Eamonn McCann: Rage at Stormont over Workfare (or not)

Tonight The Pensive Quill links to a piece in the Derry Journal on Thursday 29 March 2012 by radical socialist activist Eamonn McCann. A regular to TPQ recommended it, saying 'it exposes the Stormonteers for their eagerness to push through Tory attacks on the unemployed.' Posh-boy Chancellor George Osborne barely had time to draw breath after his feed-the-rich, fleece-the-poor budget last week than a succession of Stormont politicians was mad-dashing for the microphones to express anger and dismay at the likely effect of the measures on the less-well-off...

History in the North of Ireland is Repeating Itself with a new Dimension added to it - British Interference in America.

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Helen McClafferty from the Free Gerry McGeough Campaign, www.freegerry.com I don't know if people realize the degree to which the injustices in the North of Ireland are starting to mount again, especially since 2006 when the Weston Park Accord was withdrawn?  The British government is blatantly treading all over people's human and civil rights by arresting and incarcerating republicans at whim, flaunting their total disregard for a person’s right to ‘due process’, interfering with legal documents,...

Intrusive Freedom

This is the fool who made a complete ape of himself last March by telling the nation that bishops have no obligation to report crimes of child-rape to the civil authorities.  Maurice Dooley is a former professor of canon law, which tells you all you need to know about canon law — shit they made up.  Dooley thinks canon law is superior to the law of the land, and sees no problem with the cover-up of the Catholic hierarchy, including Seán Brady, swearing raped children to secrecy – Bock The Robber, 2010 The experience of those children...

Chris Bray: The People Who Ratified the US-UK MLAT Think the DOJ Is Wrong About What the Treaty Means

At the bottom of this post, a strong letter sent yesterday by Senator Charles Schumer to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric "La La La I Can't Hear You" Holder regarding the Belfast Project subpoenas served on Boston College. Schumer makes his position plain, asking Clinton and Holder to "work with the British authorities to have this MLAT request withdrawn." Read the whole thing, but one paragraph in particular wages a direct assault on the arguments made in court by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District...

ICAN: Problematic Stories: Documenting Conflict during a Peace Process

“Problematic Stories: Documenting Conflict during a Peace Process” Saturday, 24 March, 2012 NINE TENTHS UNDER – Performing the Peace Playhouse ICAN – International Culture Arts Network in partnership with School of Creative Arts at Queen’s University, Belfast Chaired by Declan Keeney, Queen’s University, Belfast and Dr Cahal McLaughlin, The Prisons Memory Archive and University of Ulster. This symposium will focus on the issues of recording memories from the Northern Irish conflict in the context of a peace process. Journalist Ed Moloney will...

Chris Bray: Boston College Faculty Call for an Investigation

Boston College Faculty Call for an Investigation -  Boston College Sleeps Through the Whole Thing An online petition created by the Boston College chapter of the AAUP gives you a chance to join their call for an independent investigation of the Belfast Projec...

Triple A Rating

Liverpool have won 5 out of 15 home games this season - Abysmal. They got beat 3-2 at home by QPR during the week and lost 2-1 at the same ground to Wigan on Sunday - Atrocious. Manager Kenny Dalglish blames fatigue – Awful. They sit 13 points behind Tottenham. Many of us remember when a good Liverpool side were beating Spurs 7-0 and were capable of producing a goal of memorable quality from Terry McDermott after a well coordinated team move.  Little sign of coordination, fluency or flair in the side of today. There is more chance of herding...

Chris Bray: An Aside

I warn you in advance: I'm mostly repeating myself, here, on a matter of personal concern that you will only want to know about if you're closely interested in the saga of the Boston College subpoenas. If that's not you, then here, watch this soothing music video instead: Swimmer: Solo Version...

On Hunger Strike Against her Israeli Jailors

Tonight on The Pensive Quill guest writer, Sandy Boyer, the co-host of Radio Free Eireann on WBAI in New York City, reports on the heroic struggle of Palestinian political prisoner Hana Shalabi. This article featured on SOCIALISTWORKER.org on March 21, 2012 HANA SHALABI, a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike since February 16, was transferred to an Israeli military hospital as she clung to life by a thread. The transfer took place on March 18, the 34th day of her hunger strike, according to CNN. According to Jawad Bulos, one of Shalabi's...

St Patricks Day: Radio Free Eireann interview with Carrie Twomey

Radio Free Eireann Saint Patrick’s Day Special WBAI – New York Saturday 17 March 2012 Sandy Boyer (SB) interviews Carrie Twomey (CT) Sandy Boyer (SB): You’re listening to Radio Free Eireann WBAI 99.5 FM and this is our Saint Patrick’s Day Special. And we have just about an hour and twenty minutes to go and then the last hour we’re going to turn it over to Eliza Butler to spin her inimitable mix of Irish music. But we’re very lucky that we have Carrie Twomey in the studio today, who’s normally in Ireland, and her husband, Anthony McIntyre, was...

Marian Price Needs Our Help

Tonight The Pensive Quill featured guest writer, Sandy Boyer who highlights the grave situation of the Irish republican political prisoner Marian Price who 41 years after the a British Tory Government introduced internment, findes herself interned by another British Tory government. Marian Price could be in a British prison for the rest of her natural life. Unlike other political prisoners in the North, she has had no trial, no sentence, no release date and not even a date when the Parole Commission will review her case. Unless the courts intervene,...

The General’s Daughter

The reader doesn’t have to journey too far into Frances Cahill’s book before discovering the real villain of the piece - An Garda Siochana. Her father Martin and his cohorts were pretty okay sort of guys who made a stand against the police and invasive authority. Nor did the father countenance marital infidelity, never having had an affair with his wife’s sister, nor fathering a number of her children. Just a good, all round solid guy, the type you would not mind climbing over your back wall in the middle of the night. Reluctant to judge her father...

Ed Moloney: BC Subpoenas are Legally Dumb and Dumber

Irish Echo March 14TH, 2012 Slowly, but inexorably, the penny is dropping, both here in the United States as well as back in Ireland. The Boston College subpoenas seeking access to oral history interviews with former IRA activists on behalf of the police in Northern Ireland are about the dumbest things that have ever happened in the long relationship between the United States, Britain and Ireland. The difficulty is not how to describe why they are so dumb, but in counting the ways in which they are so dumb. First of all, this is not the...

The sin of omission was Boston's, not ours

This is a letter published in Times Higher Education on 2 February 2012 in response to Professor John Brewer Your readers will emerge much better informed about the Boston College-Belfast Project case having read Peter Geoghegan's informed piece rather than John Brewer's speculative letter on the subject (respectively, "If trust is lost, future promises naught but troubles for research", 19 January, and "Inescapable burden of 'guilty knowledge'", 26 January). Geoghegan at least spent considerable time researching before he wrot...

Onward Christian Socialism

Tonight, on Patricks Day, The Pensive Quill features guest writer former Blanket columnist and self proclaimed right-wing commentator, Dr John Coulter.  He maintains that the St Patrick’s Day celebrations for Ireland’s Christian patron saint should be used to boost the concepts of Christian Socialism. Christian socialism is the springboard which the Labour movement in Ireland, north and south, can use to save the island from the ravages of Tory-style cuts. The Occupy movement, which has set up tent camps near major Christian cathedrals,...

Patrick’s Day.

It’s that peculiarly Irish day again tomorrow. My plans are to head off with the kids into town for the parade just like last year. They are looking forward to it, as am I, even if their presence limits me to one pint.  Unlike last time around we will be without my wife as she is in the US lobbying on the Boston College case. More the pity as she wouldn’t mind me having one too many to add to the festivities.  Drogheda always puts on a great display and, weather permitting, for its denizens the shamrock will be drowned with something...

Chris Bray: Howlers (Final)

About the origins of the Boston College subpoenas: The PSNI's "murder investigation" isn't a murder investigation. Period, full stop. No police investigator ever cared especially much about Jean McConville's 1972 murder until 2011. This is an acknowledged fact. Nor is the PSNI now conducting an investigation; rather, it is attempting to borrow someone else's. This attempt to take archival materials is not police work, and is unlikely to result in successful prosecutions. Don't take my word for it: Go see what the PSNI's chief constable said...

Lab Rat Stares Back at the White Coat

Tonight The Pensive Quill features a piece by guest writer Mark McGregor. Mark blogs at Hearts of Oak and Steel. This article should be of particualr interest to all who like to debate on the web. Not being one for academia when a friend drew my attention to a seminar organised by the Centre for Research in Political Psychology at Queen's University Belfast on ‘The content and function of dissident Irish Republican discourses online' I surprisingly found the topic interesting enough to invite myself along. The talk was given by Dr Lorraine...

Chris Bray: Howlers (Part Two)

or, But We Don't Want Our Power to be Limited (Part One is here.) As I've argued before, the DOJ's view of legal assistance treaties means that we have fewer protections against foreign governments than we do against our own. The new novella from the government again makes this argument explicit, using breathtaking language with all the customary flat affect of the bureaucratic scrivener. Time to rewrite that stupid Fourth Amendment thingie: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable...

Píobaire Hamelin

This morning saw me off to my daughter’s school for a drama performance being staged there. While I make no great claim to be what they call a culture vulture, my children are educated through the medium of Gaeilge and it was heartening to see so many parents there in support of their local Irish language school, Gaelscoil An Bhradáin Feasa. It means a lot to the parents and the school does a great job. Probably with unemployment being so high people have time on their hands which they did not solicit but are going to make use of anyway. Turning...

Chris Bray: Howlers (Part One)

The government has filed its brief novella in the legal appeal by Belfast Project researchers Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre. Ted Folkman has already posted his legal analysis, noting some things along the way that surprised him: "Most boldly, the government goes for it and argues that there simply is no First Amendment academic’s privilege." Of course, the government is quite boldly going for it in arguments against the First Amendment all the time, these days, so I take that boldness as part and parcel of a larger assault on civil ...

Support Republican Prisoners - Join the Protests!

Tonight The Pensive Quill carries an appeal from the Cork Prisoners Solidarity Group. Protest at Daunt Sq Cork City 24th March 3pm Thirty one years on from the H-Blocks where ten men died for political status, republican prisoners are on dirty protest fighting criminalisation. The current protest has been going on now for nearly a year. Whether you agree with the politics of those imprisoned, held on remand or interned doesn’t matter: the prisoners deserve your support. Rather than underestimating the seriousness of the situation in Maghaberry...

Either Or

The wars we lose, the wars we winAnd the world is - what it has been - Randall Jarrell A couple of Fridays back a friend asked if I would like to take a run up to Newry where he had a few odds and ends to attend to.  Iceland being one of the things I most miss about living in Louth, I jumped at the opportunity. Whiskey can be bought the country over but those Iceland pasties, well, they are something else. On our return we took a detour into South Armagh and looked at sites, unmarked and otherwise, of historical importance. We made our...

Chris Bray: Because They Are Icky, Your Honor

Boston College has filed a docketing statement -- two days after the court's deadline, 'cause they're right on top of this one -- in its Belfast Project appeal (see below, if you have lots of time on your hands). The sad thing here is that the First Circuit's docketing statement form is a total snooze -- compare it to the form from the Ninth Circuit, which requires a brief description of the "Principal Issues to be Raised on Appeal." Clearly, the First Circuit is not thinking about my needs. But there's one very mildly interesting addition,...

Suckers

There is a funny cafe scene in The Departed where Boston gang boss Frank Costello, played by Jack Nicholson, is embroiled in an exchange with some Catholic clergy. Costello dismisses them with the words ‘have a nice day, cocksuckers’ and saunters off nonchalantly. At other points his references to pederasts joins the dots for any still wondering what he might have meant. Yet Catholic holy men are not alone in having the put down thrown their way.  ‘Literally cock-sucking Jews’ is not the sort of copy line that would normally make me sit...

Chris Bray: Gov't to Judge - This is Gonna Be a Little Harder Than We Thought

Several developments in the legal appeals over the subpoenas of Belfast Project interviews at Boston College: First, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston has asked the First Circuit for an extra business day to submit its response to a pair of appeals filed by Belfast Project researchers Anthony McIntyre and Ed Moloney, and to the amicus brief filed by the ACLU of Massachusetts. The government's brief is below, but here's the most important piece: The arguments in these appeals raise a number of issues of first impression regarding the rights...

Screws Beating Brian Shivers

We utterly condemn this brutal attack on a terminally ill republican prisoner and call for all those involved to be held accountable. We demand assurances from Maghaberry and David Ford that Brian will be able to attend his many future hospital appointments without fear of a repeat of the brutality inflicted upon him by the thuggish screws employed by Maghaberry - Mandy Duffy PRO, Family & Friends of Republican Prisoners Maghaberry. Brian Shivers is to appeal the verdict delivered against him in a juryless court. That court decided that he...

One Night

Tonight The Pensive Quill features a short story by guest writer Thomas Dixie Elliot A reddening Irish sky casts a bloody reflection on the long narrow lake. The lofty mountain on the eastern side of the lake gradually loses it’s purples and greens to the dark grey shadows of dusk. The incessant cawing of crows as they circle above pierces the quietude like an angry crowd. One of their number, perhaps tired after a day of foraging, alights on a fence post for momentary respite. It looks out over the valley before spreading it’s wings and flying...

Cardinal Cretin

But the overwhelming dominant norm of traditional marriage was enabled to be precisely that, a norm, because anything outside of that was treated as profoundly abnormal and either rejected or punished.  Male homosexual practice was criminalised, unmarried mothers institutionalised or shunned, the children of the outside the norm families similarly treated – anything that did not fit the dominant cultural norm was to be jailed, institutionalised or forced to flee – Irish Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly There has been no shortage of Scottish bigots...

Difficult to get caught out when you always tell the truth

Tonight the Pensive Quill features guest writer Thomas Dixie Elliot. The following piece was published as a letter in the Irish News on on 25 January, 2012. The thing about the truth is: you can’t get caught out telling it. Maybe that’s the reason Richard O’Rawe hasn’t been caught out telling lies, or ever changed his story regarding the events surrounding the 1981 hunger strike.  Others, Danny Morrison in particular, haven’t been so consistent. In the Irish News on January 17th Danny said “the British telephoned Duddy [Brendan Duddy, the...

Throwback on Talkback

Not too long back a comment appeared on this blog suggesting that it would be worth listening to BBC Talkback’s discussion around the ongoing imprisonment of Marian Price. When I eventually found it, the suggestion turned out to be good advice. It was like one of those ‘what if?’ scenarios that historians sometimes fascinate over, where a figure from the past could be put in a studio with one from the present. The historians might go on to manufacture the exchange in order to give us a feel of what it might have been like. There was no need to...

A New War Of Independence?

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Dr John Coulter as he outlines why he believes Irish nationalists may need to fight a new War of Independence. John is a former columnist with the Blanket and writes within what he describes as a Radical Unionist perspective. Ireland may have a new War of Independence on its hands as an indirect result of Tory David Cameron’s snub to the Eurozone. From 1919 to 1921, Irish republicans fought a bloody war against the British Army, police, Unionists and Protestants – mainly in Southern Ireland – which...

The Boys Are Black In Town

For those without religious belief the rituals associated with the phenomenon always have a touch of the unreal about them. Nothing strange about that given that religion is founded on the unreal itself and nowhere more so than its zombie culture where the dead are brought back to life. Religions have never offered any proof of it but millions claim to believe it anyway. The more mundane tricks like holy water and sin absolution are bog standard daily rituals particular to Catholicism, and the other major religions are not without their own tricks...

Double Jeopardy

Tonight The Pensive Quill features guest writer Martin Galvin who draws attention to some important points in the case of Gerry McGeough Gerry McGeough must soon face a Diplock version of “double jeopardy” courtesy of the crown. On Friday, March 2nd, the Tyrone Republican will be kept in his Maghaberry cell, awaiting word of the first of these two judgments, by two sets of British judges. A victory in either proceeding will likely free Gerry McGeough to return to his wife Maria and four young children. A double defeat will likely mean at least...