Tag Archives: The British Occupied North of Ireland

Ireland’s British Troubles

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Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

Interesting revelation from court documents released in Belfast (via the Detail), where Ciarán Martin, the former Security and Intelligence adviser to British prime minister David Cameron, admits that British terrorist groupings operating in Ireland during the conflict in the north-east of the country did so with the backing and support of Britain, perhaps up to the highest levels of government. Writing in a redacted letter to PM Cameron, dated July 8th 2011, Martin admits in relation to the 1989 assassination in Belfast of the Irish human rights lawyer Pat Finucane that:

“Even by Northern Ireland standards the facts are grisly. Moreover, in terms of allegations of British state ‘collusion’ with Loyalist paramilitaries, this is the big one… whilst we know of no evidence of direction or advance knowledge of the murder by ministers, security chiefs or officials, exhaustive previous examinations have laid bare some uncomfortable truths.

Paid state agents were directly involved in the killing, including the only man ever convicted of involvement in it.

[official investigations paint]…a picture of a system of agent-running by the RUC’s Special Branch and the Army’s Force Research Unit that was out of control… There is plenty of material in the public domain to this effect. …the evidence available only internally could be read to suggest that within government at a high level this systematic problem with Loyalist agents was known, but nothing was done about it.

It’s also potentially the case that credible suspicions of agent involvement in Mr Finucane’s murder were made known at senior levels after it and that nothing was done; the agents remained in place. These two points essentially aren’t public.”

In a follow up letter, dated July 9th 2011, the special advisor and Cameron confidant states that the prime minister:

“… like virtually everyone else outside MoD [Ministry of Defence] shares the view that this was an awful case and as bad as it gets, and was far worse than any post 9/11 allegation.”

The issue of Pat Finucane’s murder by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a British terrorist organisation in Ireland long known to have been controlled by Britain’s Intelligence services, drew an official apology from the London government earlier this year, and was recently discussed again by the United States Congress and its Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Of special significance in all this is the UDA’s former status as the largest and most active British terrorist group on the island of Ireland while simultaneously being a legal paramilitary organisation under British law and jurisdiction. Despite its involvement in hundreds of gun and bomb attacks (and the demands of the International community that it be banned) the terror faction was able to openly organise, recruit and train in the north-east of Ireland and in Britain; frequently with the assistance of serving or former British paramilitary police officers or soldiers. Its notoriously public headquarters in the middle of Belfast city was a regular venue for interviews with gunmen and bombers by members of the International media, and its overall existence was based on a continuous supply of money, arms and intelligence data from the British military and security services.

Without the UDA, and the other British terror factions, Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland would never have been possible. And that is why no one seriously doubts that support for these groups came from the highest levels of the British government and across all party political divides and ideologies.

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Margaret Thatcher – She Came, She Saw, She Failed

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Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, '80s and '90s

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s

As a citizen of Ireland there is only one Margaret Thatcher that I remember. From the archives of the Guardian newspaper:

“Margaret Thatcher horrified her advisers when she recommended that the government should revive the memory of Oliver Cromwell – dubbed the butcher of Ireland – and encourage tens of thousands of Catholics to leave Ulster for the south.

A year after she was nearly killed in the IRA’s 1984 Brighton bomb, the then prime minister expressed dismay at Catholic opposition to British rule when they could follow the example of ancestors who were evicted from Ulster at the barrel of a Cromwellian gun in the 17th century.

Lady Thatcher’s extraordinary solution to the Troubles has been disclosed by her advisers at the time of the negotiations on the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.

Sir David Goodall, then a diplomat who was one of the most senior British officials negotiating with the Irish government, told a BBC four-part documentary, Endgame in Ireland, that Lady Thatcher made the “outrageous” proposal during a late night conversation at Chequers.

“She said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don’t they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn’t there?

“Nobody could think what it was. So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime minister? She said, that’s right, Cromwell.”

Lady Thatcher’s “outrageous” plan did not stop at reviving the memory of Cromwell.

Sir Charles Powell, then her private secretary, told the programme that she also called for Northern Ireland’s border with the republic to be redrawn.

“She thought that if we had a straight line border, not one with all those kinks and wiggles in it, it would be easier to defend,” he said.

The zigzag border is notoriously difficult to patrol. But Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, then cabinet secretary, told Lady Thatcher of the folly of her idea.

“It wasn’t as simple as that because the nationalist communities were not all in one place, not all in Fermanagh and Tyrone and South Armagh and so on,” he told the programme.

“There were many in Belfast, and the idea of partition in Belfast or moving large numbers of population didn’t seem to be very attractive.”

However, she would not abandon her idea and called for a “security zone” on both sides of the border to help the British army and the RUC to chase IRA terrorists who used to slip over the border after attacks in the north.”

Over on Bloomberg News Timothy Lavin offers an analysis of the effects on Ireland of Thatcher’s premiership:

“…the conflict did not bring out the best in her.

It showed how the character traits for which she is best remembered had some very dark consequences, and how her celebrated “resolve” often came at a brutally high human and moral cost. In Northern Ireland, in fact, that resolve directly obstructed the cause of peace.

The most illuminating example is the hunger strike in the Maze (or Long Kesh) prison from 1980-1981. In many obituaries published today, the story goes that Thatcher “faced down” Irish Republican Army hunger strikers, as the BBC put it. By “faced down” they mean “let them starve to death.” This is often treated as a victory of democratic determination over terrorism.

But history shows quite the opposite: Thatcher’s uncompromising treatment of the hunger strikers led only to an increase in terrorism and the ascension of the IRA as a potent political force.

Violent deaths related to the conflict rose to 101 in 1981 from 76 the year before, including 44 members of the security forces. Injuries rose to 1,350 from 801. Shootings increased to 1,142 from 642, and bombings reached nearly 400 that year. Far from demonstrating that the IRA’s struggle was a lost one, Thatcher only intensified its opposition to rule by what it considered an ever more brutal occupying force.

The other significant consequence of Thatcher’s unyielding position was that public sympathy for the hunger strikers quickly morphed into political support for Republicanism. Bobby Sands, one of the strikers, was elected to the British House of Commons for Fermanagh-South Tyrone while imprisoned. His victory “undermined the entire shaky edifice of British policy in Northern Ireland, which had been so painfully constructed on the hypothesis that blame for the ‘Troubles’ could be placed on a small gang of thugs and hoodlums who enjoyed no community support,” wrote David Beresford in “Ten Men Dead.”

In 1983, Sinn Fein — the IRA’s political wing – gathered 13.4 percent of the Westminster vote in Northern Ireland, compared with 17.9 percent for the moderate nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Gerry Adams, then Sinn Fein’s vice president, was elected in West Belfast over the moderate Gerry Fitt. For the British government, these were ominous omens. Today, Sinn Fein is the largest nationalist bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the fourth-largest party in the parliament of the Irish Republic.

Still, “a crime is a crime is a crime,” Thatcher insisted at the time. “It is not political, it is a crime.”

This was to deny reality, especially as international sympathy for the strikers surged. But Thatcher never took a particularly realistic approach to the hunger strike, or to Northern Ireland generally.

[she was] …someone who could occasionally show a staggering indifference to human suffering.”

As Levine continues in the Comments underneath:

“…it isn’t hard, in this case, to differentiate between what violence is “political” and what isn’t. The men in the Maze prison didn’t become political prisoners because they went on a hunger strike. They became political prisoners because they were arrested — often without trial — for violence or activism intended to overthrow what they viewed as an oppressive political order and an illegal occupation.

Let me be clear: This doesn’t make violence a legitimate response.

But the fact that the political order in Northern Ireland at the time violated Catholic civil rights on a grand scale is beyond dispute. And the IRA itself was an objectively political organization: Its terrorism, although reprehensible, was intertwined with a legitimate movement for Catholic civil rights and a party, Sinn Fein, that adhered to an overt platform of political objectives. (Roughly the same platform, as it happens, that Irish revolutionaries had been asserting for 800 years.) Most crucially, the IRA’s intended targets were the military and security forces of occupation and other paramilitaries — not civilians.”

My own feelings on hearing of her passing are best summed up in this post by Football Clichés and another by author Terry Glavin. Like other British leaders who brought war to Ireland she has passed but we the Irish people have endured.

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More Accounts Of Death Squad Britain

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General Sir Frank Kitson, the British Army's death squad supremo in Ireland during the 1970s

General Sir Frank Kitson, the British Army’s death squad supremo in Ireland during the 1970s

Veteran Irish journalist and author Ed Moloney and his colleague Bob Mitchell continue their investigations into the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a British Army death squad that operated in the north-east of Ireland during the early 1970s. Its notoriety and reckless nature (with carloads of heavily armed undercover soldiers carrying out random drive-by shootings of the civilian populace in the city of Belfast) eventually led to its replacement with a number of other covert groups including the infamous Force Research Unit or FRU. By examining the 1972 attempted assassination of Brendan Hughes, Officer Commanding D Company, 2nd Battalion, Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (and widely regarded as one of the most effective and thoughtful field commanders of his generation), Moloney and Mitchell have uncovered new evidence of the British Army’s modus operandi during the early years of the war in the North of Ireland. Evidence which corroborates Brendan Hughes own testimony of events from that time.

The military mastermind behind the introduction of the MRF and other covert units was the British death squad supremo, General Sir Frank Kitson GBE, KCB, MC & Bar, DL. On the basis of his “successes” in Ireland he rose to become Commander-in-Chief of the British Land Forces and Aide-de-Camp to the British head of state in the 1980s. In this BBC news-documentary from 1975 examining “war gaming” exercises Kitson can be viewed in action. The nature of the exercise, as described by the BBC Panorama programme, show that the concerns and ambitions of the British Army leadership in the 1970s ran far beyond the conflict in Ireland:

“Filmed at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, this programme offers a fascinating insight into officer training. Six years in Northern Ireland have given the British Army unique experience in counter insurgency and internal security techniques. Sandhurst recognises that the Army’s Ulster experience could – one day – have to be used in Britain, and there is a need to train officers for that possibility. So imagine a world where Scotland has left the United Kingdom, where some English cities are thinking of following suit and where law and order is breaking down in our towns. It may seem far fetched, but the recruits of Sandhurst are presented with just such a scenario.”

If you have difficulty viewing the documentary due to your location try installing Tor on your device (video guide here). The new investigation by Ed Moloney and Bob Mitchell, using redacted British military records, can be read in full here.

UPDATE: Here is the BBC 1975 Panorama documentary featuring Kitson, via YouTube (indirect link I’m afraid).

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Unionism Closes Ranks

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Anti-UDR poster highlighting the British Army's links to British terror gangs in Ireland

Anti-UDR poster highlighting the British Army’s links to British terror gangs in Ireland

Interesting to note that the DUP leader Peter Robinson and UUP leader Mike Nesbitt have agreed a joint “Unionist Unity” candidate, Nigel Lutton, for the Mid-Ulster by-election, and the furore that has emerged around it. Lutton is a former liaison-officer with the Northern Ireland Police Fund, a former volunteer with the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (run by the British Ministry of Defence), a former British Army reserve soldier, a co-ordinator with the group South Down Action for Healing Wounds, a member of the Orange Order (the anti-Catholic, Protestant fundamentalist society) and a former researcher with the DUP.

He is also the son of Frederick “Eric” Lutton, a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland disbanded under the Irish-British Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Frederick Lutton had resigned from the RUC shortly before he was shot dead by the Irish Republican Army in May of 1979. Around the time of his killing rumours in the local Irish Nationalist community insisted that Lutton had been forced to resign by RUC management due to concerns about his family connections.

In fact his brother, Joey Lutton, was a British Army soldier with the Ulster Defence Regiment or UDR during the same period, a militia raised from within the British Unionist community (and also disbanded in the wake of the Belfast Agreement). This particular Lutton was convicted in 1979 of participating in a number of terrorist atrocities carried out by a British terror group known colloquially as the Glenanne Gang. It was made up of members of several British terrorist organisations, principally the UVF and UDA-UFF, most of whom were also former or serving soldiers and police officers with the British Army, UDR and RUC.

Joey Lutton’s offences included his involvement in the May 1976 bomb-attack on Clancy’s Bar that left three Irish civilians (Felix Clancy, Sean O’Hagan and Robert McCullough) dead and several others wounded, and a subsequent gun-attack on the nearby Eagle Bar resulting in the murder of Frederick McLaughlin and the wounding of numerous others. Lutton was widely suspected of involvement in a number of other murders in the Armagh region, many of which were carried out using ammunition and weapons later traced back to British Army stocks.

In 2007 the DUP MP David Simpson, who is a cousin and close associate of the “Unionist Unity” candidate Nigel Lutton (as well as an Orange Order member and proponent of “Creationism”), used legal immunity granted by the British parliament to claim in the House of Commons that prominent Sinn Féin politician, Francie Molly, was suspected of involvement in the assassination of Nigel Lutton’s father, Frederick.

Francie Molly is the Sinn Féin candidate in Mid-Ulster and Nigel Lutton’s opponent.

A “Unionist Unity” candidate is just about right.

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Britain’s War In Ireland – Learning The Lessons

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Bloody Sunday Massacre, Derry, Ireland, 1972

Bloody Sunday Massacre, Derry, Ireland, 1972

The Irish journalist and author Finian Cunningham examines the conflict in the north-east of Ireland during the late 1960s and early ‘70s and draws some lessons in relation to France’s present military intervention in Mali. His description of the origins and early years of the Northern War are particularly noteworthy:

“This week sees the anniversary of one of the worst massacres in modern Irish history, when British paratroopers murdered 14 unarmed civilians in cold blood.

On 30 January 1972, the British troops opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry City, Northern Ireland’s second city after Belfast, in full glare of the international news media.

Half of the victims that day were teenagers, shot in the head or in the back by British snipers. Some of the fatally wounded were shot multiple times as they tried to crawl to safety. Others were cut down in a hail of bullets as they tended to those lying wounded, bleeding on the ground.

One iconic image from that horrific day shows a Catholic priest, Fr Edward Daly, holding up a bloodstained white cloth, pleading with the British soldiers to cease-fire as he helped carry a dying youth.

Bloody Sunday, as it became known, was a watershed event. From then on, the conflict in Northern Ireland exploded. Some 3,000 people would lose their lives in the ensuing decades of violence – a huge death toll for the tiny population, equivalent to 240,000 in Iran or 900,000 in the United States.

Many Irish citizens, outraged by the British army slaughter, went on to join the ranks of the newly formed Provisional Irish Republican Army, the armed guerrilla movement that would kill hundreds of British troops and police and take the war to the very streets of London, with massive bombing campaigns in the British capital and other major cities.

Prior to the arrival of the British troops, the British-controlled Northern Ireland saw an outbreak of violence in the summer of 1968 when Nationalists began agitating for equal civil rights under the corrupt pro-British Unionist administration. Peaceful demonstrations by Nationalists were subsequently attacked by Unionist gangs and paramilitaries, aided and abetted by the sectarian state police force. Many civilians were killed as Nationalist communities were shot at and burned out of their homes and workplaces in reprisals over their political demands.

The Unionist-dominated province of Northern Ireland brought international disgrace to the United Kingdom, and the London government was obliged to post thousands of British soldiers “to restore order”. At first, Nationalist communities welcomed the British troops when they were deployed in August 1969, believing the army to be affording protection from marauding Unionist paramilitaries and police.

When the British army went into Northern Ireland in 1969, it soon became apparent that the intervention had nothing to do with protecting Nationalist civilians, under the boot of the Unionist statelet, and everything to do with suppressing the political challenge being posed by Irish separatism, which wanted to dismantle the British partition of Ireland and to create a united, independent country, free from London’s political control.

The pretext used by London for despatching troops to Northern Ireland concealed its real purpose. That agenda was to target the Nationalist population with state terrorism for political ends. Whereas in previous years, the Unionist paramilitaries could rely on the collusion of the local police force to terrorise, from 1969 onwards these forces had the full might of the British army to ramp up the violence against Nationalist civilians and thereby intimidate them from supporting political opposition to the British government’s presence in Ireland.

The year before Bloody Sunday, in August 1971, British paratroopers shot dead 11 unarmed civilians in the Ballymurphy area of West Belfast. Among the dead was a 50-year-old woman, Joan Connolly, who had been standing peacefully on the street. Another victim was a priest, Fr. Hugh Mullan, who was shot dead while trying to assist a man wounded on the ground. [ASF: Click on the link for more on the Ballymurphy Massacre]

On 9 July 1972 – six months after Bloody Sunday – British troops again shot dead five unarmed Nationalist civilians in another area of West Belfast, Springhill. Three of the victims were children, including 13-year-old Margaret Gargan, who was shot in the head by a British sniper as she was walking to her home. The two adults who died that day, Patrick Butler and Fr. Noel Fitzpatrick, were killed with the same bullet, it ripping through one man’s head into the other. One of the survivors of the Springhill massacre later told how, as he lay wounded, bullets were ricocheting off the ground near his head, fired by British soldiers who had taken up position in a nearby timber yard that overlooked the residential neighbourhood.

On another occasion during that year, a friend of this author told how when he was only a young boy he witnessed his father and a neighbour being shot at by British troops, while they were painting the family home in West Belfast. The neighbour was blown off the ladder when a high-velocity round slammed into his upper leg. It was fired by British soldiers dug in a couple of kilometres away on the Black Mountain looking down on the housing estate. Just one of countless acts of gratuitous violence committed against the civilian population by British troops.

During these gun attacks on Nationalist communities, the British army would often work hand-in-glove with Unionist paramilitaries, or death squads, as they fired into family homes, indiscriminately killing the occupants. That secret policy of collusion between British forces and Unionist death squads would later be refined with even more deadly impact.

It should be noted that this wanton state terrorism by British forces was taking place in a part of the United Kingdom, where there was supposedly the rule of law, human rights and due process.”

 

Bloody Sunday Massacre, Derry, Ireland, 1972

Bloody Sunday Massacre, Derry, Ireland, 1972

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The McGurk Bar Massacre – British Bombers In Irish Cities

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13 year-old Irish child James Cromie murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in the McGurk Bar Bombing, Belfast, Ireland, 1971

13 year-old Irish child James Cromie murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in the McGurk Bar Bombing, Belfast, Ireland, 1971

Two reviews of the ground-breaking investigative book “The McGurk’s Bar Bombing: Collusion, Cover-Up and a Campaign for Truth” by the Irish author and campaigner Ciarán Mac Airt. The first is from the news and current affairs blog Its A Political World and the second is from the journalist and screenwriter Viv Young in The New York Journal of Books.

For more on the McGurk Massacre and the campaign of terrorist bombings carried out in Ireland by the British military and intelligence services and their paramilitary allies in the 1970s please see here.

Please Tweet at #deathsquadbritain

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Counter-Gangs – The Origins Of British Terrorism In Ireland

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12 year old Maria McGurk, murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in 1971 at McGurk's Bar, Belfast, Ireland. Another victim of Britain's dirty war in Ireland.

12 year old Maria McGurk, murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in 1971 at McGurk’s Bar, Belfast, Ireland. Another victim of Britain’s dirty war in Ireland.

I’ve devoted considerable space on An Sionnach Fionn to cataloguing Britain’s dirty war in Ireland highlighting a wide range of evidence gathered over the last forty years by human rights organisations, journalists and historians. Now the independent news and current affairs site Spinwatch has worked with the Pat Finucane Centre to publish a new study, “COUNTER-GANGS: A history of undercover military units in Northern Ireland 1971-1976“, a comprehensive investigation into the origins of British state-terrorism in Ireland.

The author of COUNTER-GANGS is Margaret Urwin, the secretary of Justice for the Forgotten, a branch of the Pat Finucane Centre which works with victims of Britain’s bombing campaigns in Ireland during the 1970s. Her report is based on years of work including interviews with former members of the British military and intelligence services and extensive documentary research. The publication presents evidence proving:

  • that senior British Army officers stationed in the North of Ireland during the early years of the conflict developed close contacts with various British terrorist factions in Ireland as part of a wider counter-insurgency war against the Irish Republican Army and Irish civilian population in general.
  • that the British Army created a special forces intelligence group, the Military Reaction Forces (MRF), in late 1971 and that the public exposure of the MRF as a death squad led to their replacement a year later by a larger organisation: the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU).
  • that the SRU relied heavily on members of the Special Air Service (SAS) for special forces manpower. Successive British governments went to enormous lengths to conceal this fact from the British parliament and media, denying the role of SAS death squads in Ireland.
  • that deliberately misleading information about British special forces and intelligence units in Ireland was fed to the British and international press as part of a black propaganda campaign. One resulting media story included information that would have enabled the Irish Republican Army to identify Louis Hammond as an MRF agent in their ranks. Hammond was shot shortly afterwards.

The report is the first of the State Violence and Collusion Project, an online research collaboration between SpinWatch and the Pat Finucane Centre, established with funding from the respected British-based Scurrah Wainwright Charity.

For more information please download the free PDF booklet “COUNTER-GANGS: A history of undercover military units in Northern Ireland 1971-1976” (verified virus-free). I also recommend the use of the independent wiki Power Base for more to the background of Britain’s thirty-year war in Ireland.

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The Ballot-Box And Petrol-Bomb – Unionism In Action

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Irish communities under British siege - the Short Strand, Belfast, Ireland 2013

Irish communities under British siege – the Short Strand, Belfast, Ireland 2013

The best of British – in Ireland.

“Northern Ireland” 48% Protestant, 47% British – So Why Is Ireland Still Partitioned?

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Jamie Bryson, a very public voice of the Ulster People's Forum and the flag protests marching in a quasi-military band (Photo: Ulster Band Scene)

Jamie Bryson, a very public voice of the Ulster People’s Forum and the flag protests marching in a quasi-military band (Photo: Ulster Band Scene)

Several weeks ago the elected members of Belfast City Council voted by a majority to end the year-round flying of the British national flag from the rooftop of the city hall. Councillors agreed instead to reduce the number of days the flag was flown to certain “designated days”; essentially those periods during the year held to be of special significance to the British Unionist minority in the city (for instance the “official” birthday of Britain’s monarch). However the reaction from the more extreme elements of the British separatist population across the North of Ireland was one of outrage and fury at this “compromise” with the political representatives of Belfast’s Irish Nationalist majority.

In answer to the calls by Unionist political and community leaders to defy the decision street demonstrations and rioting have been combined with attacks on perceived symbols of Irishness in the north-east of the country (Roman Catholic churches, non-state schools as well as sports and community centres belonging to the GAA). Dozens of people have been injured so far, and at least two attempts to murder have been carried out by British terrorist groups (in particular by the UVF, a terror organisation which was formerly part of Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland during the long struggle with the Irish Republican Army that preceded the Peace process of the late 1990s and early 2000s).

Now mainstream Unionist politicians, which have traditionally made common cause with their compatriots on the militant edge of Unionism (including the terrorist factions), are finding that they have released forces over which they can exercise scant control. In a strange repetition of the early and middle 1960s when the conservative one-party Unionist regime found itself challenged by more extreme Unionist demagogues from below, a new wave of would-be leaders are emerging from within the British separatist minority in the north-east of Ireland. Many are linked to movements which combine militant Protestant fundamentalism with extreme British nationalism under the guise of a shared British colonial identity or “heritage” on the island of Ireland. A colonial heritage much of which is built upon a hatred or contempt for all things Irish.

Census of “Northern Ireland” 2011, Aggregate Nationalities, Irish, Northern Irish, British

Census of “Northern Ireland” 2011, Aggregate Nationalities, Irish, Northern Irish, British

In two recent articles I have pointed out that the so-called “flag protests” in the north of the country by militant demonstrators from within the breakaway British Unionist community have very little to do with the issue of the flag flown from the top of Belfast City Hall. Instead they are simply symbolic of wider changes in the last remnant of the British colony on the island of Ireland. Where once a local British and Protestant ethno-national majority existed, and indeed upon which basis the nation of Ireland was forcefully partitioned and the statelet of “Northern Ireland” created, we instead have a nearer balance of British and Irish nationalities. The excuse for the establishment and continued existence of “Northern Ireland”, in British and Unionist eyes, can no longer be said to have any great force.

In 2011 some 47.74% of the population in the North of Ireland described themselves as “British” while 48.36% described themselves as belonging to a Protestant denomination. This means that at the start of the 21st century those who self-identify as British and Protestant are no longer in a regional majority in the north-east of Ireland and so goes the very reason for the existence of “Northern Ireland” as argued at the start of the 20th century.

Fear Manach – Fermanagh – the irrelevance of “partition” and the end of “Northern Ireland”

It is the change in population, evolving demographics, that is the cause of the renewed ”troubles” in the North. And the separatist British Unionist minority can see it all around them. Bangordub links to an article featured on his blog which highlights this. From the Unionist-leaning Impartial Reporter newspaper:

“AN Ulster Unionist assembly member has claimed protestant employees of Fermanagh District Council are fearing “verbal and physical abuse” over the use of the Irish language on Council-owned vehicles.

But the chief executive of Fermanagh District Council, Brendan Hegarty, says he is “not aware” of any employees raising concerns, despite what Tom Elliott is claiming.

Mr Elliott is angry that the policy, passed by the Council in June of last year to include Irish graphics on the passenger’s side and the back of its electric vehicles, was not ‘vetted’ by the equality commission first and “bemused” by the Council’s decision not to carry out an equality impact assessment before implementing it.

The politician says he has received complaints about the matter from members of the public and Fermanagh District Council employees.

He wrote: “Members of the public have indicated that while they do not want to have [the] Irish language on the Council vehicles, if that is to happen then there should be equality by also having other languages, including Ulster Scots. I also have a complaint from a member of the Polish Community living in Fermanagh who is complaining that there is no equality in the policy for him as he has a very limited knowledge of English and no knowledge of Irish.”

The pathetic nature of Unionist bigotry is plain to see in the reaction of Tom Elliot, a recent leader of the UUP or the second largest Unionist political party on the island of Ireland. A bigotry that is based upon a British colonial heritage on the island of Ireland that is so imbued with anti-Irish sentiment that it would rather, apparently, see any language on public signage in the statelet of “Northern Ireland” than the indigenous language of the country it exists in.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bangordub for pointing out the typo on what was originally the “Impartial Informer newspaper” ;-)

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Fantasy Troubles Part 4

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British Military Intelligence FRU member Ian Hurst - Martin Ingram circled in white, British Occupied North of Ireland, c. 1980s

British Military Intelligence FRU member Ian Hurst – Martin Ingram circled in white, British Occupied North of Ireland, c. 1980s

In the aftermath of the publication of the de Silva report into the assassination of the Irish civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane by terrorists from the British-run UDA the journalist and author Paul Larkin has an excellent summing up on his blog of the career of the British “super-spy” Ian Hurst (also known by his media nom de plume, Martin Ingram). Over the last decade Hurst has been at the centre of a flurry of stories in the UK media claiming that he and other members of the British Army’s Force Research Unit (or FRU) played a crucial role in bringing an end to the armed struggle of the Irish Republican Army by successfully placing high-level spies and double-agents within the IRA’s command and control structure. In this James Bond fantasy, which has been seized upon by certain sections of the British press eager to present a historic compromise with the forces of Irish Republicanism as a victory, Britain defeated the IRA through the superior guile and cunning of the English mind over that of its Irish rival.

Even if it took thirty years to do so.

From Larkin’s Cic Saor:

“With the de Silva report, Ian Hurst reaches the end of the credibility road – what about his media backers?

Tucked away in Chapter 21 of the de Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane is this devastating statement regarding Ian Hurst’s testimony:

“I do not attach any weight to his allegations with respect to the FRU and the murder of Mr Finucane.” 

Chapter 21 as a whole, which deals with FRU agent and loyalist killer Brian Nelson’s role in the murder of Pat Finucane, can be read here

Anyone who reads this chapter will see that Ian Hurst’s credibility as a reliable witness and commentator on the Troubles is demolished once and for all.

This comes on top of the Saville Inquiry (Bloody Sunday report) and its total dismissal of Hurst’s evidence (also referred to by De Silva in this chapter). Here again is how Saville politely described Hurst as a dissembler:

147.270 – We are of the view that Martin Ingram to a substantial degree exaggerated the importance of his role at HQNI and his level of knowledge and access to intelligence.

Now how is it that none of the above has been reported in any newspaper or media outlet?

Those same media sources (the Sunday Times and the Guardian in particular), which have reported Ian Hurst’s spurious claims from 1999 onwards suddenly fall silent when presented with this devastating demolition of their FRU spook of choice. Moreover, the latter part of what is allegedly the definitive book on the IRA written by Ed Moloney also uses Hurst as a key source.

There are also huge questions now for the current Smithwick Tribunal, because much of the reason for its existence stems from Ian Hurst’s claims that there were British spies everywhere who were controlling all aspects of the guerrilla war in Ireland.

So perhaps now we can start asking the question about Ian Hurst that no journalist, astonishingly, has ever asked – what exactly did Ian Hurst do as a FRU agent in the only period when he was actually an agent handler?

I can answer at least part of that question.

Ian Hurst was never in the FRU in Belfast, but he did serve in Fermanagh from the end of 1987 to the early 1990s and was part of the FRU team that sought to “facilitate” dissident republicans in their attempts to source weaponry via the likes of veteran republican Joe O’Neill in Bundoran. It should be stressed that Joe O’Neill has stated that he was unaware that he was being used as a “proxy” in this way and that he had no intention of importing arms from places like America or Canada.

How do I know about illegal FRU activities in Fermanagh, Sligo and South Donegal? Because I made a film for BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight programme about that very issue, though we were unaware that it was the FRU we were dealing with at the time. We also know that the FRU/Joint Services Group of British Military Intelligence attempted exactly the same psyops scam (and targeting exactly the same dissident groups), with MI5 agent David Rupert in the run up to the horrendous Omagh bomb in 1998.”

This, of course, is far closer to the truth about Ian Hurst’s “military career” than many of his British media fans would allow. Hurst himself has issued so many versions of his claims about the FRU’s (undoubtedly murderous) actions in Ireland that he frequently finds himself slipping into self-contradictions. In 2006 he claimed that one in every twenty IRA Volunteers (soldiers) was a British spy, while “higher up” it was one in every three. Yet by 2011 he was claiming that it was one in every four Volunteers, while one in every two senior officers was an agent of Britain.

All of which stands in stark contrast to the genuine analysis by British Intelligence of its war efforts as detailed in the de Silva report where the British express frustration at their inability to penetrate the Irish Republican Army’s ranks. This is stated without dispute in a confidential note from the head of MI5′s operational section in Ireland, one of the most senior British Intelligence people in the struggle against the IRA, to his bosses in London. It dates from the late 1980s:

“15.19: …recruitment of PIRA players has proved impossible”

However, in contrast, the official de Silva report states that:

“11.5:…the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), which sought to murder members of the security forces, was at times able to cultivate and maintain a limited number of sources working for the security forces in some capacity.”

So much for super-spies and informers.

UPDATE: Veteran Irish journalist Ed Moloney and Bob Mitchell present the origins of the Force Research Unit on the blog, The Broken Elbow.

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Death Squad Britain

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12 year old Maria McGurk, murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in 1971 at McGurk's Bar, Belfast, Ireland. Another victim of Britain's dirty war in Ireland.

12 year old Maria McGurk, murdered by British state-controlled terrorists in 1971 at McGurk’s Bar, Belfast, Ireland. Another victim of Britain’s dirty war in Ireland.

Two weeks ago the British prime minister, David Cameron, apologised in the UK parliament on behalf of the British nation for the assassination of the Irish civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane by gunmen from the UDA-UFF, a British terrorist organisation in the North of Ireland under the control of Britain’s paramilitary, military and intelligence services.

An official report into Pat Finucane’s murder by the former UN war crimes’ investigator Desmond de Silva, released the same day, catalogued the contributions made by various terrorist factions from the British Unionist minority in the north-east of Ireland to Britain’s counter-insurgency war against the Irish Republican Army and the Irish population in general, north and south of the border. In particular the report focused on the relationship between the terror gangs and the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the notorious British paramilitary police force disbanded by Britain as part of the Irish peace process, British Military Intelligence and its various secret armies (including the infamous Force Research Unit or FRU), as well as the British Security Service or MI5.

In one day some four decades worth of accusations and claims by politicians, lawyers, journalists, historians and human rights activists from Ireland, Britain, Europe and the United States were given vindication. There was now a de facto acknowledgement by the London authorities that Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland consisted of a military strategy based upon state-terrorism, by and on behalf of the state, which traced its roots to the very start of the conflict. Since the publication of de Silva’s report, despite the hostility, resentment or indifference of some in the British media, many other stories from Britain’s “Dirty War” in Ireland have come back under the spotlight or started to leak out.

In an unusual move, and perhaps indicative of how much the recent revelations have shook the British establishment, the deeply conservative and jingoistic right-wing British newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, has a feature story on the earliest of Britain’s modern secret armies in Ireland, the Military Reaction Force (or MRF). In the early 1970s this band of out-of-uniform soldiers terrorised Irish Nationalist communities in the North of Ireland, in particular the city of Belfast, carrying out or organising random drive-by shootings of civilians, murders, kidnappings and bombings.

McGurk's Bar in Belfast on the 4th of December 1971, destroyed by a bomb that left dozens dead and wounded which was placed by British terrorists controlled by British Military Intelligence

McGurk’s Bar in Belfast on the 4th of December 1971, destroyed by a bomb that left dozens dead and wounded which was placed by British terrorists controlled by British Military Intelligence

In its most infamous operation the MRF arranged for terrorists from the British UVF to attack McGurk’s Bar in Belfast on the 4th of December 1971 with a parcel bomb that demolished the building killing fifteen, including 12 year old Maria McGurk, and wounding seventeen others. In the aftermath of the atrocity the British Forces used the excuse of “follow-up operations” to swamp local neighbourhoods with troops and paramilitary police who carried out destructive house-raids and multiple arrests or detentions.

Now the Mail has one of the MRF’s members apparently speaking on record:

“A former British soldier who belonged to an undercover unit in Northern Ireland has claimed he and his colleagues resorted to ‘murder and mayhem’ during a secret campaign against the IRA.

Simon Cursey was a member of a 30-man team which would ‘shoot first and ask questions later’.

Cursey says these shootings were carried out by the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a clandestine Army team sent into Republican neighbourhoods to eliminate IRA gunmen.

His accounts are being studied by detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Historical Enquiries Team (HET), which was set up to re-examine suspicious deaths over  the course of ‘The Troubles’. More than 2,260 cases are on its books.

Cursey’s devastating disclosures include the claim that he never once cautioned a terror suspect or fired a warning shot before himself engaging with lethal force. He said he and his colleagues shot at least 20 men, though he could not say how many died.

‘The Rules of Engagement in Northern Ireland were very clear: you were only allowed to open fire at a person actively shooting at you or someone you are with. Also, you could open fire at someone aiming a weapon but who hadn’t fired yet. We had our own slight variation on these rules. We opened fire at any small group in hard areas, neighbourhoods that even looked suspicious, armed or not – it didn’t matter. We targeted specific groups that were always up to no good. These types were sympathisers and supporters, assisting the IRA movement.

‘As far as we were concerned they were guilty by association and party to terrorist activities, leaving themselves wide open to the ultimate punishment from us. If someone was picked up and it was discovered that they were illegally armed, or that they were on our “special” wanted list of IRA killers, they could be dealt with right there in the countryside: neutralised.’”

In other words the MRF was a British military death squad. Its purpose was simply to cause murder and mayhem in the Irish communities of the north-east that continued to live under the British Occupation by killing innocent and “guilty” alike. However the MRF’s reckless nature eventually brought about its own downfall and it’s operations were uncovered by the Intelligence Unit of the Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army in mid-to-late 1972. After extensive surveillance units of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Belfast Brigade attacked soldiers of the MRF at two different locations in the city on the 2nd of October 1972, killing or wounding several and causing panic in the British Army as intelligence operations over the following weeks effectively collapsed.

By early 1973 the now discredited MRF was disbanded but its tactics, techniques and most of its personnel went on to become part of the Special Reconnaissance Unit (or the SRU though it was also known by the cover name of the 14th Intelligence Company) and the Force Research Unit (FRU). All of them contributed to the evolving culture of Death Squad Britain.

Tweet at #deathsquadbritain

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People Power – Taking Back The North

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Census of “Northern Ireland” 2011, Aggregate Nationalities, Irish, Northern Irish, British

Census of “Northern Ireland” 2011, Aggregate Nationalities, Irish, Northern Irish, British

Sometimes the sheer two-faced hypocrisy of the average Unionist media sympathiser leaves one dumbfounded. And none more so than the ever-so flexible opinions of the Neo-Unionist apologist-writer Ruth Dudley-Edwards. As a “commentator” Dudley-Edwards has spent decades excoriating Irish Nationalism and Republicanism throughout the British and Irish media with repetitive allegations of tribalism, sectarianism, fascism and half-a-dozen other –isms. Yet a phrase frequently comes to mind when viewing her opinions: “…considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Her latest propagandist nonsense on behalf of the British Unionist minority in Ireland follows weeks of violent protests in relation to the decision by Belfast City Council to restrict the number of days the British flag flies from the roof of the city hall to periods deemed to be of special significance to the Unionist minority in the city. A compromise readily agreed to by Irish Nationalist and liberal Unionist councillors following precedents established elsewhere across the north-east of Ireland (including the northern regional legislature at Stormont where sits all the main Nationalist and Unionist parties).

Most intelligent observers know full well that the rioting and threats by extremists from the Unionist minority following the vote have nothing to do with the actual flying of the British national flag from Belfast City Hall. The issue goes far beyond that. For two centuries and more the city of Belfast was at the heart of “British Ulster”. It was a colonial city in a British colonial plantation, the most thorough and long-lasting such plantation in Ireland. Nowhere else, outside of Dublin, did British rule in Ireland grow such deep and pernicious roots. Yet the city of Dublin and its colonial hinterland (the Pale) fell to Irish Nationalism over a century ago through the political, cultural and economic changes that stemmed from changing demographics in the region (principally as a result of An Gorta Mór or the Great Famine of the mid-1800s and the influx of monolingual or bilingual Irish-speakers from the rural heartlands of north Leinster, south Ulster and Connacht).

Over the last twenty years a similar phenomenon has been observable in the North of Ireland, the last remnant of the British colony on the island of Ireland. As those with an Irish identity have grown in number those with a British identity have retreated into a tighter and tighter cluster of communities centred around the east coast and the city of Belfast in particular. Yet that city has seen its own growth from within as the dominant Unionist majority has been supplanted by a narrow Nationalist majority, the vote by the city council reflecting that sea-change in population and allegiances.

That is the real story behind the flags’ issue. The “rivalry” between two national communities in the north-east of the country and the slow move towards demographic equilibrium. Rather than dam the Nationalist tide through the Peace Process and Belfast Agreement, which all-but ended forty years of military struggle, if anything the new power-sharing arrangements have accelerated the changes. The Irish Nationalist community, however one defines it, is in the ascendant across the greater part of the north-east of Ireland, in the process making many of the old statistical justifications for the British-imposed partition of the island irrelevant. If the country was to be partitioned today in order to appease the violence of the British minority on the island of Ireland, that minority would find itself retreating into a redoubt consisting of slivers of land taken from north Down, north-east Armagh, south and west Antrim, and eastern Derry. Belfast would find itself a candidate to become the new “West and East Berlin” of Europe; a city divided between the two nation-states of Ireland and the UK.

It is this dawning reality that is driving Unionism, giving it the new impetuous and purpose that sympathisers like Dudley-Edwards crave.

It’s not about a flag – it’s the demographics, stupid.

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Named And Shamed – The Faces Of Britain’s Death Squads In Ireland

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The Cairo Gang - Britain's notorious death squad in Ireland during the War of Independence, c.1920

The Cairo Gang – Britain’s notorious death squad in Ireland during the War of Independence, c.1920

Gunmen from the Force Research Unit (FRU), Britain's notorious death squad in Ireland during the Northern War, pose with their weapons, 1980s

Gunmen from the Force Research Unit (FRU), Britain’s notorious death squad in Ireland during the Northern War, pose with their weapons, 1980s

Following the report by the former UN war crimes investigator, Sir Desmond da Silva, into the 1989 assassination of the Irish human rights lawyer Pat Finucane by British terrorists under the control of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the former British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland, a greater focus in now on those behind Britain’s “Dirty War” in Ireland.

The veteran Irish journalist Ed Moloney, with his colleague Bob Mitchell, has presented over on his blog, The Broken Elbow, a fascinating analysis of Britain’s intelligence struggle in Ireland by placing it in the historical context of the 1919-1923 Irish War of Independence and the 1966-2007 Northern War. In the lengthy article the two writers tie together all the known information about Britain’s secret armies in Ireland, notably the notorious Force Research Unit (or FRU), and names and shames several leading members. He also highlights some startling links between the FRU and a previous generation of British spies and assassins in Ireland, the so-called “Cairo Gang” who operated in 1920s’ Dublin during the height of the Irish Revolution.

The Force Research Unit (FRU) - Britain's notorious death squad in Ireland during the Northern War, c.1982

The Force Research Unit (FRU) – Britain’s notorious death squad in Ireland during the Northern War, c.1982

Britain's death squads in Ireland - will justice ever catch up with the killers?

Britain’s death squads in Ireland – will justice ever catch up with the killers?

 

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Pat Finucane – A Victim Of Britain’s State-Sponsored Terrorism In Ireland

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A memorial to Pat Finucane, the Irish human rights lawyer assassinated by British state-sponsored terrorists in the Occupied North of Ireland, 1989

A memorial to Pat Finucane, the Irish human rights lawyer assassinated by British state-sponsored terrorists in the Occupied North of Ireland, 1989

On the 12th of Februaray 1989 the respected Irish civil rights lawyer Pat Finucane was sitting down to a Sunday dinner in his north Belfast home with his wife Geraldine and their three young children. Pat was a northern Roman Catholic from a large working-class Nationalist family and Geraldine a northern Protestant from a middle-class Unionist background both of whom had met and fallen in love while attending Trinity College in Dublin. Suddenly there was a hammering at the front door of the house as two masked gunmen used a sledge-hammer to smash their way in. Both men were members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (or UFF), the largest British state-sponsored terrorist group in Ireland which operated under the legal cover of a militant Unionist group known as the UDA which the British government refused to declare illegal until 1992, two decades after it began a campaign of terrorism against the Irish people.

Pat and his wife rose from the table but as he stepped into the doorway of the kitchen a series of loud bangs rang out. The impact of two bullets striking his torso slammed the 39 year old father of three back into the room and he dropped helpless to the floor as Geraldine, also wounded, fell into an adjacent corner of the kitchen. As the screaming children, two boys and a girl, scrambled under the table to hide themselves the British terrorists rushed forward firing a total of twelve rounds into Pat’s face at almost point blank range from a Browning 9mm automatic pistol taken or supplied by the British Army, rendering his head virtually unrecognisable. The gunmen then ran from the house leaving the slain lawyer, his injured wife and traumatised children behind lying in a pool of blood and gun smoke.

Within hours of Pat Finucane’s death political and media circles in Belfast and Dublin were awash with rumours and accusations of British state involvement. The speedy declaration by the UFF that they had murdered the lawyer simply added to the rumour-mill, as the terror-gang’s role in Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland was common knowledge. Soon the lengthy record of death threats against Pat by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the notorious paramilitary police force the British government later agreed to disband as part of the Peace Process, became known.

After years of high-profile scandals the pressure from human rights groups (including Amnesty International), the government of Ireland, the United States’ Congress and other International partners, forced the British state in 2001 to arrest and try a suspect for the killing, one William Stobie. This former British soldier was already known to be a UFF armourer and supplier of weapons but he was also revealed as an agent of the RUC liaising within the UFF on their behalf. His eventual trial for participating in Pat Finucane’s murder collapsed in chaos and embittered by the process he pledged to publicly name the RUC police officers behind the UFF terror campaign. Within months he was dead, shot down outside his home in December of 2011 before he could give any further details. Various British terrorist factions claimed credit for his assassination though many questioned the true identity of his killers.

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

In contrast a second man suspected of involvement in the killing, the infamous British terrorist Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair, managed to escape arrest for the murder despite evidence of his participation. Adair, a former skinhead and Neo-Nazi who boasted of deriving sexual pleasure from killing Irish men and women, fled to Britain in 2003 as his opposition to the Peace Process and push to control the lucrative drugs trade in the north-east of Ireland led to internecine warfare amongst the British terror gangs. There he became a close associate of a number of Far Right extremists, including leaders of the National Front, Combat 18 and the BNP. However before his exile a British government investigation by the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens revealed that Adair had become close friends in the 1990s with the then head of British Army Intelligence in the North of Ireland. Through this relationship British Intelligence officers passed on dozens of files to the Unionist death squads, as well as weapons and financial ”assistance”. For many years after fleeing Ireland, despite no employment or visible means of income, Adair and his family continued to live in relative affluence and safety in Britain.

A third suspect, Ken Barrett, was arrested and charged in 2004 for the murder of Pat, some fifteen years after the assassination. However the PR disaster for the British state deepened when it was revealed that Barrett was a former RUC police officer and another serving agent of the RUC in the UFF terror group. His previous open boasts to the media of having been directed and assisted by the paramilitary police in the murder only added to the British government’s woes. In 2006, after serving just two years of a 22 year sentence for Pat’s murder, Barrett was released from prison in the North of Ireland and immediately travelled to an unknown destination in Britain.

But now it seems that one of the darker episodes of Britain’s “Dirty War” is being brought a little further into the light after a bilateral agreement between Ireland and Britain forced the British government to initiate and publicise the findings of a new report by an internal investigative panel led by Sir Desmond de Silva, a former United Nations’ war crimes investigator.

Though, as will be seen, the report still manages to conceal more than it reveals.

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970

The key conclusions include the following acknowledgements:

  • There was a continuous supply of information from the British state to the British terrorist groups in the North of Ireland over a period of many years. In fact, concludes the report, by the mid-1980s up to 85% of all intelligence information gathered by the UFF / UDA alone was supplied to them by the RUC, British Army and the British Security Service (MI5).
  • The British authorities took no action in relation to numerous intelligence reports which outlined a number of future terrorist attacks by the Unionist gangs, with the paramilitary police and Intelligence services ignoring or concealing such information.
  • British agents employed or working on behalf of the RUC, British Army and MI5 played “key roles” and actively “furthered and facilitated” the murder of Pat Finucane and others.
  • Following the murder there were no attempts by the RUC or British authorities for a long period of time to investigate or arrest known suspects belonging to the UFF / UDA for their participation in the assassination.
  • Serving or former members of the RUC, British Army and MI5 Army persistently lied or attempted to deceive investigators. Several senior British Army officers provided  highly misleading and inaccurate information.

From RTÉ:

“A review into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989 has found that actions by employees of the British state “actively facilitated” the killing.

Mr Finucane was shot dead by loyalists [British terrorists] in front of his wife and children in February 1989.The report by Desmond de Silva concluded that there was no “adequate framework” for the police and security forces running agents in loyalist and republican gangs.

Mr de Silva said people whom the RUC Special Branch viewed as “thorns in the side” were not warned when threats were made against them.

It found that the British army and Special Branch had advance notice of a series of planned UDA [UFF] assassinations, but nothing was done.

Mr de Silva found that employees of the state and stage agents played “key roles” in Mr Finucane’s murder.

Mr de Silva said “agents of the state were involved in carrying out serious violations of human rights up to and including murder”.

He wrote that while there was no “over-arching state conspiracy to murder Patrick Finucane,” there was collusion in his killing in terms of the passage of information from members of the security forces to the UDA, the failure to act on threat intelligence, the participation of state agents in the murder and the subsequent failure to investigate and arrest key members of the West Belfast UDA.

The publication of a report provides “the fullest possible account of the murder of Mr Finucane and the extent of state collusion”, British Prime Minister David Cameron said.

He added: “It cannot be argued that these were rogue agents.”He said the degree of collusion exposed was “unacceptable” and said in a message to the family: “I am deeply sorry.” Last Sunday, RTÉ News published details of a 2003 inquiry which showed the RUC had recovered the murder weapon and gave it back to the British army to facilitate its destruction.”

The government of Ireland, whose constitutional duty is to protect the life and property of the citizens of Ireland, has pledged to push for a full independent and international enquiry into the assassination, as also outlined by RTÉ:

“Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has told the Dáil that the Government will continue to call for a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane.

Mr Gilmore said that Mr Finucane’s widow Geraldine has worked tirelessly on uncovering the truth in her husband’s murder.

The Tánaiste said British Prime Minister David Cameron had shown determination to get to the truth and that his apology to Mrs Finucane followed on from his apology in the wake of the Lord Saville Inquiry.

He gave credit to the acknowledgement by Mr Cameron of the systematic failures in the murder inquiry.

He said that an inquiry need not be open-ended but could be done in a timely fashion.

The Finucane family have said “the dirt has been swept under the carpet” and described today’s report as a sham and a whitewash.

The family said the worst thing about the Desmond de Silva report is that it is a “suppression of the truth”.

The family again called for a public inquiry, and said the case was the “most controversial”, demonstrated the most state collusion and was a case the British “state had most to hide”.

PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott is to discuss the de Silva report with the Police Ombudsman and the Public Prosecution Service to see if more people should be held to account for the murder of the solicitor.

He said: “The murder should never have happened. There was a catalogue of failure which needs to be assessed to see if people should be held accountable.”

In a statement, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the de Silva report and David Cameron’s statement acknowledge the “shocking extent of state collusion in the murder of Pat Finucane and the efforts to subvert and frustrate subsequent investigations into that murder”.

He welcomed Mr Cameron’s “clear condemnation of the nature and scale of collusion, and his firm public apology to Geraldine Finucane and her family for all they have endured”.

He continued: “I note that the Prime Minister has indicated that various authorities in Britain and in Northern Ireland are expected to consider the report.”The murder of Pat Finucane was one of a number of cases which gave rise to allegations of collusion by the security forces.

It is a matter of public record that the Irish Government disagrees strongly with the decision by the British government last year not to conduct a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane.

Mr Kenny said the Government’s position “has consistently been in accordance with the all-party motion adopted in the Dáil in 2006 which called for a full, independent, public enquiry, as recommended by Judge Cory.”That position is unchanged”, he said.

He said the Government has also supported the Finucane family in their efforts “to ascertain the full extent of collusion behind Pat Finucane’s murder and the subsequent investigations”.

Mr Kenny said he spoke with Mr Cameron this morning before the House of Commons statement, and repeated these points to him once again.

He said he had also spoken to Mrs Finucane today, adding that he knows the family are not satisfied with today’s outcome.”

Of course, despite all the evidence presented, some people are still prepared, eager even, to defend or excuse away the murder of an Irish citizen and a member of the Irish legal profession. Can there be anything more degenerate than the perverse views of the Neo-Unionist apologist historian Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Telegraph?

“…let’s bust the myth that Finucane was a human-rights lawyer.  A human-rights lawyer is someone who disinterestedly protects people from abuse by the state or by terrorists.  Pat Finucane didn’t do that.  He was an IRA lawyer who worked for terrorists against the interests of justice.

The early 1970s in Northern Ireland were terrible times that pushed towards violence many who in a normal world would have led peaceful lives.  Finucane was one of those.  Although Northern Irish, at the expense of the British taxpayer, he studied law at Trinity College, Dublin.

After his death he was canonised by republican propagandists and turned retrospectively into a human-rights lawyer.  It turns my stomach that this man was murdered, that members of the security forces colluded with it and that the murder was carried out in front of his family.   But journalists and commentators should not carelessly adopt the language of propagandists.  Finucane was a lawyer who was a faithful servant of a terrorist group that carried out in his lifetime many hundreds of vicious murders that he himself condoned.

The British state has admitted its wrongdoing.  It’s time to close the book on Pat Finucane.”

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Continuity IRA Prisoners End Dirty Protest In Maghaberry

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Volunteers of the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) in South Armagh, British Occupied North of Ireland, 2006

Volunteers of the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) in South Armagh, British Occupied North of Ireland, 2006

Last week a significant number of the Irish political prisoners in the now notorious British-run Maghaberry Prison in the Occupied North of Ireland announced an end to their long-running “dirty protest”, a campaign to highlight the inhumane conditions they were being kept in. The prisoners were members of the Real Irish Republican Army or other unaligned Republican groups but are now attached to the “new” IRA, an amalgamation of several Republican Resistance organisations including the Real IRA and DAAD announced in July.

Speculation that the prisoners belonging to the Continuity Irish Republican Army, held on landing three of Roe House (or Roe 3) within the Maghaberry complex, would follow suit was confirmed with an announcement on Sunday:

“Statement from Continuity IRA POWs, Roe 3, Maghaberry Jail, Co Antrim:

After a long period of deliberation, it has been decided that we the Continuity Irish Republican Army POWs will suspend our current phase of protest from Monday November 26, 2012 in order to give the prison regime another opportunity to acknowledge and implement the agreement all parties signed up to in August 2010.

As Republicans we undertook the agreement in good faith and committed to honour it, and as Republicans, at no time did we break our word. After a period of six months it became increasingly clear that in the tradition of Perfidious Albion the British Government had reneged on their word to implement that solution and so we resumed our protest.

Now after 18 months of this second phase of protest, we believe that we have shown the prison regime our resolve and determination to oppose conditions not befitting Republican Prisoners of War. We also believe we can afford them the opportunity at this juncture to implement the agreement.

It is our hope that with this magnanimous gesture the prison regime will now honour their word. As Republicans we will not shirk our responsibility and we believe that it is now necessary for us to take this lead in bringing the agreement to its conclusion.

Like our Comrades on Roe 4 [the “new” IRA POWs], we assert that the resolving of this conflict lies squarely at the feet of David Ford [the regional northern justice minister from the Unionist Alliance Party] and the British Government, despite Ford’s assertion to the contrary.

Failure on the part of the British Government to implement the August 2010 Agreement in full, will result in a re-emergence of conflict in the Jail.

To all who have supported us up to this point, we ask for your continued support. We salute all people across the world who have worked on our behalf. We thank our families and our friends and CABHAIR [the Irish POW support organisation] who have given us unswerving support and assistance.

Signed O/C [Officer Commanding] Maghaberry Prison.”

The statement from the CIRA prisoners came as speculation mounts over behind-the-scenes negotiations between representatives of the Republican Resistance movements and the regional northern and British authorities via a number of intermediaries including some acting on behalf of the Government of Ireland.

A Letter From John Paul Wootton

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John Paul Wootton, an Irish political prisoner in the British Occupied North of Ireland at the age of 17

John Paul Wootton is a twenty year old Irishman who was arrested on the 10th of March 2009 at the age of seventeen by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland. He was interrogated for two weeks by PSNI officers in the most appalling of circumstances following the killing of a fellow PSNI member, Steven Carroll, on the 9th of March 2009 by the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA). Despite his youth, concerns surrounding his arrest and three-year detention without trial  and his nationality as a citizen of Ireland, John Paul was tried under the infamous no-jury Diplock court system which the British state has used since 1973 as part of its counter-insurgency struggle in the North of Ireland.

“John Paul Wootton – Letter To All:

My name is John Paul Wootton and I am now twenty years of age and I have been imprisoned in Maghaberry Prison for the last three years, that is, from when I was 17 years of age.

On the 10th of March 2009, while still a teenager, I was arrested and interrogated for thirteen days in relation to the fatal shooting of Constable Steven Carroll in Craigavon on the 9th of March 2009. From the outset of this period of interrogation I made it clear that I neither knew nor had any part in this incident and indeed the duration of my interrogation was only ended when my legal representative took out a legal injunction.

On the 30th of March 2012, after a trial before a Diplock Court [one of the British counter-insurgency non-jury courts imposed on the North of Ireland], I was convicted and sentenced to a life-sentence for the killing of Constable Carroll on the basis of a tracking device that had been fitted to my car at some point and which allegedly placed me at the scene of the shooting. However, the device in question, which had been placed there by members of MI5 [the British Security Service], went missing for a period of time and when it was finally recovered portions of the data allegedly recorded on the device were missing! These ‘gaps’ were supposedly filled by an MI5 operative who gave his evidence at the trial anonymously from behind a screen and his explanation for the data going missing was that, ‘he had left it on his desk and someone had moved and then replaced it without his knowledge’!

Additional to the missing data, the examination of my car, during the period of the missing data, also produced a brown coat that had particles of gun powder residue on it. These particles did not match the rifle or ammunition recovered by the PSNI that was claimed by the prosecution to have been the weapon that fired the fatal shot which killed Constable Carroll. This coat, which was a central piece of evidence in the case, not only did not belong to me but it had no physical connection to me, that is, no traces of my DNA, fibres or fingerprints were found on the coat.

In short, there was no physical evidence presented to the trial that linked me to this shooting rather a process of speculation and hypothesis that turned the legal principle of innocence until proven guilty on its head was applied.

During the trial my legal team attempted to tease out the anomalies of this case to demonstrate the complete lack of evidence against me, however, at each attempt they were met with the barrier of ‘Public Interest Immunity Orders’ being sought and granted to the prosecution [a controversial British government mechanism to prevent “sensitive information” being examined in court cases]. As a result of this crucial lines of inquiry about the movements of my car and the particles on the coat were denied to my defence.

As a consequence of all of the above I have instructed my legal team to appeal the conviction against me on the grounds that I did not receive a fair trial for the following reasons:

  • I was refused the right to a trial by jury and instead I was tried by a single judge in a Diplock Court [a British non-jury counter-insurgency court].
  • This single judge in the absence of any physical evidence against me resorted to negative inference and opinion.
  • Evidence which may have assisted my defence or undermined the case against me was kept hidden from my legal team through the use of Public Interest Immunity Orders [the system of quasi-legal British government gagging orders].
  • Several witnesses were granted anonymity thereby preventing the defence from properly cross-examining them.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this short description of what has happened to me and I would ask you to do all that you can to highlight this miscarriage of justice in the hope that I will get the chance of a fair trial at my appeal.

Further information on the legal detail of this case and the summary of the original trial are also contained on this web site. Please feel free to use them to demonstrate the scale of the injustice involved or to contact my legal representatives with any enquiries.

Thank you,

John Paul Wootton.”

Whatever one’s views on the tragic death of PSNI member Stephen Carroll and the continued campaign of armed resistance to the British Occupation in the North of Ireland, there can be no doubt that the arrest, prolonged interrogation, trial and conviction of a young Irishman, a teenage boy when first detained, in the most dubious and controversial of circumstances is not the answer.

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“New” IRA Prisoners End Their Dirty Protest In Maghaberry Prison

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It’s been announced that a section of the Irish political prisoners engaged in a “Dirty Protest” in the notorious Maghaberry Prison near Lisburn in the Occupied North of Ireland are to end their campaign from today. According to media reports twenty-two prisoners who now form part of the “new” Irish Republican Army (a military coalition of the Real IRA, RAAD and some non-aligned Irish Republican guerrillas) called off their protests in a unilateral move designed to encourage new negotiations between their representatives and the regional northern and British authorities. All twenty-two prisoners are held in Landing Four of Roe House and a campaign has been running since May of 2011 in opposition to full body strip searches and other inhumane conditions by a majority of Republicans held in the prison. Since then the situation in Maghaberry has rapidly deteriorated culminating in the shooting dead of a prison guard, David Black, by Resistance Republicans. The northern justice minister, the Alliance Party’s David Ford, claims that no secret deals have been done to end the trouble. Which is hardly the first time we have heard that.

The following statement was issued by the twenty-two “Prisoners of War” in Maghaberry Prison aligned to the “new” Irish Republican Army:

“Following the signing of the August 2010 agreement with the Prison Service, Republican POWs continually attempted to resolve all outstanding issues. Despite the continued use of the brutal forced strip searches we regularly engaged with political parties and groups who showed an interest in bringing a resolution to the impasse.

This process of dialogue lasted nine months. The amount of time and effort put into this process cannot be over stated, unfortunately despite this lengthy engagement all we had to show were the injuries inflicted during these searches and beatings. The resumption of protest action became inevitable. On May 6th 2011 we commenced our current phase of protest action.

We are now into our 19th month of this phase of protest. Our resolve and commitment are unquestionable. As Republican POWs we are prepared to meet head on any attempt to reintroduce failed policies of the past. This should never have to be the case.

Following intense and detailed discussion and analysis, we, the Republican POWs on Roe 4 have decided on a unilateral initiative which we believe will provide the space required for a resolution of the current impasse.

As from Wednesday 21st November 2012 all Republican POWs on Roe 4 landing will cease our current protest action.

This initiative should be viewed as a genuine and sincere attempt to create the conditions in which a conflict free environment can flourish whereby all are treated with respect and dignity is guaranteed.

A dialectical process of engagement to resolve all issues should be the order of the day. Confrontation need not be part of the environment that we all have to live and work in.

Upon launching this initiative we call upon all those political parties and groups who profess to share our stated aim of a conflict free environment to immediately seize upon this initiative. We call upon you to use your political influence and position to bring about the progressive change that is required.

We call upon the prison service management at all levels to jettison the failed policies of the past and to move forward progressively.

Finally, to all who have campaigned on our behalf, we applaud your commitment and steadfastness and ask that you continue to highlight our plight.

For our part, we will not be found wanting in the task that lies ahead.

Republican POWs, Roe 4, Maghaberry.”

Interestingly Republican political prisoners elsewhere in Maghaberry Prison were by some accounts unaware of the new developments and remain on protest until their demands are met.

More here [Italian].

Irish Political Prisoners And The Revolutionary Dynamic

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Volunteers of the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) armed with AKM and AK-47 assault rifles, British Occupied North of Ireland, 2011

Well there is no surprise in this tragic news. In fact observers have been predicting something along these lines for several months now. According to the news media a member of the British-run Northern Ireland Prison Service was killed in an ambush in County Armagh. So far reports are pointing towards an operation by Resistance Republicans, partly on the basis of briefings by the PSNI, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland, who initially believed the incident was the result of a road accident.

From the Guardian newspaper:

“Dissident republicans are believed to have shot dead a Northern Ireland prison officer in a motorway ambush.

David Black, who had worked in the Northern Ireland Prison Service for more than 30 years and was nearing retirement, was shot dead on Thursday on the M1 between Lurgan and Portadown, in County Armargh.

In what has been described as an ambush, Black, from Cookstown, Co Tyrone, was killed after shots were fired into the car as he drove to work at the top security Maghaberry jail near Lisburn, Co Antrim, which holds several key republican dissident prisoners.

At first the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) thought the death was caused by a road crash and shut down the busy motorway shortly after 7.30am on Thursday.

When officers later examined the vehicle they realised that shots had been fired into his car, prompting it to go out of control and spin off the motorway at the M12 junction.

Both the Provisional IRA and the Irish National Liberation Army targeted and killed prison officers during the long disputes in the jails climaxing in the 1981 hunger strike.

At present, Maghaberry – Northern Ireland’s maximum security prison on the outskirts of Belfast – is the focal point for ongoing protests by Continuity IRA and other dissident republican inmates. There is also widespread anger among those republicans opposed to Sinn Féin’s peace strategy about the continued incarceration of the Old Bailey bomber and IRA veteran Marion Price in a prison hospital.”

Though some reports are linking the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) to the attack little evidence has been presented so far. In fact the vehicle registration of the car used in the ambush was a Dublin one (pointing towards the Real Irish Republican Army or RIRA) and operationally the CIRA remains crippled by internal disputes. However all that is an aside.

The real issue here is the ongoing protests by political prisoners in the North of Ireland and the slow descent into violence and anarchy now gripping the prisons in that part of the country, all of which have led to the unfortunate death of prison officer Black. Over the last year human rights’ activists, journalists, politicians and many others have repeatedly warned that the deteriorating situation in the prisons, specifically the now infamous Maghaberry Prison, were building up a head of steam that would inevitably lead to violence. With a significant number of prisoners being forced to engage in de facto “dirty protests” to highlight the brutality of their treatment and the deplorable conditions they are being kept in no one should or can be surprised by the tragic incident in Armagh.

Unfortunately the majority of the British media, along with much of its Irish counterpart, has resolutely ignored the prison protests in the North of Ireland, simply refusing to address or highlight what is going on. Instead it has been left to a legion of freelance journalists, bloggers, activists and a growing number of Irish and US politicians to highlight the growing trouble.

Despite the limited reform of policing through the disbandment of Britain’s former paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland, the notorious RUC, the Northern Ireland Prison Service has largely escaped rehabilitation. Some officers with long records of misconduct and brutality were retained right into the “Peace Process era” and a few continue to serve in the same roles for which they previously gained such infamy. Even the smallest attempts at reform have been met with stubborn resistance, with Peter Robinson, the DUP leader and Joint First Minster of the North, threatening to wreck the entire Peace Process at the mere mention of prison warders receiving new apolitical hat badges!

In fact the only genuine reform of the Prison Service since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 involved massive financial ”bribes” to encourage long serving officers into early retirement.

Gerry McGeough, Irish political prisoner interned in the British Occupied North of Ireland, with his wife and family before his detention

This institutionalised culture of violence towards political prisoners continues to operate within the Prison Service with only limited controls put in place to ameliorate it. Simply read this report by Emmet Doyle, published on the 22nd of October, both on his blog and on The Pensive Quill (and now reposted on many other sites). Doyle is a member of the SDLP, a political party that strongly disagrees with the tactics and strategy of the Resistance Republican movement, yet note his outrage and concern here:

“Last Thursday I again found myself in the bleak surroundings of Roe House, Maghaberry Prison. Pat Ramsey and I went to visit some of the men, including Gerry McGeough. I thought that the shell-chocking effect of the place had hit me hard my first few visits, and that I couldn’t be shocked any further. Boy was I mistaken.

Usually, we enter Roe at landing four, and enter the Recreation Room to meet individuals and groups. It is a much larger, cleaner and more modern space. Akin, strangely, to my old school canteen. Not this time. We were led by the SO upstairs, to Roe 3 as the Officers and external staff were cleaning the floor on Roe 4, as a result of the on-going protest, and given it was early in the morning, the stench was almost overpowering.

At the foot of the stairs were bags and bags of Acro – the organic absorbent compound used to soak up urine on the floors, which is then hoovered up. As we descended, the clean, modern façade of Roe began to fade away. What I can only describe as a total mess, was piled up outside a cleaners store just before the security gate. An iron, cables, it was like someone had fly-tipped in the middle of the hall. Granted, they were all on a shelf, which I could spot after about ten seconds of looking, but this is supposed to be a Category A facility where human beings were held, it was a total travesty.

At the top of the stairs and through the first door, we had to wait until the gate was opened by Officers clad in CSI-white overalls, walkie-talkies and batons. Once on the landing, we were led to the “classroom”. I use inverted commas, primarily because there is no way on earth the room we were led to could be said to be a classroom. Other than the electronic whiteboard on the wall and the whiteboard on the floor at the back of the room with Irish on it, the only other thing that was in the room was dirt.

The desks must have been brought in from Long Kesh, they were so old. The computers at the back of the room, though they looked relatively modern, were covered in cobwebs and debris. On the wall was a canvass picture – of a red telephone box and Big Ben – ironic, I thought.

We met Gerry first, as always in good spirits and friendly, despite the obvious hardship he has endured. We all spoke for about 40 minutes, then we met a few other men, all who raised issues about the primary issue coming out of Maghaberry at present – healthcare.

That is a conversation for another day. After the meetings had ended, we emerged from the cave which was deemed a classroom, and were once again on the landing, smell and spray [which has brought me out in a rash again this week] right in our faces. It was lunchtime, and the Officers set about going to give the men their plastic covered food.

Pat set off down the right side of Roe, seeking out two opened cells at the bottom of the wing – one cleaned, one dirty. I set out down the left side, seeking out the new machine that was being used below to clean the cells, which had been causing annoyance to both staff and prisoners as it was used in conjunction with a diesel generator, and the fumes in such an enclosed area were not pleasant.

I couldn’t get downstairs, but I asked one of the officers to go down and see if he could get me the name of the machine, its make, serial number, any markings on it. He re-appeared a few minutes later, but with no information. I wasn’t leaving without it.

Pat came back up the landing from one of the dirty cells, shaking his head. I had caught a glimpse of the cell on way down to see if I could get downstairs, and would be lying if I said I wasn’t physically afraid of going to look into it.

When we were ‘spun out’ of the landing [the process whereby one officer has to radio another officer in another part of the building to release the turnstiles to let us out] we went back downstairs, though locked back from the landing on Roe 4. I asked to see the SO, to get the information I had sought about this machine, while making notes about the cleaning products and absorbent material being used for the protest clean-up. Again, no joy.

Surprisingly, and I have to give credit where it is due – one of the external workers, about my age, came right up to the gate and asked what I was looking for – I repeated, the name, serial number, model of the new cleaner – and he came back a few minutes later with the information on a post-it.

As we left, escorted by an Officer to the exit of the compound, that feeling of not wanting to leave but impatient to get out of the harrowing building again visited me, and Pat also, as it always did. As we walked up the driveway towards the main gate, the follow-up plans flowed, as they always did, what was next to address the issues raised, which family members did we need to phone.

Let no-one tell you that the men there, and indeed all prisoners regardless of colour, creed or nationality have no-one standing up for them in the Assembly – because we left the Quakers after a near two-hour visit to Roe and after getting our first food of the day (and toilet break given we are not permitted to use facilities in the prison) and drove straight to Parliament Buildings to address what we could from there.

I know that eight or nine Deputies are to visit Roe within the coming weeks – something made possible by the changing of prison rules that we had worked on for months to allow TDs equal access to Northern prisons as MLAs and MPs have. That will be important for all in Roe – to know that honourable men and women North and South have not forgotten.

I’ll finish by saying the intense itching in the car to Stormont and the rash and boils underneath my beard following the visit as a result of the spray, have now ceased, but I don’t know how they do it.

Never forget.”

Gerry McGeough, Irish political prisoner interned in the British Occupied North of Ireland, pictured in a recent photo from the infamous Maghaberry Prison, Co. Antrim, Ireland

Or take this article written by a serving political prisoner, Alan Lundy, featured here:

“A Day In Maghaberry Prison

Its 27th September about 5 o’clock in the morning I am lying in my cell nervously thinking about the day ahead.

Today I am in court and with court comes the brutal, degrading and humiliating tactic of the forced strip search of Republican prisoners. This is not my first time being brought to court so I know what lies ahead. My heart beats faster and faster I can actually hear it pumping through my chest as thoughts of what I am about to receive run through my mind. I might be worried but at the same time I know I wont comply to these bitter heartless torturers.

The next few hours seem to drag in then about 7 o’clock the alarm bells ring throughout the wing, they couldn’t be any louder. I lift myself up into a sitting position and stretching myself out I look into corner of the cell and see last nights dinner I had thrown it there as it wasn’t edible.

Looking on the floor beside my bed I see my breakfast, a small packet of Alpen and a half carton of milk, the screws [prison officers] had threw it into my cell the night before knowing I was for court this morning. I eat this and when finished I keep the spoon as I will need it later. I rip up the plastic container it came with and the milk carton and I throw them out the window, this procedure happens with the three daily meals, it stops them from using the containers and cutlery over and over again and it also leaves the outside of the Republican wing looking like a rubbish dump which annoys the administration as they have to pay industrial cleaners every so often to come in and clean it up.

I can hear the cleaners outside with big hoovering machines cleaning up the mess we had made by pouring the stuff threw the doors last night. I realise I had better go to the toilet quickly before they come and get me for court. The toilet consists of a sheet of newspaper on the ground and an empty half carton of milk, out the window the urine goes and onto the wall the rest of it goes. Its not a nice thing to be spreading this onto the wall first thing in the morning, not a nice thing to be doing anytime of the day but we have no other choice the administration has forced us into this position but at least today there is room to spread it, my cell was cleaned for the first time 2 weeks ago, before that the four walls were covered top to bottom with a double coat of excrement as well as the ceiling. The ceiling isn’t accessible to all the prisoners as height comes into play here. To cover the ceiling it entails stacking a load of newspapers on top of the plastic chair we have or placing your brown bag of clothes on top of the chair and standing on it, it takes good balance as it is awkward but it is a good feeling knowing that the person cleaning it with the power hose will be finding it difficult to dodge the waste coming down on him from the ceiling.

Shortly after the door opens and there they stand. The riot squad. These are the hateful rats that work our landing every single day. There are four of them “shower, you’re for court” one of them snarls. I walk out carrying my towel, toothbrush/paste and soapbox, one of them takes these from me and searches through the towel and box, another searches me from head to toe while the other two just stand and stare at me with hate filled eyes. The four of them walk me the short distance to the showers, two to the front of me and two behind me, this is what they call controlled movement. No other prisoner will be out on the landing while another prisoner is on it and at all times he will have four of this riot team around him.

At the showers they throw a box at my feet with a brown paper bag on top, in this box we have our clean clothes, they don’t let us wear the clothes we have in our cells when we leave the landing as they say they are contaminated.

I take my clothes out of the box and lift the brown bag, they open the steel barred grille let me in and then lock it behind me. I’m only in a few minutes when one of them shouts “hurry up the bus is here” I take my time I’m in no rush for what lies ahead. I put the clothes I had wore leaving my cell plus the towel and toiletries into the brown paper bag I walk over to the grilles the same four are standing waiting. One takes the brown bag and searches it thoroughly while another searches me again from head to toe and the other two yet again just stare with their hate filled glare. “Right use the phone” one of them says I tell him that I can’t use the phone as my phone card is in my cell “not our problem” he says and I quickly realise that I wont get my 5 min phone call to my family today with that he turns to other members of the riot team who have now gathered at the reception desk “that’s him for the bus, he doesn’t want the phone” they all burst out laughing. Pathetic.

Four of them again walk me the short distance to the grilles that leads me off our landing and out into to the circle, through one gate and then another a short walk to the turn-style,through it and straight onto the bus at the entrance of Roe house. The engine starts and away we go. There is a small hole in the material used to blank out the window and as we go through the two large electronically controlled gates I can see we pass the search box. The search box contains the boss chair which is a body scanner that can detect objects hidden inside ones body they put us through this on our way back from visits so why cant they just put me through it now instead of driving straight by it and on to the reception area where a body search will be forced upon me by a five strong riot team.

My stomach is in knots as the van pulls up to the reception area. I’m brought into the reception area and asked immediately if I am going to comply with the strip search. My answer is no. They put me into a small room and tell me I have 15 minutes reflection time to think about it. “I don’t need it” I say but the door slams firmly shut. During this time I am pacing up and down the small room taking deep breaths and moving my arms and wrists in circular motions to loosen them up for the attack that lies ahead. After the allotted time the door opens and a governor walks in he asks me am I going to comply with the strip search, more determined than ever I repeat “no”, he asks is there anything he can do that will change my mind again I say no, “ok then” he says “I am going to order the search” and he walks out. Within seconds a five strong riot team rush through the door, one of them runs to the corner with a hand held video camera in his hand while two quickly rush me and grab my arms, they pull them straight out from my sides and twist my wrists, fingers and arms into some kind of martial art lock. A third grabs hold of my head and pushes it down to my chest whilst pushing me hard enough to force me to my knees.

Whilst on my knees my arms are outstretched in a crucifix type position and my wrists are twisted agonizingly upwards. The fourth member goes behind me and pulls my legs from the kneeling position while the third one forces my head to the floor, all the while the other two still have my arms, wrists and fingers in locks, I am now lying face flat on the floor two of the riot squad are on the ground with me still with my arms wrists and fingers in these painful locks. Again the fourth member of the team begins taking off my shoes and socks, he searches them and finds nothing, he then pulls off my jeans and underwear leaving me naked from the waist down, again he searches these and finds nothing, Then the third one lifts my head about 8 inches off the floor while the other two have my arms wrists and fingers still in locks then the one doing the stripping pulls off my t-shirt searches it and finding nothing, he throws it on top of me and the senior officer of the riot squad tells them one by one to pull out. The first to go is the one stripping me he is then followed by the one who is holding my head to the floor. This leaves three of them still in the room, one in the corner who has been videoing the whole ordeal and the other two who have my arms, wrists and fingers in locks. All of a sudden one of them starts shouting “stop resisting, stop resisting” I can’t move never mind resist and at this they systematically pull my arms up outstretched behind my back. I squeal in agony, I don’t know how to explain the position I am in because I don’t think it would be humanely possible to put ones body in this shape, I think my shoulders are going to pop out, I feel my wrists are at breaking point, I am still screaming in pain when they let me drop to the floor, “don’t get up till we leave the room” one of them says. I just lie there in agony but a sigh of relief comes over me, it was over, for now.

I get myself together and get on my feet I look at the door, the hatch is open and the one who had the camera is still videoing, I get dressed and the hatch slams shut. Within a minute the governor walks into the room “have you any complaints about the search?” he asks I say it was overly aggressive and uncalled for. “I’ll make a note of it” he says he leaves the room and a nurse enters “have you any injuries?” I just look at her, and she leaves. The screws at the door shout “lets go.”

I walk out to the reception area and there is the riot squad standing laughing, they all stand tall as if they had just carried out something to be proud of. I just look at them smirk and turn and walk to the front door.

Out we go and into the prison van for the short journey to Laganside courts in Belfast. Once there I am brought straight down to the cells and I wait to be called. Within the hour I am brought upstairs to the courtroom. I get to sit beside three of my friends who are in the dock with me, all four of us in court on trumped up charges placed against us by the RUC [PSNI]. Within minutes the judge adjourns it as the so called police witnesses haven’t appeared.

I shake hands with my friends and am lead back down to the cells. I am held here for a few hours. They bring me lunch, a sandwich and a packet of crisps and then its back onto the prison van and the same short journey back to Maghaberry.

The nerves in my stomach return again. I know they are waiting on me.

Back in reception the whole brutal procedure is repeated again.

I am in agonizing pain as I am brought back to Roe 4. I am lead straight to my cell by four of the riot squad. Two in front and two behind.

The cell door slams behind me. My dinner is already sitting on the bed, freezing cold potatoes and some kind of cheese and broccoli slice. I throw it behind the door and lie down on top of the bed and think about the day I’ve just had. I ask myself, why do they drive past the search box with the boss chair in it?

If they put us through the boss chair leaving Maghaberry then there would be no need for these brutal forced strip-searches. Then reality kicks in, it is all about power and control. I cant help but wonder what sort of person would you have to be to go to work every day and brutalise another human being ? A sick individual is my only conclusion.

As I lie there in thought my cell door opens “anything for the duty governor” one of them says, I don’t even lift my head to acknowledge him the cell door slams shut.

Its about half 6 now time to start the nightly building of the dam to block the door for when I put the stuff out later. Some skill is needed in mastering this art but within a few days I had it sussed.

When I need to go to the toilet later I will use the plastic spoon I saved from this morning from breakfast to mix it all together until it turns into a brown nasty liquid which I will be able to pour out onto the landing.We never get to see it but I would love to see the state of the landing and the mess they have to clean up after all the lads have emptied their mix out the doors. With this done and after a little bit of reading I close my eyes and settle down for the night. Tomorrow brings a new day and although we might be locked up 23 hours a day I will get to see my friends and comrades during that little bit of exercise time. This brings a smile to my face because despite the treacherous conditions we are forced to live in despite the brutal regime we are forced to endure, the craic and the spirit couldn’t be greater.

It fills me with great pride to play a small part in this phase of the prison struggle. We are more determined now than ever to see this protest through to the end and we will win. These men on dirty protest here in Maghaberry are brave men, these men are strong men but above all else these men are Irish Republicans.

Victory to the protesting prisoners in Maghaberry.

ALAN LUNDY, P.O.W
ROE 4, MAGHABERRY”

With such brutality and inhumanity inside the British-run prisons of the North of Ireland is it any wonder that it manifests itself outside as well? Throughout the last 150 years Irish political prisoners in British custody and the conditions they endure have been one of the dynamos driving revolutionary Republicanism in Ireland (and beyond). Today we see that same dynamic in effect once again.

British Supremacism In Ireland

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Anti-Irish extremists from the British separatist minority in Ireland parading outside a Roman Catholic Church, Belfast, Occupied North of Ireland, 2012 (Photo: The Five Demands)

The British separatist minority in Ireland doing what the British separatist minority does best: terrorising and intimidating other communities while expressing the supremacist attitudes of a colonial elite. From Chris Donnelly over on Slugger O’Toole:

“1. Loyalist bands, along with Loyal Order representatives and unionist politicians –  including First Minister Peter Robinson - release a letter to the newspapers condemning the Parades Commission for action taken following an explicitly sectarian act by a [British terrorist] UVF-aligned Loyalist band on the 12th July outside of St Patrick’s Church on Donegall Street, Belfast. The sectarian action involved stopping to play a song described as ‘racist’ by a Scottish Court and which celebrates the death of one million Irish people during the Famine.

2. Loyalists assemble and are whipped into a frenzy by the City Grand Master at Clifton Street, who rips up the Parades Commission determination before the bands proceed towards St Patrick’s Church.

3. According to numerous accounts, virtually all (if not all) of the Loyalist bands breach the Parades Commission determination by playing music outside of the church, including the Sash.

4. In addition to the music, many of the loyalist supporters have been pictured stopping directly outside of the church and waving loyalist flags, dancing with [British] Union Flag umbrellas and/or making offensive gestures to the assembled protesters.

5. Known Loyalist paramilitary leaders – and Unionist politicians – accompany the UVF-aligned Young Conway Volunteers band past St Patrick’s Church, a direct breach of the Parades Commission ruling that the band be forbidden from taking this route.

6. Nigel Dodds releases a statement condemning republicans and the Parades Commission for causing the trouble. Seriously.”

A British terrorist-supporting band from the British Unionist minority in Ireland beating anti-Irish music outside a Roman Catholic Church, Belfast, Occupied North of Ireland, 2012 (Photo: The Five Demands)

For more information read the latest report over on the Five Demands (in Italian).

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IRA, CIRA And ÓnahÉ

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Volunteers of the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) on patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland

Following on from my article about the claimed merger of several Republican Resistance groups to form a new Irish Republican Army comes the latest analysis from Suzanne Breen in the Belfast Telegraph:

“An announcement that dissident groups have formed a single, new version of the IRA has been dismissed as a publicity stunt.

Sources in the new organisation told the Belfast Telegraph that they had joined forces to end “the confusion” in republican heartlands created by the existence of a myriad of dissident groups, and that they would target police officers and soldiers. The Real IRA, Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), and a group of independent republicans — responsible for the Massereene soldier killings and murdering police officer Ronan Kerr — have merged to form a single organisation calling itself the IRA.

The formation of a single, new IRA has its roots in co-operation between independent republican prisoners and Real IRA inmates in Maghaberry prison. The two groups had formed an increasingly close and friendly working relationship in the jail. On the outside, there had also been growing co-operation between the Real IRA and independent republicans.

The Real IRA provided the weapons for Massereene, but the attack was carried out by independent republicans. This group of independent republicans — made up of ex-Provisional IRA members who had also called themselves the IRA — had recently posed the deadliest threat to the security forces. They were responsible for the attempted murder of PSNI officer Peadar Heffron and the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr.

This group — along with the Real IRA and RAAD — decided to bring their co-operation to a new level by dissolving their organisations to form a new, single entity.

Sources said that moves to stand down the three groups in order to set up a single, combined command structure and army council began in January. Each group brought its separate “strengths” to the merger. The Real IRA had a sizeable membership across Northern Ireland and in parts of the Republic — with a high proportion of young activists. It was the best armed of the three organisations. The independent group of republicans — which almost entirely consisted of seasoned ex-Provisional IRA members — brings with it a range of deadly expertise and experience.

The Continuity IRA and another republican paramilitary group, Oglaigh na hEireann, will continue to exist separately.

The new IRA presents the greatest threat in Belfast, Derry, South Down, Lurgan and Tyrone. The security forces will be watching avidly to gauge the group’s capabilities. Despite its high-profile emergence, the impact of the new IRA and the level of support it will receive in republican communities, remain to be seen.”

So what are we to make of this?

It seems that the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD) and members of one or more independent Republican groups that may have operated under the name of the Óglaigh na hÉireann (by this stage a sort of general title for the Republican Resistance) have come together to form a single military force, with a unified command-and-control and membership. Meanwhile at least two other Resistance organisations have declined (or were not invited) to join the new movement. One is the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), an organisation that came into existence following a minor spilt in the Provisional IRA during the 1980s, largely over the recognition of Dáil Éireann and any future northern assembly by Sinn Féin. It has always retained a less than amicable relationship with other Republican organisations believing itself to be the one and only IRA and all others illegitimate claimants. In the last three years it has been rent by internal rivalries (personal and ideological), not to mention infiltration by criminal elements who have exploited its structure and membership to pursue their own non-political ends. This has affected the group’s alleged political wing too, Sinn Féin Poblachtach (better known as Republican Sinn Féin or RSF), a miniscule Republican party that manages to draw some traditionalist Republican support in Ireland, Europe and the United States far out of proportion to its influence. At the moment even seasoned observers of Republican politics find it difficult to know who exactly is in charge of CIRA and RSF since there are several rival and bitterly opposed claimants.

Volunteers of the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) fire a volley of shots over a Republican grave, Ireland

The second organisation outside the new IRA structure is a group of independent Republicans who have also operated under the title of Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓnahÉ) for the last few years. They seem to have a very loose structure, largely based upon personal relationships and knowledge stemming from military careers as former Volunteers of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army or (P)IRA. Classed as veteran guerrillas this group is viewed by some as the one with the greatest immediate military ability, though this is counteracted by a lack of members, weapons and equipment (though, apparently, not communal support). Whether this organisation can transcend its present situation and become a formal insurgent force is highly debateable and it remains unclear if that is even the intention of its membership. The reasons why it rejected overtures to join the “new IRA” are also unknown, though suspicions about the motives of those involved in the RIRA may have in part motivated this refusal, as well as more personal or ideological concerns (in my first article I expressed scepticism about some of those operating under the ÓnahÉ banner joining the new movement and this seems to have been borne out by recent news reports).

One thing apparent though is the power of the name Irish Republican Army, and the view of most Resistance Republicans that continued military opposition to the British Occupation in Ireland is given greater legitimacy through its use. Even Óglaigh na hÉireann, “the Volunteers of Ireland”, the preferred official name of the IRA in the Irish language is secondary in import to its English form (for some at least). As always with Irish Republicanism the importance of legitimacy cannot be underestimated.

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