Geneva Fallout

To be pro-choice on assisted dying means simply to me to be entirely pro–life - Suzanne Moore

The Terry Pratchett documentary Choosing To Die produced quite a bit of reaction, much of it, although not all, reactionary. The BBC very quickly received 900 complaints and found itself accused of being a cheerleader for suicide. The Care Not Killing charity warned of copycat deaths and demanded an urgent inquiry. This hardly needs demystifying to show it as an impulse towards censorship. Others argued that the documentary was one sided. Perhaps, but as the BBC argued it is over the course that it tries to achieve balance and not in one particular programme. In response to the demands of the censorious who opposed the airing of the documentary Charlotte Moore, the BBC commissioning editor for documentaries, defended the corporation’s decision to feature the most controversial scene, Peter Smedley’s death at the Swiss clinic Dignitas on the grounds that the event was:

extremely powerful and challenging … but above all … honest. To gloss over Peter's final moments would be to do a disservice to Peter, to Terry and to the viewer. We have a responsibility to tell the story in its entirety. How can we do this if we shy away from the crux of the story, difficult as this may be?’

Axiomatic it would seem, but not to all. Those who do not want to watch such a documentary need merely switch channels. It is not compulsory to view them. They have the freedom of choice they so wish to deny others. They will be closing parks next on Sundays because they, not us, object to the swings being used. There is no reason why society’s viewing should be subject to the likes or dislikes of particular interest groups. Theirs is a recommendation for keeping us all stupid.

An Unrepentant Fenian

Tonight The Pensive Quill features Martin Galvin's speech at the recent commemoration for Brendan Hughes in County Louth.

An influential New York radio program, Radio Free Eireann, where Brendan Hughes’ voice was often heard, begins each week with a song that shouts the words “unrepentant Fenian bastard!” Years ago when first I came across the phrase “unrepentant” Fenian or “unrepentant” Republican, it puzzled me. Repentance to me meant remorse and contrition for some wrongdoing that one later comes to regret.

We mark Easter as our national day to honour Ireland’s patriot dead and pay tribute to their unbroken bond with the volunteers of 1916 by reading the Proclamation. That generation honoured the Fenians, whose very graves they said, guaranteed that” Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Later the word Fenian came to be commonly used as a label to abuse any defiant Republicans who did not bend the knee to British rule or the beneficiaries of sectarian privilege.

Either way I took the term to be a compliment, high praise, and another way of saying Irish patriot. No one speaks of a repentant patriot. Why should any Fenian or Republican be repentant and why would it ever be noteworthy to single out any Fenian for being unrepentant? Of course it is easier to see the meaning today.

Brendan Hughes surely lived and died as an unrepentant Fenian. He could have no more repented, nor disowned, nor denied his part in the IRA’s fight against British rule, than he could repent being Irish, or disown Belfast, or disavow the legitimacy of the Irish struggle by donning a British criminal uniform in the H-blocks of Long Kesh.

The very suggestion that he repent, disown or even minimize his part in the struggle to make himself more politically acceptable to the British, much less to a Paisley or Robinson led Stormont, would have been answered with that sly mischievous grin, perhaps a chuckle and an instruction to ”cop yourself on.”

Last week David Cameron managed to take time out from his busy schedule with more important matters, to visit what he repeatedly and deliberately calls “this part of the United Kingdom”. He patted himself on the back for the Bloody Sunday families’ hard won apology, said he did it to close the chapter, and spoke of honouring those who he says served with distinction in upholding British rule and law. There does not seem to be much repentance there for the Ballymurphy Massacre, or shoot-to-kill, or internment, or collusion murders with loyalist death squads, or torture or Hunger Strike deaths, Diplock Courts or any of the many other unjustified and unjustifiable acts, mere tactics, wielded in the name of British law and rule. His arrogance is of course in line with what Republicans have always heard from the British crown. Cameron by the way was applauded at Stormont.

Brendan Hughes took pride in counting himself as one of those men and women who” served with distinction” standing against these unjustified and unjustifiable acts committed by those upholding British rule and law, and against the very idea that the right of Irish people to national freedom vanishes into the air a few miles from here.

It should hardly be necessary for me to speak about his part in the struggle in the presence of some who were with him, with him in the streets of Belfast or the infamous H-blocks of Long Kesh.

However some mention must be made if only because some, in the name of the new political dispensation, seem to believe that it is permissible to dispense with the reputations and role played in the struggle of those like Brendan, who did not fall in line behind the narrative. Our presence here today, the memorial lecture of a few weeks ago, the murals of him, so fittingly near murals dedicated to Republican political prisoners, are proof if any were needed, that Brendan Hughes is beyond any attempt to discredit, diminish or dispense with his exploits.

Like countless others, I knew of him long before I would meet him. Like a Jim Lynagh, or Pete Ryan or Francis Hughes among so many others, Brendan Hughes was one of those volunteer IRA soldiers whose courage and determination seemed to overflow into those alongside them, somehow instilling confidence that the overwhelming military advantages held by British crown forces would someone be neutralized or overcome because he was there.

He was fearless, a leader who was there at the beginning in Belfast, rose through the ranks, and led from the front. He saw family members killed, faced imprisonment and was not deterred.

It was perhaps most characteristic of him that when he escaped from a British prison he did so not to gain safety in the south or even a respite, but to get back to Belfast and the fight within days.

In the H-blocks he had the unenviable, if not near impossible task of rallying the H-block blanketmen, the 300 Spartans, as Richard O’Rawe described them, keeping up their spirits and morale in the daily fight against British criminalization while at the same time, exercising the restraint and patience required by the Republican movement, to build the campaign which would eventually inspire countless thousands across Ireland and across the globe to rally behind the blanketmen against Thatcher’s brutal torture.

When all attempts at a political resolution, including that by Cardinal O’Fiaich were dismissed by Thatcher, and the ultimate protest, hunger strike, was forced upon Republican political prisoners, Brendan Hughes volunteered to lead. While himself suffering 53 days of hunger strike, on the back of years of protest, the responsibility fell upon him to end the first hunger strike in time to save the life of Sean McKenna. We would then see Thatcher throw away still another opportunity to resolve the protest, instead choosing tactics which would mean the death of ten hunger strike martyrs, in her vain effort to break the struggle by breaking the prisoners.

After his release from Long Kesh, Brendan volunteered to come to the United States to collect funds for the Republican Movement. It was not an assignment he relished, but one that was important to the struggle. He would begin meetings by explaining he was not there to seek monies for Irish Northern Aid or the families of political prisoners or even for Sinn Fein. He was raising money for the IRA.

He threw himself into the tour, meeting small groups answering questions and explaining strategy. He worked with patience, determination and some humor and succeeded nearly doubling his original goal. He was perhaps too successful. It is perhaps no coincidence, that when he returned to Ireland he was slotted into the IRA’s security department, where he could be checked by at least one prominent British agent, Freddie Scappaticci, while another paid British traitor, Denis Donaldson would be posted to New York the next year where he could knock down all that Brendan had built up.

In those days, the British trumpeted the propaganda fiction that the IRA fight was not due to the injustice of British rule but because so-called godfathers were profiting from the war. Anyone who ever visited Brendan Hughes would see this claim for the lie that it was, as he clearly never asked or accepted any profit, from a struggle in which he had given years of his life.

Later, he would come to question a deal that he feared would not only barter away acceptance of British rule and a unionist veto, but would hijack Republicanism,- maneuvering some well-meaning Republicans into positions within a British Stormont administration or constabulary boards where they inescapably would be used by the British to put a Republican front on British rule.

How easy it would have been for him to keep silent, perhaps be seen at the odd political event or commemoration and simply enjoy the prominence, fame and opportunities, which his part in the struggle might have merited. Instead the same beliefs which brought this Unrepentant Fenian out onto the streets of Belfast to join the struggle against the forces of the British crown now led him to decide that loyalty to the struggle demanded he speak against the deal, and direction in which the Movement was headed.

His arguments were seldom answered on the merits but sidestepped with fanciful claims that Brendan was affected by the hunger strike or his years of imprisonment. The worst and most hurtful of these was the slander that he was against the leadership on a personal basis. This was a movement led by some with whom he had fought alongside, been imprisoned and risked his life. The idea of speaking against a leadership which included such close friends must have been heartbreaking for him and harder in some ways than refusing the crown uniform in Long Kesh. Such slanders were created to enable others to justify themselves to themselves without dealing with the truth behind his words.

He became a rallying point for debate, for independent Republican analysis, and for legitimate criticism at a time when many who could never be intimidated into talking at Castlereagh were intimidated into silence by threats, pickets, slurs or ostracism so strong that it could push a strong individual like Whitey Bradley to take his own life.

Today it is important to return to the fundamental question of that debate. Is this Stormont deal a transition to a united Ireland? Will accepting British rule, taking Stormont ministries or places on constabulary boards, and banding together in partnership with the DUP, succeed in removing the injustices underpinning British rule, overcoming the unionist veto and uniting Ireland?

Or was the deal planned by the British to be a final resting place for Republicans? Will those who become wedded to a British administration ultimately be wedded to its injustices- their very presence and reputations as Republicans trotted out to present visible Republican faces behind which British rule will be administered in British interests? Will those from the unionist community be swayed to join them in a united Ireland or is it more likely that some from the nationalist community, who take up jobs and positions, begin to think that British rule is not so bad for me?

We need only look to Maghaberry, and the plight of Republican prisoners which was always so close to Brendan’s heart. Thirty years ago, Republicans were in the midst of a Hunger Strike in Long Kesh.

It had been forced on the prisoners by years of beatings and “naked brutality”, much of inflicted during mirror searches of naked prisoners. The British crown indulged the sectarian brutality and beatings because it served British objectives. Forcing Republican prisoners to wear a criminal uniform was part of a strategy, to claim the six counties as normal, and claim those in Long Kesh or Armagh as criminals duly convicted by Diplock courts.

Many who supported these Republican prisoners, Cardinal O’Fiaich first and foremost, did not support the armed struggle, but did so a humanitarian basis, noting that the Blanketmen were jailed under special laws, by special Diplock Courts, for unselfish politically motivated actions that would never have occurred except for the political situation. Which of these criteria does not apply to Republican political prisoners in Maghaberry today?

Why cannot Sinn Fein on this same basis halt this naked brutality and secure the enforcement of the reasonable agreement made last August 12?

Why today in Maghaberry under a compromised justice ministry, and handpicked minister, is this brutality allowed to continue?

Why do we hear DUP members and David Ford sounding Thatcher like in saying no concessions and Sinn Fein unable or unwilling to halt this naked brutality?

Marian Price is also in Maghaberry, not for anything she said or did at an Easter Commemoration in Derry, (although the day when it is illegal to commemorate Easter and its meaning in the six counties may be coming .She is there because a British official arbitrarily revoked her decades old license.

One of those then charged with her, has a top position at Stormont and on the constabulary board. Does that make her situation better or worse? When will she have an opportunity to challenge the crown’s use of a license as a license to intern at will?

Gerry McGeough is also in Maghaberry. He was jailed in 2011 for IRA charges that took place in the middle of the 1981 Hunger Strike. We know he was arrested in retaliation for running for election as an Independent Republican and criticizing a re-branded crown constabulary. How many members of the crown forces have been give a silent amnesty for shoot-to-kill, collusion murders, or even torture or perjury in cover-ups.

How can Republicans look at cases like this and not question whether seats at Stormont or constabulary boards are leading only to more seats at Stormont or more places at boards serving British rule in a partitioned Ireland.

Again last week, Cameron was at Stormont. His speech should have shattered the myths and illusions. He thinks it is done and dusted. He thinks when we speak of Ireland and unification we should be speaking of the north cemented together with England, Scotland and Wales. He thinks that the British crown has at last locked up movement towards Irish freedom within Stormont, as tightly as Brendan Hughes and the three hundred Spartans were locked away in Long Kesh. He was even applauded by Sinn Fein.

How many times did his predecessor, Thatcher think that she had Brendan Hughes and the blanketmen beaten? How wrong she was.

Brendan Hughes and his fellow political prisoners locked away in the H-blocks or Armagh were able to inspire a unity and determination which broke anything that Thatcher or the British could throw at them. Can Republicans today forge a unity and strategy which can break through once more, and get us back on the path to the united and free Ireland which this unrepentant Fenian and so many others sacrificed and suffered so much to win for us?

Dying In Geneva

This seems to me quite a reasonable and sensible decision for someone with a serious, incurable and debilitating disease to elect for a medically-assisted death by appointment – Terry Pratchett

The Swiss clinic Dignitas which provides people with the means to acquire a peaceful and dignified death first caught my attention a few years ago. Long prior to that I understood the perspective of recently deceased Dr Jack Kervorkian. I vaguely recall writing a poem in prison lauding his endeavours to assist the terminally ill determine how their lives would end.

When Dr Anne Turner decided to bring her life to a close at Dignitas in 2006 and brought the issue of the right to die under the public spotlight, I firmly believed she made the correct decision for her, and I was not well disposed towards those who sought to pillory her for the path that she had chosen. Her case was captured in the film A Short Stay In Switzerland.

It seems a cruelty inflicted on any terminally ill citizen that they should have to travel to distant Geneva in order to seek the death they feel they need in order to be freed from whatever life-demeaning condition afflicts them. Were the same facility available in Ireland terminally ill people could die surrounded by those they love and in the comfort of their own home. Travelling to a flat in an industrial estate in Switzerland, a country perhaps never visited before and only now to die in, seems deeply callous.

The fantasy author Terry Pratchett did a considerable job in putting together the documentary Choosing To Die. He travelled to the Dignitas clinic to film 71 year old Peter Smedley end the life that had so blighted his existence since motor neurone disease first began its colonisation of his body, totally devaluing the quality of his life. Smedley described his illness as a ‘beastly, undignified business.’ Pratchett, who was in the room with Smedley at the end, was himself diagnosed with Alzheimer's three years ago and argues, ‘I know the time will come when words will fail me. When I can no longer write books, I'm not sure that I will want to go on living.’ While there is more to life than writing books, should he be told it is not his right to choose?

I watched Choosing To Die with my ten year old daughter. It was difficult viewing; the central character is no actor who gets up after he dies, shakes himself down and retires to his makeup room. I found it awkward when Smedley was denied water which he requested after taking the lethal concoction of barbiturates that would end his life. There may have been good medical reasons for this but if the process of terminating one’s own life is something which must be carried out autonomously the denial of water appeared to violate that. It seemed an interventionist act aimed at hastening his demise.

Throughout, Pratchett’s travelling companion looked distinctly ill at ease, clearly disapproving of the course of action taken by Smedley. I found it difficult but not for the same reasons, I being in agreement with his course of action. While Peter Smedley died relatively peacefully on camera, there was a paradox at the heart of his decision that I understood but was discomfited by. He was so rational that it seemed there was still purpose in life, that somehow it was wrong to cut it short. Yet in order to make the decision and be permitted to carry it through by Dignitas staff he had to be totally rational.

My daughter too found it disturbing. She cried as she watched Peter Smedley’s life depart him. I have wondered since if I made the right decision in allowing her to watch it. But I feel it is important to introduce children to some of the difficulties and challenges of life. I want her to see human life as characterised by real life dignity rather than by some spurious ethereal sanctity. She believes it was a worthwhile exercise and tells me that she thinks about death in a different way now, seeing that choice is important. At the same time she believes more effort should be put into finding cures.

At heart, the issue is about individual self determination, freedom to choose, the determining principle. Some have a problem with the human ability to self determine, thinking in the fashion of the former bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, that ‘life is a gift and it has infinite value and we are not competent to take it, we do not have the right to take it, except perhaps in the most extreme circumstances of protecting the weak.’ But he also has a problem with gays exercising the right to choose so his comments amount to little more than biblical prejudice. And the bible can no more determine how we live and die in modern democratic secular societies than the rulebook of a golf club.

There seems no justifiable reason why people should be forced to hold onto a limiting, debilitating life when they no longer want to. Whatever reservations I may have about Dignitas, and the facilitation of dying, its method seems much more reliable and humane than some of the DIY suicides which can be so messy and absolutely devastating for the loved ones left behind.

Souvenirs

Cartoon by Brian Mór
Click to enlarge

The New Politics of Sinn Fein

The conversion of Provisional Republicans from fanatical terrorists into mainstream politicians was central to this ‘new normality,’ if only because the main focus of British state strategy for nearly 40 years had been on defeating Republicanism’s political and military challenge to the constitutional status quo … As the process of institutionalisation deepens, the power of the movement becomes measured more by the ability to obtain resources and political benefits from the state on behalf of its constituency than by its commitment to radical change – Kevin Bean

Before setting out on his substantive analysis of Sinn Fein’s ‘new politics’, completed in 2007, Kevin Bean invited his audience to consider the backdrop against which his case is constructed. Provisional republicanism had come to accept the British state’s definition of the conflict and had acquiesced in what it had long opposed; Irish unity could only come with the consent of a minority in the North of Ireland. The ‘volte face’ that the Provisional leadership managed to accomplish may have been carried out with much dexterity but it had to be situated in a wider process which has been both long and complicated. Bean rose to the challenge of explaining the objective pressures and constraints that shaped the collapse of the republican dimension of the Provisional project.

The author leaves his readers in no doubt as to the outcome of the Northern conflict. Since 1998 republicanism has undergone ‘a decisive defeat.’ The resistance community became an electorate while community bodies evolved into businesses. Bean offers an illustration of this process in his comments about ‘the evolution of the Andersonstown News from a newssheet for the Andersonstown Central Civil Resistance Committee in 1972 to a privately owned media group of locally influential newspapers.’ He then complements this by shifting focus to the IRA by citing an observer of the 2005 Bodenstown commemoration: ‘gone were the paramilitary trappings and in their place a colour party wore green blazers. It could have been a parade led by tennis umpires at Wimbledon’.

While accepting that the trajectory of the Provisionals must be understood as being rooted in the dialectic between them and the British state, in this work Bean offers a more panoramic view of the array of forces that lay behind the British front lines. Rather than isolate British military strategy and corresponding political negotiations with the Provisional leadership, Bean creates a mosaic upon which a multiplicity of apparatuses were at play. These were attuned more to the Ideological State Apparatuses of Althusserian theorising than to the Repressive State Apparatuses which featured in the work of the 20th Century French Marxist thinker. The purposeful coupling of political direction with social policy would carve out a strategic cul de sac into which Provisionalism would be pushed and pulled. In the words of one former British minister the purpose was to draw Sinn Fein into ‘a very different part-public part-private partnership which was the essence of our long term solution.’ By 2000 a British secretary of state could confidently pronounce ‘today Catholics are part of the establishment as never before.’ This, added to the admission by Gerry Adams that in the South Sinn Fein is an establishment party, shows the distance travelled from the heady days of violent conflict when Sinn Fein could plausibly claim to be something other than a Catholic party for a Catholic people.

At the heart of the case made in this book is that communitarianism was a powerful ideology inserted into Northern Irish political discourse and practice primarily by the British state and European Union, but also by the British Left. Situated in a postmodernist context this influenced the Provisionals’ communal and identity politics which saw their uninterrupted drift into an accommodation with the British state on British terms.

Bean suggests that this ideological penetration of the Provisionals was in fact pushing something of an open door given the pre-existing susceptibility of the Provisionals to postmodernist influences. The reason for that susceptibility was that within the Provisional mindset identity politics had long occupied a commanding height. This came to usurp a more universalist liberationist thrust guided by a grand vision of who should run society. It is an academic way of saying the Provisionals settled for the internal conflict model long in vogue in established circles but for equally as long rejected by the Provisionals. In the stand off in the battle for definition the Provisionals were first to blink. The British had successfully defined the problem as one of two tribes rather than a national liberation struggle against a foreign power.

The upshot was the primacy of the micro-narrative identity politics rather than a nationalist or socialist macro-narrative taking a firm definitional grip on the causes and range of outcomes to the Northern conflict.

In criticising this particularism that the Provisionals lapsed into Bean needs to do more to dislodge the view that in attacking postmodernism his real target is an ideological pluralism which he finds less appealing than the more totalising grand narratives that have shaped his reading of both history and politics.

In this work Bean declines to buy into the notion of many dissenting republicans that Sinn Fein leaders simply sold out and took the bribe. In his view they were squeezed by the social and political context shaped by a British state more powerful than them. It is a necessary foil to the dubious critique that personal corruption and ambition was the primary determinant in the failure of the republican project on the Provos’ watch. Where they exist corruption and ambition are more features of the management of the defeat than they are causes of the defeat itself.

Central to grasping this is an appreciation of the advent of the community sector which helped transform the Provisionals from being challengers to British state power into a junior partner in administering that power. ‘While the Provisionals acknowledged that ultimate power resided with the British state, some of the state’s functions were in effect, sub-contracted to the Provisionals.’

Here Bean traces the importance of British state community-cum-economic initiatives initially designed to marginalise the Provisionals but which eventually brought them into the British state fold. Rather than being simply bought off ‘the powerful forces of state, economy and society provided the external context for the ideological exhaustion of the Provisional national liberation project.’ At this point republicanism gives ‘the appearance of an ideological project that has run its historical course.’

Bean tries to broaden out the explanatory framework so that the collapse of the republican dimension of the Provisional project does not come to be seen as reducible to the ‘secret diplomatic history of the IRA.’ In this sense, while not the author’s intention, it complements rather than detracts from Ed Moloney’s Secret History of the IRA by providing a backdrop against which the one man band of Adams played its diplomatic tune.

Bean suggests that in the 1980s neither Adams nor his colleagues could have known where the process of managed retreat and negotiation was leading and feels that republican critics of Sinn Fein mistakenly see in an ‘inchoate ideological direction’ a ‘deep laid plot contrived by the Adams leadership.’ He cites one former Sinn Fein ard comhairle member who felt the perspective of Adams was pragmatism rather than politics; he went where the process led him.

Against this there is the recently expressed view of another former ard comhairle member, the revisionist writer Danny Morrison, who in February past claimed the intent behind Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy being dropped in 1986 ‘was to facilitate the opportunity - to get to the position where they are today.’ Even while this is post hoc revisionism and something Morrison, never the sharpest of analysts, realised decades after the event, there remains too much evidence against sustaining Bean’s line of reasoning that the outcome was fortuitous rather than designed. In fact the outcome was so easily read off from the facts on the ground as each stage of the process unfolded that the strategy’s republican critics could from the earliest stages accurately forecast its trajectory with consummate ease. They proffered Adams’ innate caution as the reason for what Bean terms the hesitant evolution of policy. Bean in stripping the Adams project of any teleology tends to attenuate an otherwise robust critique.

The evidence available thus far indicates that the Provisional republican venture ended up close enough to where Gerry Adams concluded it would go as far back as 1982. Rivers may change their course at times but invariably they reach the sea. Adams might have felt that given the balance of political forces it was as much as could be achieved but that is a perspective that requires a different analytical focus than what is under discussion here.

Bean introduces an element of nuance with his argument that the Provisionals were defeated not destroyed. It is a useful contextualisation in which to place the defeat. Often because there was no destruction in terms of organisational obliteration, while sufficient space was carved out to allow morphing to occur, the argument is frequently made by project apologists that somehow defeat was avoided and that a draw of sorts was achieved. Destruction, however of insurgents, is not the primary goal of modern states. Defeat followed by cooption is. Given that there has to be something to co-opt organisational structures of the former insurgents can be maintained providing that they are divested of any insurrectionary characteristics.

The New Politics of Sinn Fein adds to an ever growing understanding of how a well armed modern guerrilla movement can be neutralised. Bean outlines his perspective well but he could have explained it to so many more people had he divested the work of some of the more top heavy theorization and conceptualisation that makes an otherwise excellent book a task that academics might enjoy but which the average reader is likely to find hard going. Bean however had to press certain academic keys in order to hit a note that would be heard in the senior echelons of erudite institutions where, if he is not unfortunate, his analytical skills are likely to resound for some time to come. But the reading public who have an interest in modern Irish history would benefit enormously were a popularisation of the ideas in this book to occur. Simply put, Kevin Bean is one of the most penetrating analysts of the republican scene and his views deserve a much wider airing.

The New Politics of Sinn Fein by Kevin Bean. Liverpool University Press: 2007.

Depravity in Maghaberry Jail

Tonight the Pensive Quill features guest writer Sean Doyle of the East Coast H Block Hunger Strike Commemoration Committee which is organised by the Socialist Republican Unity Committee.

Lillian, so sorry and appalled to read your account on Monday May 30th after the visit with your brother Harry Fitzsimons on Sunday 29th May of the unprovoked brutal attack. He was beaten and tortured by the ever present sadistic enforcers of the British in partnership devolved governance. Possibly devoid governance would be more appropriate. Devoid of human rights, of truth, of freedom of speech and honour of commitments signed in writing with POW's. This is a human rights issue and not negotiable. It is not a fleeting discretion to be bestowed at the behest of and on those they consider fitting. As we are commemorating the 30th anniversary of the 1981 H block hunger strike.

I recall the first hunger strike in 1980 led by Brendan Hughes when assurances were given then and it was called off only to be reneged on by the British and the rest is history. When we are commemorating the hunger strikers as their anniversaries occur we will be holding public meetings and I can assure you we will also inform the people of the plight of your brother Harry and the POW's. We will endeavour to build a unified Socialist Republican campaign around this fundamental human rights catastrophe. They say silence is golden I say it is condoning. No proper civilisation can be built on a foundation of brutality and denial of basic human rights without these principles at the core to deny them and turn the other way is to debase humanity itself. 

I am astonished and bitterly disappointed that so many in POWER SHARING have suffered the beatings, strip searches and degradation and our hunger strike martyrs to resolve this. That you are prepared to have this inflicted on fellow human beings because you disagree with them. I repeat it is not yours to give, it is a basic human right an automatic entitlement to all friends or considered foe. Remember power has responsibility and it can also corrupt. You have no right to tailor make a persons human rights pending on their considered level of activity be it extreme by your present perspective. Their sentence no doubt and incarceration will reflect that. Human rights and honouring agreements signed in writing are a reflection on you as a society. Denial of and brutality and inhuman degradation should not be used to exert vengeance. Denial of human rights is a crime that must be exposed. It is a rot in the root of society that will spread through denial, lies, collaboration and silence. Speak out now: you know human rights is a given for all.

Bangers Babble

Danny Morrison must long for the time when he could still write with a pen, when he could still command an audience's attention, when he could still damage an opponent with a quick turn of phrase, when a good idea was not stillborn due to impaired ability.

There is little point in my feigning hurt or offence that Bangers should wield his crayon against me, Ed Moloney, Boston College or the interviewees who have so vexed him by deciding to follow his advice and not allow others such as him to become the authors of their own history. When have I ever concerned myself with what he thought, whether it be on Scappaticci, decommissioning or anything else?

He has been so hopeless on the lot of it, that The Wrong Man would be a much better title for his biography than the novel he hung it on. A person of extremely limited foresight who managed to learn nothing with the benefit of hindsight, what credibility has his persistent inconsistency not robbed him of? Slow on the uptake, he seems determined to drown in his own drivel, to the sound of the gurgling nonsense he is now renowned for.

One of West Belfast's better known bluffers, Danny Morrison would appear to carry his grievances heavily and sorely. For the most part his spites against slights are hurled in the direction of those who have persistently proved him wrong over the past two decades, leaving him looking as daft as a baldy brush. Even his big black hat can't disguise that. Yet proving him wrong is nothing for any of us to boast about - that's hardly the most daunting challenge we could face; just as hard as showing that England are not world soccer champions.

In Tipperary on Thursday morning I got a text from a friend informing me there was a nasty piece on the Bangers website directed at myself and Ed Moloney. Later in the day, with no great sense of urgency, I rang my wife and mentioned it to her in passing. She has experience of Morrison, having turned his baldpate purple on more than one occasion, and treats him with even more disdain than I do. After she read it she called and told me it was so boring that if I bothered reading it I should only do so in shifts.

But let's cut to the chase. The latest output from this angry old man finds him hurling invective at the oral history project sponsored by Boston College. In spite of his brouhaha and transparently fake concern about the ethos governing the project, his anathema towards the college project is deeply personal. That is why he seeks to weaken the college's case against handing over its oral history recordings to British authorities. It also explains his lack of invective aimed at the British for seeking the recordings.

He blames Boston College for having unlocked the real story behind the 1981 hunger strike which uncovered his malign role and destroyed what remained of his credibility. Had that pesky college not been willing to allow activists of all stripes to author their own history he could still be living on the wounds of those whose lives he helped end.

People like Danny Morrison want only, if at all, a managed and massaged ‘truth recovery process’ in which invidious activities such as his own will be airbrushed out of the narrative. The Boston College project did not provide that. He has been found out, hence his unhinged fury.

One point raised in the lengthy Bangers article which should be addressed is that Ed Moloney and I took a leaf out of his book by emulating his shafting of the hunger strikers of 1981. On that occasion he deliberately withheld information from republicans on hunger strike, effectively sending six of them to their graves. Had that information been in their possession they most certainly would have ended their protest, a satisfactory outcome reached.

Morrison's case is that both Ed Moloney and myself (and presumably Wilson McArthur, who interviewed the loyalist activists) aped him by withholding information; that we, acting in bad faith, failed to tell the people interviewed for Boston College that their interviews could not be protected from certain forms of legal action and that as a consequence they could be endangered.

Now, were it true that we withheld any information of such a nature from those interviewed that would be a grave offence; one which would place both myself and Moloney on the same lowly moral plateau long occupied by Morrison, making each of us a louse in the locks of humanity, just like him. Were we to have been guilty of such a betrayal we would have behaved both abominably and unpardonably and would justifiably be condemned, pilloried and lambasted out of hand by all those who would have been victims of our nefarious shafting. We would deserve no quarter. But then, typical for Danny Morrison, nothing of what he says is true.

For the record Ed Moloney told the interviewees nothing. He had no contact with them. Wilson McArthur and I told them that their interviews would be protected in all circumstances. We were convinced beyond doubt that this was true, otherwise no interviews would have been initiated. The irrefutable evidence for the basis of my belief is available to all who were interviewed. None thus far have contradicted it.

Thanks to the Boston College Project we now know that Danny Morrison amongst others helped foreclose an alternative route to six hunger strikers and subsequently steered them down a path where only the silence of the grave awaited them. He has lied about it ever since, sure that his sordid secret was safe. But like with much else that proved so wrong. An alternative history emerged that rained on his parade and the sun has not shone on his baldpate since. Does this deceitful hypocrite seriously expect to raise a head of steam against those involved in the Boston College project? More chance that he will raise Sammy Llewellyn from the dead. Pennies for your thoughts on what Sammy might tell.

Culpability Not Absolved

I'm disgusted. I cannot believe that anyone, let alone people in these very trusted positions, would hold back, withhold, doctor, cover-up, information … If someone who is vested with the responsibility to stand full square for saving children, safeguarding children, removes vital information that therefore never gets to the SCR, I can think of no more serious charge than that - Lynne Featherstone, MP for Hornsey & Wood Green.

The torture murder of tot Peter Connelly in 2007 slammed many in the emotional solar plexus. For long referred to only as Baby P, Peter was slowly tortured to death by his mother’s boyfriend in his London home while the mother looked on and allowed the child to die. In terms of human cruelty against children this case is hard pressed to find a rival.

Later jailed, the killer and the mother are now said to have found god in their prison cells. Stephen Barker, the prime mover in the child’s death, is reported to have said Jesus has forgiven him. None who buy into that sort of thing should forgive Jesus if he has.

Peter was visited 60 times by authorities during his torture but nothing was done to protect him from his tormentor. Time after time he was handed back to the 6 foot four brute where he was forced to endure his hellish existence over and over again. Merciless and murderous, Stephen Barker, with an addiction to sadism, plied his vicious trade to the helpless child.

At the time the authorities, including police, social workers and medical staff were accused of gross incompetence. Yet with some measure of asymmetry the only serious head of note to roll was that atop the brass neck of Sharon Shoesmith, Haringey's former director of children's services, who recently won her appeal against unfair dismissal. The judges said she had been a sacrificial scapegoat. That verdict is being appealed by the British government. Ed Balls British Children Secretary at the time he dismissed her said he would do the same again.

Now, according to the BBC, it has emerged that ‘detailed criticisms of the failings of Great Ormond Street Hospital over Baby Peter were never disclosed to the original inquiries into the toddler's death.’ Two days before he died, Dr Sabah Al-Zayyat, a consultant locum working at Great Ormond Street Hospital, examined the child only to miss a broken back and return him to his lonely hell.

An independent report by Professor Jo Sibert and Dr Deborah Hodes into this doctor ‘concluded that the unusual bruising to his back and neck and an infected lesion on his head should have alerted her to abuse, and she should have removed him to a place of safety.’ The report called into question the professional competence of the doctor concerned, cast doubt on her experience in the field of child protection, and asked why she had ever been hired given that she did not have the necessary certification. Great Ormond Street Hospital had initially claimed that there was no course of action that its staff could have pursued which would have preserved the life of Peter Connelly. This was patently untrue.

The Sibert-Hodes report was never handed over in full to the Joint Area Review. Ed Balls had used that review as the basis for sacking Sharon Shoesmith. Yet the Joint Area Review was woefully incomplete because Great Ormond Street had airbrushed out its own failings. Shoesmith’s lawyers are now claiming that the case against the social services was ‘beefed up’ while the police and the National Health Service were allowed get out of jail free pass. She has a point. Dr Jane Collins of Great Ormond Street Hospital at least should have been sent packing along with her.

Shoesmith was hard done by only to the extent that she walked the plank alone. The shortcoming of Ed Balls was not that he sacked her but that he did not abide by proper procedure and failed to apply the same sanction to a few more. As a Guardian editorial claimed:

Very few people who have studied the Baby P case in detail will be in much doubt that Ms Shoesmith bears a very serious share of responsibility for the Baby P case failings and for the unacceptable state of child services in her borough at the time. If proper procedures had been followed it is unlikely she would have remained long in her post or have had any case against her dismissal.

Technicalities should not be allowed to mask the systemic failure to protect a child from torture and murder. Sharon Shoesmith was not alone. Her culpability is therefore shared not absolved.

Rita at Rosie's

Cartoon by Brian Mór
Click to enlarge

No Gravitas

As of late there has been quite a bit of public discussion about truth recovery processes. Despite considerable opposition it has even been suggested that the shelved Eames-Bradley project be dusted down and slung back into the mix. Watching Prime Time a few nights back it was all too evident jut how rocky a path is being treaded by Sinn Fein on the question of truth recovery. Trip hazards abound. The party might have a brass neck but it is simultaneously disadvantaged by a glass chin to go with it which is occasionally proffered to pugilist interviewers. Gerry Adams, the party leader for as long as most people can remember, was interviewed about the phenomenon of the Disappeared, something he has long been suspected in many circles of having orchestrated.

The interviewer Donagh Diamond was persistent and refused to acquiesce in the standard bullying that Adams resorts to each time he is put on the spot. Diamond put it to him that he had been a central member of the Belfast IRA when the strategy of disappearing people was put in place. Adams denied it. Diamond followed through with obvious riposte: ‘there is nobody with even a passing knowledge of the Troubles in the North over the last 25 years who does not believe that. So if you deny that, it undermines your denial about Jean McConville.’

Adams was rattled but Diamond was on sure ground; it being impossible to find a journalist or academic willing to risk their reputation by stating anything contrary to what is known by the dogs in the street about the Adams association with the IRA.

The Disappeared is not an issue that anyone would relish being publicly grilled about. It conjures up too many images that resemble Pinochet’s Chile. Try as we might it is virtually impossible to evade the charge that the secret grave industry was anything other than a war crime. Everywhere else it is, from the Balkans to Argentina, so why in Ireland alone was it just a mistake on the part of the IRA as Adams sought to make out? It sounded lame, a perfunctory disavowal stated because it had to be rather than being asserted with any degree of conviction.

Adams sought to hector Diamond into refraining from asking what he termed stupid questions. But Diamond had the advantage when pointing out that a TD suspected in some sections of society of being responsible for war crimes cannot expect to escape probing. This would seem self evident given that Adams wants others in the Dail brought to account for activity much less heinous than what he stands accused of.

It is bad press for any TD to have to come along and defend himself against such allegations. The answers don’t really matter; that the question is ever raised to begin with is what does the damage. In any event Adams simply had had no answer. Indeed, his performance was so poor that it is easy to see why one columnist described the exchange as one in which the IRA’s former chief of staff ‘was completely, utterly and brilliantly filleted live on air.’

Yet the party leader continues to expose his party to ridicule by making demands for truth recovery that nobody takes seriously because of his own insistence on denying what everyone knows to be true. Wanting the truth to be told about everybody else will hardly cut the mustard in robust interviews. Such lightweight endeavours against heavy hitting interviewers are not worth the candle for Sinn Fein. At a time when the party is eager to present itself as a serious alternative, the leader, whatever his responsibility for the disappeared, conveys a demeanour of all grave and no gravitas.

DIY Butchers Apron

Cartoon by Brian Mór
Click to enlarge

Made In God’s Image

The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence - Abu Ala Al-Ma'arri

This time last week I was at the world atheist convention in Dublin. It was an event I enjoyed immensely. Good debate, interesting and informed panellists, and many different points of view, on occasion resulting in sharp clashes. Even the religious had a presence there. The Muslims turned up by design (not intelligent design) while the Christians turned up by mistake. The Muslims sought to undermine a scientific approach to understanding the world in favour of creationism while the Christians handed out hate filled tracts about gays. Neither made much headway. The Muslims were given the intellectual coup de grace by Maryam Namazie during her keynote speech at the close of the convention on Sunday afternoon. The Christians only realised they were handing out daft tracts to atheists after about the 50th.

Richard Dawkins and Hamza Tzortzis of the Islamic Education and Research Academy
discuss religion outside the World Atheist Convention in Dublin
Photo: Atheist Ireland

God’s Greater Plan

When Mickey Harte, father of the murdered Michaela, penned his first column for the Irish News since his daughter’s death not too long after her demise I was happy that he had emerged from the paralysis of grief so soon. It is testament to the strength of character of the man. While still grieving he has overcome the power of grief to debilitate and render a bereaved father inert.

The loss of his only daughter is not the sole bereavement Mickey Harte has faced in recent times. In a three month period two brothers also died. Not easy to carry that amount of loss around. He does it better than I ever could.

As a columnist Mickey Harte is aware that his views publicly expressed will invite public comment in turn. In that sense it is not insensitive to his situation to take up some of the opinions that he has expressed and air reservations about them. How he finds the solace he deserves is a matter for him. I would not seek to deny him peace of mind from whatever source.

That said, I remain puzzled by some of the views he has made public. While mindful that there is no one size fits all approach to grief and that loss of a loved one has to be rationalised in a way that makes the burden somewhat more bearable, I find his thinking incomprehensible. I grudge him not but it certainly would not work for me.

Mickey Harte has a strong belief in the Christian god. He feels that his daughter’s death no matter how unforgivable is part of "God's bigger plan".'

If we attempt to put human logic on this awful event, then there are no answers … Yet, if we view this on a spiritual plane, the evidence is already abundant that Michaela is very much what she would have described herself as ’God’s bigger plan’. During her short but fruitful life, she used this logic to encourage me when all-important football results didn’t go my way.

This plan has not only robbed him of the daughter he cherished and loved, leaving him heartbroken, but it also made murderers of a number of Mauritians who never asked to be part of god’s plan. If it was god’s plan they had no say in the matter which tends to limit their culpability.

There are answers to the death of Michaela Harte that require no input from the 2870 odd gods humans have invented since their emergence 200,000 years ago. She was brutally killed by people who could have chosen to let her live but opted not to. With god’s plan they had no choice. How does one work against and upset the plan of an omnipotent god? And if they had no choice they can not be accountable and should be freed. The logic can even be extended that if it was god’s plan the killers were only carrying out the work of god.

I simply cannot buy into any of that. I admire Mickey Harte for his fortitude in facing what he has. But there is no way I can intellectually accept his religious logic.

I am happy not to endorse the Christian god. It is a frightening entity which if armed with the omnipotence ascribed to it, can only strike terror into the being. People must fear rather than respect this self-absorbed entity. That such a being could exist is not a comforting thought for those who have to face it at the end of their days. Imagine going home to that a few indulgences short of the requisite total.

Sinn Fein: A Catalyst For Unionist Unity

Former Blanket columnist and Radical Unionist Dr John Coulter takes what he considers a realistic look at how Sinn Fein could spark the process of lasting Unionist unity. This article was written before the May elections but unfortunately slipped of the radar.

A four-year dose of Martin McGuinness as Sinn Fein First Minister is the perfect remedy to bring about unionist unity, and ultimately a single Unionist Party.

Since my primary school days, I have watched unionist rip unionist apart, and become convinced that Irish unity will eventually come about because of Protestant voter disunity. It is going to take some very bitter medicine to create a situation like the early 1960s when all shades of unionism were represented by a sole movement, simply known as The Unionist Party.

And in last year’s General Election, even when we Prods had an agreed candidate in Fermanagh South Tyrone along with a split nationalist vote, they still managed to allow ‘Shinner’ farming minister Michelle Gildernew to hold the seat.

Unionist unity has become almost as big an aspiration as Irish unity. Realistically, the wounds of unionist infighting will take generations to heal.

Even the latest campaign of violence by the factions which comprise the so-called dissident republican movement does not seemed to have sparked an enthusiasm among Unionists for the ballot box.

Had it not been for the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and the need for a multi-million euro bailout, the island would have been well on the way to political unity by the Shinners’ target date of 2016 – the centenary of the failed Dublin Easter Rising.

Since the late 1960s, there have been so many movements whose aim was unionist unity, they have now run out of names to call themselves. If you thought divisions were bad between Peter Robinson’s DUP and Tom Elliott’s feud-festering Ulster Unionists, you should see the political exchanges between the DUP and its even more bitter rivals in Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice party.

While it will take decades to bring about an eventual single Unionist Party, nationalists have the chance on 5 May’s Stormont poll to create a scenario where there will be Irish unity in everything but name only. But this means moderate Catholics sacrificing the ‘Stoops’ in favour of ‘Shinners’. It may mean respectable, middle class nationalists having to vote for ex-IRA jailbirds.

For many Catholics, snubbing the moderate SDLP may be one bitter pill too much to swallow. A Sinn Fein victory on 5 May will not just mean McGuinness ascending to the First Minister’s throne. It will also mean a huge rise in power for the cross-border bodies.

For republicans, would an increase in cross-body numbers and powers be enough to get the dissident terror groups to call a halt to their campaigns?
Unionists will be so busy indulging themselves in their favourite political pastime, the ‘Blame Game’, that they will have totally missed the all-island structures which mainstream Sinn Fein will have sneaked into place.

And nationalists should not underestimate how deep the divisions in unionism run. I grew up in Bannside, the launching pad for political Paisleyism. As a Primary Six pupil in the heart of unionist North Antrim, I remember a fundamentalist fellow pupil waving a ‘Vote Paisley’ poster at me in class. When I laughed, I literally got the boot stuck in me.

During the 1970 General Election campaign, I brought cups of tea to a very physically shaken Unionist MP Henry Clark, who lost his seat to Paisley senior, after he witnessed a painted slogan ‘Shoot Clark’ in a 100 per cent Protestant village.

My father and a fellow Orange chaplain, the late Rev John Brown, had to try and calm Clark’s nerves in Clough Presbyterian manse after Paisley supporters blocked his canvassing team from entering a staunchly unionist area.

The RUC once called my father – then the local mainstream Irish Presbyterian minister - to physically escort the chairman of a local Unionist branch out of an Orange hall after Paisley supporters surrounded it and forced the meeting to be abandoned.

In those days, attending a Unionist Party meeting in North Antrim was by formal invitation only. A one-time Paisley supporter told me he was ‘leaked’ his ticket to infiltrate the party meeting in an Orange Hall by hardline Right-wing elements in the Unionist Party itself.
Even within their own Unionist Party ranks in the early 1970s, the Hard Right was working in cahoots with Paisley supporters to undermine Prime Ministers Terence O’Neill and James Chichester-Clark.The anti-liberal Unionist Party members were using Paisleyite ‘boo-boys’ to undermine the liberising policies of the UP leadership.

In the coming years, many UUP meetings ended in chaos as Paisley supporters disrupted the party in an orchestrated campaign. This drove many Ulster Unionist branches out of the Orange Hall, especially in rural areas, and into people’s homes, which could only accommodate a limited attendance.

Eventually, many once thriving Unionist Party rural branches folded, both because people were too scared to attend, or there was nowhere big enough to hold the meetings. This policy of having to meet in people’s homes was even still taking place as late as 1979.

My father, who retired at 81 as an MLA last month, still bears the scars of a kicking given to him by DUP hardmen during a Ballymena canvass in the 1983 General Election campaign.

In another sickening episode, fanatical DUP supporters heckled an UUP candidate who had been disabled through an IRA booby-trap bomb. They even goaded his relatives as he walked into an election count to give him a suicide pill.

Incidents like these are burned into the memories of many unionist families. Like malign tumours, no sooner has one been eradicated, than another cancer of disunity appears.
Unionism has already had its crossroads election when Paisleyism landed on the political map. May 5 will be nationalism’s crossroads. The question is simple – can republicans unite and maximise on unionist disunity?

Many Christian outreach workers believe only through a united Ireland will a genuine spiritual revival once more come to the island as it did in 1859. My own political ideology is that of Revolutionary Unionism – one faith, one party, one Commonwealth. That faith is the Christian faith as defined by the Biblical New Testament text of St John 3, verse 16.

I want one single movement, The Unionist Party, to represent all shades of pro-Union opinion. And my aspiration is for the Occupied Twenty-Six Counties to rejoin the British Commonwealth. The South becoming a member of the influential Commonwealth Parliamentary Association would be a welcome start.

Yes, there was some form of unionist partnership in 1974 with the Unionist Coalition and the United Unionist Action Committee in 1986 to combat the Hillsborough Agreement … but neither lasted.

There has to be a short, sharp shock which will bring the unionist family to its senses. I fear a united Ireland or Sinn Fein domination at Stormont may well be that treatment.

Disbelief in Dublin

Gods always behave like the people who created them - Zora Neale Hurston

Last weekend I attended the World Atheist convention hosted in Dublin by Atheist Ireland. My wife bought me a ticket as a birthday present. Normally I get books but on this occasion it was an opportunity to listen to Richard Dawkins rather than read him so the present did not fall into the unwanted gift category.

It was a beautiful warm Friday evening as I made my way from North Dublin into the city centre. I was with a Romanian friend although our destinations were not the same. We did, however, discuss the event and while he was a religious believer he had no interest in enforcing his religion’s moral code whatever it is, on anyone else.

Them Protestants

A while back my ten year old daughter asked to look over the census form that my wife had been filling in. There was no reason not to let her. The first thing she noticed was that no box had been ticked in relation to religion. Pointing out that ‘no religion’ was an option she inquired why that hadn’t been expressed as our preference. After explaining to her that her mother hadn’t yet completed the form, I facetiously told her we could put ‘Catholic’ down. She dismissed this immediately on the grounds that ‘we’re not Catholics.’

I then ventured the mock suggestion to her that we should put down ‘Protestant.’ Her response was ‘what’s that?’ I asked her did she not know what a Protestant was and she seemed genuinely flummoxed. It was an attitude that repeated itself at today’s Global Atheist Convention when she again asked what Protestants were, her curiosity prompted by a contribution from someone in the audience.

I confess to harbouring surprise as she is not ignorant of religions. She knows what a Muslim is. Islam is a subject she was taught about in school. She wasn’t taught that it was right, just that it existed. Yet her response brought home in a flash more than any amount of political theorising could ever have managed, how far we have travelled from the sectarian mindset that is so entrenched in the North.

When she was around five and living in West Belfast, she came in one day to announce to me her latest discovery - Protestants were bad. I asked her to explain the thinking behind that ponderous judgement and she simply told me that Protestants shoot you. The identity of ‘you’ was not made clear but already in her young mind an ‘us and them’ divide was being forged. The Protestants were ‘them’ and the ones being shot were ‘us.’ They of course were bad for shooting us, whoever made up the ‘us’ camp. I didn’t go as far as to explain to her that her father was no innocent when it came to shooting Protestants. Work for another day.

Being only her father and not her god I had no desire for her to be made in my image. So, a few days later we set out on a journey to the home of a unionist friend. He and I sat and chewed the fat while his mother in law entertained the child for three hours. On our way home I explained to my daughter that the woman she had such a good time with was a Protestant and that she had not shot us. The moral of the story: Protestants were not bad and they do not shoot us.

There was no understanding on her part of any of the politics around her. But already she was being moulded by the discourses she encountered in her daily life. She never disclosed where she picked it up, probably having forgotten. It could have been the schoolyard or in the street at play. Although the parents of the kids she played with never seemed to vent sectarian comments. She may even have heard older kids being loud. While sectarianism is not something in the air that we breathe it might as well have been. Live in that type of culture and we are certain to inhale the particles that make up the atmosphere.

So the census form helped illustrate a strange kind of awakening on my part. I became alive to the fact that in the act of forgetting, my daughter had unlearned the bad and learned the good about people. It left me wondering what Milan Kundera would have thought of the idea that memory over forgetting isn’t always a victory.

Policing the Children

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Alec McCrory

Policing the Children
Alec Mc Crory

Last Sunday afternoon I was bringing my wife and two daughters, 11 and 2 year old respectively, to the cinema at the Kennedy Centre. On the way I called into the local garage for petrol and a newspaper. When I returned to the car my oldest daughter drew my attention to two police land rovers circling the garage like vultures waiting to swoop on some unsuspecting victim. However, she and I both knew who they were waiting for and we were not in the slightest bit surprised. My family have become accustomed to this type of special treatment from the new police service with their fine manners and sense of civic responsibility.

I was followed a short distance before being flashed to stop on the bypass. One of our finest new policemen, fresh from his passing out ceremony by the look of him, approached the driver’s door and informed me that I was being stopped under the Justice & Security Act. Of course, I demanded an explanation for this blatant act of harassment and he simply shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I’m only doing my job, sir.”

“If you have a problem take it up with the Ombudsman,” says he. Some of the older RUC types had a giggle at his expense as I proceeded to give him a tongue lashing. That I had my wife and two young daughters on board didn’t cut me any slack with this young prodigy.

My family and I were hastily ordered out of the car onto the side of the road. Under section 21 & 24 my car was searched for munitions and wireless apparatus then, as my wife held our two-year-old baby in her arms, I was also searched for said items. The young constable looked slightly miffed whenever I refused to open my car bonnet or to raise my arms for the body search. Clearly unprepared for such a challenge to his authority, he took to his task with even greater gusto. Suffice to say, nothing was found and I was free to go.

The above experience has become common place for some republicans and their families. Normal activities such as going to school, attending the hospital, visiting a grandparent, have become fraught with anxiety and fear of being stopped and searched by heavily armed policemen. On one occasion the attitude of the police was so openly aggressive towards me that my daughter was left trembling on the street on the verge of tears. Now every time she sees a land rover she tenses up and prepares herself for the worst. I fear these unpleasant experiences are having a negative impact on her development leading to a deep resentment of those who are tasked with upholding “law and order” in our society.

The policy of legal harassment of republicans and their families must end. According to CAJ there is no enhanced protection for minors written into the legislation, an incredible omission when one considers the implications. What my daughter endures each time she is stopped with me is, in my opinion, a form of child abuse. This approach to policing dissent is counterproductive and seriously undermines the argument for an impartial, civic orientated police service: an argument which remains as unconvincing today as it did with the onset of Patton.

Finally, the children should not suffer for the perceived sins of the father.