivalent of the three-card shuffle.

McDonald's book, a sustained polemic, records most of the milestones of their journey and unearths many quotes and incidents that Sinn Fein's born again Stormontistas would rather forget. Martin McGuinness's toes must curl with embarrassment when he is reminded of how he told a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis that "partition has failed and there can be no return to a Stormont regime. Sinn Fein's attitude to Stormont is one of abstention".

Or how about this? "There can be no involvement of republicans in any body which denied the Irish people the right to self determination." That was in 1995. Just three years later, Sinn Fein accepted the Good Friday Agreement, which specified that Irish unity could only come about if it secured majority support in Northern Ireland. Power-sharing in Stormont became the new republican ideal.

McIntyre's central thesis is that partition has not failed at all – it is the IRA campaign which didn't work and had to be abandoned.

"The major question that historians will ask, is not why the republicans surrendered, but why they fought such a futile long war," he writes. It is an impressive statement coming from a man who served 18 years in jail for his part in what he now sees as a futile war.

Sinn Fein avoids the S word, but what else can you call it? Today the British Army is free to recruit not only in Northern Ireland but also in the Republic. The IRA is still an illegal organisation, even though it has dismantled its structures and decommissioned its weapons.

It is all a far cry from the mood after the 1994 IRA ceasefire when hundreds of republicans took to the streets convinced by Sinn Fein's rhetoric that they had won. McDonald remembers some revellers stopping reporters from covering the celebrations and shouting "don't go to work. Today's a holiday. They will be calling it St Gerry's day in a few years time."

Republican social clubs sold beer at 25p a pint and the black taxis in West Belfast gave free rides. The assumption was that there had been some secret deal, that the IRA had only abandoned its campaign after its traditional terms had been met and Britain had agreed to make an orderly withdrawal. It was assumed that the full details would become clear later, and this illusion was fed by McGuinness's hollow assurances to the Sinn Fein faithful.

What republicans would consider, he told his followers, was “transitional arrangements which are linked by a clear commitment by the British government to end British jurisdiction in our country.” It didn’t happen.

Republican leaders can use their privileges at Stormont to protect themselves from accusations about their IRA past.

We had an example of that just a couple of weeks ago when Adams “refuted” accusations, based on books in the Assembly library, of his role as a former IRA leader. His accuser, Nelson McCausland, was suspended from sittings for 24 hours when he refused to withdraw his comments.

Republicans now have little to say about the IRA campaign. There are few ballads about the big bombs or the ambushes. All they want to remember is the hunger strike and the Maze breakout.

Yet after the ceasefire, the enthusiasm was infectious, and not just for republicans. Many unionists assumed that there was some secret agreement between the British government and the IRA. It was hard to believe that the Provos would have stopped in return for terms which they had spent the best part of 30 years opposing.

As I wrote at the time, unionists were too stupid to know when they had won and republicans were too clever to admit that they had lost.





Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!


Friday, November 21, 2008

Mommy Dreadful

The Baby P story, where the child could not be identified, demonstrated the importance of pictures. Most papers, including the Guardian, ran pictures of bloodstained clothing and computer-generated images of the child's injuries. Some readers protested they were unnecessary and voyeuristic. But any news editor would argue that, with no other images of the child available, they were essential to engage readers' sympathy – Peter Wilby

Whatever the biases of the media it is at least reassuring that an element of gravitas has returned to what it chooses to report. It is most unfortunate that the catalyst for it should have been the sadistic torture murder of a baby boy. 450,000 people signing a petition, even if organised by the Sun, demanding instant action against those considered most negligent in the case of the murdered baby suggests that a sense of proportion and prioritisation has returned to the minds of the British public. With 40,000 people a matter of weeks ago having phoned in to complain about a prank in woefully bad taste played by two celebrities on another from the same stable, it seemed that the dumbing down virus spawned by Nonsense TV had infected radio.

‘Welcome’ is not a choice word to describe the resumption of serious news. Its advent is invariably accompanied by a high price tag, on this occasion ‘one of the worst cases of sadistic brutality and sordid child neglect to come before a British court.’ While the unremitting suffering this child of 17 months was forced to undergo intensifies the sheer horror of what is being reported, it also magnifies the discomfort in viewing, reading or listening to it.

Yet there are those who for some incomprehensible reason take the view that one very noticeable reaction to the murder was exhilaration. Striking out in the Times at the way in which the case, in her view, has been transformed almost pornographically into a penny dreadful, Janice Turner wrote:

I was rounding the bread aisle in Sainsbury when I came across three young women in mid-conversation. “He ripped off his fingernails,” said the first. “And nearly pulled off his ear,” added a second. “Who could do such a thing?” said the third, and they all shook their heads in what's-the-world-coming-to despair. But their eyes were lit by other emotions: excitement, titillation, glee.

This seems a hopelessly subjective and ultimately self-serving interpretation of what the women in question thought. I have spoken to many people about the Baby P story and glee was the one emotion definitely absent from their eyes and voices. Yet Janice Turner just happened effortlessly to find three all in one go titillated by the sordid saga. Presumably they were happy that the tedium in their lives had been punctuated by riveting tales of torture. Were they eating popcorn and sipping fizzy drinks while they were at it?

I don’t believe that these emotions of excitement, titillation and glee were really stalking that shopping aisle vicariously experiencing the thrills of the Nazi sadist while he ripped at baby ears and fingernails. More plausibly, it strikes me that the writer on this occasion found what she was looking for; more, placed it there for the very purpose of giving substance to a story she had already intended to write. The women conversing became a useful prop to stand it up against. The ugly spectre that wisped along the Sainsbury aisle was not excitement, titillation or glee but callous manipulation of imagery. Glee did not make the story, the story made the glee.

I suspect, rather like myself and countless others, the Sainsbury women were horrified and not at all titillated that any child could be forced to undergo trauma that many adults would have expired from quicker than Baby P. Unable to end his own wretched life as a means to escape the unbearable suffering the baby had to wait, traumatised by agony and depression, until his three adult tormentors tortured what remained of his life out of his tiny broken body.

In pitching the story in terms of vicarious titillation there is no concession to the possibility that the women in question may have been mothers who found it incomprehensible that another mother would be an accomplice in the torture murder of her own child; that they like many others have experienced great anguish over this baby boy and feel, even in some nebulous way, that by facing that anguish rather than opting for clinical detachment they, through a sense of common humanity, can grasp something of his pain; that through internalising that pain the women are uncompromisingly pitching themselves against those who inflicted it. This is a story of mommy dreadful, not penny dreadful.

For Janice Turner it seems the detail should be dulled down because of those deriving ‘a kick from the adrenalin surge of our own shock and disgust.’ Whatever good reasons there may be for cutting back on the detail this is hardly one of them. The cruel story of Baby P brings only depreciation in peace of mind with its vicious assault on the emotions. It is about mood deflation not adrenalin surges. There is no comfort zone to escape to here. The child suffered horrifically, experiencing a lonely, terrifying and agonising end. I for one shudder with dark despair on learning of his ordeal. The coward within me urges that I run away, spare myself the burden of empathy, take the easy way out, turn the page, skip the detail, abandon the murdered baby - the very things that happened to him while alive. Reflect on a key prosecution witness account of Baby P’s response to a social worker who greeted him ‘hello little fella’ a mere four days before his murder:

The heartbreaking thing is Baby P smiled at the woman. Sitting in that buggy with his back broken, eight broken ribs, fingernails missing, toenail missing and a nappy full of excrement and he still managed a smile.

Reading that what right have I to take refuge in my cowardice or seek shelter in accounts defined by their detachment?

There can be no retreat from this. Our awareness of the bottomless cruelty inflicted on this baby forcefully reminds us of what we are and more importantly of what we are not. We identify exclusively with his suffering and distance ourselves absolutely and irrevocably from those who caused it. The discourse of Baby P must become so voluble that it crystallises into both an ethical imperative and political bulwark against a reoccurrence. Never again should a letter be added to the alphabet of mutilated and murdered children. For this to gather irreversible momentum the desolate life and despicable death of Baby P needs to be engaged not just intellectually but emotively as well. Were it not for emotive involvement with African hunger, Asian tsunamis or Iranian earth quakes brought to us by imagery that torments rather than titillates would we dig as deep into our pockets?

For some the terrible truth lest we forget, for others the sanitised story lest they remember.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Henry Rollins Uncut

Henry Rollins Uncut's Northern Ireland episode broadcasts on the IFC channel in the US on Friday, 21st November, 10:30pm. Video clip follows the jump.


Rollins writes about making the show on the Huffington Post:

"I went to Northern Ireland to get a better understanding of what the last few decades had been like there and where things are now -- if there is peace or merely a cease fire. To be honest, I had no idea what we would get. What we ended up with was some of the most intense interviews we have ever conducted. By day we would travel and conduct interviews from all sides, trying to be objective and allow different points of view to be aired. By night, I would get e-mails from people who knew I was in town with very opposing views urging me not to believe what had been said by the ones they disagreed with. The whole experience was extremely heavy."

Monday, November 17, 2008

The Torture Murder of Baby P

"This boy was given a death sentence and Haringey cannot be allowed to get away with it.” Mor Dioum, of the Victoria Climbie Foundation

Few things send molten hatred coursing through the veins like the murder of a child and in particular where that murder has been preceded by prolonged physical and mental torture stretching over months or years. Reason temporarily departs and with it opposition to the death penalty as well as resistance to all demands for the perps to be tortured in a thousand different ways. Water boarding seems humane juxtaposed to the actions of child torture-killers. Burning suddenly seems too good for them. The thirst for retribution on behalf of the infant innocent is hard to slake. Anger subverts reason in its hope that fellow prisoners of those who inflict torture-infanticide will deliver a rough justice that will cause them to suffer for eternity and a day.

But it is always a temporary state of mind, although a state of permanence might well kick in to any parent if the victim were their own child. Humanity can never triumph if it is dragged down to the level of the most bestial in its midst. Even when it is impossible to haul those who by some biological quirk inhabit human form the human imperative must be to avoid slippage down an evolutionary rung or two. Unfortunate as it may well seem, our rights are theirs. There is no other way.

I recall many years ago, as a young apprentice tiler working on a building site, reading in one of the English tabloids about the brutal death in Brighton of Maria Colwell. She was killed by a hateful stepfather whose name I have never forgotten, William Kepple. Shortly after her death a book was published. Authored by John Howells, its title was Remember Maria. To the extent that it remembered her at all British society seems to have learned little. As much as she was a victim of the brutal Kepple Maria was also a victim of the catastrophic failure of the social services.

Since Maria Colwell’s death in 1973 other cases every bit as harrowing have come to light. Dominic Lawson points out in today’s Sunday Times that:

The Wave Trust charity recently produced a grim list of the most disturbing cases that have followed over the intervening 35 years. Jasmine Lorrington, battered to death at the age of four in 1984; 20-month-old Martin Nicoll, who died of 68 injuries in 1991; Lauren Wright, 6, starved and beaten to death in 2000; two-year-old Ainlee Labonte, ditto, in January 2002; and 21 month old John Gray, who died as a result of 200 injuries, including a ruptured liver, in 2003.

The torture murder of eight year old Victoria Climbié in 2000 at the hand of her aunt and the aunt’s boyfriend in Haringey was supposed to be the never again case. That Baby P was also subjected to a similar fate in Haringey only streets away from where Victoria died underlines the failure in child protection policy. There were enough warnings. After the death of Victoria Climbié word association alone “child in danger + Haringey” should have sent the authorities racing, blue lights flashing, alarms blaring to the torture chamber where Baby P lived and died. Inexplicably, it never happened. All sorts of excuses, better described as evasions, have been proffered. The arrogance of senior social workers beggars belief. Despite Haringey being a by word for ‘blinding incompetence’ when it came to the protection of vulnerable children, pass the problem seems have been an institutionalised facet of child policy at government level. As Children Secretary Ed Balls comments ‘people are asking how these despicable acts of evil can happen in this day and age and in Haringey of all places.’ Indeed Ed, but at least have the balls to do something about it.

Since reading about the fiendish torture murder inflicted on this 17 month old child who we are allowed to refer to only as Baby P, I have found my emotions on a rollercoaster, being pulled from blinding seething anger to a more calm and detached reflection. Trying to stay within the parameters of the latter is a hard fought battle which is lost each time I read another account of what Baby P suffered and how his death could so easily have been prevented through the application of a modicum of competence. But it was not to be. The wee man never made it because of serious systemic failure at the heart of the agencies tasked with protecting him. He was so badly let down.

Children are, as I am often reminded by an elderly friend, the only true innocents in the world. The rest of us to varying degrees are not. They need the protection of society. Statistics show that they are more likely to be killed by people who share their homes than by strangers. All the more reason for society to have in place measures which recognise children as full but vulnerable citizens entitled to every measure it can provide to ensure their safety.

Three people have been convicted of causing the death of Baby P or having allowed it to occur. One happened to have a human body out of whose birth canal Baby P entered what for him was a valley of tears, torment and torture. Dignifying that beast with the term mother even if for technical reasons is something currently beyond me. Two Nazi thugs were also convicted of similar charges.

It seems unfair that two of the three killers of this child for now remain anonymous. The thing that brought him into the world and her Nazi mating partner should be publicly identified so that they may walk the face of this earth forever carrying the mark of Cain.

Baby P. Nobody loved him, nobody helped him, nobody saved him. Disgraceful.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Good Friday Review: A Human Call for Justice and Truth

Seaghán Ó Murchú, formerly of The Blanket, reviews Good Friday:

"This will be a long review, as the ones so far I've seen have not dealt with the contents in depth. They've focused more on the controversy of the author and his thesis. What's missing from such terse attention? The flair with which McIntyre conveys his passion-- and his sobriety. There's little autobiography, but he's dealing with a shadowy, fatal, yet publicized and romanticized cause to which he gave his youth, and much of his adulthood. Half of his life's in the H-Blocks. He leaves to find himself facing a different IRA on the outside than the one he'd sworn to defend decades before. From the mid-1990s on-- along with like-minded volunteers, their families, friends, and comrades-- he's left to flounder while the party leaders posed for the cameras, accepted the acclaim, and betrayed the footsoldiers, those living and dead, those who had starved themselves rather than accept branding as common criminals.

One does not have to accept their methods of the proxy bomb, the guerrilla attack, or the torture of innocents to accept what McIntyre and those whose stories he tells believed in: a united Ireland that through their guns would be gained. They gave up their lives in total or a portion for such an ideal. This vision dimmed under the glare of their commanders who proclaimed a treaty that echoed that compromise which they had rejected in 1975. That was thousands of killings earlier. The confusion and outrage of those left fooled again becomes a human call for justice and truth."

Anthony McIntyre's Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism
Book Review

Seaghán Ó Murchú


As an ex-IRA "blanketman," already imprisoned in his teens, interned for 17 years at Long Kesh, Anthony McIntyre knows his subject by having lived most of his life as a volunteer. After prison, he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Queen's. This Belfast native collects various articles and interviews from the past decade or so that list the deathbed rattles and defiant ralliery of Sinn Féin, the IRA, and the stalemated peace process after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The chicanery with which this deal was finagled to a rank-and-file previously misled about the continuation of their armed struggle led to McIntyre's break with the "Republican Movement" at least as constituted under the control of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and their devoted cadre.

Becoming a leading voice for those who disagreed, not for a return to the "physical-force tradition" but a renewal of the ideals which the IRA he and others joined had abandoned, Dr McIntyre combines two rarely encountered areas of expertise. As an insider, he betters the academics and reporters in relating the perspective of an Irish republican who's proven his credibility on the blanket. As a commentator, he's able to silence the "militant Republicans of the verbal type" eager to perch on barstools or boast to the naive their exploits, fueled with Dutch courage.

Admirably given his doctoral competence, McIntyre never lapses into jargon (although "etiology" escaped onto his keyboard once). He avoids sounding sanctimonious or overbearing. He, as with his model Orwell, manages to keep the human dimension within his sustained criticism of the IRA leadership that, for 320 pages, motivates his setting down-- with as much proof as can be summoned against an organization committed to double speak and clandestine councils-- the reasons why one can be principled, yet oppose the GFA packaged as "the peace process." Furthermore, he relates details to us in a calm, wry manner so that any newcomer can clearly understand the participants who support or oppose this intricate strategy.

It's a testament to his evenhandedness that one of the best moments comes when he's interviewing the chief of the reorganized Police Service of Northern Ireland (formerly the RUC), Hugh Orde. "It was the most I had ever talked in a police station," he admits. (282) While his sympathies remain throughout with the peaceful dissidents, he includes fair treatment of those later incarcerated from the splinter groups determined to fight for the cause abandoned-- with considerable cynicism, spin, and rhetorical acrobatics-- by the IRA leadership and Sinn Féin negotiators. Attention to the Loyalist perspective might have been welcome, but this anthology's already large enough. Counterparts to McIntyre or Ed Moloney's "A Secret History of the IRA" exist from the Unionist viewpoint. As the subtitle indicates, McIntyre's not providing a history of the past forty or hundred years in the North. He's analyzing the RM endgame itself, as a former player privy to many of the moves.

The book's organized into thirteen chapters. Each offers a few articles around a theme. I found the organization sensible, and there's an internal coherence that carries you from one topic to the next gradually, if subtly. An introduction by Moloney, whose own views have been met with the same outrage accorded McIntyre's among the party faithful, but with equal recognition of insight by those less aligned, provides background on the policy shifts. A glossary clues you in to who's Ronnie Flanagan or what's the IMC.

This will be a long review, as the ones so far I've seen have not dealt with the contents in depth. They've focused more on the controversy of the author and his thesis. What's missing from such terse attention? The flair with which McIntyre conveys his passion-- and his sobriety. There's little autobiography, but he's dealing with a shadowy, fatal, yet publicized and romanticized cause to which he gave his youth, and much of his adulthood. Half of his life's in the H-Blocks. He leaves to find himself facing a different IRA on the outside than the one he'd sworn to defend decades before. From the mid-1990s on-- along with like-minded volunteers, their families, friends, and comrades-- he's left to flounder while the party leaders posed for the cameras, accepted the acclaim, and betrayed the footsoldiers, those living and dead, those who had starved themselves rather than accept branding as common criminals.

One does not have to accept their methods of the proxy bomb, the guerrilla attack, or the torture of innocents to accept what McIntyre and those whose stories he tells believed in: a united Ireland that through their guns would be gained. They gave up their lives in total or a portion for such an ideal. This vision dimmed under the glare of their commanders who proclaimed a treaty that echoed that compromise which they had rejected in 1975. That was thousands of killings earlier. The confusion and outrage of those left fooled again becomes a human call for justice and truth.

Chapter 1 laments the GFA. McIntyre in 1999 conjures up the tale of the pickpocket who robs his prey while unctously soothing his victim: "your personal security is brilliant." SF strips their communal base of its pride while telling its gulled voters how they were "the most politicised people in Europe." (10) In Chapter 2, the ghosts of the Republican Dead return to haunt those investigating in 2004 the 1987 pre-emptive attack by the British upon an IRA mission at Loughall. This is one episode that may elude those less knowledgeable about such incidents. I'd have liked more attention to the moral conundrum underlying the Loughall inquiry. The larger question of how ethical should the state be in eliminating or sparing those who seek its overthrow, however, remains sadly all too contemporary.

Poignantly, McIntyre confronts this problem personally. With his toddler daughter, he visits Bobby Sands' grave, only to hear the girl chortle; thus in a small way's fulfilled Sands' prediction that the revenge of the Irish would be the laughter of their children. In this 2004 entry, "Padraig Paisley," this sometimes reticent reporter offers one of his most powerful admissions of the cost of the long war upon those who had invested their lives towards a different ending than the one now on offer from their former commanders. In Long Kesh, they followed a leader who turned on them once they were freed. "Were I to have suggested a course of action during my H-Block days that would lead republicanism to where it is today I would have found myself residing in a loyalist wing." (40)

The space given as Chapter 3 to the hazily explained 2002 mishap of the Colombia Three surprised me, but this episode foreshadows later IRA-SF debacles in the Northern Bank Robbery and the fatal stabbing of Robert McCartney. It remains a muddled area; the murky accounts at the time show the difficulty in separating dirty deeds by the IRA's left hand from SF's right hand. When Adams is charged by Congressman Henry Hyde to "'appear and help us determine what the Sinn Fein leadership knew about the IRA activities with the FARC narco-terrorists in Colombia and when did Sinn Fein learn of them', it was clear that the knotted tie of the IRA was being moved uncomfortably close to the party windpipe." (50) The ten years of witnessing the RM's downhill slide proves grimly amusing, tracked from higher up this slippery slope.

Decommissioning magnifies the microcosm of the Colombian misadventure for global inspection. Not as a symbol, but as fact: giving up IRA arms dumps means the conflict's truly ended. 2001: As the leaders, pushed back from their goal of a unified Ireland into capitulation keep retreating and calling it progress, "they are moved muttering from one slain sacred cow to defend another before it too is slaughtered." (64) 2002: Those like him who complain will incur blame for raising their heads out of the trenches, where "they would immediately draw the attention and surveillance of thought traffic control and the fire of the verbal snipers, their weapons loaded with vitriol, eager to impose silence and prevent republicanism from becoming more democratic." (71)

Long before 2003, McIntyre's disgusted at "organised lying by organised liars. Half a century from now pilgrims, patriots, and prevaricators will flock to the graves of the Provisional Republican leadership to be greeted by an inscription meticulously inscribed into a headstone: 'Here they are-- lying still'." (78)

Cemeteries in West Belfast already fill with those who went to their graves believing in a patriotism that their leaders had, in secret, already abandoned. McIntyre has both outgrown his youthful enthusiasm and managed to nourish his righteous ideals. These matured, I would suggest, from the Fenian slogans of his teenaged years into a humanist skepticism towards totalitarianism in any form, however benignly promoted or however applauded by the chattering classes. He resists the cult of personality that has eclipsed the democratic socialist Republic of 1916.

Chapter 5, most notably with a twenty-page 2006 interview with fellow ex-blanketman Richard O'Rawe, delves into the difficult matter of how much Adams knew when in charge of part of the IRA contingent in the H-Blocks during the second hunger strike that left ten men dead in 1981. O'Rawe's "Blanketmen" book's claims are balanced by outside sources which both men carefully cite in their cautious yet charged dialogue. They explore O'Rawe's argument that Adams deliberately withheld information to advance SF electoral fortunes, rather than intervene with proposals relayed from British negotiators that could have ended the strike, thereby saving the last six men from self-starvation.

A quarter-century later, McInytre speaks at Bundoran to those who shared the years on the dirty protest. Addressing those who now oppose his own dissidence, he manages to affirm his own position while remaining respectful to his detractors. He defends O'Rawe, and reminds his comrades that the rumor-mongering against O'Rawe (and himself by extension) does the 1981 commemoration no credit. He paraphrases the press who lambasted the SF rally (with blankets sold to marchers) to commemorate the ten men dead "as resembling a Friar Tuck convention more than the austere era of the Blanket protest and hunger strikes. The contrast between the easy corpulence of today and the hard emaciation of twenty-five years ago was no more stark than it was on the Falls Road at that political rally. In a sense the imagery mirrored perfectly the ethical decay that has come to beset republicanism. The screws at least gave out the blankets for free." (115)

Suppressing Dissent, as Chapter 6, continues in similar tone. McIntyre allows us to hear more stories from those who speak out against party lines, and in West Belfast, who suffer for their rebellion. Brendan Shannon, "Shando," sticks to his guns as a proponent of the armed struggle. While McIntyre regards him as a cautionary tale of the true believer left stranded, he treats him with dignity and in 2003 tells his story honestly. In 1995, Shando explains to McIntyre: "I did not leave the Provos because they gave up the war. I left because they gave up republicanism." (139)

One who did not survive in early 2005 after standing up against the system, Robert McCartney, merits Chapter 7. His murder, along with the Northern Bank and Colombia 3 incidents, further tarnished an already dulled Sinn Féin. McIntyre and his wife ran the e-zine "The Blanket" 2001-08. They refused to back down to SF militia. They were harassed, raided, and intimidated. Most of the entries in this book originated with their grassroots Net campaigns on behalf of their cowed neighbors and harangued colleagues. They display to future historians and activists the birth of Web networks married to practical solutions. This harnessed solidarity for concrete gains rather than arcane monographs on republican community organizing.

These chapters also reveal McIntyre's growth as a more generous participant in his changing Irish reality. He almost encourages a PSNI officer with "good luck" as the police try to find Bert's killers. As one with his ear to the ground, McIntyre knows at least one culprit even if he's not charged directly. "IRA culture was drawn on heavily both to inflict the crime and to cover it up," (173) even if hard proof dissolves into soft supposition and perhaps a bit of brass knuckles on any witnesses out of the dozens of people who saw the fatal assault-- unless they were all as they claimed in the pub's jakes. The party interferes, so no allegations of collusion between the supposedly rogue IRA operators and SF can be sustained in court.

This leads to frustration. How can you fight such an implacable PR machine? Others join in the protest, but against those who complain. They defend Adams and McGuinness. Why do McIntyre and his colleagues oppose what so many voted for, North and South? The Loyalist veto's consented to by SF. The IRA surrendered. The Crown rules as long as most Northerners agree to a British ruler. McIntyre counters that "the process subverts the peace." (168) Many who favor cessation of violence do not assent to the process, he argues. Their disagreement with the GFA, moreover, remains non-violent. Meanwhile, the IRA and SF subvert the community they claim to advance-- with thugs, censorship, and discrimination.

Informers, long the republican's bane, now turn into its own agents of destruction. Freddie Scappaticci, "Stakeknife," and Denis Donaldson gain infamy. McIntyre's clever. He asks nimbly what Donaldson as a British agent did that Martin McGuinness as a British minister at Stormont did not. Both "shaft Republicanism." Rumors persist, and seem to be hushed, about IRA spies even higher up than Donaldson. The author knows the pressures that burden those volunteers fresh out of prison, unable to cope. "The choice was simple: Grow old and grey with imprisoned comrades and wake up alone each morning to the sound of clanging grills or come to beside a partner and to the laughter of children." (191) While never excusing what Stakeknife or others did by betraying their cause, McIntyre as an ex-prisoner and as one who has worked with many others like himself captures what few other writers could have expressed about the personal torment that a few of his weaker colleagues endured for decades as they fought, plotted, and confided in comrades whom they would expose to their own compromise, or often worse, at the hands of death squads within the IRA as well as among the Loyalists and British forces-- whether vetted or below the radar.

McIntyre's also compassionate towards the reputation that shrouds their children and grandchildren; he implies how this character assassination may be the worst crime yet hatched by such informers. "Provisionalism is being haunted by a spooky spectre," he confides in 2005. "What blossomed in spring has now become autumn fruit, as poisonous as it is bountiful." (193)

With Chapter 9, Comrades appear. These too have been weighed down by compromises when they emerged from prison. The late Brendan Hughes in 2000 tells McIntyre: "We fought on and for what? What we rejected in 1975." (198) A leader of the H-Blocks during the strike, on release he found himself cheated by building crews in West Belfast where he worked; those who were his bosses justified their hypocrisy by their ties to the cosy SF leadership. Exposing this immorality, he found himself expelled by those whom he once had commanded and respected. He concludes how the "Republican leadership has always exploited our loyalty." (200)

In 2006, "Granny Josie" Gallagher remembers when she visited her three sons, all jailed at Long Kesh, over twenty-two years. Two were in the Marxist INLA. Thumbing a ride in the snow on the way back from her prison visit, the Sinn Féin transport van refused her a ride. If she was at the H-Blocks to see her third son, in the IRA, than she might have earned a ride. Such was the discrimination and pettiness even within the RM, as McIntyre rues now.

For Dissembling, Chapter 10, McIntyre introduces other critics of SF-IRA groupthink. In 1994, when the cease-fire was declared, McIntyre was with his comrade Tommy Gorman when Gorman called to agree with Bernadette McAliskey on BBC's "Talkback" with her comment that "the war is over and the good guys lost." (226) From that point on, they and others discussed in this chapter found themselves the targets of the SF-IRA disinformation operatives. Their names were discredited, their supposed links to the militants were publicized, and their credibility was attacked. What differs between the tactics of any faction who has gained power in a putsch? Perhaps the fact that the leaders had led on the followers for so long, so fatally, while dissembling.

With the 2004 Northern Bank robbery in Chapter 11, there's not much point even pretending. "If, as has been widely alleged, the robbery is the work of the Provisional IRA's Army Council, then it is a matter of the rich robbing the rich." (254) Policing, in Chapter 12, finds SF in a quandary. Having lost the hearts and minds of those in projects such as Ballymurphy (where McIntyre had lived when writing these articles), the RM could not provide the protection the residents needed. Over nine months in 2006, 700 acts of violence or intimidation had occurred in his neighborhood. The collapse of the community, as former republican ideals to rally solidarity eroded under drugs, teen pregnancy, vandalism, and theft, showed another collapse of Irish idealism under British administration. The PSNI had first been castigated by republicans, and then clumsily courted, but this left the locals in an awkward situation of who to call on for help. The PSNI wearied, the IRA devolved into a gang, and with few arrests amidst the grim scenario, the costs of the long war's slide into a restless temper tantrum of dealing and dissing showed how hollow had been the claims of a peaceful Northern Irish settlement for so many in what had been Gerry Adams' heartland, his base for IRA action and a unified front pledging SF allegiance.

Strategic Failure, fittingly, concludes this book as Chapter 13. It includes the visit to Orde. What do republicans and dissidents do when the system's in place and the Loyalists remain in control with the consent of the nationalists, post-GFA? Learning to get along, in power or driven away from the dream of centuries of Irish men and women who fought and died for unification, republicans today may be the last of their line so bred to never give up the battle in every generation. Post 9/11, the lust for the brawl's faded. McIntyre's post-mortem for Moloney's 2003 castigation of the hypocrisy of the Adams-McGuinness leadership finds its eulogy repeated in his own compiled arguments here. "For those of us who sought a different and a better outcome-- more just, more egalitarian, more democratic, more honest-- read it and weep." (308)

One does wonder-- admittedly lacking the personal experience that informed the rationale of McIntyre after so much of his life fighting the British state-- if the author should finally blurt out what he locks inside. Why not, imprisoned for so long, as an ex-prisoner demonstrate your inner liberation? Why not embrace your local peeler?

Frequent criticism levelled at dissenters has been that in their refusal to change, they etch deeper the corrosive qualities of a toxic republicanism that will not glow much longer into our own century. McIntyre and his comrades debated against those who drowned them out in the mainstream media on TV most nights. They persisted despite direct and disguised attempts to shut them up. They refused to submit to those who had betrayed them; they turned away from those who beckoned them back to a useless fight. This collection offers carefully reasoned articles insisting that another form of purer republicanism still lingers that deserves resurrection. "The Blanket," as an aside, often featured spirited debate about this very issue, although the selection of more topical pieces by McIntyre may tilt his own anthology towards a clearer chronological, thematically cohesive presentation.

Perhaps, given the futility of the hardline remnant of compromised and infiltrated militants and the corruption of co-opted SF, any "third way" here appears a glimpse up a foggy cul-de-sac. McIntyre and Moloney convince you that the ground troops in the Fenian campaign have been betrayed, but like the Wild Geese, one now wonders what cause will answer their ambitions. Will those who visit the graves in fifty years look back on today's dissidents as students may skim the manifestoes from the ralliers for the restoration of Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Bourbon dynasty?

The failure of an alternative movement to counter the party machine resulted, eventually as this anthology tacitly documents, the folding up of "The Blanket" earlier this year. Its purpose appeared to have been finished; other community activists had taken up the watch, the governments had agencies in place, and the criminal activities that had replaced the RM with petty theft, drug running, and slum squalor appeared less the blame of the Brits and more the lassitude of post-GFA residents. The tricolor flutters and the strikers commemorated on murals still grace the closely packed streets, but one wonders if these depictions will in time fade into "tradition" as walls in other redoubts, those post-GFA Unionist enclaves. The whitewashing waits. McIntyre's anthology warns us of the impermanence of what once stood as an unshakeable foundation under any republican, dawn over a unified island.


(Disclosure: I contributed to "The Blanket" throughout its run, 2001-08, and know Anthony, not as well as I wish, but blame a continent plus an ocean's distance for that!)



Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Enforcing the Code of Malpractice

The Press Council of Ireland in deciding to uphold a complaint against Kevin Myers and the Irish Independent erred badly and in blinkered fashion. It found that Myers’ column from July 10 entitled ‘Africa is giving nothing to anyone apart from AIDS’ was in breach of Principle 8 of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Periodicals.

Principle 8 refers to incitement to hatred. This principle was supposedly breached despite the Press Council acknowledging that there was nothing to suggest that Myers sought to stir up hatred or that hatred was likely to result from what he had penned. The council held that where Principle 8 was violated it was on the grounds of the article in question having caused offence. There is little in the Press Council’s justification for its actions that displays the slightest awareness of the vast gulf between writing that is offensive and writing which is penned for no other reason than to fuel hatred.

What was Myers guilty of apart from being absolutely wrong? He caused offence as does much of the country’s better writing. Even if the column was in direct conflict with human rights precepts this was no reason to hound it. Human rights are social constructs. They do not exist in an ahistorical hermetically sealed vault but operate within moveable boundaries. How those boundaries are drawn is partly the result of informed discussion and debate, a process Myers was contributing to when the dogs were set on him.

Arguably what the myopic stance of the Press Council has completely missed in its deliberations is the intrinsically self defeating nature of the Myers column which needed no outside intervention in order to ensure the logic of the column was spiked. Myers, albeit unintentionally, underlined the view that stubbornness, chauvinism and wilful indifference are three strands weaved together to form an obstruction that is clumsily heaved across the tracks of public concern in relation to Africa. The hope of those sympathetic to what Myers wrote was the derailing of any progress that may be made in the difficult task of overcoming Africa’s terrible predicament. It is arguably a forlorn hope. After reading the irascible column I became even more convinced that the author had got it wrong and that much more should be done to put a fair wind at the back of agencies like Goal.

The Press Council in making its customary nod to free expression claimed that:

The opportunity for robust presentations in the print media of widely different views, however controversial or disturbing some of them may be is a powerful indicator of a mature and confident democracy.

Then with a liberal injection of forgetfulness it immediately lurched onto the home ground of the censor with its comment, ‘but ultimately the same broad boundaries which limit all freedoms must apply to freedom of expression including comment in the press.’

How ludicrous. Freedom of expression inextricably linked with free inquiry is what allows society to ponder on what freedoms actually are and where the boundaries should be placed. We don’t need to be lectured that freedom without limit is license. But to curb liberties, even where distastefully used, through introducing the constraint that opinion should ‘have regard for others and for the common good’ is an abdication of vocational responsibility on the part of the Press Council. It empowers the licentious concept of political respect by dressing it up as neutral and overlooking its cultural signifiers. This allows cultural mores to morph into rights. Consequently license is granted to a gamut of power structures which use respect as an armour to ward off free inquiry in relation to what malpractices may be ongoing behind the shield. It affords protection to the vile freedom usurping practice of speaking power to truth.

The Press Council has failed to show that Myers actually violated any rights other than the pseudo right not to be offended. His ‘rhetorical extravagance’ is a well known polemical device not a rights crusher. In its verdict the Press Council is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It is a disquieting outcome which paradoxically will produce a quieting of the worst possible sort – censorious silence. Keep going as we are and soon only anodyne vicars will be columnists.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Good Friday Review: "The new Good Book for all Unionists"

Revolutionary Unionist Dr John Coulter, in Monday's Irish Daily Star: "This work must rank as one of the best insights into why the Shinners have become Britain's 'token nationalist' puppets operating the Stormont partitionist Parliament in the North."

The new Good Book for all Unionists

John Coulter, Irish Daily Star

Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, by Anthony McIntyre, Ausubo Press (New York), 322pp, $21.95

The death of Irish republicanism – there's a fantastic phrase to warm the cockles of all Unionist hearts.

What makes it all the more amazing is that it's the title of one of the most damning criticisms of the Shinners' peace strategy ever penned by an Irish republican.

Every Unionist should read the new book by ex-Provo inmate turned academic and writer Anthony McIntyre – Good Friday The Death of Republicanism.

This work must rank as one of the best insights into why the Shinners have become Britain's 'token nationalist' puppets operating the Stormont partitionist Parliament in the North.

If Unionists want to know how to keep the Shinners in check, they just need to smother themselves in the well-written 13 chapters based on McIntyre's comprehensive portfolio of articles, many penned when he was editor of the dissident website, The Blanket.

The book's official launch in Belfast Linenhall Library was a who's who in anti-agreement republicanism.

In his launch speech, Dr McIntyre – who served 18 years in the Maze's H Blocks – pulled no punches emphasising republicans must never again resort to killing to achieve a united Ireland.

Even if you're a diehard Shinner fully in love with the Assembly peace tactics, you need to read McIntyre's work to understand the depth of grumblings within your own ranks.

Even a glance through the defeatist titles of the various sections will stress to even the most disillusioned Unionist that the Provos were defeated both politically and militarily.

What else are we to conclude from articles called: 'We, the IRA, Have Failed'; The Last Supper'; 'Sinn Feign'; 'Republicanism's Surrender by Instalment' – and my personal fave, 'Go to Sleep, My Weary Provo.'

Many evangelical Unionists keep the Holy Bible on their bedside tables for daily inspiration. For added encouragement, get Dr McIntyre's book.

One conclusion was clear after the launch: republicanism is as split as unionism.

It's not so much a case the Shinners have the Hun on the run. If McIntyre's work based on his thoughts as a former leading Provo is to be believed, it's Sinn Féin and the IRA which is on the run from the Hun.

And who is the young man with the black glasses and beret pictured walking beside a coffin on the front cover just above the word 'Death'? I'm sure I've seen him somewhere before.

Meanwhile, everyone in Ireland should wear a poppy to mark the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day to remember the 30,000 plus Irishmen slaughtered in World War One.

Unionists and republicans don't have a monopoly on victims. German and Turkish bullets did not take account of religion.

If republicans cannot bring themselves to wear the red poppy, they should sport a green one to honour the tens of thousands of Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalists who fought imperial Germany's tyranny.

Ireland's dead may have become a political football over the generations since 11 November 1918, but at 11 am, as an island, let's unite in tribute to their sacrifice.



Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Belfast Book Launch

The launch of the book, Good Friday: the Death of Irish Republicanism, was a special moment for me. It was a triumph for ink over erasers, reason over faith. The reasoning was simple. The peace process would take republicanism to the internal solution of today which guarantees the longevity of partition and the hegemony of British rule. Faith held that the peace process would lead to a British withdrawal and a united Ireland. Faith could not bear to coexist with reason and at every point sought to suppress it. The book is testimony to the failure of faith based republicanism.

The range of people the launch attracted from differing political perspectives was heartening. There was even a unionist church figure there. Given my avowedly republican and humanist perspective it said much for his power of understanding that he attended. Friends from prison, the blanket protest, family and others who I have befriended since release turned up. Of particular significance to me was the presence of Tommy McReynolds, Frankie and Eleanor Rea, Noel Breen, Noel McGuinness and Magdalene Robinson, all friends from a South Belfast childhood. Others were there simply because they admired the writing, wanted a signed copy, obtain a book as a present for a friend, or because they had a strong humane streak and long abhorred the manner in which people were treated for the thought crime of thinking differently. Journalists were also there, two of whom, Henry McDonald and Suzanne Breen, I had the honour of being with on the day they conducted the first substantial interviews with the sisters of the murdered Robert McCartney. Unionist friends gathered including the writer David Adams who knows from bitter experience the high cost of expressing an independent viewpoint. Also there, but whom I unpardonably overlooked on the evening due to having no written prompts, was the republican author Richard O’Rawe whose book Blanketmen has revolutionised the way in which the 1981 hunger strike is both thought and talked about. He too learned that an alternative thought would cause more anger within Sinn Fein than any DUP diatribe. A close friend of my wife travelled from the Republic, spent the evening with us and then drove us home.

That was the sort of audience it was, a mosaic of Northern society and a distillation of the type of social network I have floated in since release from prison. I was deeply satisfied that they had assembled for the event in the Linenhall Library. Every day for a considerable time in the 1990s I made my way up its stairs into the cramped but cosy environs that were the Northern Ireland Political Collection to work on a doctoral thesis. The staff there were outstanding in both their accessibility and erudition. In a city where knowledge was regarded by some as a candle which had to be snuffed out the library operated like a lighthouse, withstanding even the firestorm of one IRA firebomb attack.

The book was launched 33 years to the day after I had been released from my first prison term. Then I walked out into the middle of a feud between the Provisional and Officials IRAs. The Officials were accused of rampant criminality. It was a mere pretext for launching a military assault on a political rival. They were hated less for their alleged criminality than the fact that they supported Stormont, would supposedly lift the phone to tell the British police that republicans were involved in military operations against the British, believed in the consent principle, opposed armed activity, and were advocating non-sectarianism. The same type of thing the organisation that attacked them from October to November 1975 advocates today.

But 33 years is a long bland time if not broken up by the odd somersault. It doesn’t do to be too predictable. The enemy might just see the pattern and defeat you, bring you to a position whereby you hold to the same position as it; might just have you agreeing with them that anybody who breaks its law regardless of motive is a criminal. ‘Crime is crime is crime’ as Mrs Thatcher once lectured us.

I am grateful to everybody who turned up for the night. My publisher Aoife Rivera Serrano travelled from New York. It was nice to actually meet her at last. In her opening words she shed light on how a Puerto Rican publisher-activist could come to develop a strong interest in Irish republicanism. Her words generated considerable conversation after the event.

Tommy Gorman launched the book. It was fitting that he did. He had been situated at the heart of reasoned critical thinking throughout the peace process when most others found it easier to abide by its law of blind faith. Together we helped sustain each other in the face of the Stick virus which was ravaging republicanism from top to bottom causing people to believe the diametrical opposite of what they proclaimed to have believed a week earlier. Just two weeks prior to being in the Linenhall Library I had stayed in his Donegal home, enjoying a late night drinking session followed by a walk to clear the head on the beach at Downings the following day. It was 30 years earlier that our paths traversed through the H-Block blanket protest. It would be some years before I would know what Tommy looked like with his clothes on! On the morning of his release he was physically attacked and injured in his cell by a prison administration furious that another republican would escape its clutches unbroken.

Mere months later he was back behind bars. When released for the last time in 1985 he would regularly write to me on political matters, always on cigarette papers and invariably smuggled into the jail. At the core of his concern was a perceived rightward shift within the Sinn Fein leadership and hostility to any serious discussion of the issue at grassroots level. On my first parole in 1989 after more than 13 years in prison I sought him out within hours of hitting the street. He gave me a quick tour of two Sinn Fein centres in Sevastopol Street and Connolly House. On the day of the 1994 ceasefire, together we incurred the ire of the leadership for subscribing to Bernadette McAliskey’s view that ‘the good guys lost.’ And along with me he paid a certain price for speaking out against the Provisional killing of Joe O’Connor in October 2000. Our homes were mob picketed by a Stormont gang and we were subjected to a campaign of ostracism and vilification aimed at silencing us. As the Linenhall Library launch of Good Friday showed the only place we have remained silent was under police interrogation.

After the event a number of us headed off to a restaurant which did a great fish meal eased down by the beer we already had a taste for as a result of the wine provided in the Linenhall Library. It was a pleasurable way to end the evening. Yet I could not prevent an unsettling thought flitting through my mind; that such a book ever had to be written at all is symptomatic of the atrophy of a once vibrant movement. Leonard Cohen better sums it up than I ever could:

Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows





Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism
is available at these online outlets:
Ausubo Press; Online Bookshop at Queens, Small Press Distribution.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan:
Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie

Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599

Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore,
ask them to order it for you!

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Book Burners

Still it goes on. The incident which in other circumstances would have been long forgotten by now (there has been a US Presidential election since it happened to take minds elsewhere) - the lewd call to Andrew Sachs made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand - is still hugging the headlines. After a staggering 42,000 complaints from people with little else to concern them the BBC apologised for the behaviour of its two errant presenters. The apology was broadcast at the beginning of the Ross show, minus Ross, this morning. And a further apology is to go out this evening at the time the Brand show would normally have started. Dave Barber, the head of specialist music at Radio 2 has also resigned. Is there no end to it?

For me, by no stretch of the imagination a paid up member of the sadly inflated Kill Kevin mob, the most disappointing aspect of the BBC Radio 2 lewd call affair has been that Kevin Myers should devote one full Irish Independent column to calling for the heads of Brand and Ross. I fail to understand this bout of Kevin Ires. Always an engaging writer who – good for him - has offended many in his day, surely his Malthusian suggestion last summer that we let the Africans starve rather than donate aid to them has much more serious consequences than anything the unfortunate Mr Sachs may have undergone. Kevin Myers who was once unceremoniously hounded for having referred to children born out of wedlock as ‘bastards’ should know to appraise the logic of burning the books of those who write unsavoury things. Like Niemoller, he might find that by the time they come for him there will be no one left to speak out.

There are enough censors world wide hunting down the word without artists leaping on the entourage of book burners seeking to destroy the offensive. Protection of the offensive is at the heart of secular culture without which we would be subject to even more dangerous forms of offence. Brand and Ross were wrong. That’s about the height of it. They didn’t gouge anybody’s eye out or slice their ear off.

In the same issue of the Irish Independent there was a news feature about a violent incident at a Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul heath centre in Dublin. In a very uncharitable act Michael Shadlow had his nose bitten off by a work colleague, whose testicles Shadlow had allegedly squeezed. The headline ran: ‘Nose was bitten off and spat into toilet, court was told.’ Sister Marian Hart who fortunately was on hand at the time of the nose biting incident said:

I realised Michael had a serious bite on his nose and that a piece of the nose was actually missing. I knew it would be imperative to get the piece and stick it back on. I found the piece in a nearby toilet bowl that had not been flushed.

The jolt to the mind of being hit with language so descriptive was more shocking than anything that I have read about the experience of Andrew Sachs. That type of vicious violence is what should be taxing our minds rather than fall outs between celebrities. Despite claims that the powerful are using their position in the media to torment the powerless a more purposeful way of assessing it is by asking how the lewd call incident could be ratcheted up into the stratosphere of news stories without really having much news value; and why, when real torment is experienced in working class communities, it often does not register on the news barometer.

All up, Russell Brand bragging on public radio about screwing a fellow professional’s granddaughter is of less concern than clerics screwing children.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Video of Belfast "Good Friday" speeches

Last night's launch was a great success. Heartfelt thanks to all who attended, and to Aoife for all her efforts. Further report to come in the following days; for now, Sleepyjean at YouTube has posted the evening's speeches. They follow after the jump.

FULL TRANSCRIPTS OF SPEECHES NOW AVAILABLE.
Updated 9 Nov: Aoife Rivera Serrano, Ausubo Press (transcript added)


Aoife Rivera Serrano starts the evening's speeches

AOIFE RIVERA SERRANO: We're here today to celebrate the publication of Good Friday, the Death of Irish Republicanism, and there are a couple of comments I would like to make before Mr. Gorman takes over the stage...takes over the microphone. First of all I want to welcome you all to Linen Hall and this event for Anthony McIntyre and for Ausubo Press.

I'd like to speak a little about Ausubo Press because I think some people might be interested why a company that isn't American, but a company that is from Puerto Rico, and the publisher is Puerto Rican, would go to the trouble of publishing this book.

I am really overjoyed and at the same time saddened to be here, because the histories of our two island nations have crossed paths before, and they are crossing paths again today, with this book, this launch, and this author. My presence here would never have happened without the Latin American Fenian, Pedro Albizu Campos and his contribution to the Irish struggle that began when Albizu Campos was scorched by the fire of Irish republicanism in 1919, as I am scorched by the same fire.

In publishing Good Friday, I continue the work of my compatriot, Pedro Albizu Campos. I think it is worth noting that few publishers would have touched Anthony's book and that it took a republican from Puerto Rico or from Borikén, which is the indigenous name of my country, to publish the book.

I'd also like to point out that when this Irishman's book was published, no store on the island north or south would carry or stock the book. So, again, a Puerto Rican who is, for lack of a better way of putting it, an Irish Republican, intervened and somehow got the most reputable distributor in Ireland, Gill and Macmillan, to distribute this book, so that anywhere on this island, north or south, Good Friday can be purchased and read.

I don't have much else to add to that. I would have thought a lot of people might be interested in Ausubo Press, I would just like to finish with this thought. Despite the title of the book, Good Friday, the Death of Irish Republicanism, it is because of the fire of Irish Republicanism that I am here. Irish Republicanism is at a crossroads, to be sure, at this time, but it is far from being remotely moribund. Especially in the last two oldest colonies in the world, Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico, or Borikén, which is what we call it.

So that is how I will finish my comments. And I would like to intro -- oh, one more thing. Greetings have been sent to Anthony, and to people of like mind, from an old Republican in Puerto Rico who has equally been ostracized and marginalized for being very frank in his discussion of republicanism in Puerto Rico. He wrote me a note saying - his name is Dr Ovidio Dávila and he was, he's retired now, he was the Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. And he said, "I wish you the best of luck in Ireland, that special nation that holds a very, very special place in the heart of every true Boricua Republican."

And with that I'd like to introduce, Mr. Tommy Gorman.


Tommy Gorman speaking at the launch of Good Friday, also first half of Anthony McIntyre's speech

TOMMY GORMAN: Some years ago, if Mackers had had a mind, he could now be living in luxury, and a hassle free life, not harassed by thugs and former comrades in West Belfast. He could also, I imagine, had been offered a nice job in Stormont, in the new administration, enjoying all the trappings of luxuries which the former socialists up there now display. He could have done this by first of all, in the first instance by walking away, when he walked out of jail after doing a substantial time in prison. And he could have got the second one, the job in Stormont by joining in the whole charade which is described graphically in the book which is now launching.

Mackers sought to do neither but to stay and get involved in fighting the new oppressor, and the new oppressor turns out to be our former comrades in the organisation to which we belonged. My efforts against the machine were feeble to say the least. More like a scatter gun against the attack. A little bit of noise but no real damage. Mackers, on the other hand, was like a skilled surgeon, cutting through the flim-flam, cutting through the fudge and the organised lying, to expose all the contradictions within this charade. The charade was [unknown] to sign up to and look at it at some way progressive when its the opposite.

Mackers has been blessed with more than his share of cynicism and more than his share of brilliance. And he puts those two together to pen some massive [unknown] pieces on the situation carried in the book. And this book should be read by everyone. And particularly people who still cling on to the notion within the box that this leadership is going to lead them anywhere near the secular socialist Republic of our promised land.

The opposite is true. They are now getting quickly towards shit creek and they haven't got the paddles.

And again I am proud to be a very, very small part of this struggle against this new oppressor. I'd like to hand you over now to my good friend, Mackers.


Anthony McIntyre speech, part 2.

ANTHONY MCINTYRE (FULL SPEECH): Thanks very much, Tommy, and Aoife. I feel very humble, and at the same time, honoured to be here. And that people have turned up to, the launch of a book which in some ways is controversial in that I don't think there's many other writers who were mad or gifted enough or whatever to accuse the Sinn Fein leadership of being liars, on many of these points and issues that we've raised. I suppose one of my favourite lines from the book is that in 50 years' time we shall see pilgrimages to the graves of Sinn Fein leaders, where they will say on the headstones, "Here they are, lying still."

And, you know, in many ways this is what this book tried to do. It was a collection of articles written over the years. And, you know, I remember, Danny Devanney, a Sinn Fein member, now you have to bear in mind that Danny Devanney if he had two heads he'd be twice as stupid, that's probably the best thing you could say about him, is that he accused me of, "You, wee Tony McIntyre from the Ormeau Road, criticising Gerry Adams?" And in ways he realised, that this is what it boiled down to, that I didn't have the right to speak. Being an IRA volunteer of many, over two decades of having been involved in the IRA, having been involved in the prison protests, having never once crossed the picket line, that, you know, that - I could not - there was a very elitist culture there whereby people like me could not criticise. I felt that at all times it was an attempt to speak truth to power, to speak a certain truth and ask certain questions of people that many of our dead comrades never got the chance to ask.

I come here tonight as a writer and as a former IRA volunteer. I'm very, very pleased there are many people here, including people from the Unionist community. One of the benefits of the relationship that I have with people in the Unionist community is that I try to be direct and very, very honest. And quite often it comes at a price. But I've always said, and the unionists understand when I say this, that I have, will never once apologise for having been a member of the IRA. I've never once apologised or regretted having joined the IRA, having been in the IRA, having served time in the H Blocks, having been on the blanket protest. And to this day I still don't.

But I know that people are here from the Unionist community who have themselves been denigrated and vilified for having had the temerity to write articles that sort of dissent from the dominant line... Within that, within that sense, we're all here together.

I'm very pleased that I see so many people here from my early life. I had a curious journey. This day 33 years ago, as a young IRA volunteer, and so eager to get back into the IRA, I was leaving prison, I had been imprisoned for a two year sentence and I left prison on the 5th of November 1975, and [was] eager to get back into the IRA. 33 years later, I stand here, perhaps unable to stand the sight of the IRA given what's become of it, what it has done, the betrayals that the leadership have engaged in.

But I served time with so many IRA volunteers and I see some of them here tonight. I'm so proud to stand alongside them. I'm very, very proud to see so many different people, the likes of former blanketmen, people like Tommy McKearney, people like Gerard Hodgkins, people like Tommy Gorman, standing here tonight, people who have come, and a guy that I didn't recognise, a guy called Liam who just said he had been on the blanket now, I signed a book for him, and it meant an awful lot to me that comrades from the blanket, because that was a difficult, difficult time in our life. In many senses the blanket was about protest and this book was about protest.

But it was strange tonight that the man who brought me into the IRA, my first comrade in the IRA, from the lower Ormeau Road, should be the same man who picked me up in Dundalk and brought me to this event tonight, Tommy McReynolds. Tommy McReynolds has been there for me all my life, in times of crisis, and I am deeply, deeply grateful to a person like Tommy.

[video break]

A great IRA comrade, and because he brought me into the IRA, I don't blame him, I have to be philosophical about it, Tommy was a great guy, who wasn't one of the people who at the end of the day betrayed and effectively sold out.

For long enough I used the term the leadership failed, but now as a dissenting republican even though I am not worried about the term dissident, I am not a dissident in that I do not support armed campaigns, I do not support violence, I have simply said that they have turned [their] backs on us, too many of our comrades died and too many other people died.

But people like Tommy McReynolds were great guys and have stood by me. But I also know from that time, when I was a young IRA volunteer at 16 when I was first arrested, and I see people here tonight from the lower Ormeau Road and I can't pick out everybody but I can pick out people like Frankie Ray who has been a life long friend, him and his wife Eleanor who visited me in prison, who welcomed me into their homes and who might not have agreed with my views and at times we didn't even talk politics but in human, social situations they were always there for me, and I am very, very grateful that they have turned up tonight.

And I can't let the moment pass without paying great tribute to Magdalene Robinson. Magdalene Robinson's a lifelong friend and again somebody who I was very close to and a person who I wrote a poem to, her and her husband at one time, "13 Years and Still They Come", -- in case anyone thinks there's sexual connotations, I merely talked about the way they visited me in prison regularly and were so good.

And then at other times, I mean, people here tonight, lifelong comrades. Comrades themselves who were hassled in Sinn Fein. Comrades who were in the Irish Republican Socialist Movement who are here tonight. People like Kevin McQuillan, people like Tony Catney who went through jail with me. I'm so pleased that these people turned up, even if they don't agree with my view on everything, even if they don't agree with my attitude.

And then there's other friends and I can't name everybody, but people stand out, the likes of Ann Gorman, the likes of Niall Corey, the likes of Diarmuid Twomey. And journalist colleagues, like Mick Brown. People who, at all times when I was in trouble with the police for writing about things that the police don't like, and that's virtually anything about them, that they would come into my home and raid my computer and people like Mick Brown would stand up and defend me and take up the case with the NUJ.

But I am particularly grateful to my publisher, Aoife, who spoke at the start, because without Aoife, I doubt if I would have get off my backside to do the work. She hassled, harried and is absolutely brilliant. And it's without doubt, had she not have put the effort in, we wouldn't be standing here tonight, either criticising this book or praising it for what it's worth.

I'd also like to say that, I wasn't the first person to see what was going on within the ranks of the IRA. I found myself at times thinking, what sort of position have I got into? I'd suddenly become and cast by the SF leadership as 'Peace Process Enemy #1'. I got called every sort of name, I was ostracized. I was actually accused, at one point by Comical Marty McGuinness of being the brains, the Svengali type figure behind the McCartney sisters, who I'm so pleased to see are here tonight. I was not their advisor. Those women were too intelligent for Comical Marty to deal with, so he had to make up the notion that there was some 'man' manipulating them, somebody with a gripe against the peace process.

On top of that as I said earlier, I was not the first person to see what was going on, I merely wrote about it. I merely asked questions, and the book is full of questions. I think a very important thing is that even 12 years, 10 years, a decade, whatever it was before I was writing about it, the IRA's most successful, the most intelligent, an IRA intellectual, the IRA's Chief of Staff, in 1983 predicted exactly what was going to happen. Adams of course, with the aid of the British thru the Bobby Lean case, removed him. And myself and Ed Moloney discovered this when we were in London a couple of years ago when we were talking to people who were academics but with close associations as a result of research with British intelligence services. And they told us that the key moment in the defeat of the IRA was the removal of the IRA's Chief of Staff in 1983.

Now I would argue very, very strongly if people go away with nothing from this book, or remember nothing about this event that they try and keep a number of things in their head, is that the IRA's Chief of Staff in 1983 was right. He was right then, he is right today, he'll always be right.

And Mr Adams, who was an IRA Chief of Staff despite the fact that he wasn't in the IRA, has consistently disputed claims that this whole struggle has been a failure. But I watched the protest the other day at Belfast City Hall or in the town against the march of the RIR through the city, and it seemed to me that the defeat could be summed up in simple terms. The only demand that Sinn Fein could have actually stood there and asked, and you couldn't have shouted at the Unionists, the only thing that they could have genuinely said given their politics, they would have looked stupid shouting it but, what they should have been shouting was Bring Back Paisley, because Peter Robinson, the whole thing there is that Peter Robinson seems to have made a fool out of them, seems to have trumped them, nothing has emerged from a Republican point of view in relation to the struggle that I could acknowledge has been beneficial.

On that, I'd like to thank everybody who turned up here tonight. I'm very, very grateful. Most of all, I'd like to thank my wife, Carrie Twomey. In moments of absolute darkness and despair, when the IRA and Sinn Fein were outside the house rolling cars with the engine off up and down the street, when they were in the living room and in the kitchen, the Chief of Staff, Dumb and Dumber, the Intelligence Officer, his sidekick, the Idiot General come in and decided to threaten us in the kitchen, she faced them. When they hounded, when they hounded us and came to our home and stood outside my home and I was unfortunately at a conference, a political conference in Cookstown, my wife went out, six months pregnant, stood and faced them. And they howled and they scowled but they couldn't defeat her. And in a sense, if this book is the throne, she is the power and the strength behind the throne that this book is. There's no doubt that this book would not have been possible were it not for her.

I'd like to finish off by saying that everybody who has come here, who has come here tonight you are very, very welcome, regardless of what the political affiliation is, and regardless of what the past is. There's many people here tonight wouldn't like my past, and I'm sure I don't like theirs. The one thing that we are certain of, that I am certain of, and I know not everybody would agree with me on this, that never again, and myself and Tommy Gorman paid a price for saying this but we agreed it is certain, time and time again, never again should republicans take human life in pursuit of their goals. Whatever differences we have with people, we should find another way to resolve them. I want a United Ireland, I would love to see an United Ireland, but I do not want to see it at the expense of one person's life.

I thank everybody for coming here tonight.

(RUSH TRANSCRIPTS - WATCH VIDEOES FOR FULL SPEECHES)

Good Friday, The Death of Irish Republicanism is available at these online outlets: Ausubo Press; Small Press Distribution and Amazon.

You can also order directly from Gill & Macmillan: Email sales@gillmacmillan.ie
Are you a bookseller looking to stock Good Friday?
Call or Fax your order to: Tel: +353 1 500 9500 or Fax: +353 1 500 9599
Gill & Macmillan is now the exclusive distributor in Ireland and the UK If the book is not on the shelves of your local bookstore, ask them to order it for you!

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