An Phoblacht February 2014

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Maeve McLaughlin MLA

NHS EMERGENCY

FACING DOWN APARTHEID

Ireland South EU candidate

LIADH NÍ RIADA

From ANC activist to Lisnaskea nurse

Raising rural regeneration

anphoblacht

Sraith Nua Iml 37 Uimhir 2

February / Feabhra 2014

PRICE €2/£2

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS PENALTY PROBE HITS POLICE ROADBLOCKS

MARY LOU McDONALD PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE MEMBER

Garda chiefs close ranks

SINN FÉIN ARD FHEIS THE OPERA HOUSE, WEXFORD

FRIDAY 7th & SATURDAY 8th FEBRUARY

SEE INSIDE PAGE 27

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anphoblacht

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IN PICTURES

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WHAT’S INSIDE

6 John Brewer, Professor of Post Conflict Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, on the need for compromise and the Haass Talks 7 Council budgets: Fianna Fáil and Labour councillors vote to save their jobs rather than serve community 10 & 11 Twenty years on from Section 31 state censorship, Irish media still restricts republicans 12 Eoin Ó Broin: Start of a recovery – but only for some 14 Eoin Ó Murchú: The labour movement needs to break stranglehold of the Labour Party

5 Eugene Kelly, who lost his brother Robert (17), Antoinette Keegan and Christine Keegan whose daughters Mary and Martina died in the Stardust nightclub fire, Dublin, in 1981, meet with Gerry Adams, Lynn Boylan and Mary Lou McDonald at Leinster House as part of their campaign for justice

15 Rehab and CRC: Fine Gael and Labour vote down Sinn Féin Bill to clean up charity sector 18 & 19 ‘Unionist leaders follow the Orange Brick Road’ – Mainstream unionism pandering to extremists 20 Seán Crowe meets ministers in Iran on Syrian civil war and Palestinian refugees

21 Catalonia defies Madrid and sets date for independence vote 24 Margaretta D’Arcy: Níor chaill bean an mhisnigh ariamh é!

26 & 27 Tottenham verdict’s echoes in Ireland – The ‘lawful killing’ of Mark Duggan 28 Book reviews: Fenian bombs in London; IRA flying columns in Connemara

5 100 people attended a commemoration in Coolderry, Armagh, to remember Volunteer Seamus Harvey, including his brother Seán Harvey, Councillor Terry Hearty, Megan Fearon MLA and other councillors and members of the Morris/Harvey Sinn Féin Cumann

5 Tyrone Sinn Féin representatives with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness at the Sinn Féin Cuige Uladh AGM which took place on Saturday 18 January in Gulladuff, County Derry. Belfast’s Bobby Storey and Derry republican Andrew McCartney were elected as chairperson and vice-chair respectively

5 Sinn Féin candidate for Ballyfermot/Drimnagh in Dublin City, Daithí Doolan, collects signatures for a petition in opposition to water charges in Ballyfermot

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February / Feabhra 2014 3

Oireachtas penalty points probe hits roadblocks

GOVERNMENT AND GARDA CHIEFS CLOSE RANKS THE Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee probe into claims by Garda ‘whistleblowers’ that motorists had their penalty points ‘fixed’ by senior officers who quashed them was in doubt after dramatic interventions by Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan and Justice Minister Alan Shatter.

The Justice Minister referred the allegations on Monday 27 January to the Garda Ombudsman Commission watchdog — more than a year after the affair became public.

The Justice Minister’s very belated move was seen sceptically by Public Accounts Committee members Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald TD and Shane Ross TD. Irish Times analyst Arthur Beesley wrote on Tuesday 28 January that the Justice Minister’s move to empower the Ombudsman to investigate com-

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn wondered why it had taken the Justice Minister 14 months to refer the penalty points affair to the Garda Ombudsman Commission plaints made directly to it by gardaí “seems like an obvious move [but] begs the question as to why it did not happen sooner”. He continued: “The Garda authorities insist their own inquiries have found there was no wrongdoing. However, questions about the credibility of gardaí investigating gardaí persist.

“It was, of course, open to the Minister to send in the Ombudsman at an earlier date. This he signally did not do. His intervention came only in the face of turmoil within the PAC over breaches of its legal remit and the prospect of court action by the Garda Commissioner against the committee hearing evidence next Thursday from a serving Garda sergeant.”

It was a point made earlier by Sinn Féin Justice spokesperson Pádraig Mac Lochlainn TD. He wondered why it had taken the Justice Minister 14 months to refer the penalty points affair to the Ombudsman Commission but “only took him a handful of days to recommend an investigation into the whistleblower — I must question why it has taken so long for this to happen”.

5 Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan and Justice Minister Alan Shatter

5 Justice spokesperson Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and PAC member Mary Lou McDonald The Donegal deputy pointed out: “There has been a cry for an independent inquiry for well over a year.

The Oireachtas Petitions Committee, which I chair, asked for this issue to be referred to the Garda Ombudsman Commission last year and I have called for this on countless occasions in the Dáil.

“It is plainly obvious that this issue needed an independent investigation.”

Mary Lou McDonald told Newstalk radio’s Pat Kenny Show after the Justice Minister’s move that it seemed a decision has been taken within Government under the guise of protecting the integrity of the PAC “to essentially stymie or perhaps even shut down entirely the work that we’re doing”. She said it was “beyond bizarre for the simple reason that the PAC has operated effectively, fairly and in a non-party political way”.

5 Garda ‘whistleblowers’ claim motorists had their penalty points ‘fixed’ by senior officers

There is “no fear or favour”, the Dublin TD said, in “following the money trail” in the spending or loss of taxpayers’ money and getting best value for the public. She has insisted that the whistleblowers must be afforded the opportunity to state their case and be questioned before the PAC. Mary Lou McDonald was quite clear that she accepts that any issue of a disciplinary nature or that strayed into allegations of corrupt or criminal activity by Garda members was beyond the scope of the PAC. Justice Minister Alan Shatter also criticised unnamed PAC members over comments they have made on the issue in response to media interviews. He told Newstalk’s Breakfast show on Tuesday 28 January that he doesn’t think the PAC is the place to inquire into the allegations.

The referral to the Garda Ombudsman Commission by the Justice Minister came after Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan told the PAC in a face-to-face meeting the previous week that he personally found the whistleblowers’ “extraordinary, seri-

There is ‘no fear or favour’, Mary Lou McDonald said, in getting value for money for the taxpayer ous allegations” to be “quite disgusting”.

The Garda Commissioner told the PAC he would be taking legal advice with the clear intention of preventing the appearance of two Garda whistleblowers (“subordinates”) before the PAC. “It goes without saying I would have to take legal advice,” the Garda Commissioner told the PAC, adding that it was his personal view that serving or retired members of An Garda Síochána “should not be coming into this forum and use this platform to discuss matters of such importance, particularly in the context of serious and criminal allegations that have been made”.

The PAC met in closed session on Tuesday 28 January to take its own legal advice on the situation.

As An Phoblacht went to press, the PAC meeting was deadlocked with Government TDs resisting an invitation to a serving Garda whistleblower to give evidence on Thursday 28 January. Mary Lou McDonald and Shane Ross sought to break the logjam by calling for a vote, prompting an adjournment. Government TDs then acceded to the invitation ‘by consensus’. PAC members were told a hearing with the whistleblower was a political decision. The hearing was agreed to be in private with legal advice that the whistleblower could not name names and would be restricted in what he could say and what he could be asked.

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Make 2014 the year of change

BY GERRY ADAMS TD PRESIDENT OF SINN FÉIN THE Central Remedial Clinic and Irish Water scandals are part of a toxic political culture marked by ‘jobs for the boys’ and contracts for a small group of consultants and insiders who are closely linked to the Establishment.

It is part of a culture of greed and cronyism that came to dominance after partition and the defeat of the revolutionary fervour of 1916. It is the outworking of the coming to power of conservative right-wing elements within Irish society. It is classic neo-colonialism: the colonial power leaves and is replaced by an indigenous elite that seeks to advance its own narrow interests.

The Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties (occasionally supported by Labour, the Greens or the PDs) created and oversaw a culture of corruption and of ‘Golden Circles’ involving bankers and developers and politicians who looked after

each other to the detriment of ordinary citizens.

These are the people who collapsed the Irish economy five years ago.

There is an alternative to this toxic culture.

Sinn Féin is for a realignment of Irish politics across the island.

We believe that fairness and equality must be central to government policy.

We are for core republican values which are about defending public services.

Sinn Féin believes that citizens have fundamental rights, including the right to a wraparound health service; to a decent education free and accessible to third level; to a home; to a clean environment; to a fair wage and to a job.

Why should gender be the basis for the exclusion of anyone? Or disability? Why should race or class or skin colour or creed give one group of human beings the ability to deny other human beings their full rights or entitlements as citizens?

Society must be shaped around these rights.

Society must be shaped around people – around citizens, not elites or hierarchies.

In May, there will be local and European elections in both parts of the island. Sinn Féin will be the only significant party contesting these in both parts of the island. We will have candidates standing in all of the European constituencies and – for the first time since 1918 – there will be Sinn Féin candidates in every local council on the island, North and South.

For those who want to look to a different, better future, who want hope for themselves and for their families, then the choice is obvious. In May, make 2014 the year of change and vote for Sinn Féin candidates.

READ MORE FROM GERRY ADAMS AT

leargas.blogspot.ie

Florrie French

Fógraí Bháis

FLORRIE FRENCH, who passed away on 22 January, was born into a farming family in Ladyrath, County Meath, on 1 May 1923.

At the age of 20, Florrie met and fell in love with Ben French, a well-known republican who had fought in the Tan War and the Civil War in the 1920s.

Ben remained an active Volunteer for much of the first half of the 20th century and was fully committed to the cause of Irish independence up until his death in 1972. Florrie’s sister-in-law spent time in Kilmainham Jail after the 1916 revolution.

As Florrie’s relationship began with Ben, so too did a lifelong commitment to the Republican Movement. Florrie studied republicanism with the help of Ben through publications such The Wolfe Tone Weekly and The United Irishmen, copies of which dating from the 1950s remained in her possession. Florrie started selling The United Irishmen in the 1950s and continued with An Phoblacht up until 2007, at the age of 84.

5 Society must be shaped around people – around citizens, not elites or hierarchies

In Florrie’s heyday she sold to over 40 rural pubs throughout north Meath and Cavan. This involved selling on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday night, selling 140 copies a week. It is estimated that during her selling years Florrie sold upwards of

5 Sinn Féin stand for core republican values which are about defending public services

CONTACT

Nobber, Meath 300,000 copies of the United Irishmen/An Phoblacht, and tens of thousands of Easter Lilies and Republican Calendars.

Florrie’s activities throughout the years offered invaluable support to IRA Volunteers and Sinn Féin activists who were given shelter during the toughest of times.

During one Special Branch raid on her home, an eager Garda superintendent wrongly identified the resin dust of Florrie’s favourite fiddle as gun powder until such time Florrie reminded the superintendent that she had in fact played the fiddle in his company many times before.

In 1972, Florrie took part with Máire Drumm and Eileen Shields in the antiinternment march from the Hill of Tara to Navan. Florrie also hosted different Sinn Féin leaders, including Paddy McLogan and Gerry Adams.

Florrie was the last of an incredible generation stretching back to the Civil War. Ní bheidh a leithead ann arís.

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www.anphoblacht.com AN PHOBLACHT is published monthly by Sinn Féin.

The views in An Phoblacht are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sinn Féin.

We welcome articles, opinions and photographs from new contributors but please contact the Editor first.

AN PHOBLACHT www.anphoblacht.com Kevin Barry House 44 Parnell Square, Dublin 1, Ireland Telephone: (+353 1) 872 6 100 Email: editor@anphoblacht.com Layout: production@anphoblacht.com – Mark Dawson

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February / Feabhra 2014 5

In the second issue, Arthur Griffith describes visiting a Dublin drill hall and finding that four times as many men turned up as the hall could accommodate

BY

BY MÍCHEÁL MÍCHEÁL Mac Mac DONNCHA DONNCHA

EACH ISSUE OF The Irish Volunteer from February 1914 to April 1916 is being put online weekly by An Phoblacht (see advertisement) and is avaialble to online subscribers. We would like to thank Shay O’Hanlon of Dublin for his generous loan of this unique complete set of newspapers.

The Irish Volunteer newspaper rallies a new movement

THE Irish Volunteers – Óglaigh na hÉireann – were founded in November 1913 and grew rapidly across Ireland in the subsequent weeks and months.

In an appeal for financial support issued in December, the Provisional Committee of the Volunteers stated that they were the nucleus of a national army and “will be an arm and a possession of the whole nation, the focus of its defence and the necessary guardian of its liberties both now and hereafter”.

As well as providing arms and equipment, one of the priorities of the Provisional Committee was to spread the message of the Volunteers and ensure communication between headquarters and the growing number of units throughout Ireland. For this purpose, a weekly newspaper was established. It was entitled simply The Irish Volunteer – Óglach na hÉireann. The first issue appeared on 7 February 1914.

The front-page article was a rallying call to the growing movement. It said that the first issue of the paper was devoted mainly to Volunteer propaganda and that future issues would provide practical help to Volunteers with articles on training and equipping the force. The Volunteer leader Eoin Mac Néill wrote that “the government of Ireland, since it was taken over by the British Parliament, has always been a mixture of force and corruption”. Mac Néill was very much the public face of the Volunteers, being the best-known member of the Provisional Committee.

From the beginning, the more radical leaders were coming to the fore. The first issue of the paper had a piece by Pádraig Mac Piarais (P. H. Pearse), a long-time colleague of Mac Néill in Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League). In his article, Mac Piarais argued that the Volunteers arose directly out

YOU CAN READ the historic editions of The Irish Volunteer weekly from:

7 February 2014 until 22 April 2016 with a

yearly online subscription to the Irish Volunteer and An Phoblacht for

just €10

anphoblacht PUTS HISTORIC WEEKLY PAPER ONLINE

emembering R the

Past

The newspaper of the new Volunteer movement, first published weekly from 7 February 1914 to 22 April 1916, just two days before the Easter Rising.

It chronicled the growth of the movement throughout Ireland and provided military instruction and political commentary for the Volunteers.

5 The Irish Volunteers parade though Cork City on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1916 of the work of the League. He wrote: “Is 1914 to be the Home Rule year? I do not know, but I know, or think I know, that it is to be the Volunteer year.”

There was an article and a poem

by Joseph Plunkett and an article by Éamonn Ceannt, both of whom, with Pearse, were executed in 1916. At this time, Roger Casement had not long left the British diplomatic service and was devoting his life to the struggle for Irish freedom. Casement wrote a piece urging separate Irish participation in the Olympic Games which were scheduled for Berlin in 1916. He urged the Volunteers to mark the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Clontarf in April 1914.

The first issue begins a regular feature on ‘Progress of the Movement’ that continues throughout 1914. There are accounts of recruiting meetings in Monaghan, Longford, Kerry, Cork,

‘Is 1914 to be the Home Rule year? I do not know, but I know, or think I know, that it is to be the Volunteer year’ Pádraig Mac Piarais writing in The Irish Volunteer

Tipperary, Tyrone, Derry, Westmeath, Mayo, Wexford, Limerick, Galway and Donegal.

There is a list of a dozen locations in Dublin where Volunteers are drilling.

In the second issue, Arthur Griffith describes visiting a Dublin drill hall and finding that four times as many men turned up as the hall could accommodate.

In early 1914, the British Government was already hatching its plot to partition Ireland. In issue number 4, The Irish Volunteer declares that “at any price the national integrity of Ireland must be maintained”. In the same issue Éamonn Ceannt announces that “this is a democratic movement so no one need wait for a lead from the rich or from the great”.

• The first issue of The Irish Volunteer – Óglach na hÉireann appeared in February 1914, 100 years ago this month.

YEARLY ONLINE SUBSCRIPTION

ONLY €10

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PROFESSOR JOHN BREWER

Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, writes for An Phoblacht

What is compromise? does it require we also lose our feelings of anger, hate or contempt toward each other. Whatever it was that caused the need to compromise in the first place and to change the nature of the relationship does not disappear suddenly with the agreement.

What matters is that people stick to the terms of the compromise as the agreed way to conduct social relationships in the future. This is often misunderstood. Compromise requires people to affirm in public what they often might disagree with or be less than perfectly happy with in private. Compromise, after all, involves loss as well as gain.

The sense of loss, even if the gains outweigh them, dissipates only very slowly. What matters to the stability of the compromise is that, in public, people keep to the terms of the agreement and continue to conduct social relationships in the manner determined by it, irrespective of what they feel in private.

All too often, of course, politicians make public their reservations to the very accord they

AN INTERESTING SHIFT has occurred in people’s vocabulary in Northern Ireland with the increasing use of the word ‘compromise’.

Ecumenism somewhat spoilt the word ‘reconciliation’ by associating it with religion and by making it well-meaning but rather wishy-washy.

The word compromise identifies that what people have to come to terms with is different political positions and identities not religious differences. The problem is that people talk about compromise in opposite ways.

It is not that its meaning is unclear, despite what critics say. Compromise is the reciprocal agreement to act toward each other differently in the future. This agreement can be a spit and a handshake or a statute running to thousands of clauses. The problem arises in how the agreement, whatever it is, is subsequently perceived by those who are made subject to its terms.

It can be seen as surrender, as giving up, a loss; so people talk of being compromised by the agreement. The agreement can also be seen as a

Compromise requires people to affirm in public what they often might disagree with or be less than perfectly happy with in private. Compromise, after all, involves loss as well as gain gain because the new terms on which relations are conducted avoid the difficulties of the past.

These two views, which you hear often in the media and on street corners in reference to the both the Good Friday Agreement and the Haass Talks, are not actually mutually exclusive.

Compromise is both of these things at the same time.

It is important to stress that compromise is more than a set of positive feelings. Compromise is a type of social relationship. It is one involving mutual concessions that affect future behaviour toward one another. The social relationships can be political ones between political parties and groups, social ones between communities, interpersonal ones between individuals, or national ones between countries.

The agreement to act toward each other differently in the future does not depend on first coming to love, respect or trust one another. Nor

5 Compromise is a social relationship involving mutual concessions that affect future behaviour towards each other

5 Irish statesman Edmund Burke was a firm believer in the benefits achieved through compromise

John Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He has an honorary degree from Brunel University for services to study of peace processes and is a member of the UN Roster of Global Experts. He runs the £1.26million Leverhulme Trust-funded

research programme ‘Compromise after Conflict’, which looks at the development of compromise amongst victims of conflict in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka (www.qub.ac.uk/researchcentres/CompromiseAfterConflict/) Professor Brewer is the author and coauthor of 15 books, and editor or coeditor of a further three, including Peace

The agreement to act toward each other differently in the future does not depend on first coming to love, respect or trust one another once willingly signed. Maintaining a public front in face of one’s private disagreements has been difficult for Northern Irish politicians historically (virtually every compromise settlement has been unpicked by public bickering afterwards) but the principle of cabinet collective responsibility in democratic systems calls for precisely that.

To counterbalance some people’s negative views on compromise, I subscribe to the opinion of the 18th century Irishman Edmund Burke, who expressed the necessity of compromise: “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise.”

As a sociologist I would go further.

Compromise is a social practice that makes society possible. Without compromise, society descends into conflict because social relationships break down under dominance or force.

Compromise is therefore a moral sensibility or moral virtue that allows people who disagree with one another to live together harmoniously, in tolerance and for mutual benefit.

Processes: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press), Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, with Gerard Leavey and David Mitchell), and Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, with Gareth Higgins and Francis Teeney).

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February / Feabhra 2014 7

IN PICTURES

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5 Blanchardstown Sinn Féin hold a demonstration outside Connolly Hospital in opposition to Government health cuts

5 Demonstrators take part in a solidarity event for Basque political prisoners in Daunt Square, Cork

Establishment councillors put their own jobs ahead of constituents in Donegal and Dublin

The self-preservation societies

BY MARK MOLONEY IN DONEGAL AND DUBLIN in January, councillors from Fianna Fáil, Labour and some self-styled left-wing Independents displayed an amazing ability to ensure their jobs were protected to the cost of the people in their respective counties.

Throughout December and the beginning of January, Donegal County Council met four times for 39

In Donegal, Thomas Pringle’s protégé (a former spokesperson for the Campaign Against the Household & Water Taxes) rode in behind Fine Gael and Labour to back the budget hours in futile attempts by Fine Gael and Labour to push through their unfair €138million budget package. It included austerity measures, the introduction of water charges and the signing over of the council’s €300million water network to Irish Water without any compensation. Opposed to them were Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil who, along with Independent councillors held a 15-13 majority.

Speaking as the council almost collapsed following a defeat of the budg-

et proposal on 8 January, Sinn Féin Councillor Mick Quinn said: “We were not given a mandate to introduce water charges and we will not be doing Phil Hogan’s dirty work for him.”

He went on to say that this could mean the collapse of the council and the loss of salaries for councillors but made it clear where he and Sinn Féin stood: “We did not seek election for salary or personal gain.”

The national media was eagerly awaiting the final meeting to see the Government embarrassed by the failure of the budget to pass and watch as Phil Hogan was forced to install a commissioner to take over from what was dubbed a “rebel council”.

At the final meeting, however, Fianna Fáil Councillor Rena Donaghey disappeared from the chamber without notice, allegedly to teach an adult education class the same evening she knew the council’s fate was in the balance.

Meanwhile, Independent councillor John Campbell, the protégé of Independent TD Thomas Pringle, switched sides. The self-styled leftist who had previously acted as a spokesperson for the Campaign Against the Household & Water Taxes (CAHWT) flip-flopped and rode in behind Fine Gael and Labour to back the budget after he received some concessions on tourism and library funding. This allowed the budget to pass on the deciding vote of the mayor.

Sinn Féin’s Mick Quinn was furious.

“It’s clear Donegal has been ignored and has been fed the crumbs from the

Dublin table,” he said. “We had a huge opportunity to try and force the minister’s hand to address our needs.”

Sinn Féin Councillor Jack Murray was also seething at the turn of events.

He said the unfair budget will “inflict untold suffering on struggling families across the county. Let’s be clear, the councillors who supported this budget did so to save their own skin and they should hang their heads in shame.”

LABOUR PROPAGANDA STUNT IN DUBLIN

Donegal Councillor Mick Quinn

Dublin City Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha

In Dublin, the day after the Donegal debacle, there was another stunt pulled during the budget debate there, this time from Labour.

At the beginning of January, a draft Dublin City Council budget for 2014 was published which included plans to impose rent rises, cuts to homeless services and cuts to grants for disabled and older people to adapt their homes, among a raft of other unacceptable measures.

With a lack of support from Labour councillors for the cuts to older people and those with disabilities and also against the rent rises, though, there were discussions with Fine Gael.

Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha tells An Phoblacht: “Suddenly, out of nowhere, in the space of two days, the money was found to avoid these three cuts. And, hey presto, Labour rides in on a white horse posing as the saviour of the people for avoiding cuts (arising

from their own Government’s actions), cuts that should never have been proposed in the first place!”

The first time opposition councillors got to see these new amendments was at the council meeting that evening.

“Were these cuts and rent rises ever really going to take place?” asks Mícheál suspiciously. “Were they put up to be shot down? Or was it a case of the cuts and rent rises being pushed by Environment & Local Government Minister Phil Hogan but

The Dublin City Council budget was about saving Labour Party seats in the local elections then withdrawn to try to save the skins of Fine Gael and Labour councillors in Dublin?”

While the Sinn Féin team supported the amendments to remove rent rises and cuts to homeless services, the party voted to reject the overall budget which introduces water charges and the Local Property Tax. “This budget was not about saving the citizens of Dublin or about standing up to the Government,” Mícheál Mac Donncha says. “It was an attempt to save Labour seats in the local elections, while still maintaining the austerity policies of the Government and leaving unchallenged the scandals of the Local Property Tax and Irish Water.”

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MAEVE McLAUGHLIN MLA, Chairperson of the Health Committee in the North’s Executive, talks to An Phoblacht about the crisis in the Health Service north of the Border and Sinn Féin’s vision for the future.

+

HOSPITAL I TOOK ON the role of Chairperson of the Health Committee in October 2013 when I replaced my friend and colleague Sue Ramsey due to her illness and I want to wish Sue a full and speedy recovery.

Not only has it been a baptism of fire but it also has been quite an eye-opener.

EMERGENCY

The scope of the Health Committee is enormous: from basic healthcare right through to public health and public safety and everything that entails. The focus, however, has been on the provision of services at the sharp end of the service.

The Health Service in the North of Ireland is now focused on the ‘Transforming Your Care’ agenda which is about transferring £83million from acute to primary and community care — a laudable principle on paper but there is nothing in this framework that

Delivery of health provision cannot become ‘care on the cheap’ provides us with targets for our health inequalities or demonstrates how we will have better health outcomes as a result.

Tackling health inequalities must be central to the delivery of health and social care provision and to the delivery of these proposals. Early intervention and prevention is central to this objective. We spend £4.6billion per year on health and social care and employ 70,000 staff. The reality is that shared health has not been shared equally across all people in our society. The life expectancy of someone in more affluent areas is around 10 years more than someone in more deprived areas. The top three constituencies in terms of health inequalities are Belfast West, Belfast North, and Foyle The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) should consider increasing the percentage of its overall health and social care budget on early intervention and prevention to 6% with the next decade.

From taking up this position six months ago, DUP Health Minister Edwin Poots has staggered from one crisis to another.

These range from the child sexual exploitation inquiry with no statutory power to a lack of rights for our elderly community in residential care, and indecision on children’s heart services to confusion on termination guidelines. In all of these he has failed to give leadership.

He has also failed to implement EU directives on preventing care to asylum seekers and tobacco restrictions to protect children

5 Royal Victoria Hospital declared a major incident emergency on 8 January and young people. And we have seen a crisis in our Accident & Emergency departments Both the issue of the blood ban and the Health Minister’s objection to appoint a representative from the trade union movement

brought him to the High Court where he was found to be “irrational” and “in breach of his Ministerial Code”.

As blood supplies continue to run low we have seen the Health Minister introduce his

5 Health Minister Edwin Poots introduced his own fundamental reilgious views into policy areas

own fundamental religious views into the policy areas by banning blood donated by gay men even though all blood is screened before use. It is also a fact that, in times of emergency, we import blood from Britain where blood from gay men is rightly accepted as equal as everyone else’s blood.

It is time the Health Minister introduced equality into the Health Service.

When someone is sick or has been injured they expect that when they arrive at a hospital they will receive prompt help and be able in most cases to make a full recovery with the proper care, That’s not the case anymore and health provision has become a bit of a lottery.

On Wednesday 8 January, a major incident emergency was declared in the Accident & Emergency ward of the Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital. People may well be asking was this due a plane crash, a multi-vehicle pile-up, a fire at an old people’s home, a major chemical spill, or some other catastrophe or natural disaster.

Fortunately none of the above had occurred but this major incident emergency was a response to failure of the ability of the A&E ward to cope with the routine rigours of a busy ward. This is becoming indicative of the entire Health Service.

The major incident emergency in the Royal Victoria Hospital in January wasn’t due to a plane crash or a multi-vehicle pile-up I would like to make it clear that this failure was not due to the magnificent work of the doctors and nurses who, despite enormous pressures, have struggled on to provide a service to the public.

The reason for the collapse lies with the management of our health system as we see an attempt to downgrade services and in some incidents to privatise services across the board.

Closing A&E wards in the City Hospital and other hospitals in the greater Belfast area has created a situation where the main A&E ward in the Royal is unable to cope unless we see major changes. This is due in the main to poor policy and even poorer planning having a knock-on effect in getting the correct resource to the correct place.

We have the ridiculous situation where we have new hospitals being built such as the South West Acute Hospital and the Downe

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5 The privatisation agenda is still on the table as Health Minister Edwin Poots attempts to close the entire care system down Hospital yet services are being removed as soon as they open, piling pressure on other services.

But it is not only A&E where we see a crisis appearing due to decisions that don’t stack up to scrutiny in terms of promoting better health.

Sinn Féin’s ambition of care from the cradle to the grave cannot be realised if we continue to with the policy of closing our elderly care homes. We hear much about “reablement” and about older people staying and being looked

‘Transforming Your Care’ cannot be a privatisation charter after at home but this is at a time when some of our elderly receive 15-minute care packages daily. Surely if we are serious about care at home then an investment in domiciliary care is required. We have seen the debacle with many elderly and infirm residents of care homes being informed that they were to be dumped on the street with no provision for their future needs.

Although the Health Minister was forced to 5 The failure was not due to the magnificent work of doctors, nurses and other staff stall his plans to close the entire care home estate, the threat still remains as the privatisation agenda is still on the table as he attempts to close the entire care system down.

‘Transforming Your Care’ cannot be a privatisation charter.

There is ample evidence to demonstrate that ‘for-profit’ organisations fail to deliver firstclass health services. Many serious issues have arisen with private equity companies who attempt to maximise profit to the detriment to services they deliver and the patients who receive them. Delivery of health provision cannot become ‘care on the cheap’.

The issue of suicide is one that has blighted our island with every parish knowing the pain of losing people through suicide: Do we do enough to tackle it?

Right across the island within our health systems, mental health protection is considerably lower down the importance scale than physical health in terms of treatment and research investment, yet mental health illnesses can lead to more lethal outcomes than many physical illnesses.

The European average of spend on mental 5 The Health Minister banned blood donated by gay men even though all blood is screened before use

health is 12% of the budget and we need to increase our spending to bring it into line with this figure.

The indecision on the issue of children’s heart surgery provision and whether we can buckle together a deal that will allow services for children in the North of Ireland being able to access surgery in Belfast or at least on the island of Ireland is again at the forefront of the media after an aircraft taking a baby to Britain for treatment was forced to make an emergency landing.

This is one area where the Health Minister can be praised in that he has at least looked at a solution that includes an all-Ireland dimen-

The life expectancy of someone in more affluent areas is around 10 years more than someone in more deprived areas sion and more solutions could be found if we continued to address our deficiencies on an all-Ireland basis.

Health innovation is an emerging sector that has potential economic outcomes such as job and business creation. We are well positioned in the north-west to grow this sector given our resources.

Sinn Féin is actively developing the health innovation sector in the north-west by establishing the North-West Health Innovation Corridor (NWHIC) that complements the new connected health initiative.

NWHIC will span the arc of the north-west (including Derry, Coleraine, Letterkenny and Sligo). The initiative will involve all the key stakeholders (e.g. University of Ulster at Magee and Coleraine, Letterkenny IT, Sligo IT, Invest NI, Enterprise Ireland, the health boards, and other health professionals such as Co-operation and Working Together).

Sinn Féin has a policy of creating a health service from the cradle to the grave that is free for all its citizens. But a health service is more than nursing the elderly and attending the sick – it is about the creation of a society that promotes healthy living and preventative medicine.

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Journalist

PHIL Mac GIOLLA BHÁIN on what’s behind the mainstream media’s treatment of Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams

THE

CENSORSHIP GENERATION Sinn Féin, like all of the other major parties in the Dáil, came out of armed conflict. They can trace their roots from either the Irish Volunteers or the Irish Citizen Army. There are current members of the Labour Party who may have once been, ahem, close to the thinking, shall we say, of the ‘Official IRA’.

Personally, I don’t care if anyone in the current Labour Party frontbench once thought that North Korea was a model for Ireland to follow. However, I do want Irish journalists to ask them about past events – in the same way that they quiz Sinn Féin leaders – in the interests of ‘balanced reporting’.

The recent highly-personalised onslaught directed at Gerry Adams TD is, in my opinion, without parallel in this state. This is the same

PEOPLE don’t change much but generations do. The people in leadership positions in the Irish media at the moment tend to be about the same age. Like all folk of a similar age, they are a product of the same historical moment.

Lots of them started out as bright, ambitious young things in the mid-1970s. Now they are at the pinnacle of their chosen greasy pole. This is the generation that implemented Section 31 state censorship – the ‘Censorship Generation’ – and only when you think of them in this way does their collective behaviour make any sense.

It is an attitude and behaviour that is highly partitionist and imbued with a visceral hatred of Sinn Féin. Another of this generation’s main characteristics is being rather comfortable with censorship.

Conor Cruise O’Brien tried to use Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act in the 1970s and 1980s to censor coverage of ‘the Troubles’ in or

When Sinn Féin is mentioned, many people in senior positions in the media unconsciously consult with their inner censor, their ‘inner Stasi’

A lot of the people in leadership positions in the Irish media are of the generation that implemented Section 31 state censorship for 22 years about the North of Ireland which could in any way have been seen as pro-republican. In papers such as the Irish Press, editor Tim Pat Coogan published editorials attacking Section 31.

The Section 31 broadcasting ban was lifted in 1994 by the then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, as part of the Peace Process sequencing and ending 22 years of direct political censorship. But even when the ban on Sinn Féin elected representatives was lifted, the journalists and broadcasters who had implemented this state censorship retained the old mind-set. The years of silencing republicans in the 26 Counties left an enduring legacy within journalism as people working within this trade became socialised into a reality whereby the state told them what to report and what to think. This is not unique to Ireland.

A good friend of mine lived through the later years of the communist regime in East Germany, the old GDR. He had an interest in journalism but didn’t take it any further. The

5 TV3 airbrushed Gerry Adams and Richard McAuley’s part in Mandela’s international guard of honour party hacks in his town were told what to write and what to think. Even today, 20 years after Section 31 was repealed, in Donnybrook and in newspaper offices across Dublin, when Sinn Féin is mentioned, many people in senior positions unconsciously consult with their inner censor, their ‘inner Stasi’.

The funeral of Nelson Mandela (as reported in our last issue) put these apparatchiks into a real spin. Their quandary was to broadcast the images of the global village paying homage to Madiba without letting the Irish people know that Gerry Adams TD was held by the Mandela clan in the highest regard.

TV3 broadcast a one-hour special on 29 December titled Remembering Mandela on the week-long memorial events for Madiba and featuring Irish personalities, including (quite rightly) the Dunnes Stores anti-

apartheid strikers of the 1980s.

TV3’s hour managed to mention Bono and President Michael D. Higgins at Madiba’s mass memorial rally in Soweto but ‘overlooked’ the presence of joint First Minister Martin McGuinness, who was a prominent rival candidate to Michael D in his election as President of Ireland.

TV3’s Remembering Mandela also totally airbrushed the inclusion of Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and Richard McAuley in the international guard of honour alongside Mandela’s coffin at the family service that ended a week of commemorative events. No other Irish political figures received this distinuguished honour but TV3 chose to pretend it never happened – because of bad journalism or because they were Sinn Féin? If it had been Bono or Jedward, however . . .

media that did not pass public comment on the fact that Charles J. Haughey, on a modest public salary, lived in a mansion and owned his very own island off the coast of Kerry. Only when his power was on the wane did they start to rip at the carcass of his career. It was hyena journalism: willing to feed off a dying political animal but frightened to strike until they smelt infirmity.

State censorship pollutes journalism if it is allowed to take root. We now have a generation of people at the senior levels of their trade in organisations that started their careers on the understanding that, no matter what the verdict of the people was, some democratically-elected voices were not to be heard.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher followed in their wake and journalists in Britain derided her “oxygen of publicity” nonsense for what it was: the decision of a Prime Minister who had clearly lost her grip on reality.

Anyone who thought that it was a blow against Irish republicanism to have the words of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness spoken by an actor belonged in a locked ward.

The Censorship Generation recoiled in hor-

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5 TV3 managed to mention President Michael D Higgins but ‘overlooked’ Martin McGuinness’s participation

5 Journalists and broadcasters who implemented state censorship have retained the old mind-set

5 Balanced reporting? RTÉ and TV3

5 Conor Cruise O’Brien vigorously enforced Section 31

Gerry Adams has been targeted not because he is a liability to Sinn Féin – quite the opposite.

There is nothing amiss with the Fourth Estate going after an elected politician, especially a party leader. That is to be expected.

What is aberrant is the extent to which the Irish media have gone after Adams but at the same time been poodles of a government that has ripped up the living standards of the poor and less-well-off and the marginalised at the behest of the Troika with hardly a word from our ‘opinion formers’.

After the next election in the 26 Counties, Sinn Féin will likely be the biggest party in opposition. As Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond once presciently observed, oppositions have a habit of becoming the govern-

ror recently when Pádraig Mac Lochlainn TD explained on TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Browne that IRA Volunteers (like previous eras of the conflict) had a duty to do what they did when out on operations in the then political circumstances. The Donegal TD was simply stating a truth. However, if you have been socialised into a type of journalism whereby state censorship is normal then the truth is sometimes a problematic substance.

I do not know how the Censorship Generation will cope when Sinn Féin eventu-

The Censorship Generation seem determined to use all of their influences to prevent, or at least delay, Sinn Féin being in government in Leinster House is that, even if they wanted to go back to the days of official Section 31, in the age of social media they can’t.

Even though the mainstream media remain hostile and influential, their power is not what it was. Through social media, traditional media platforms can be successfully bypassed much to the chagrin and befuddlement of the Censorship Generation and a ‘responsible’ media (i.e. pro-status quo).

As the mainstream media make themselves distant and irrelevant from the people, in the digital age, the people can do it for themselves.

The nation of the townlands can now tweet at the crossroads.

The best thing that the Censorship Generation can do now is to realise they lost and that their day has gone.

TV3’s ‘Remembering Mandela’ totally airbrushed the inclusion of Gerry Adams and Richard McAuley in the international guard of honour alongside Mandela’s coffin ally sits on the government side of the Dáil.

If the Irish media village was run by people who accepted all democratically-elected politicians on the basis of their mandate then we would be in a new dispensation. That would be a level playing field without fear or favour. Then, anytime a Sinn Féin representative dropped the ball it would be fair game because it would be what everyone else got.

ment. This is not the retirement present that the Censorship Generation will want and they seem determined to use all of their influences to prevent, or at least delay, that event.

When they were cub reporters the main objective of the 26-county state and the Establishment at large was to smash republicanism. Of course, they failed and now they anticipate (and not in a good way) the ranks of Sinn Féin being swelled on the benches of the Dáil. This is what Section 31 was designed to prevent.

The thing that rankles with the Censorship Generation and the Cappucino Commentariat

5 Even if they wanted to go back to the days of official Section 31, in the age of social media they can’t

PHIL Mac GIOLLA BHÁIN is the Editor of The Irish Journalist, the National Union of Journalists’ in-house magazine for members in Ireland. He writes here in a personal capacity.

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ANOTHER

The recovery being talked about in Government Buildings is one leaving the majority coping with rising costs and debts, falling income and crumbling public services

EOIN Ó BROIN

NO FAMILY LEFT BEHIND

VIEW

THERE IS a recovery – OF SORTS – beginning to take shape in the 26 Counties.

The state has exited the Troika bail-out. The Government has re-entered the bond markets.

And the number of jobs in the economy is starting to grow, albeit at a very slow pace.

Some in government are talking these changes up, telling anyone who will listen that the age of austerity is coming to an end. Others are more cautious, talking about light at the end of the tunnel but warning that there is still more pain to come.

What we are seeing is the start of a recovery . . . but only for some.

So don’t be fooled. This recovery won’t trickle down to the majority of people struggling to get by under the weight of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour austerity.

It is a recovery that is predicated on growing poverty and inequality in our society and the asset stripping of our public services and utilities.

It will be a recovery of winners and losers.

The winners will be the top 20% of income earners alongside large corporations and investment groups; the losers will be the remaining 80% of the population and small and medium-sized indigenous businesses.

The figures speak for themselves.

In three consecutive studies, the Economic and Social Research Institute have exposed the deeply unfair impact of Fine Gael and Labour’s austerity Budgets. Since 2011, lower-income

What we are seeing is the start of a recovery . . . but only for some groups have borne the brunt of the spending cuts and extra taxes.

Fine Gael and Labour have managed to design Budgets even more unfair than their Fianna Fáil predecessors.

The consequence is increasing relative and consistent poverty and deprivation as recorded in the annual Central Statistics Office EUSILC survey.

One of the tragic ironies of the Fine Gael/Labour administration is that the Government that enshrined the rights of the child into the state’s constitution is also the government that has presided over the largest increase in child poverty for decades.

Even those lucky to be in work are not immune as one in seven of those families at risk of poverty are in employment.

Thanks to Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, a quarter of the population of the state are now officially deprived.

This is no accident. It is not an unfortunate or unavoidable result of the economic crisis.

It is the direct result of the social and economic model being implemented by Governments since the crisis began in 2008.

The logic of this model is very simple and very damaging to the long-term social and eco-

5 Sinn Féin stands for a recovery in which no family is left behind nomic development of the state.

In order to generate economic growth the Government has decided that wage levels and business costs must be kept at a minimum. Tax on corporations and company executives must also be kept low.

All other social and industrial policy objectives must take second place to attracting foreign direct investment and facilitating export growth in the large corporate sector.

Meanwhile, the Government is trying to tackle the public deficit and debt caused by socialising the cost of the banking crisis. As corporate and executive tax can’t be touched, the cuts must come from Government spending and the tax hikes must be shouldered by low-income and middle-income families.

This is the real meaning of austerity.

It is not simply about reducing the deficit. It is reducing the deficit by imposing the cost of the adjustment on those least able to pay – by reducing their disposable income and weaken-

ing the social services on which they rely.

In turn, the domestic economy (the largest employment sector in the state) continues to struggle. Less money in the pockets of ordinary people means less money spent in the local economy.

The result is a two-speed recovery, for families and for businesses; growth (increased prof-

Even those lucky to be in work are not immune as one in seven of those families at risk of poverty are in employment 5 Fine Gael and Labour have managed to design Budgets even more unfair than their Fianna Fáil predecessors

5 The Government is trying to tackle the public deficit and debt caused by socialising the cost of the banking crisis

its and wages) for the lucky few while the rest of us are abandoned to a decade of economic stagnation.

The Government’s own economic strategy prevents it from investing in economic and social recovery for all. Some headline figures may prove comforting for Government ministers and backbenchers but only if they shut their eyes to the social cost of the policies that they have chosen to implement.

The recovery being talked about in Government Buildings today is not a real recovery.

It is not a fair recovery.

It is a recovery that will leave the vast majority of families behind, coping with rising costs and debts, falling income and crumbling public services.

Sinn Féin, as demonstrated in our Alternative Budget proposals, stands for a recovery in which no family is left behind.

Sinn Féin is for a social and economic recovery whose success is determined by the wellbeing of the poorest in our society, not the interest rates on the international bond markets or the editorials of Forbes business magazine.

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BRITISH GOVERNMENT IMPOSES GAGGING ORDER ON FREED PRISONER AND LEGAL TEAM

MARTIN COREY RELEASED UNDER HEAVY RESTRICTIONS LURGAN MAN Martin Corey was released from Maghaberry Prison on Wednesday 15 January under stringent restrictions imposed on him about where he lives and not speaking to the media.

In the four years since his arrest and detention, Martin Corey was never once questioned by the PSNI about any alleged offence nor was his legal team shown evidence implicating him in any offence Corey had previously been convicted of the 1973 killings of two RUC members and served almost 20 years before being released on licence in 1992.

BY PEADAR WHELAN In April 2010, then British Secretary of State Shaun Woodward revoked the Lurgan man’s licence, claiming he was deemed to be a risk to the public. But Corey was imprisoned without any charges being brought against him.

In the four years since his arrest and detention, Martin Corey was never once questioned by the PSNI about any alleged offence nor was his legal team shown evidence implicating him in any offence.

Ordered to live away from his native Lurgan, Corey and his legal team are also forbidden to speak to the media about the terms of his release.

This blanket ban (ordered under Rule 22 of Parole Commissioners legislation) means that the circumstances surrounding his detention in April 2010 until his release cannot be scrutinised.

This is in keeping with the secrecy

that cloaked Corey’s arrest and fouryear detention in Maghaberry Prison.

Prison authorities smuggled Corey out of jail in a blacked out prison van and handed him over to his solicitor at a rendezvous in the car park of a near-

Ordered to live away from his native Lurgan, Corey and his legal team are forbidden to speak to the media about the terms of his release by train station, no doubt to eliminate the chances of his release being seen on the TV news and film footage as background to the raft of questions this case raises.

Sinn Féin Junior Minister Jennifer McCann (who along with party colleagues constantly challenged Justice Minister David Ford and the British authorities on behalf of Corey) said:

5 Martin Corey was held for four years without ever being questioned about any alleged offence “This was a clear abuse of Martin Corey’s human rights and is an indictment on those who imprisoned him. At no time was due process adhered to.

“Sinn Féin has consistently raised this issue and the conditions under

which Martin Corey was detained. I am glad that he has now been released.

“The arrest and detention of people without any evidence cannot be justified in any terms.”

‘Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1953’

LUCINDA CREIGHTON’S REFORM ALLIANCE RALLY

BY DARREN O’KEEFFE AS KIDS, many of us probably dreamed of the chance of hopping into Marty McFly’s DeLorean and blasting off back to some bygone era.

Fans of time travel fantasies were presented with the remarkable opportunity to skip through the years for the mere cost of a trip to Dublin for the Reform Alliance’s ‘national conversation’ in Ballsbridge on 25 January.

All you had to do was pop along to the RDS and you would have been transported back to 1953.

Media reports bigging up Lucinda Creighton’s ‘Monster Meeting’ beforehand suggested that so many people were expected to attend that, instead giving thought to forming a new political party, the Reform Alliance could legitimately consider establishing their own state.

And given some of the contributions from the floor (such as the assertions that women do not possess the attributes for public life), the image of some attendees being confined to an island of their own wasn’t such an unsettling thought.

5 The Reform Alliance most likely want an Ireland in which the working class are seen as drones

5 The Reform Alliance’s Lucinda Creighton TD I suspect that a large contingent of the folk at this event would have preferred if Lucinda was only there to make the sandwiches and pour the tea.

And then came the call for the “O’Learyisation” of the health service, ą la Ryanair.

I wondered at this point if some of the Reform Alliance team weren’t bustling around the background busy with the work of forming the Sarah Palin Cumann.

Maybe the GOP would be interested in returning the adoration, issuing Lucinda with a US passport and pushing forward with ‘Creighton for America’ in 2016.

When the biggest cheer of day came, it came in response to an acknowledgment of the RA TDs’ stance on abortion. At this point I wasn’t convinced that this whole rallying of right-wing conservatism, disguised as

Contributions included the assertion that women do not possess the attributes for public life

reform to improve its palatability, wouldn’t conclude with an act of mass self-flagellation.

Penance would surely have to be paid by these bluer than blue Fine Gaelers for conducting a séance to resurrect the spirit of the Progressive Democrats The Reform Alliance most likely want an Ireland in which the working class are seen as drones to be used and abused by their entrepreneurial overlords. And the poor?

They’re not the responsibility of the state.

Charitable donations will sustain the beggars.

Cancel the meeting.

Look outside.

Your work is done.

A meeting of monsters?

Indeed.

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When will the organised labour movement flex its muscles and break with the stranglehold of austerity that its association with the renegade Labour Party has imposed upon it?

The labour movement is the key to changing the system

BY EOIN Ó MURCHÚ THE Irish people are reeling almost daily from new and ever more outrageous revelations about the way the people at the top look after themselves and their mates in the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) in Dublin and other public bodies while the rest of us suffer the dire results of austerity.

But the real question is how to put an end to this nonsense; and, more fundamentally: when will the organised labour movement flex its muscles and break with the stranglehold of austerity that its association with the renegade Labour Party has imposed upon it?

In the lead-up to the Easter Rising, labour organiser James Connolly argued that the cause of labour was the cause of Ireland, and that the cause of Ireland was the cause of labour.

What he meant was that the workers could not break the power of local capital without breaking the power of Britain to determine our political and economic future. Also he meant that Irish freedom couldn’t be won unless it included the liberation of the working class and unless that class took a leading role in the fight for freedom.

Connolly’s central involvement in the Rising won for the labour movement a leadership role in the national liberation struggle but those who came after Connolly stood aside from that leadership role and waited on the sidelines — a stance that helped defeat both the social and national liberation struggles.

Remember: the labour movement is not the Labour Party; it is the organised force of workers in trade unions, residents’ and tenants’ associations, community groups and other organisations of working people for advancing their own specific interests.

For too long, however, this movement has been politically neutered, conditioned into accepting the leadership of the middle class and hijacked by Labour Party politicians to being a source of finance and personnel for the political games of that party’s leadership as they advance their personal careers while selling out the workers they claim to represent.

At the moment, the Labour Party is attempting to lay the blame for the CRC outrage on Fianna Fáil, and that party does indeed bear a burden of shame for the ‘I scratch your back; you scratch mine’ principle by which public service has been regarded as just another course of personal enrichment.

But this current scandal occurred on the Labour Party’s watch. To try and pretend that the Health Service Executive did not know

5 Labour Party politicians have used the wider labour movement to advance their careers while selling out the workers they claim to represent that private monies (in this case raised by charitable donations) were used to top up official state-sanctioned salaries is laughable.

Of course they knew, and the nod and the

that we practise a special crony capitalism unique to Ireland. But this is a travesty. Just look at England where there is an ongoing major row about bankers in nationalised

wink allowed it all to continue. Just it suits the politicians now to make an example of the CRC, while the Government’s backers in Goldman Sachs and the AIB continue on their merry way with no sign of Labour Party concern.

This pretence takes the form of claiming

banks paying themselves “performance bonuses”.

No, it’s not crony capitalism and it’s not unique to Ireland. It’s the inevitable consequence of a system that gives the rich the power to run everything, and no surprise that they run it for their own benefit.

The labour movement is not the Labour Party; it is the organised force of workers in trade unions, residents’ and tenants’ associations, community groups and other organisations of working people for advancing their own specific interests

Sinn Féin has rightly identified the need for a different way, a way that places the biggest burdens on those most able to bear them, that puts incomes and opportunities on a more equal basis, and that challenges the whole rotten system.

But Sinn Féin cannot do it on its own.

If workers wait patiently on the sideline for someone else to change the system that change will never happen.

It must be fought for in the unions, the residents’ association and community groups.

And we must face down the dishonest criticism of the ultra-Left who denounce Sinn Féin in the North for not implementing socialist economic policies, when such policies can only be implemented when Britain no longer has the power to dominate our political and economic life in a system inherited from Westminster.

The key to that, of course, is to win the Protestant working class away from their illusions of labour aristocracy and show what the South can achieve when the real labour movement wakes up and fights.

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THIS BILL WILL SHINE A LIGHT ON THOSE CHARLATANS AND PARASITES WHO ARE EXPLOITING THE GOODWILL AND GENEROSITY OF IRISH PEOPLE Seán Crowe, Sinn Féin Dublin South-West TD

FG/Labour TDs vote down Sinn Féin move to clean up charity sector

BY MARK MOLONEY AT THE SAME TIME that Taoiseach Enda Kenny was telling everyone at the World Economic Forum in Davos that charities in Ireland “need to be seen to be on a very transparent, accountable footing”, his own Government TDs were voting down a Dáil Bill that would have done exactly that. The Fine Gael leader’s problem is that it was a Sinn Féin Bill and that’s why the Government was against it.

Enda Kenny was speaking following revelations of gold-plated pensions and huge wages paid to senior executives of the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC), many of which were paid from charitable donations to an orgnaisation that also receives taxpayers’ money through the Health Service Executive.

There have also been questions raised about the payment of senior executives at the Rehab charity lottery and the minuscule profits made by the group which is also supported through Government funding.

The Sinn Féin Charities (Amendment) Bill simply aimed to ensure the full implementation of the Charities Act of 2009 by the end of May. Moving the Bill, Sinn Féin Justice spokesperson Pádraig Mac Lochlainn explained that it would ensure greater accountability and protect against abuse of charitable status and fraud. It would increase transparency in the charity sector and public confidence in the charity sector overall.

“This Bill will shine a light on those charlatans and parasites who are exploiting the goodwill and generosity of Irish people,” he said.

Cork North-Central TD Jonathan O’Brien said he hoped the scandals and negative news stories would not stop people giving to charities.

“We cannot let the greed of the few inflict on the many people who need those charities,” he said.

Cork East TD Sandra McLellan echoed his concerns and said that unless something is done now then the revelations could have a long-term, damaging effect on the charity dector: “Years of good work is under threat of being undermined and discredited by the few at the top who are more interested in lining their own pockets than providing a service to those who need it most.”

Sligo/North Leitrim TD Michael Colreavy described the wages of senior CEOs at certain

OBSCENE SALARIES During the debate which took place over two days in January, Dublin South-West TD Seán Crowe said the charity sector must be regulated to bring transparency.

5 €740k in charitable donations to the CRC was used to pay the pension package of a former CEO

5 Rehab have yet to reveal CEO Angela Kerins’ salary

5 Minister Joe Costello u-turned on the issue

charities as “quite frankly, obscene”, adding that it is “questionable that the money given by generous, hard-pressed citizens to help improve the lives of people with disabilities should be diverted to slush funds for pensions most of us could only dream of”.

Speaking of the decision by the CRC to pay their former CEO €740,000 from charitable donations, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams TD noted: “A kid going in and robbing the Poor Box in the chapel would be in Mountjoy Prison.”

He also read out a letter from the mother of his friend, Donnacha Rynne from Clare, a severly disabled man who has been bed-bound for the last year waiting on a new wheelchair. He is told that due to lack of funds he will have to keep waiting.

“Families who have raised millions of euro over many years for these charities are shocked and angry by these revelations. What is clear is that there is a toxic culture of bonuses, top-ups and bail-outs; where there’s always money for the elites and none for the services charities were established to provide.”

overall aims of the Bill but claimed reservations about implementation, cost and the inclusion of groups who advance the cause of human rights.

Responding to the Government, Mary Lou McDonald said: “Minister of State Kathleen Lynch has told us that the Government cannot afford to implement the Charities Bill in full — Sinn Féin states it cannot afford not to do so.”

Sinn Féin Justice spokesperson Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, who moved the Bill, said that the Government had once again chosen to drag its feet on the issue. When asked why he believed Labour and Fine Gael opposed the straightforward, common sense measure, he told An Phoblacht: “The only conclusion I can come to is that they opposed it because this was a Sinn Féin Bill, which is just absolutely petty.”

He was also critical of what he said was the hypocritical stance taken by the Labour Party during the debate: “We sought to include the advancement of human rights as a charitable purpose so groups involved in human rights could be registered as a charity and avail of all the funding opportunities that comes with that. Interestingly, Joe Costello — now Minister for Trade and Development and who deals with human rights and overseas aid — previously spoke in favour of this inclusion back in 2009. But somehow the Labour Party voted against that last night.”

MINISTER COSTELLO’S ABOUT-FACE 5 Donnacha Rynne has been waiting on a wheelchair

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MARK MOLONEY talks to Sinn Féin’s Ireland South EU candidate LIADH NÍ RIADA, daughter of renowned composer Seán Ó Riada

We need to be leaders in Europe FROM A YOUNG AGE, Liadh Ní Riada was acutely aware of the anomaly of partition.

“When I was a child I could never get my head around what partition was. I couldn’t understand the concept of living in a country yet we were divided.”

She says the 1981 Long Kesh Hunger Strikes had a huge impact on her.

“I was babysitting for my elder sister when I was quite young and they had posters of Bobby Sands up. When the strikers died, our family wore black armbands. That had a huge impact on me, and just coming from a Gaeltacht region I was always very aware of who we are in terms of our cultural identity and as a nation.”

A native Irish speaker from Cúil Aodha in the Muskerry Gaeltacht, Cork, Liadh has spent much of her life working in the media as a TV film director and producer as well as with numerous cultural organisations.

In school she had a passion for music and moved to live with her aunt in Limerick at age 15 so that she could study music for her Leaving Certificate. Her interest came as little surprise to those who know her family — she is the youngest daughter of renowned composer Seán Ó Riada, who passed away when she was just four years old. Seán is considered the single most important figure in the revivial of traditional Irish music during the 1960s.

Although Liadh wanted to continue on in music at third level, she could not bring her-

self to leave Ireland to study abroad in Sussex, in England, to do the course she wanted.

“Instead I ended up, by accident really,” she smiles, “doing media work.”

It was something that would see her go on to train with RTÉ and Údarás na Gaeltachta.

“Much of my life before joining Sinn Féin was taken up making documentaries for RTÉ and TG4. I produced well over 35 programmes

‘I didn’t get involved to be a politician. I became involved because I’m an ordinary person living the same struggle as everybody else and I think the ordinary voice is seriously lacking’ which covered everything, all kinds of topics. I even directed a film called An Gobán Saor when I was 24, even though I had no experience in doing drama.” The film starred the late Eamon Kelly and she worked alongside famed cinematographer Seamus Deasy. “I had a crew of about two dozen people and we got European funding for it as well as backing of

Sinn Féin is the only party standing European Parliament candidates on an all-Ireland basis: Lynn Boylan (Dublin), Liadh Ní Riada (South), Martina Anderson MEP (Six Counties) and Matt Carthy (Midlands-North-West) the Irish Film Board. So it was quite an exciting move.”

She was later appointed to the Coiste Bunaithe by then Arts Minister (now President) Michael D. Higgins, something she says she was truly proud to be a part of. Their role was to set up the national Irish-language station TG4. She later went on to work as a director for RTÉ in Cork City when it was European Capital of Culture.

Following her marriage to Nicholas, and the birth of their three daughters, she began working as a freelancer with her own succesful media production company.

“I was still able to do my own freelance work while being at home with the kids as well. It was really important to me to be there with my daughters.”

Throughout all this time Liadh remained

very strongly involved in community activities and development, working with local voluntary and cultural groups in her native Cork, particularly in the area of securing funding and organising fundraising activities. Liadh later became the only person in Ireland selected to do a European diploma in Cultural Project Management. Her studies took her right across Europe.

A native Irish speaker from Cúil Aodha in the Muskerry Gaeltacht, Cork, Liadh has spent much of her life working in the media as a TV film director and producer In recent years Liadh took on the role as National Irish Language Officer with Sinn Féin.

“I thought it was a great opportunity in terms of implementing policy for the language on all-Ireland basis.”

Before taking up the role, Liadh said she was involved in politics “as much as the ordinary person on the ground was”.

“Politically, and from my own social con-

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5 Sinn Féin candidates Liadh Ní Riada, Matt Carthy and Lynn Boylan at the EU Parliament in Brussels

5 Liadh’s husband Nicky with their daughters Neans, Ailsa and Cáit

5 Liadh’s father Seán Ó Riada 5 Martina Anderson MEP, Martin Ferris TD and Liadh Ní Riada at the National Ploughing Championships science, Sinn Féin was the perfect fit.”

Her experience with so many state bodies is something that has stood to her in her political and campaigning role.

“The frustration and the bureaucracy in dealing with state agencies, state bodies and semi-state bodies was something that was making me very much aware of how systems work — or don’t work.

“At one point I was trying to access funding for a local singer. I had a huge debate (to put it mildly) with the Arts Council because they said he could only apply online. The man was computer illiterate. And even if he could use a computer it wouldn’t have mattered because there was no broadband in the area! It was discrimination.

“So there were lots of instances where the person on the street is facilitating these box tickers in offices when really they should be acting as support structures to facilitate people. It goes right across to anybody working in small businesses or enterprises who are being forced to jump through hoops to get the support they need, and even at that they’re not assured of it.”

Standing in the massive constituency of Ireland South (made up of the ten counties of Wicklow, Carlow, Wexford, Kilkenny,

Waterford, Tipperary, Clare, Limerick, Kerry and Liadh’s own native Cork), Liadh says rural regeneration is a key issue for her campaign.

“If facilities and jobs aren’t there in rural communities then people are having to emigrate. We have garda stations being closed and local schools under threat. What’s going to be left? Young people are leaving, and it’s not just single people; entire young families are going. It has a detrimental effect on everything from local GAA clubs to community development because people simply aren’t there.

“I’m not an experienced, polished politician,” admits Liadh. “I didn’t get involved to be a politician. I became involved because I’m an ordinary person living the same struggle as everybody else and I think the ordinary voice is seriously lacking. I just think a lot of Establishment politicians are greatly out of touch with what is happening on the ground.”

Liadh says it is still unfortunate that women are so under-represented in politics.

“There are so many women out there doing fantastic work that go unrecognised. I suppose I want to become a role model for my own girls, to show them that you can do anything you can put your mind to and that you can make a difference.”

She points to Joanne O’Riordan from Millstreet in County Cork, a young woman born with no limbs, the 2012 Young Person of the Year at the People of the Year Awards, as somebody she admires greatly.

“Despite all the difficulties she faces, Joanne

Liadh was appointed to the Coiste Bunaithe by then Arts Minister (now President) Michael D. Higgins to set up the national Irish-language station TG4 has shown that nothing is impossible. She’s really somebody who has never been afraid of anything, or let anything hold her back.”

Hitting out at some politicians, Liadh says that much of the political jargon used in Europe is designed so that ordinary people switch off on hearing it.

“It’s very inaccessible. They’ve so much terminology that lets them say one thing when

5 Liadh with her husband Nicky and daughter Cáit they mean the other. You hear them go on about ‘socio-economic deprivation’ when what they’re talking about is poverty — plain and simple. We need to speak in terms people understand: straight talking instead of getting bogged down in terminology and jargon.”

Speaking of Irish MEPs generally (with a few notable exceptions such as Martina Anderson), she says most MEPs have simply gone along with the consensus in the EU Parliament.

Recognising that it can be difficult for such a small nation to make an influence in Europe, Liadh says that she and other Sinn Féin candidates will do their utmost to represent those who elect them and oppose the continued right-wing austerity-driven agenda emanating from Brussels. But she also believes that our MEPs should not merely oppose such policies.

“We should be coming up with visions ourselves of what we think Europe should be like.

We need to be the leaders in creating policy.”

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PEADAR WHELAN argues that the DUP and UUP leaderships have been immobilised by the reactionary nature of the unionist ideology that frames their thinking

UNIONIST LEADERS FOLLOW THE ORANGE BRICK ROAD “WE’RE still in Ulster,” exclaimed a shocked Dorothy Robinson to Toto Nesbitt as they emerged from the Haass talks.

Behind them snaked the Orange Brick Road, stretching as far as the eye could see, as far back as 1690. Before them it

only stretched as far as the new challenges of 2014.

Aghast at the notion of showing leadership and making decisions, the pair eyed each other knowingly and set off – back through the flag protests, the Twelfth

riots, Camp Twaddell and the broken promises – on the road to the Boyne.

“No Surrender,” they sang to the tune of, well, ‘No Surrender’ as they shuffled to the back of the howling mobs to be led from behind and go to whence they came.

THIS is how I saw the end of the Haass/O’Sullivan Talks that were scuppered by the DUP and UUP. The talks had been billed as the way out of a year marked by the violence, threats and intimidation that bubbled up out of the chaos of the so-called flag protests. But the lastminute loss of nerve that saw first the Ulster Unionist Party drop the ball, then the DUP, meant that the efforts of Haass and O’Sullivan come to a halt.

For now it seems that unionism is content to parade back along their Orange Brick Road rather than meet the challenges of the days ahead.

The certainties of the past are more comforting than the possibilities of a better future.

As it became clear that the unionist parties were not willing to implement what has become known as ‘Haass 7’ (the seventh and final draft of his compromise paper), opinion makers and commentators from across the political, social and media spectrum concurred that DUP leader Peter Robinson and UUP leader Mike Nesbitt were never serious about the talks.

The suggestion that they were bounced into them reluctantly has a degree of merit in my mind.

Last year, 2013, started off badly for both unionist parties.

The violent reaction to the vote by Belfast City Council on 3 December to limit the flying of the Union flag was being squarely laid at the doors of the UUP and DUP in light of their decision to issue a leaflet that clearly inflamed the situation.

The leaflet’s focus on the Alliance Party (which had taken Peter Robinson’s DUP Westminster seat in east Belfast) led to scores of physical and verbal attacks on party offices and members.

5 The DUP’s Peter Robinson and the UUP’s Mike Nesbitt were never serious about the talks From December 2012 through to April (see An Phoblacht of April 2013), so-called flag protesters were responsible for scores of attacks on political opponents, nationalist homes or businesses, and the PSNI. The small nationalist Short Strand district of east Belfast was repeatedly attacked as illegal march after illegal march went past, with par-

ticipants urging respect for a flag directing their sectarian venom at people.

Unionist Forum Having let the genie of loyalist thuggery out of the bottle, the unionist leaders set up a

‘Unionist Forum’ on 10 January 2013, It established a ‘task force’ to consult the public on issues including flags and symbols, parading, unionist identity and educational underachievement in unionist areas.

By the end of March the initiative was floundering with much of the criticism coming from none other than the Reverend Mervyn Gibson, Grand Chaplain of the Orange Order.

Gibson (who would end up as part of the DUP delegation at the Haass/O’Sullivan Talks despite not being a member of the DUP) said the Orange Order would not be a “sticking plaster” for the project.

Needless to say, both Jim Allister (Traditional Unionist Voice) and Billy Hutchinson (Progressive Unionist Party) expressed their own reservations about the Forum.

Indeed in June Jim Allister jumped ship from the Unionist Forum after Peter Robinson and Sinn Féin joint First Minister Martin McGuinness announced that the Long Kesh site was to be developed and would include the building of a Conflict Resolution Centre.

Allister resigned, saying the “greatest issue of concern to the wider unionist community are the DUP/Sinn Féin plans to build a socalled ‘Peace Centre’” at Long Kesh.

The TUV leader added: “The 13 groups representing innocent victims who signed up to the Charter for Innocent Victims – FAIR, the UDR Regimental Association, the RUC GC Association, the RUC GC Widows’ Association and the biggest mass-member organisation in the unionist community, the Orange Order – have all urged the abandonment of the project.”

It was from this coalition that much of the unionist opposition to Haass emanated.

Just days before the US diplomat arrived in

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5 Sinn Féin Mayor of Belfast Máirtín Ó Muilleoir is attacked by loyalists at Woodvale Park

TUV leader Jim Allister

5 Drunken ‘fleggers’ attack PSNI lines on the Woodvale Road the North, the Orange Order was setting out its stall — dump the Parades Commission.

The nightly protests at Ardoyne in north Belfast, centred on the Orange Order’s selfstyled ‘civil rights camp’ (established after the Parades Commission placed restrictions on bands passing the Ardoyne shops on the Twelfth) is proof that Orangemen and their supporters still see Catholics and nationalists as second-class citizens to be walked on.

Then we had the ‘RUC and B-Specials old comrades’ organisation, the NI Retired Police Officers’ Association, who in their submission to Haass demanded there be “no form of moral equivalence between those who take life and those who attempted to save life” during the conflict.

If when preparing for the Haass negotiations the unionist parties were looking over their shoulders at Jim Allister and his ultraRight coalition of ‘moral high-grounders’ then there is no doubt that events on the ground completely unnerved Robinson and Nesbitt.

Cranking up tensions The events of 2013 saw the Orange Order and the UVF crank up tensions around marches.

What have become known colloquially as the ‘fleggers’ still made their presence felt and turned up to wave flags as Sinn Féin Culture, Arts & Leisure Minister Carál Ní Chuilín opened the North’s first Olympic standard pool in Bangor in March.

They erected flags at interfaces and thoroughfares near nationalist areas and daubed the kerbstones near the well-known Holy Cross Girls’ School at Ardoyne red, white and blue. On 26 April, a loyalist mob gathered at

5 ‘Fleggers’ riot on Royal Avenue

the school gates in a clear act of sectarian intimidation.

St Mary’s Star of the Sea Church and St Enda’s GAA Club on the outskirts of Belfast were targeted with hoax bombs. Both have suffered badly at the hands of loyalists over the years. (St Mary’s would also be paint bombed in September and October.)

St Patrick’s Church near Belfast City Centre became a high-profile battleground for Orangemen as they demanded their unfettered right to march where and how they see fit.

On 4 May, a Catholic teenager from west Belfast, her Protestant friend, and her sister, were lucky to be alive after a gang assault in a Rangers FC supporters’ club in the loyalist Donegall Road. Leading members of the UVF were involved in the incident.

On 7 June, a hoax bomb was left at a family home in north Belfast. UVF graffiti was also daubed on the door and windows of the house.

A 4-year-old girl and her friend suffered minor burns and were lucky to escape serious injury after loyalists lobbed a petrol bomb across the Short Strand peace wall at Bryson Street on 18 June. This was just one of a series of petrol bombings in the area.

Tension rocketed in the lead-up to the Twelfth as a result of the Parades Commission’s curb on north Belfast Orangemen passing Ardoyne on their return journey after passing it earlier.

As the PSNI blocked the parade on the Woodvale Road on Friday the Twelfth, serious rioting broke out.

March supporters who were clearly drunk, Orangemen in collarettes and uniformed bandsmen were involved in frenzied attacks on PSNI lines.

Martin McGuinness called the Orange Order “a disgrace”, saying “responsibility rests

with the leadership of the Orange Order”.

In related incidents, loyalists rioted throughout Belfast; in Portadown and Derry, loyalists took to the streets.

The venomous sectarian nature of loyalism was exposed in all its bitterness at the beginning of August.

On 6 August, a baying mob swamped Sinn Féin Mayor of Belfast Máirtín Ó Muilleoir and a PSNI escort at a family fun day during the reopening of Woodvale Park. Ó Muilleoir suffered cuts and bruises in an attack which many believe could have ended in serious injury to the mayor or the PSNI. On 10 August, Belfast City Centre became a battleground as, in the words of Martin McGuinness, the “combined forces” of the UVF and Orange Order rioted against the PSNI. The violence erupted as loyalists tried to prevent an ‘Anti-Internment League’ march passing through Royal Avenue.

Rioters also attacked the Short Strand and Carrick Hill.

In September, the loyalist paramilitary Red Hand Defenders told schoolchildren from three Catholic schools (including Holy Cross, in north Belfast) they were “legitimate targets”.

The RHD was a cover name used in the past by loyalist groups to claim attacks.

UVF members got the guns out on Wednesday 25 September and shot 24-yearold Jemma McGrath five times in the abdomen, legs and arm, reportedly over a personal fall-out with a senior UVF figure in east Belfast.

The shooting was a clear indication that the UVF is in the driving seat in east Belfast and the re-emergence of militaristic UVF murals reinforced that point.

Caught in a pincer of the moral and violent wings of unionism, Peter Robinson and Mike Nesbitt got themselves stuck on the Orange Brick Road. Where will they go now?

PUP leader Billy Hutchinson

The Orange Order’s Reverend Mervyn Gibson

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EOIN Ó MURCHÚ

Ní leór dúinn geallúint bhréagach a thuilleadh NÍL AON AIMHREAS ach sé fás na ngaelscoileanna ar fud na tíre an scéal is suntasaigh maidir le beatha na Gaeilge.

In ainneoin neamhshuim (ó dheas) is námhadas (ó thuaidh) na stát tá sé léirithe ag na mílte saoránaigh go dteastaíonn uatha an teanga a choinneáil beo is a thabhairt don ghlúin atá ag teacht.

5 Cluain Dolcáin na Gaeilge, ach ní féidir gaelscolaíocht a chinntiú

Ach níl aon spéis ag an Aire Oideachais, Ruairí Quinn, i scéal na gaelscolaíochta; agus, do deimhin, bíonn a chomhleacaí Dála, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin – gaeilgeoir díograiseach é féin – go nimhneach i gcoinne na gaelscolaíochta.

Tá an cruthúnas ann, mar sin fhéin, go dtagann páistí amach as na gaelscoileanna le togha na Gaeilge acu; ach gur ar éigean a fhoghlaimíonn aon pháiste Gaeilge ar bith sna bunscoileanna Bhéarla.

Is leir freisin go bhfuil éileamh mór ar an ngaelscolaíocht. I gCluain Dolcáin, i mBaile Átha Cliath, mar shampla, tá dhá ghaelscoil ann, ach fós cuirtear líon trí ranga ó dhoras toisc nach bhfuil spás nó múinteóirí ann dóibh. Agus seo díreach na daoine a dhein iarratais oifigiúla ar ghaelscolaíochta, mar meastar go bhfuil a dhá oiread eile – sin líon cuig rang déag ar fad – ann a mbeadh spéis acu sa ngaelscolaíocht dá mbeadh fáil acu air.

Ach ní dhéanann an Roinn Oideachais iarracht ar bith freastal ar an éileamh seo i gcomparáid leis an tacaíocht gan limistear a thugtar don oideachas Educate Together.

Is aindiagach mise, agus ní maith liom go mbeadh guth ar bith ag an eaglais i gcúrsaí oideachais, ach tá ceist na Gaeilge níos bunúsaigh is níos tábhachtaí ná oideachas cómhchreidmheach nó neamhchreidmheach.

Ag deire thiar, mura n-aontaíonn tú le creideamh ná téigh ag seipéal nó eaglais nó mosc nó eile.

I gcás Chluain Dolcáin gheall an Roinn go dtógfaí scoil nua ar shuíomh atá ar fáil in aisce don Roinn sa gcaoi go mbeadh cheithre rang in aghaidh na bliana ann.

Ach sin geallúint eile nach bhfuil se ar intinn na Roinne a chómhlíonadh, is níl tasc nó tuairisc den scoil nua go fóill.

Ní scéal Chluain Dolcáin amháin é, ar ndóigh. Tá an scéal céanna ann ar fud na tíre, ach tá Cluain Dolcáin roghnaithe ag an rialtas mar cheantar bádhúil don Ghaeilge (nó Gaeltacht cathrach mar a thugtar air go minic).

Ní fiú an roghnú seo ar ndóigh mura feidir le gluaiseacht na Gaeilge a chinntiú go ndéanfaí beart de réir bhriathar na Roinne is na bpolaiteóirí.

Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe in Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee delegation meeting Iranian Government in Tehran

Syria and refugees raised with Iran TRADE was the main issue when an Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee delegation met senior ministers in the Iranian Government in Tehran in January but Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe used the opportunity to also discuss the war in Syria.

The three-year-old conflict has left over 100,000 people dead and millions displaced. Iran has close ties with the Syrian Government and pro-Iran Hezbollah militants are fighting alongside the Syrian Army against anti-government rebels and jihadists.

Seán personally spoke with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zari about the plight of Palestinian refugees trapped by fighting within Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus. Seán told An Phoblacht: “As rebel forces refuse to leave the camp it has been besieged by the Syrian Army and this is creating a severe humanitarian crisis. People in the camp have extremely limited

BY MARK MOLONEY access to food, medicines, and other vital supplies. Aid cannot reach the camp and people are dying of hunger.”

The Iranian Foreign Minister told the Irish delegation he is working with the Syrian Government, and the governments of Turkey and Jordan, to try and secure a humanitarian corridor to allow urgent humanitarian aid to reach the camp.

GENEVA II PEACE TALKS As well as being critical of the decision by the UN-mediated peace talks in Switzerland dubbed ‘Geneva II’ to exclude Iran, Seán Crowe also said it was unfair to lump the Kurdish representatives in with the “all-encompassing” opposition. “The

Kurds deserve their standalone representation at all negotiations,” he says.

There are serious concerns as to what exactly Geneva II can achieve.

With over 100,000 opposition fighters splintered into 1,000 different groups there are questions as to just how much influence the antiGovernment Syrian National Coalition and its rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) has on the ground. The FSA has been eclipsed by much larger and better-equipped Al Qaeda-linked forces.

Seán Crowe says he hopes one thing to come out of the talks will be the creation of humanitarian corridors to get aid to those most in need.

“I don’t think anybody believes that these peace talks will solve the conflict or that the conflict can be solved overnight. That said, opposing sides coming together to talk is definitely a welcome and positive step that can be built upon.”

5 Seán Crowe TD meets the Chairperson of the Parliament of Iran, Ali Larijani

5 Palestinian refugees have been trapped for months in Yarmouk refugee camp

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Threats from Spanish Establishment as Barcelona defies Madrid

CHOOSING FREEDOM CATALONIA’S INDEPENDENCE VOTE

BY MARK MOLONEY SCOTLAND will not be the only European country voting on whether or not to become a fully-fledged nation this year. The people of Catalonia, currently an autonomous region in northern Spain, will get to vote on independence after the regional parliament defied the Spanish Government to call for an independence vote for 9 November.

Announcing the decision last December, Catalan President Artur Mas called on the Spanish Government to allow a fair and democratic referendum on freedom for Catalonia.

In January, he added: “Catalans have won their right to decide their future because they have been able to keep their identity, their culture, their language and their rights despite the existence of unfair laws and norms.

“I ask the Spanish state to let us vote, to listen to the voice of the Catalan people.”

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy immediately dismissed the move, saying it

Spanish Army Colonel Francisco Alamán told reporters that Catalonia would only be independent ‘over my dead body and that of many other soldiers’ was illegal as the Constitution of Spain forbids any break-up of the state.

“I guarantee that this referendum will not happen,” the Spanish premier said, adding that there was “nothing to negotiate”. His governing right-wing People’s Party had earlier pledged to use “every means necessary” to stop the vote.

The spectre of fascist dictator Franco has been resurrected over Catalonia following threats from the politically outspoken Spanish Military Association (AME), composed of former soldiers, to court martial the Catalan President and anybody else promoting the break-up of the Spanish state.

Spanish Army Colonel Francisco Alamán had previously told reporters that Catalonia would only be independent “over my dead body and that of many other soldiers”.

A Twitter account run by Spain’s notorious Guardia Civil paramilitary police force warned of troops and tanks on the streets of Barcelona.

Ariadna Jou, International Secretary of the Young Republican Left of Catalonia (JERC), at the forefront of the pro-independence campaign over the last few years, told An Phoblacht: “The people of Catalonia are sick and really

5 Sinn Féin’s Seán Crowe TD celebrates Catalonia’s National Day with the Catalan community in Dublin tired of the Spanish Government’s behaviour.

People are every day more convinced that the only solution is independence.”

Interventions by the Spanish military and state forces to physically prevent the vote taking place would be “a very stupid move”, Ariadna says.

“An aggressive response from the Spanish Government will be bad for themselves and their international image. They will be seen to be banning the right to self-determination. I hope that international pressure will prevent them from doing that.”

The pro-independence campaign will

focus strongly on economic, cultural and linguistic arguments in its push for a double ‘Yes’ vote. Catalonia is one of the most powerful economic regions in Spain and much of the population feel they are subsidising Madrid through their taxes and not receiving a fair return. There is a widespread belief that the country would be in a far better economic state by breaking away from Spain. The issue of language rights for Catalan speakers will also play a large part in the debate as many feel the only way to safeguard its future is through complete independence.

Anti-independence parties and campaign-

Catalan vote on independence, 9 November 2014

THE QUESTIONS: Do you want Catalonia to be a state?

Do you want that state to be independent?

5 JERC International Secretary Ariadna Jou ers are expected to use similar scare tactics to those being employed against the Scottish independence campaign by implying that Catalonia would be left outside the European Union, or that Spain would move to block membership.

Recent claims by the campaign that 500 US companies based in Catalonia had plans to “flee” were dismissed by the US Ambassador to Spain as baseless and untrue.

Opinion polls show the pro-independence side with a slight lead. The decision to have

Claims by the antiindependence campaign that 500 US companies based in Catalonia had plans to ‘flee’ were dismissed by the US Ambassador to Spain as baseless and untrue two parts to the question is seen as a concession to middle-of-the-road nationalists who are in favour of a federal solution with maximum devolution from Spain but not total independence.

Ariadna says supporters of Catalan independence are also expecting to have to fight a campaign against the pro-Spanish parties who will try to dissuade voters from going to polling stations. “There is definitely a social majority in favour of independence. With the date set we have enough time to convince those who are still on the fence and to make sure people get out and vote. We will keep working right up to the referendum to make sure we get a ‘Yes, Yes’ vote and gain our independence.”

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Facing down the apartheid regime She arrived at school to find that the police and the army had occupied it.

‘We immediately began singing freedom songs. They gave us three minutes to disperse; we refused and they opened fire. I still remember the screams, the noise of gunfire, and smell of tear gas.’ remember the screams, the noise of gunfire, and smell of tear gas.

“I ran for safety, finally running into a nearby house. The woman of the house told me to quickly take off my school uniform and she gave me her own daughter’s clothes. Soldiers burst into the house and roared: “Where is that kaffir?”

The woman replied: “This is my daughter. I did not send her to school today because of what was happening.” I was so grateful.

“Later, as I was making my way home, I witnessed a young boy lying dead and others been

From ANC activist in Cape Town to nurse in Lisnaskea, County Fermanagh – CAROL DENISE JORDAAN talks to LEANNE MAGUIRE CAPE TOWN, the travel book Rough Guides says, “is Southern Africa’s most beautiful, most romantic and most visited city. Its physical setting is extraordinary.”

Carol Denise Jordaan didn’t get to ‘visit’ her own city centre until she was in her late teens because she was ‘the wrong colour’ in apartheid South Africa – she wasn’t white.

Carol was born on the outskirts of Cape Town in a very poor shanty town area. Carol’s father died when she was six years old, leaving her mother to raise a family of ten children. To survive, her mother worked as a domestic servant for a white family in a rich area. These are Carol’s earliest memories – that they were second-class citizens, a servant class.

The white supremacist South African Government had a policy of total separation of the races, what become widely known as apartheid. Black people not only lived in separate areas but had to sit only in certain seats on buses and trains, use separate waiting areas at stations, different toilets, shops, schools and even park benches.

Carol’s mother used to bring her children to the stunning Cape Town beaches on Sundays in the summer, having to pass miles of beautiful beaches with prominent signs declaring “Whites Only” before arriving at the designated

‘I gave medical assistance to wounded MK soldiers who could not attend hospital because they would be arrested’ 5 Carol's mother Nellie worked as a domestic servant for a white family “Non-Whites” beach. The law stated that breaching any of these rules would result in prosecution and imprisonment. It was strictly enforced.

At the age of 18, Carol and some comrades established a youth movement in their district “I’d never seen the centre of my city, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, until my late teens,” Carol tells me with a sadness that is

still obviously with her. “It was a no-go area for my colour unless you had a special permit to work there.”

In the late 1990s, the apartheid government brought in a second-rate education system for ‘coloured’ children. Youths began protesting and rioting in Johannesburg. Demonstrations later spread to Carol’s own district of Cape Town, where the organising of youth rallies had already begun. One day she arrived at school to find that the police and the army had occupied it.

“We immediately began singing freedom songs – singing and dancing is a form of protest in our country. They gave us three minutes to disperse; we refused and they opened fire. I still

taken away in ambulances. It must be remembered that over 1,000 children and teenagers were killed across South Africa as they protested against the new education system.”

At the age of 18, Carol and some comrades established a youth movement in their district.

Carol became the local movement’s first secretary and at the same time she and her sister joined the African National Congress. Some joined the military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’, also known as ‘MK’).

Carol’s sister later went to train with MK while Carol neared the end of her studies in nursing and to support their mother.

“Those of us who stayed were to continue to keep the struggle alive through protests, mobilisations and low-level sabotage.

“I remember we used to commandeer food lorries and distribute the food to the poor of the

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February / Feabhra 2014 23

5 Segregated beaches in Durban in 1989

5 Carol Jordaan with Gerry Kelly MLA and her partner Seán Lynch MLA at a Friends of Sinn Féin event in London

5 1994 saw the first free and democratic elections area. My only role in the military campaign later was to give medical assistance to wounded MK soldiers who could not attend hospital because they would be arrested. Later this involved visiting makeshift hospitals as the struggle intensified.”

Police soon became aware of their activities and one morning the door of Carol’s family home was kicked in with the shout of “Where are those two bastards?”

Carol recalls how they brushed past her mother and burst into her bedroom, “ripping the blankets from me”.

“My mother pleaded with them that I was only a student. They left after telling my mother that two of her daughters were up to their necks in subversive activity.

“That same morning I told my mother the truth. Although concerned, she stood by us to

the end. This was the same day I was beginning a new placement in one of the big city hospitals. Apartheid had also invaded hospitals. I had to enter via a ‘Coloured Entrance’ and there were white wards for white patients and vice versa.

“On one particular occasion I was bringing blood samples to the laboratory. The lift stopped at a floor, the doors opened and a white nurse was waiting. She wouldn’t get in the lift because I was there. I stood my ground. I thought to myself: I’m now a proud member of the ANC – there are things that I will not do; vacating a lift for someone else, regardless of their colour, was one of them.”

Nelson Mandela was one of the big influences for many people she recalls, as we talk in the week after Madiba’s funeral.

“His very name was enough to inspire people to struggle and one could say he was a guiding light. I remember the day he was released. I was

‘I had three choices: Dubai, London or . . . Lisnaskea!’ heavily pregnant with my first child but I made my way with thousands of others to the centre of Cape Town to await his arrival that night.

Although he did arrive three hours late, his address to the people of South Africa and particularly the ANC still lives with me. He thanked us for continuing the struggle while he was in prison. I was so proud. That day I knew that freedom was on our doorstep.

“The more obvious aspects of apartheid col-

lapsed overnight. We could walk and go where we liked.”

Other people who had a significant influence included Winnie Mandela.

“She was seen as ‘The Mother of the Nation’ when Nelson was in prison. She particularly inspired women to struggle. There were very few white people involved in the struggle in our district as only coloured people lived there. I did meet ‘white liberals’, as they were known, afterwards. I once attended a rally addressed by Joe Slovo, or ‘Red Socks’ as he was known because he was a leading communist,” Carol chuckles.

“He was one of the leadership and admired by us for his sacrifice.”

At the age of 25, in April 1994, Carol witnessed another remarkable day that stays with her – South Africa’s first democratic elections. Carol and her mother, now in her 60s, attended the polling station with great pride. Carol remembers: “There were tears in my mother’s eyes as she cast her vote. She whispered to me on the way out of the polling station: ‘I am proud of you both!’”

Carol’s activism in the ANC continued for many years and in 2004 she became the area campaign manager for Thabo Mbeki, who followed Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. Soon afterwards, Carol left South Africa to experience nursing in other parts of the world.

“I had three choices: Dubai, London or . . .

Lisnaskea! I arrived in Lisnaskea in July 2004 and I could not believe the British flag was hanging from every lamp-post. The following week they were replaced by green and white

5 Carol’s sister trained with Umkhonto we Sizwe flags. I quickly learned that this part of Ireland was disputed and that the Fermanagh GAA team had reached the latter stages of the AllIreland finals.

“It was only a number of years later that I learnt of the similar experiences and histories of

‘I read Alex Maskey’s book, ‘Man and Mayor’, about being the first Sinn Féin Mayor of Belfast, and I realised that the nationalist people here were treated as second-class citizens also our countries. I read Alex Maskey’s book, Man and Mayor, about being the first Sinn Féin Mayor of Belfast, and I realised that the nationalist people were treated as second-class citizens also.

“I could not believe the close relationship between the leaderships of both of our struggles. Republicans could talk in depth on the African struggle and its leaders. I know Madiba supported the Irish Peace Process. When he died I must admit tears came to my eyes. It was an end of an era for me and my country. We would not have had a peaceful transition in South Africa but for Madiba. He set us free from apartheid. I hung the flag from the house for a week after his passing and I am and will always remain a proud South African.”

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Le Trevor

Ó Clochartaigh

Níor chaill bean an mhisnigh ariamh é!

Cás Margaretta D’Arcy agus mí-úsáíd aerfort na Sionna

fad aige. Cloigeann sa ngaineamh atá anois ag an Tánaiste maidir le sáraithe cearta daonna ar thalamh na hÉireann. Sin an rud atá Margaretta ag iarraidh athrú.

Nuair a d’ardaigh mé seo leis an rialtas sa Seanad le déanaí, is é an freagra céanna a bhíodh Fianna Fáil ag tabhairt nuair a bhíodar i rialtas is atá ag an Lucht Oibre ag úsáid anois — nach bhfuil aon fhianaise ann, go bhfuil barántas ag an rialtas ón leibhéal is airde ó na Poncánaigh nach bhfuil tada mícheart ag tarlú agus gur cheart muinín a chur iontu.

Cinnte níl aon fhianaise ann, mar níl éinne ag dul ar bord na h-eitleáin le fianaise a lorg.

TÁ ARDMHOLADH tuillte ag Margaretta D’Arcy as an seasamh láidir atá tógtha aici in aghaidh eitleáin chogaidh atá ag tuirlingt ag aerfort na Sionna. Cuireadh treímhse trí mhí príosúntachta ar Mhargaretta mar gur dhiúltaigh sí banna ‘deá-iompar’ a shíniú le go stopfadh sí ag agóidaíocht ag an aerfort, rud nach raibh sí sásta a dhéanamh.

Chur sé alltacht ar a lucht tacaíochta gur chaith an córas dlí agus cirt an oiread acmhainní le bean seachtó naoi bliana d’aois, nach bhfuil an sláínte go maith aici, a chur i ngéibheann mar go bhfuil sí ag iarraidh deireadh a chur ar an sáru atá an stat seo ag déanamh ar chearta daonna. Bhí sé thar a bheith suntasach gur thug beanchéile an Uachtarán, Sabina Higgins cuairt uirthi i bpríosún — rud a lírigh a tacaíocht siúd — agus I mo thuairim sa tacaíocht Mícheál D Ó hUiginn dá seanchara.

Ach, bheadh sé micheart díriú ar ghábháil agus daoradh Margaretta seachas breathnú ar na cúiseanna a bhfuil sí ag agóidaíocht ar a son le fada.

Tá comóradh dhá dhéanamh i mbliana ar an gcéad chogadh domhanda a tharla cead bliain ó shoin. Ach, is cothrom na bliana seo i mí Dheireadh Fómhair céad bliain ó shoin freisin gur chomhbhunaigh James Connolly Léag Neodrachta na hÉireann. Ó 2003 tá rialtais éagsúla i ndiaidh brú a chur ar an stát seo, gan cead na Dála ná saoránaithe na tíre, tacú leh-ionradh mídhleathach ar an Iaráic, bunaithe ar fhianaise bhréagach. I 2003, amháin tugadh cead do 3500 eitleán mhíleata dul tríd aerspás na hÉireann agus sheas ós cionn 125,000 saighdiúr ó na Stáit Aontaithe in aerfort na Sionna ar an mbealach le dul i mbun cogaíochta. Meastar go ndeachaigh thart ar 2.2milliúin saighdiúr tríd an aerfort céanna idir 2002 agus 2011.

Nuair a bhí an Tánaiste sa bhfreasúra lábhródh sé go paiseanta maidir le mí-úsáíd aerfort na Sionainne agus an easpa iniúchadh a bhí dha dhéanamh ar eitleáín a bhí dul tríd agus go raibh imni mhór air go raibh ‘géilleadh úrghnách’ (‘special rendition’) ar siúl.

‘Not knowing is not good enough’ a bhíodh sé ag rá agus é ag impi ar na h-údaráis dul ar bhord na h-eitleáin ar raibh amhras futhú le deimhniú nach amhlaidh a bhí. Anois, is eisean atá freagrach, mar Aire Gnóthaí Eachtracha, as eitleáin eachtracha ag teacht tríd an aerfort sin agus tá a phort athraithe ar

5 Gearradh príosún trí mhí ar Margaretta D’Arcy

5 Agóid lasmuigh de Theach Laighean ar son Margaretta D’Arcy

Cloigeann sa ngaineamh atá anois ag an Tánaiste maidir le saraithe cearta daonna ar thalamh na hÉireann. Sin an rud atá Margaretta ag iarraidh athrú Níl aon chead ag sibhialaigh dul isteach san aerfort lena leithéad a bhailliú ach an oiread – sin ann fáth go bhfuil Margaretta gafa. Tá dalladh fianaise bailithe ag Shannonwatch agus imní mhór leirithe ag Comhairle na hEorpa agus Amnesty International ach níl aon fhiosrúchán ceart déanta ag an rialtas. Is léir ó sceitheadh Wikileaks go raibh barúil mhaith eg Dermot Ahern nach raibh gach rud mar is ceart agus sa Bhreatain thug Ed Miliband le fios i Westminster le fios nár insíodh an fhírinne ar fad dóibh siúd maidir le h-ábhar den chineál ceanna ansiúd thall.

Ach, tá Eamon Gilmore agus an rialtas sásta breathnú an treo eile anois freisin agus ligean don chóras dlí mná cróga atá ag seasamh ar son cearta daonna idirnáisiúnta a chur i bpríosún as an fhírinne a inseacht. Nach iontach an tír beag í seo.

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Homeless numbers an indictment of governments’ inaction

www.anphoblacht.com

THE RIGHT to adequate housing is fundamental and an obligation on government to ensure there is sufficient housing to meet the needs of its citizens.

The right of access to housing and to housing assistance is recognised in Article 34 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Articles 30 and 31 of the revised European Social Charter adopted by the Council of Europe, and Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights.

Yet this recognition of the right of access to housing in EU charters and articles, while welcome, are meaningless when austerity monetary policy in member states, designed by unelected bureaucrats in Europe and imposed by the Troika exacerbates the social and economic crisis being experienced by countries with more fragile economies, creating endemic population displacement and homelessness.

The economic and financial crisis and implementation of austerity measures, rising unemployment, continued high rents and mortgage repayments are leading to an increase in repossessions and homelessness. The social and family profiles of people needing social housing have changed dramatically with increased demand for such housing.

As part of the eradicating homelessness strategy, governments should carry out a full audit of existing vacant properties and, where possible, utilising or adapting these buildings to ensure availability of housing for all homeless people.

There should be an immediate moratorium

This is funded by the European United Left/ Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL)

Aontas Clé na hEorpa/Na Glasaigh Chlé Nordacha Crúpa Paliminta – Parlaimimt na h Eorpa

on home evictions of people who find themselves prisoners of circumstances created by the collapse of the economy for which they bear no responsibility. Financial institutions (who are responsible for many of the economic difficulties that citizens now find themselves in) should not be allowed to repossess family homes, dispose of them at fire sale price and

Another Europe is possible

The economic and financial crisis and implementation of austerity measures, rising unemployment, continued high rents and mortgage repayments are leading to an increase in repossessions and homelessness

5 Martina helps with the distribution of items collected through her Christmas Homeless Appeal

then continue to pursue the householder for the difference in the outstanding mortgage.

Governments have squandered billions of taxpayers’ money bailing out banks and paying off international bond-holders and speculators.

Surely it is not beyond their collective imaginations to identify measures to find the comparatively lesser amount of finance that would be required to resolve the problems of mortgage distress and stem the increase in homelessness as a first step to eradicating it.

I will continue to lobby support for action on homelessness both at home and at European level.

400 at Bantry meeting vow to fight Single Farm Payment cuts CUTS to Single Farm Payments are another attack on farmers and come as a blow to those who are already marginalised because of the disadvantaged land that makes up many of the holdings in west Cork, a packed meeting in Bantry heard in mid-January.

The SFP cuts, after a year which saw a fodder crisis due to the wet weather and recent storm damage and flooding, are causing severe stress to many farmers in the region and all along the western seaboard.

The meeting, attended by over 400 people, was chaired by Councillor Donnchadha Ó Seadha and addressed by Martin Ferris, Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

Martin Ferris spoke about the unequal

February / Feabhra 2014 25

BY CATHY POWER nature of SFPs, where a small number of big farmers get millions compared to the meagre payments made to small farmers, farmers who need support much more. Many of those on payments as low as Ř4,000 to Ř5,000 per year are farming in disadvantaged areas and living in rural communities suffering the effects of the Fine Gael/Labour Government’s austerity policies.

A number of others spoke from the floor, including young farmers, members of West Cork IFA, and regional Sinn Féin EU candidate

Liadh NÍ Riada, who gave her backing to the efforts of those seeking to reverse the cuts.

Various speakers expressed their disgust that not one of the three Government TDs who are supposed to represent the area bothered to turn up or send anyone to represent them.

The meeting decided to protest by collecting signatures on a petition against the cuts and to visit the clinics of Government TDs to express opposition.

Dermot Kelleher of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association, Seamus Sherlock of the ICMSA and the Life After Debt group, Donie Shine of the Farm Family Rights Association, and Bantry-based Senator Denis O’Donovan were also at the meeting.

Martina Anderson MEP is a member of the GUE/NGL Group in the European Parliament

RURAL AFFAIRS ARD FHEIS FRINGE MEETING Sinn Féin’s Rural Affairs Group in Leinster House will host a fringe meeting, ‘Challenges Facing Rural Coastal Communities’, at the Ard Fheis in Wexford.

The group is headed by Martin Ferris TD (Agriculture, Food and Marine), Micheal Colreavy (Energy and Natural Resources), and Brian Stanley (Environment).

It will be addressed by a representative of the United Farmers’ Association and the South and East Fish Producers.

Ard Fheis Saturday at 1pm.

Venue: Crean Room

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London inquest finds that police shooting of unarmed man was ‘lawful’

Tottenham verdict’s echoes in Ireland THE MET’S ‘LAWFUL’ KILLING OF DIARMUID O’NEILL THE Mark Duggan case has similarities with the case of IRA Volunteer Diarmuid O’Neill in London in 1996, similarities that the British media have missed or chosen to ignore.

Diarmuid was an unarmed IRA Volunteer shot dead by the Metropolitan Police at a London flat while attempting to surrender.

He was under intense surveillance and could have been arrested at any time prior to the raid on his home. Not only was Diarmuid unarmed, neither he nor those with him offered any resistance to the police.

As Diarmuid opened the door to his flat in response to a police command, one officer urged his colleagues to open fire.

Diarmuid was shot six times. The autopsy report said there was the imprint of a shoe on the side of his face where a police officer had stood on him as he lay dying.

The police refused him medical help, dragged him down several flights of stairs and then deliberately lied to the press, claiming there had been a shoot-out.

The jury at the inquest in February 2000 returned a verdict of lawful killing.

After the verdict, the O’Neill family issued a statement, saying: “Our son was shot in the middle of the night when he had been woken from a deep sleep. He was in his underpants. He was unarmed. An MI5 recording tape was running at the time in the room he was in.

We can hear on the tape police officers shouting orders and we can hear Diarmuid obeying those orders. He was told to open the door, which he did, and he was shot as soon as he obeyed . . .

“We are very conscious that nothing can bring our son back to life. But all of this could happen again. Our son is not the only unarmed person who has been shot by armed officers in recent years in London.

“Now that this inquest has finished and has uncovered decisions and actions that the police clearly are content to repeat, we suggest that a different form of public inquiry be held which can investigate all recent fatal shootings by armed police in order to ensure that lessons are learned, whether or not the police voluntarily agree.”

BY PEADAR WHELAN THE CONTROVERSIAL INQUEST finding in London in January that the Metropolitan Police were acting lawfully when they shot dead an unarmed Mark Duggan, the 29-year-old father of six whose killing led to the London riots of August 2011 brought to mind inquests into the deaths of Irish republicans at the hands of the police.

The inquest verdict handed down in the Duggan case will be instantly recognisable to Northern nationalists. What they won’t have recognised is the almost wall-to-wall coverage of the verdict in the British media and across the so-called liberal spectrum of British politics in the wake of the verdict.

Inquests in the North, particularly those relating to people killed by state forces, have been shrouded in controversy for years. It can be argued that inquests have been used by the state to deny justice to the families of victims of state violence.

In the 1985 report, Shoot to Kill? The findings of the International Lawyers’ Inquiry into the Lethal Use of Firearms by the Security Forces in Northern Ireland, they say in respect of inquests that they are “convinced that

5 Mark Duggan (below) and (above) a video still showing the scene of the shooting taken by an eyewitness The lawyers’ report goes on to highlight the importance of inquests as “the only place to find out the truth behind a killing” because “less than 8% of those killings of unarmed

The legal system in the North of Ireland was moulded to suit the political and military requirements of Britain’s counter-insurgency war

Inquests in the North, particularly those relating to people killed by state forces, have been shrouded in controversy for years where civilians are shot dead by members of the security forces on duty, the Northern Ireland coroners’ courts lack the capacity to carry out fully independent and impartial inquiries into the causes of death”.

Damningly, the report adds: “We find that inquests are delayed unreasonably, sometimes for explicitly political reasons; material witnesses are not summoned to attend and give evidence and unreliable scientific evidence has been accepted.

“We note that the law regulating coroners’ courts in Northern Ireland has been changed to deprive juries of the power to return verdicts.”

civilians by members of the security forces in disputed circumstances have resulted in criminal charges”.

This 8% only represents charges brought and does not indicate how many convictions were secured.

The reality then for families of people killed by the state is that, with little hope of a trial or a judicial process they can have faith in, they have turned to the coroner’s court.

5 Wall-to-wall coverage in the British media on the inquest verdict which found the unarmed 29-year-old father had been ‘lawfully’ killed by police

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5 Unarmed IRA Volunteer Pearse Jordan (22) was gunned down by the RUC on the Falls Road in Belfast

Tickets available from: Brian Dowling, 58 Parnell Square, Dublin 1 Telephone: (00 353) 87 230 1882 Email: briandowling@sinnfein.ie

This avenue was used by families in the aftermath of the 2001 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which found in the case of IRA Volunteer Pearse Jordan, shot dead by the RUC in 1992, that his Article 2 ‘Right to Life’ was violated by Britain’s refusal to hold a proper investigation into his death.

An inquest was eventually held but, in October 2012, the jury (which was, according to the Jordan’s legal team, “hopelessly divided”) failed to reach agreement on key aspects of the case.

The Jordan family is challenging the findings of that inquest.

The legal system in the North was moulded to suit the political and military requirements of Britain’s counter-insurgency war.

And as the lawyers’ inquiry concluded “the coroners’ rules in Northern Ireland have been designed to protect the security forces”.

The lawyers’ inquiry concluded ‘the coroners’ rules in Northern Ireland have been designed to protect the security forces’ As with the many cases of ‘Shoot to Kill’ involving Irish republicans and that of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, state forces have, again and again, got away with murder.

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www.anphoblacht.com

BOOK REVIEWS BY MICHAEL MANNION

Bombing Victorian Britain and revolution in Connacht War in the Shadows: The Irish-American Fenians who bombed Victorian Britain Irish Academic Press

By Dr Shane Kenna WHEN one thinks of the Fenians, one automatically thinks of 1867 and the uprising that took place in the aftermath of post-Famine devastation.

Fewer people will remember the Fenian bombing campaign in Britain but, if it is recalled, it too will tend to be grouped together with the 1867 campaign. There may even be a recognition that Irish-Americans had something to do with the Fenians but it’s all probably a bit vague.

A reading of Dr Shane Kenna’s mas-

terly book will change all that.

It explains in clear terms the different phases, splits, campaigns and betrayals of the Fenian movement after the failure of the 1867 rising. It focuses in particular on the bombing campaign in Britain from 1881 to 1885.

Unlike any previous campaigns, this one was planned and commissioned in America, using Irish-American operatives armed with the latest developments in explosives and timers to undertake operations exclusively in Britain.

Following the failure of 1867, captured Fenians who had been jailed were offered amnesty in 1870, with one unusual condition to their release: they had to spend the remainder of their sentences outside Ireland. America was the favoured destination, meaning that a nucleus of political activists was suddenly inject-

ed into a large diaspora already radicalised by the twin traumas of the Famine and the American Civil War. The latter was of critical importance as it changed the notion of what was a legitimate target to include infrastructural destruction, with inevitable civilian casualties, as tactically and morally acceptable.

The list of targets attacked is startling: the Westminster parliament at the House of Commons; the Tower of London; London Bridge; various key rail stations, including Victoria, Paddington and Charing Cross; underground trains; several army barracks; and the destruction of police headquarters at Scotland Yard.

It is interesting to note that the current address of the Metropolitan Police is ‘New Scotland Yard’ simply because the Fenians blew up the old one! Similarly, what is now known as

the “Special Branch” was originally set up to combat the Fenians as the “Special Irish Branch”.

This is a superb book charting a

Dr Shane Kenna’s masterly book focuses on the bombing campaign in Britain from 1881 to 1885 clear path through a mix of daring escapes, labyrinthine intrigue, petty jealousies on all sides, courage and betrayal. The varied strands of the story are too numerous to list here; just get the book.

Revolution in Connacht: A Photographic History 1913-1923 Mercier Press

By Cormac Ó Comhraí CORMAC Ó COMHRAÍ’S new book charts the history of revolution in Connacht from the founding of the Irish Volunteers to the end of the Civil War. In a departure from many other accounts of the period, this one is copiously packed with photographs which are of equal, if not greater, importance than the narrative text which accompanies them.

Many of the photographs are from unpublished sources and will not have been seen before.

All the photos serve to convey a real feel for the individuals involved and a heightened sense of time and place of the events depicted.

The text too is far from the usual chronology of events and sketches of

Gems of information combined with superb selection of photographs, many from unpublished sources individual protagonists. There is a treasure trove of informative nuggets contained in the commentary.

The rivalries between Volunteers based in flying columns and those based in towns is something not often mentioned in books on this period.

The columns felt that they were doing all the work and carrying the struggle while the Volunteers in towns were often left weaponless to face reprisals

5 The IRA’s West Connemara Brigade flying column pictured in 1921 under the command of Petie J McDonnell (Far left, front row) and attacks in the wake of flying column actions.

Mention is also made of soldiers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment who marched through Galway City in protest at the actions of the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans.

In addition, the Scottish soldiers threatened retaliation against the Auxiliaries if violence against civilians continued. A sergeant in the regiment went further and passed information to people he felt to be in danger from crown forces.

This book contains many such gems of information which were probably well-known at the time but which have certainly been overlooked in many of the subsequent histories.

These, combined with the superb selection of photographs, make this an essential record of the republican struggle in Connacht presented in an easily accessible form.

Revolution in Connacht will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in the period, and not merely a niche purchase for Western republicans.

www.sinnfeinbookshop.com THE ROTUNDA BIRTHPLACE OF THE IRISH VOLUNTEERS

LOCKOUT 1913 AUSTERITY 2013

THE HISTORY OF

THE IRISH CITIZEN ARMY

By Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD

Edited by Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha

R. M. Fox’s book reprinted

Price €9.99 Plus P+P

Price €7.99 Plus P+P

Price €14.99 Plus P+P

Sinn Féin Bookshop, 58 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

Tel: (+353 1) 814 8542 Email: sales@sinnfeinbookshop.com

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February / Feabhra 2014 29

I nDíl Chuimhne 1 February 1975: Volunteer Seán BOYLE, South Armagh Brigade.

1 February 1981: Volunteer Peadar MOHAN, Monaghan Brigade.

2 February 1981: Volunteer Liam HANNAWAY, Belfast Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

3 February 1973: Volunteer James SLOAN, Volunteer James McCANN, Belfast Brigade, 3rd Battalion.

3 February 1999: Volunteer Harry BURNS, Belfast Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

4 February 1973: Volunteer Tony CAMPBELL, Belfast Brigade, 3rd Battalion.

4 February 1992: Paddy LOUGHRAN, Pat McBRIDE, Sinn Féin.

5 February 1992: Volunteer Joseph MacMANUS, Sligo Brigade.

5 February 1972: Volunteer Phelim GRANT, Volunteer Charles McCANN, North Antrim Brigade.

6 February 1971: Volunteer James SAUNDERS, Belfast Brigade, 3rd Battalion.

6 February 1989: Volunteer James Joseph CONNOLLY, Tyrone Brigade.

7 February 1982: Volunteer Danny McMULLAN, County Derry Brigade.

9 February 1975: Volunteer Bridie DOLAN, Cumann na mBan, Belfast.

10 February 1972: Volunteer Joseph CUNNINGHAM, Belfast Brigade, 3rd Battalion.

10 February 1973: Volunteer Leo O’HANLON, South Down Command, Volunteer Vivien FITZSIMMONS, Cumann na mBan, Downpatrick.

12 February 1976: Fian James O’NEILL, Fianna Éireann.

12 February 1976: Volunteer Francis STAGG, (Wakefield Prison), England.

13 February 1976: Volunteer Seán

» Notices All notices should be sent to: notices@anphoblacht.com at least 14 days in advance of publication date. There is no charge for I nDíl Chuimhne, Comhbhrón etc.

All notices and obituaries should be sent to notices@anphoblacht.com by Friday 14 February 2014

“LIFE SPRINGS FROM DEATH AND FROM THE GRAVES OF PATRIOT MEN AND WOMEN SPRING LIVING NATIONS.” Pádraig Mac Piarais BAILEY, Belfast Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

14 February 1989: John DAVEY, Sinn Féin.

15 February 1976: Volunteer James McGRILLEN, Belfast Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

16 February 1992: Volunteer Peter CLANCY, Volunteer Kevin Barry O’DONNELL, Volunteer Seán O’FARRELL, Volunteer Patrick VINCENT, Tyrone Brigade.

18 February 1976: Paul BEST, Sinn Féin.

18 February 1986: Volunteer Francis BRADLEY, South Derry.

18 February 1996: Volunteer Edward O’BRIEN, Wexford Brigade.

19 February 1972: Fian David McAULEY, Fianna Éireann.

19 February 1992: Volunteer Brendan SEERY, Portlaoise.

21 February 1972: Volunteer Gerard BELL, Volunteer Robert DORRIAN, Volunteer Joseph MAGEE, Volunteer Gerard STEELE, Belfast Brigade, 3rd Battalion.

21 February 1984: Volunteer Henry HOGAN, Volunteer Declan MARTIN, North Antrim Brigade.

22 February 1986: Volunteer Tony GOUGH, Derry Brigade.

23 February 1981: Volunteer James BURNS, Belfast Brigade, 2nd Battalion.

23 February 1985: Volunteer Charlie BRESLIN, Volunteer David DEVINE, Volunteer Michael DEVINE, Tyrone Brigade.

26 February 1978: Volunteer Paul DUFFY, Tyrone Brigade.

28 February 1986: Volunteer Tom McGILL, Belfast Brigade, 1st Battalion.

29 February 1988: Volunteer Brendan BURNS, Volunteer Brendan MOLEY, South Armagh Brigade.

Always remembered by the Republican Movement.

CONNOLLY, James Joseph. Volunteer ‘Josie’ Connolly, West Tyrone Brigade, Óglaigh na hÉireann, died 6 February 1989 from injuries received on active service. “Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.”

Remembered with pride by friends and comrades in the Harvey/McGlynn/Connolly/McHugh Sinn Féin Cumann, Castlederg.

HAMILTON, Peter (Skeet). In proud and loving memory of our friend and comrade Peter ‘Skeet’ Hamilton. Never forgotten by the Halpenny/Worthington/Watters Sinn Féin Cumann, Dundalk.

HAMILTON, Peter (Skeet). In proud and loving memory of our friend and comrade Peter ‘Skeet’ Hamilton, whose anniversary occurs at this time. Missed every day.

From the staff and management committee of Fáilte Abhaile, Dundalk.

KELLY, Patsy. In proud and loving memory of our friend and comrade Patsy Kelly, whose anniversary occurs

» Imeachtaí There is a charge of €10 for inserts printed in our Imeachtaí/Events column. You can also get a small or large box advert. Contact: sales@anphoblacht.com for details.

at this time. From the Halpenny/Worthington/Watters Sinn Féin Cumann, Dundalk.

MacMANUS, Joseph. In proud and loving memory of our dear son Volunteer Joseph MacManus, who died in action on 5 February 1992. “Grieve not for him. Speak not a word of sorrow although his eyes saw not his country’s glory. The service of his day shall make our morrow. His name shall be a watchword in its story.” We love and miss you Joe. From Mum and Dad. MacMANUS, Joseph. In proud and loving memory of my brother and comrade Volunteer Joseph MacManus, who died in action on 5 February 1992. “True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate.” - Lafayette.

Always remembered with pride by Chris.

MacMANUS, Joseph. In proud and loving memory of Volunteer Joseph MacManus, who was killed in action in County Fermanagh on 5 February 1992. Always remembered by his comrades in the Republican Movement, Sligo.

MacMANUS, Joseph. In proud and loving memory of Volunteer Joseph MacManus, who was killed in action in County Fermanagh on 5 February 1992. Always remembered by Sligo Sinn Féin Comhairle Ceantair; Noble Six/Fr O’Flanagan/MacManus Sinn Féin Cumann, Sligo Town; T. J. Walsh

Sinn Féin Cumann, West Sligo; Countess Markievicz Sinn Féin Cumann, North Sligo; Michael J. Marren Cumann, South Sligo; Breheny Durcan Sinn Féin Cumann, Tubbercurry.

MacMANUS, Joseph. In proud and loving memory of Volunteer Joseph MacManus, who was killed in action in County Fermanagh on 5 February 1992. Always remembered by your friend and comrade Noel and family.

McNEILL, Bob (London and Toomebridge). In memory of Bob, whose 15th anniversary occurs at this time. Always remembered by his friends and comrades in the West London Republican Support Group, Hammersmith, west London.

O’BRIEN, Edward. In proud and loving memory of our son and brother Ed, who died on active service in London on 18 February 1996. Lovingly remembered by parents Miley and Margo, and sister and brother Lorraine and Gary.

O’BRIEN, Edward. In proud and loving memory of Ed O’Brien, who was killed on active service in London on 18 February 1996. Always remembered by Ann. O’BRIEN, Edward. In proud and loving memory of Volunteer Ed O’Brien, who died on active service in London on 18 February 1996. Always remembered by Tony Duncan.

O’BRIEN, Edward. In proud and loving memory of our friend and comrade, Volunteer Ed O’Brien, who died on active service in London on 18 February 1996. “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.” Never forgotten by the Volunteer Ed O’Brien Sinn Féin Cumann, Gorey, north Wexford.

Imeachtaí » Twin Peaks Mountain Challenge 2014 Saturday 22nd February, Registration 9am, Camlough, County Armagh. Entry £20/€20. Volunteers to help on the day required, contact: Declan (+ 353) 87 265 7265. In aid of Camlough Community House

IN PICTURES

5 Derry and Strabane Sinn Féin local candidates with Martina Anderson MEP preparing for the upcoming elections in May

photos@anphoblacht.com

5 Sinn Féin EU candidate for Ireland South, Liadh Ní Riada, addresses the Pickardstown Ambush commemoration in Tramore, Waterford, to remember IRA Volunteers Michael McGrath and Thomas O’Brien

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BETWEEN THE POSTS

30 February / Feabhra 2014

THE

www.anphoblacht.com

BY CIARÁN KEARNEY

TOO MUCH TO SACRIFICE

5 Thousands take part in the ‘Darkness into Light’ fundraiser in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, for suicide charity Pieta House WHEN A YOUNG LIFE is lost, there is a deeply tragic shadow cast upon the existence of those bereaved. Powerful images of a child or youth dying in the arms of their family are used to tell the story of warfare and conflict in our world.

There is the iconic image from apartheid South Africa of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, a schoolboy shot dead by the racist regime during the 1976 Soweto uprising. More recently, there was the picture of three-yearold Palestinian Hala Abu Sabikha, killed last Christmas Eve when Israeli fighter jets bombed her home in Gaza. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could witness such atrocities and not be outraged or upset.

Contrast this with the images of 22-year-old Niall O’Donohue.

Niall was a member of the Kilbeacanty Hurling Club, outside Gort in County Galway. He had won an All-Ireland under-21 medal for his county and played in the Galway senior hurling team that famously won the Leinster Championship against Kilkenny. The dream of playing hurling for his county in Croke Park was one Niall had experienced. Yet, suddenly just before Hallowe’en last year, Niall tragically took his own life.

When it comes to the loss of a

young life by suicide, whole communities are stunned into deathly silence. Unlike death in warfare and conflict, where the aggressor stands to blame, death by suicide leaves no perpetrator and rarely any answer.

There is a barely a village or town across Ireland that has not been affected by suicide. Our country still struggles with the fifth-highest rate of youth suicide in Europe. It is a leading cause of death amongst our youth.

For several years in the office of the MP for West Belfast, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, suicide prevention was part of the weekly constituency agenda.

We had discovered that the Six Counties had no suicide prevention strategy and, in conjunction with families, campaigned for this to be rectified and for resources to be ring-fenced to help those in greatest need.

Eventually the argument was won for this policy reform in the Assembly. An all-Ireland strategy for suicide prevention, jointly resourced and implemented on a North-South basis, is still outstanding.

Meanwhile, evidence grows for the potential for physical activity and sport to help promote mental health and prevent mental illness.

The Gaelic Players’ Association and Irish Rugby Football Union players deserve credit for steps to provide confidential support around mental health

Physical activity helps in coping with mild to moderate depression, facilitates self-esteem and positive self-perceptions. Social contact through team sports and local clubs also helps promote mental health. In no sport are these networks more extensive and effective than the GAA. Yet, even now, the issue of mental health and mental illness remains peripheral to many programmes for coaching and players.

When it comes to training, we still prize physical fitness over mental fitness.

Some steps have been taken by the Gaelic Players’ Association and Irish Rugby Football Union players who deserve credit for steps to provide confidential support. However, this type of self-referral service is still far short of the cultural and attitude change which Irish sport needs.

Some sportspeople in Ireland have now voiced their concern about this imbalance and their own silent struggle with mental illness.

Irish 400metres runner David Gillick spoke out last November about how the mental injuries he sustained in sport were deeper and harder to heal than any physical injury. David now advocates for mental wellbeing for athletes.

Cork senior hurler Conor Cusack also spoke publicly about how depression nearly killed him. He decided to explain his pain to help others to seek out the support they need.

Around the same time, British former double Olympic athletics champion Kelly Holmes described how she self-harmed and contemplated suicide. Irish hurdles star Dervla O’Rourke wrote in the Irish Examiner earlier this year that some athletes can find the constant pressure to achieve unbearable: “When we race, we must back ourselves 100%. However, this belief cannot be constant and there are times we struggle.”

The opportunity to promote mental health through physical activity and sport comes with an onerous responsibility. In his epic poem about 1916, Yeats warned: “Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart.”

Sportspeople are not automatons machined to precision, programmed to perform. They are emotional, thoughtful, spiritual beings, like the rest of us. For what they give to our society, they deserve better from us all.

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Cairde na hÉireann

www.anphoblacht.com

February / Feabhra 2014 31

SCOTLAND’S IRISH REPUBLICAN VOICE CAIRDE na hÉireann in Scotland marked its growth this year as one of the most vibrant organisations outside Ireland supporting Sinn Féin with the launch of a dedicated youth wing for young people aged 16 to 25.

It’s a particularly notable achievement in

what Cairde describes as “a hostile environment”. That includes not only a large and often violent unionist/loyalist opposition most visible in the Glasgow Rangers FC fan base but an Establishment and mainstream media consistently misrepresenting republican

marches as sectarian. It’s a media that, until this year, refused to even acknowledge antiIrish racism in Scotland.

Cairde National Organiser FRANNY McADAM spoke to JOHN HEDGES at the Cairde shop in Glasgow, near the famous Barras market. recognised with other ethnic communities and the voice of the Irish heard, he says.

THE CAIRDE SHOP in Glasgow stands at 260 Gallowgate, opposite The Emerald Isle and Bar 67.

Run by volunteers, the shop is open on Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 12 noon until 5pm and on ‘big match’ nights when Celtic are playing at home. It sells republican merchandise from the Sinn Féin Shop in Ireland as well as An Phoblacht.

Cairde na hÉireann is “the national structure for republicans in Scotland”. Its work includes “campaigning for a united Ireland, supporting sister organisations in Ireland [i.e. Sinn Féin], promoting a new Ireland based on the principles of justice and equality, supporting initiatives aimed at improving the material conditions of the Irish community in Scotland, and campaigning against racism and sectarianism”.

Franny McAdam became National Organiser for Cairde five years ago, a role he keeps up in between his full-time job and his family. He’s been involved in Irish republican politics in some form or another for more than 30 years.

“My grandparents on both sides were from Ireland — from Donegal and the Falls Road — and it was my grandfather telling me as a boy stories about the struggle and giving me books about it. Dan Breen was probably the first book I read. Then I joined a republican band at 14 because, at that time, there was nothing else in Scotland, just bands, until Cairde started around ten years ago.”

GOING NATIONWIDE Cairde was set up as an umbrella organisation at a meeting between republicans from

CAIRDE YOUTH

5 Cairde National Organiser Franny McAdam at the Cairde shop in Glasgow Ireland and Scotland to give a political voice and an outlet for Irish republican supporters.

“Before Cairde, nobody could join an organisation unless it was a band and that excluded a lot of republicans,” Franny explains.

“When we started Cairde na hÉireann it included the bands and we had one or two Cairde cumainn and two or three bands,” Franny says. “Now we have nine bands and 14 cumainn.”

From its ‘base’ in the west of Scotland, Cairde is spreading nationwide.

CONTACT: info@cairdenaheireann.info

“We’ve been having meetings with people in the north, south and east of Scotland.”

Franny brushes away any idea that Cairde is primarily a Glasgow organisation, pointing to central Scotland and cumainn in Stirling, Inverclyde and Port Glasgow in Greenock, Wishaw, Hamilton, Coatbridge, Plains — all outside Glasgow. “There’s fewer cumainn in Glasgow than outside.”

One of the biggest achievements of Cairde in Scotland in recent years has been “to get the Irish on a level playing field” by being

Young people in Cairde come in for huge praise from Franny.

“They do tremendous work. Cairde v Cancer was all started and driven by Cairde youth and Michael Traynor from the Plains cumann as well as other things, that’s why we’ve formed Cairde Youth, pretty much on the lines of Sinn Féin Republican Youth.”

He puts the influx of young people into Cairde down to it being an active organisation on the ground, running not only successful public meetings with Sinn Féin speakers over from Ireland and parades but social initiatives such ‘Cairde v Cancer’ (which has raised £6,500 for various charities in honour of IRA Volunteers Pól Kinsella and Brian Keenan) and the food bank initiated by its new youth wing from Cairde’s Skinnider Centre in Coatbridge.

There’s an anti-Irish racism in Scotland that doesn’t only manifest itself at counterdemonstrations at republican events or soccer matches, Franny says.

“It’s a day-to-day issue.

“Anti-Irish racism is rife throughout Scottish society, through every council we’ve met, through the Scottish police force, but Cairde and others are standing up against that and now we’re recognised as a voice for the Irish community.”

Aside from growing Cairde na hÉireann, Franny says he’d like to see the wider Irish community and its representative organisations come together “not necessarily under one banner but together in fighting for the rights of the Irish in Scotland”.

TWITTER: @CNEScotland

5 Cairde was set up as an umbrella organisation to to give a political voice and outlet for Irish republican supporters in Scotland

and @CairdeYouth

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anphoblacht NEXT ISSUE OUT – Thursday 26th February 2014 32

GARDA WHISTLEBLOWERS

Speak truth to power BY SINÉAD MÁIRE NÍ BHROIN SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. It’s a powerful statement. For me it is a fundamental principle.

Those who speak truth to power are nearly always brandished as contrarian or cranks.

Sometimes they are even criminalised.

Remember Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?

Take the carry-on at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a joint Oireachtas committee that acts as the people’s public spending watchdog.

When referring to the whistleblowers’ allegations that senior gardaí have been terminating penalty points and fines for ‘the great and the good’, Garda Commissioner Martin

Whistleblowers are nearly always brandished as contrarian or cranks.

Sometimes even criminalised. Remember Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?

Callinan told committee members: “Two people out of a force of 13,000 who are making extraordinary, serious allegations, and frankly I think it’s quite disgusting.”

Hardly confidence-inspiring words for any rank and file garda thinking about exposing wrongdoing they are aware of in the police service.

Callinan went on to refer to An Garda Síochána as his force. He stated the whistleblowers were his subordinates that he and he alone should be left to deal with the wrongdoing they have exposed. At no point did he acknowledge that it is his inaction and the failure of the accountability systems he oversees within the service that have led to this debacle.

The problem exposed in the police service

5 If we do not tackle head-on the closed culture so boldly exposed by the Garda Commissioner then we are on a road to nowhere is not the whistleblowers or the information they have helped put in the public domain.

The problem is the closed culture that emanates from the top brass in An Garda Síochána, senior officials at the Department of Justice and the Justice Minister himself, Alan Shatter.

There will always be some small amount of wrongdoing in any system. The challenge is not the problem itself – it’s how the system and those in charge deal with the wrongdoing when uncovered.

The truth is that Commissioner Callinan needs people like these two whistleblowers.

We all do.

Far from undermining discipline in the police force, people like former Garda John

5 Closed culture – Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan and Justice Minister Alan Shatter

Wilson (one of the two Garda whistleblowers) are an organic check and balance within a closed group system.

Whistleblowers are currently afforded some limited protections under existing legislation, and the Protected Disclosures Bill due to be enacted this year will put in place a robust system of safeguards.

Legislation is important but if we do not tackle head-on the closed culture so boldly exposed by the Garda Commissioner then we are on a road to nowhere. Bad cultures are like the single rotten apple in a barrel: every crisp rosy piece of fruit slowly goes bad in some way.

Something is rotten in An Garda Síochána.

It is not the whistleblowers.