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COLLUSION RUC ran loyalist death sq quads Misogyny causes and allows violence against women

The long-lasting impact of

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contents clár

COLLUSION RUC ran loyalist death sq quads

Misogyny causes and allows violence against women

Chile’s revolutionary vote

The coalition of radical support that led to the election of 35 year old Gabriel Boric as Chile’s new president is examined

by CHRIS HAZZARD.

The long-lasting impact of

Bloody Sunday

AN PHOBLACHT Editor: Robbie Smyth An Phoblacht is published by Sinn Féin. The views in An Phoblacht are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sinn Féin. We welcome articles, opinions and photographs from new contributors but contact the Editor first.

An Phoblacht, Kevin Barry House, 44 Parnell Square, Dublin 1, Ireland.

Telephone: (+353 1) 872 6 100.

Email: editor@anphoblacht.com www.anphoblacht.com

PRODUCTION: MARK DAWSON RUAIRÍ DOYLE MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA

CONTRIBUTORS

UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

Mícheál Mac Donncha 5 Emma Sheerin 8 Peadar Whelan 12&45 Jemma Dolan 17 19 Emma McArdle Niall Meehan 22 Conán Glas 27 30 Paul Gavan Chris Hazzard 33 38 Joe Dwyer Luke Callinan 41 Eoghan Mac Cormaic 41 49 Jim Gibney Margaret Ward 52 Jason Lambert 54

33

Giving a voice to disadvantaged women

36

The National Collective of Community Based Women’s Networks outlines the work and thinking behind this grassroots movement

The Elite Nationalist Network

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Emma McArdle debunks the recent claims

by Kate Hoey of an ‘elite nationalist network’, and catalogues the ongoing attempts to suppress nationalist rights and voices.

Remembering Aled Roberts and Jack Clafferty

Since our last edition, Aled Roberts, the Welsh Language Commissioner, and Jack Clafferty, one of Aled Roberts the founders of the Troops Out Movement, have died. Roberts championed language rights in Wales, showing what could be done in Ireland, and we had an article by him in our last edition.

Clafferty’s art work in the 1970s and 1980s featured in a range of republican publications and on the cover of our third issue in 2021.

Jack Clafferty

anphoblacht.com Our podcasts are available across a range of platforms including Spotify and iTunes

􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩 􀊩

Selina McDermott & Jimmy Fitzpatrick | Stardust Fire John Kelly & Tony Doherty | Bloody Sunday 50 | Part 1 Maeve McLaughlin & Pádraig Delargy | Bloody Sunday 50 | Part 2 Hilary Dully | Máire Comerford - Inspiring Revolutionary Síle Darragh & Pilib Ó Ruanaí | The 1981 Hunger Strike- 40 years on Mairead Farrell & Matthew Brown | Community Wealth Building Gerry Adams | The Centenary of Partition Alex Kane | Where now for Unionism Margaret Urwin | Britannia waives the rules - covering up collusion Sinéad Mercier| Ag Caomhnú ár gComhshaoil: Cur Chuige Iar-Shaormhargadh Brian Feeney | Unionism in Crisis ICTU President Gerry Murphy | The Future of Work Kevin Scannell | Mionteangacha agus an Teicneolaíocht Nua Dawn Foster | Disunited Kingdom, is the UK breaking up?

Danny Morrison | Life in the Orange state

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

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EDITORIAL

anphoblacht EAGARFHOCAL

The shared histories we must acknowledge

ROBBIE SMYTH editor@anphoblacht.com

In Ireland, we can only move forward as a society if we come to terms with all the aspects of our shared past

4

H

istory – personal, political, controversial and challenging is a key feature in this issue of An Phoblacht.

There are personal contributions from Eoghan Mac Cormaic and Margaret Ward that deal with their experiences in the arena of modern Irish history. Mac Cormaic’s ‘Pluid: Stories From the H-Blocks’ is a jail journal of a republican prisoner on the blanket, while Ward recounts the history of her ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries’ book, which has been updated and reissued.

Ward writes on the long journey from being told that “Irishwomen had not done anything in history” to today, where de Valera’s slight of describing women activists as “unmanageable revolutionaries” has become a badge of honour for radical campaigning women.

Jim Gibney reviews Laurence McKeown’s ‘Time Shadows’, a prison memoir, while Peadar Whelan tackles Thomas Leahy’s ‘The Intelligence War Against the IRA’. Joe Dwyer takes us through the interconnections between James Connolly and William Morris.

Jason Lambert dips into the recent history of musical censorship in Irish broadcasting. Niall Meehan’s analysis into the impact of Bloody Sunday shows clearly how the state and some willing opinion formers in the media attempted to rewrite the history of this tragic event.

Peadar Whelan writes on the most recent report from the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson that deals with RUC and British Secret Service collusion in UDA/UFF killings of nationalists in the 1990s, including the attack on Sean Graham Bookmakers on Ormeau Road in 1992 that left five people dead.

In Ireland, we can only move forward as a society if we come to terms with all the aspects of our shared past. This means accepting all its truths, especially the unpalatable ones. Those in power, whether in politics, the police, media or even academia, have attempted to discount the testimony of those most impacted by a state and political establishment that sought to deny and marginalise their experiences.

Two articles in the magazine touch on the outcomes of denying our linked histories. First is Emma McArdle’s piece on how Kate Hoey’s claims of an elite nationalist network are the latest chapter in attempt to violently suppress the nationalist and republican voice and rights from participation in all aspects of life in the Six Counties.

Finally, Emma Sheerin tackles another aspect of marginalised history, that of the origins and culture of gender-based violence. That 21 women have been murdered in Ireland since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic is startling. Women’s Aid figures of 244 violent deaths of Irish women since 1996 is proof of a history of misogyny and gender-based violence and discrimination that must be faced up to by us all.

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

'The most important election in a generation'

May Assembly elections could be epoch-making

BY MÍCHEÁL Mac DONNCHA The decision of the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson at the start of February to pull his First Minister Paul Givan out of the Executive was a pre-election gamble, a desperate bid for Unionist votes in what looks set to be an epoch-making Assembly election on 5 May. Donaldson did his best to portray the Protocol as the latest ‘great enemy of Ulster’, a type of beast always required by the DUP before an election. But this beast is distinctly unthreatening and seems not to worry most Unionists as shown in a poll which had the Protocol well down their list of priorities.

The DUP leader marched boldly out banging his Lambeg drum, but it is a broken drum and what once echoed menacingly across the towns and farms of ‘Our

Wee Country’ is now heard only by scattered groups in Orange halls.

That poll was published two weeks after Donaldson pulled the plug on the Executive and showed that the Protocol was the biggest concern for just 11.7% of Unionists, while 29.6% prioritised health. If the result was a headache for Donaldson, it would have been made worse by such comments as recorded in one vox pop which struck a chord with many. A young student compared the DUP pulling out of the Executive to herself just giving up her studies before an exam “because it is too hard”.

The same poll put Sinn Féin as the party with the largest percentage support, prompting most commen-

• DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson – beating a broken Lambeg drum

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

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�

Working together we can prioritise health, housing and education and use the protocol to create better jobs in a stronger economy

�

JOHN FINUCANE

tators to rate it as on course for the First Minister position. But it is early days yet and the party is taking nothing for granted. John Finucane, Sinn Féin’s Director of Elections, announced the party will stand 34 candidates in all 18 Assembly constituencies, in what he described as “the most important election in a generation”.

Finucane said “The days of the DUP only doing democracy on their own terms are over, and they are not coming back. Sinn Féin’s priority is to make politics work, to demonstrate that real change is possible.

“Working together we can prioritise health, housing and education and use the protocol to create better jobs in a stronger economy.”

The reality of the Protocol, as distinct from the scare-mongering of the DUP, has become increasingly clear to people in the Six Counties, regardless of their politics.

Over the past year, there has been a significant increase in all-Ireland trade, the value of goods sold from North to South has increased by an unprecedented 65% to £3.35 billion between 2020 and 2021. This

• TRADE INCREASE: goods sold from North to South increased by an unprecedented 65% to £3.35 billion between 2020 and 2021

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• Sinn Féin’s MLA for South Antrim, Declan Kearney

amounts to an increase of £3.6 million per day of trade in goods from North to South.

Sinn Féin spokesperson on the economy Caoimhe Archibald said increased all-Ireland trade is good for the economy and is creating jobs and prosperity, saying: “The DUP constantly bemoans the problems of the Protocol, that only exists because of the Brexit they championed, yet three consecutive DUP economy ministers have done nothing about the opportunities it creates.

“These figures are more evidence that businesses North and South are adjusting to new trading realities and are seeking solutions, and are benefitting from the new arrangements.”

Of course, the DUP’s position on the Protocol is a smokescreen. Behind it lurks the reality that they do not want to share power with Sinn Féin, especially not with a Sinn Féin First Minister. Yet such is the extent of change in the North, and within broader Unionism and society generally, that they cannot totally rule out working with a Sinn Féin First Minister in case they alienate more voters than they would rally with such a declaration.

There is internal turmoil in Unionism. Commenting on Givan’s resignation, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said: “For more than a year now, the DUP have brought the turmoil, chaos, and dysfunction playing out in their

party to the very heart of government. The British government’s stance has encouraged this.”

And as Sinn Féin’s Declan Kearney MLA (South Antrim) put it: “The challenge which political unionism has created for itself now is whether it will accept the direction of change in this society. That is the political crux of the next Assembly election.

“Political unionist leaders need to understand they cannot stop the change which is now happening in plain sight. We are in the end game. Constitutional change is fixed on the political horizon. Unprecedented change is happening. My message to those from the Protestant and unionist traditions is that we want you to join us in managing that change.

“Political unionism has never served the interests of ordinary Protestant and unionist people. And the Tories do not care about anyone who lives here. It is now time for change - big change, constitutional change.

“The days of the unionist veto are gone and they are finished. So, there will be no veto by the DUP over power-sharing. And there will be no veto exercised by the DUP and this British government over constitutional change in Ireland.

“The shadow of Partition is being eclipsed by a new future. That is a new Ireland which will be modern, inclusive and welcoming. A new Ireland, where we will have citizens’ rights and where there will be social progress. A new national democracy which will be built on foundations of anti-sectarianism and self-determination.” �

The DUP constantly bemoans the problems of the Protocol, that only exists because of the Brexit they championed, yet three consecutive DUP economy ministers have done nothing about the opportunities it creates

� anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

�

CAOIMHE ARCHIBALD

7

Misogyny causes and allows violence against women

BY EMMA SHEERIN

‘Gender based violence’.

The use of this term, one might argue, is relatively novel in Ireland. The phenomenon itself is sadly not. A new way of describing, acknowledging, and challenging something that is as old as time itself.

If we’re honest with ourselves, the frank conversations about the prevalence of ‘gender-based violence’ are commonplace in the wake of one particularly shocking event, after which there is a tendency to go back to normal, to go back to sailing along, saying nothing.

Until the next time. The brutal murder of Ashling Murphy on 12 January struck a chord with our nation in what was described by many in the following days as a ‘watershed moment’. Thousands lined our streets to mourn her loss.

21 women have been murdered in Ireland since the beginning of the pandemic.

The north has the highest reported domestic violence levels in Europe Candles were lit in windows. Column inches were filled and leaders came together to call for change.

She was going for a run. A hashtag trending on Twitter, a slogan across Instagram stories, young women angry that this had happened, dwelling on their own evening runs.

At the heart of the reaction are two conflicting narratives.

‘She was just going for a run in the middle of the day’, ‘I do that, it could have been me’, ‘She didn’t deserve to be murdered’.

When I think about these often well-meant words, uttered at flower strewn roadsides and in candle-lit town centres by people with compassion and love in their hearts, the first question I find myself asking is ‘who does deserve to be murdered?’

An obvious, if unintended, inference in this commentary

8

is that all those women killed by their partners, or their exes, or by strangers late at night, whilst socialising, or running alone in the dark, or walking home from work, ‘should have seen it coming’ or ‘left themselves open to it’.

That it was their own fault.

‘She was going for a run in the middle of the day in a public, well lit, densely populated place’. She followed all the advice that women grow up being bombarded with,

2004 ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

• Forensics tent at the scene of brutal murder of Ashling Murphy in Tullamore and memorial the victim; (above) A vigil for outside Leinster House, Dublin

the guidance we learn from childhood around ‘keeping ourselves safe’, and yet she still fell victim to a brutal attack that ended her life.

For those already enraged by the dialogue that surrounds violence against women and girls, the raft of responsibilities that little girls are tasked with in terms of personal safety, and the fact that victims are told what to do but perpetrators never seem to be addressed, the realities around Ashling’s murder led to more anger.

2008

Ashling Murphy was a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a colleague and a friend. She was a teacher, a talented musician, a Gael. All of these things tell us that her short life brought value beyond measure to Irish society and that her loss will be mourned by many. But none of them were necessary for her death to be a tragedy, for her life to have had worth.

In speaking at length about her attributes and pointing to how she ‘did everything right’, we risk furthering the assertion that women can somehow bring violence on themselves.

In the same way that men shouldn’t have to conjure up a vision of their mother or sister or daughter as a victim in order to feel anger about it, we don’t need to justify anyone’s right to live in peace and safe from violence.

There have been 21 women murdered in Ireland since the beginning of the pandemic. The Six Counties has the highest reported domestic violence levels in Europe.

According to the UN, women aged 15 to 44 are more at risk from domestic violence and rape than war, malaria, car accidents, and cancer.

We know that women who live in poverty and those from newcomer communities are most at risk, with fewer opportunities to escape violence and less recourse to justice.

The statistics are frightening.

How do we deal with it? Our current strategies, which have included arming teenage girls with rape alarms in social sciences classrooms and telling women to avoid public spaces at night, are clearly not working.

• NOTHING NEW: Our culture told us that women are lesser, inferior, unworthy. It naturally follows that they’ll be the subject of attacks

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• MAGDALENE LAUNDRIES: Violence against women was woven through the fabric of the states North and South Ad campaigns that advise women how not to have their drinks spiked, to only go out with others, to plan their journeys home are not helpful. In fact, these instructions are an extension of the violence women are already taught to fear.

Just as online misogynistic abuse can simultaneously hurt one woman’s feelings whilst normalising the narrative

Our culture has long told us that women are lesser, inferior, unworthy. It naturally follows that they’ll be the subject of attacks that women are fair game for abuse, our society’s habitual victim-blaming not only burdens individual women, but feeds into the narrative that women are weak, defenceless creatures who require protection, and should expect to encounter risk just by virtue of their being there.

Ireland of old was governed by gender norms, societal expectations, and, perhaps most important of all, Catholic moral teachings. Violence against women was woven through the fabric of the states North and South.

‘Homes’ for ‘unmarried mothers’, Magdalene laundries, rogue adoption agencies, all of them attacks on Irish women and girls who weren’t even afforded the dignity of an education in relation to the bodily functions that they were then expected to navigate.

Even beyond the criminalisation of pregnant people, it remained a taboo subject, the nature of the reaction depending solely on marital status. A woman who dared to have children outside of (or too soon after) marriage was a legitimate target of scorn and ridicule, and a woman who dared not to reproduce the second that a ring went on her finger was someone to be pitied and questioned at length.

No babies until you’re married. And then as soon as you’re married, babies straight away. If not, why not? Is something wrong? Are you putting your career before your family?

The legislature in the 26 Counties made it impossible for women to work in the civil service following marriage, because obviously a woman’s role began and ended in the home.

Rape wasn’t a crime if the offender was your husband.

Divorce was illegal. If she fled because he ‘was bad to

• Divorce was illegal till 1995, if a woman had to leave because he ‘was bad to her’, that’s what she did. No-one ever questioned why she had to suffer that in the first place 10

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

• CALL IT OUT: When people say things and make remarks, the belief that women are fair game is legitimised

her’, that’s what she did. No-one ever questioned why she had to suffer that in the first place. Those who made midnight ferry trips to England to avoid the punishment of their parents were actually criminalised and risked real prosecution if they ever revealed their secret.

Our culture has long told us that women are lesser, inferior, unworthy. It naturally follows that they’ll be the subject of attacks.

With the advance of the internet and social media, where we should be able to access more information and bust myths, instead we have worrying trends; online abuse, young people watching porn and creating dangerous expectations of sex, unattainable body goals promoting unhealthy eating habits and impossible standards.

It goes beyond chatrooms and forums, it’s in our public discourse, and in our schools and playgrounds, which is the most worrying aspect of all.

Jokes about menstruation are commonplace. Stereotypes paint women as moody, physically weak individuals who have no control over their emotions at certain times of the month.

No education about many of the symptoms that women learn to accept; the irregular bleeding, the severe pain that might be a signal that something is wrong, the disorders that end up being medicated with a prescription for the contraceptive pill instead of an investigation and a proper cure. We still pay a tampon tax and period poverty is something that teenagers up and down the country worry about.

Women distinguished in the arts, politics, sport, subjected to ridicule and abuse based on their physical appearance, their weight or what they wear, as opposed to their performance in their respective fields.

Internalised misogyny is so commonplace that women will frequently turn the same twisted words that have been used against themselves into insults or jibes for others.

We’ve grown up with a discourse that is so prevalent that we don’t think about the phrases we use or how harmful they are.

Then when someone goes too far and there is resistance, the defence comes rolling in; ‘It’s only a joke, don’t be so

sensitive’, ‘Cancel culture’, ‘You can’t say anything these days’. As with all the ‘isms’, and it’s no coincidence that those who use misogynistic slurs will often spout sectarian and racist bigotry, sexism needs silence to succeed.

Rather than defending the right to free speech at the expense of half the population, these are opportunities for us all to check ourselves, think about our words, and make improvements where we need to.

And we do all make mistakes. People say things and make remarks that they don’t really mean, without thinking of the impacts. The problem is that, every time rogue words and insensitive ‘jokes’ go unchallenged, the belief that

Violence against women was woven through the fabric of the states north and south women are fair game is legitimised.

There is space for us all to learn, and in doing so we must be examples, and show example. It’s not just lads’ banter.

Call it out. Don’t laugh along when you know it’s not funny.

Pull your friend for remarks about his significant other. Be a friend.

Don’t ask ‘where she was’ or ‘what she was wearing’ about a victim of an attack. We have made significant progress. Sexism is no longer accepted as an official policy of the state, but we have a lot to do if we’re to treat women as true equals.

Until we’re addressing the barriers faced by women, and implementing policies that ensure they have the same opportunity, we’re perpetuating inequality. And whilst we have inequality, we’ll have a target for misogynists.

Misogyny causes and allows violence against women.

Addressing it is the only cure for it. � Emma Sheerin is a Sinn Féin MLA for Mid Ulster and Assembly Equality spokesperson

Dedicated to the memory of ASHLING MURPHY

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Following the launch of the Operation Achille report by Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson PEADAR WHELAN sums up the reactions, implications and limitations of this shocking publication

COLLUSION HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

A further chapter in a British state policy of collusion and murder that left up to 50 people dead, killed by the UDA between 1990 and 1998 was just one of the shocking conclusions from the most recent report of Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson.

Reacting to the publication of Operation Achille, an investigation into collusion between British state forces and loyalist gun gangs Director of Relatives for Justice Mark Thompson highlighted the limitations of Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson’s findings.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday 8 February Thompson, citing the Ombudsman’s admission that her inquiry could only investigate 9 attacks that left 12 people dead due to lack of resources, disclosed that the inquiry “touched on”

Anderson’s report found that the RUC was controlling and protecting as many as eight agents who were embedded in the UDA and were responsible for multiple killings and stated that the RUC was guilty of “collusive behaviour” 12

27 killings and attempted killings while also blaming the South Belfast UDA for 50 deaths in the period under investigation by Anderson, from 1990 to 1998.

Solicitor Niall Murphy of KRW Law, also addressing the press event organised after the publication of Operation Achille stated that the report “represents a further chapter in what must be considered a state policy of collusion”.

In their commentary of the report, handed to the families on Monday 7 February after numerous delays, and 30 years and two days after the Sean Graham’s Bookies massacre, Murphy and Thompson were scathing of the role played by the RUC Special Branch in controlling and protecting the UDA killers responsible for nine attacks across South Belfast, between 1990 and 1998 that lead to the deaths of 12 people.

The men were addressing the press conference, on Tuesday 8 February, attended by family members of those gunned down

by UDA gun gangs and whose killings were the subject of the North’s Police Ombudsman, Marie Anderson’s, Operation Achille report including that on the Sean Graham’s Bookies massacre in 1992 in which five people were gunned down, and one attempted killing linked to the South Belfast UDA. Anderson’s report found that the RUC was controlling and protecting as many as eight ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

• Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson

MAIN POINTS OF THE OMBUDSMAN’S REPORT In her findings the Police Ombudsman found that the long-held concerns of the bereaved families and survivors about RUC conduct, including complaints of collusion with paramilitaries , were “legitimate and justified” .

• The report showed the role played by the RUC Special Branch in controlling and protecting the UDA killers responsible for attacks across South Belfast, including the Sean Graham’s Bookies massacre

agents who were embedded in the UDA and were responsible for multiple killings and stated that the RUC was guilty of “collusive behaviour”. Thompson went further and accused the RUC of “actions which constitutes the wholesale running of a terrorist death squad”.

Indeed Thompson, as Director of Relatives for Justice which advocates on behalf of people killed by British state forces during the conflict, revealed that the ombudsman admitted she didn’t “have the resources to take on a comprehensive investigation” into these incidents before pointing out that “in the early 1990s UDA gangs across South Belfast were responsible for as many as 50 killings involving these same agents”.

He also focused on the limited scope of the Ombudsman’s powers saying “the roles of MI5 and the British army’s undercover intelligence gathering unit the Force Research Unit (FRU) were missing from the report”.

“These agencies are beyond the remit and powers of the Police Ombudsman’s office”, said Thompson before revealing that a number of the loyalist agents involved in the multiple killings “worked across these three agencies - Special Branch, FRU and MI5”.

Referring to the use of the term “collusive behaviour” Thompson outlined how repeated legal challenges to various Ombudsman’s reports launched by former senior RUC members, particularly the report into the 1994 Loughinisland massacre had limited the Ombudsman’s scope and prevented her from accusing former RUC members of the criminal act of collusion.

Indeed in a 2020 hearing MARK THOMPSON, a judge ruled that former Ombudsman Michael Maguire Relatives for Justice

'The roles of MI5 and the British army’s undercover intelligence gathering unit the Force Research Unit (FRU) were missing from the report'

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

Anderson said “collusive behaviours” identified in her report included:

􀼐 Intelligence and surveillance failings that led to loyalist paramilitaries obtaining military-grade weaponry in a 1987 arms shipment 􀼐 A failure to warn two men of threats to their lives 􀼐 A failure to retain records and the deliberate destruction of files relating to the attack at Sean Graham bookmaker 􀼐 The failure to maintain records about the deactivation of weapons, “indicating a desire to avoid accountability for these sensitive and contentious activities” 􀼐 The failure of police to exploit all evidential opportunities 􀼐 Failures by Special Branch to disseminate intelligence to murder investigation teams 􀼐 Absence of control and oversight in the recruitment and management of informants 􀼐 Unjustifiable and continued use by Special Branch of informants involved in serious criminality, including murder and “turning a blind eye” to such activities.

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• The scene after the 1994 Loughinisland killings – 'evidence of collusion is undeniable'

had “overstepped the mark” in finding RUC men guilty of collusion.

In his remarks solicitor Niall Murphy of KRW Law stated that “This report cannot be read in a vacuum, it must be considered in the context of other reports and the defence of ‘a few bad apples’ doesn’t work anymore, the whole orchard is stinking”.

“There was an endemic policy of collusion in South Down, South, West and North Belfast, South Derry, North Antrim and Mid-Ulster, different police districts at different times, with different informers, different handlers, different weapons and different killers and different UDR barracks but the same policy. The blueprint remained the same and that is evidenced in this report”.

Murphy name-checked various reports going as far back as 2007 when then Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan exposed, in Operation Ballast, 10 deaths linked to UVF killer Mark Haddock, a Special Branch agent in North Belfast.

He also mentioned the Da Silva report on the killing of Pat Finucane as well as John Stevens reports into collusion and that of Michael Maguire into the Loughinisland killings. The “evidence of collusion is undeniable”, said Murphy.

Among the findings of Solicitor Operation Achille were those NIALL MURPHY

'There was an endemic policy of collusion in South Down, South, West and North Belfast, South Derry, North Antrim and MidUlster, different police districts at different times, with different informers, different handlers, different weapons and different killers and different UDR barracks but the same policy. The blueprint remained the same and that is evidenced in this report'

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• Special Branch agent and UVF killer Mark Haddock

that reveal a clear pattern used by British intelligence agencies that allowed loyalist killers carry out their activities with impunity, not least, the failure to warn people of loyalist threats to their lives.

In the case of former republican prisoner Sam Caskey who was shot in October 1990 the RUC failed to warn him that he was under threat from the UDA. Also in the case of mother of two Theresa Clinton, gunned to death in her Balfour Avenue home on 14 April 1994, the RUC knew of at least three threats to the life of her husband Jim. Yet a senior RUC officer made the decision not to warn him that his life was in danger.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Clinton case is that a number of witnesses came forward and gave statements to the RUC identifying the suspected killer. These witnesses were willing to attend an identity parade but when they attended ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

Names of those killed

• Desmond Da Silva report on the killing of Pat Finucane

HARRY CONLON

AIDAN WALLACE

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

14 OCTOBER 1991

PETER MAGEE • John Stevens

22 DECEMBER 1991

JACK DUFFIN

JAMES KENNEDY

• Michael Maguire

WILLIE McMANUS

CHRISTY DOHERTY

IN SEAN GRAHAM’S BOOKIES ON 5 FEBRUARY 1992

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

• Former Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan

Donegall Pass RUC barracks they found there were no protective screens which meant the suspect could see and identify them.

These witnesses also claimed that the RUC read out their personal details, names and addresses, in front of the alleged killer and so out of fear for their own lives the witnesses refused to continue with the parade. The suspect was released without charge.

Incidentally the guns used to shoot Theresa Clinton dead were a deactivated Sterling sub-machine gun which the RUC handed over to the UDA knowing that someone within that organisation, believed to be UDA quartermaster and RUC agent, William Stobie, had the capacity to reactivate the gun.

The Magnum revolver also used in the attack was “stolen” from an RUC officer in 1991.

As with previous reports, not least the Maguire investigation anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

MICHAEL GILBRIDE 4 NOVEMBER 1992

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

MARTIN MORAN SHOT 23 OCTOBER 1993 AND DIED ON 25 OCTOBER ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

THERESA CLINTON

LARRY BRENNAN

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

14 APRIL 1994

19 JANUARY 1998

ANDERSON’S INVESTIGATION ALSO EXAMINED THE ATTEMPT TO KILL FORMER REPUBLICAN PRISONER SAM CASKEY ON 9 OCTOBER 1990 15

• Brian Nelson a member of FRU

• Still on public display – the RUC ‘donated’ to the British Imperial War Museum the assault rifle used in the Grahams Bookies murders

into the Loughinisland killings of 1994 and Ms Anderson’s recent publication Operation Greenwich, the arming of Loyalist gangs with weapons imported into the Six Counties in the late 1980s from South Africa is crucial, particularly the ‘killing power’ the death squads attained through their access to the VZ58 assault rifle.

That the DUP linked Ulster Resistance movement was central to this smuggling operation tends to escape the media scrutiny it deserves.

Also that Brian Nelson a member of the British Army’s FRU and a UDA intelligence officer orchestrated the operation is also crucial to understanding the dynamic of British strategy in the late 1980s.

Arming the loyalists and using Nelson to target people, for example the targeting and killing of Pat Finucane whose anniversary occurred on 12 February, allowed the British to “take out” people they saw as a threat to their interests.

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• Ken Barrett

And in a grotesque example of the RUC’s disregard for those killed and injured in the Grahams Bookies attack the Ombudsman discovered that within weeks of the attack the RUC was in discussions with the British Imperial War Museum to ‘donate’ the killers’ assault rifle. It was eventually handed over in 1995 and in a macabre show of callousness to the families of the dead and wounded, it is on still public display.

If the story of the VZ58 is grotesque then the provenance of the 9mm pistol used in the killing of Aidan Wallace as well as the Sean Graham killings is incredible. The Ombudsman also uses the word “stolen” to describe how the semi-automatic pistol ended up in the hands of loyalist killers.

The Ombudsman outlined how two British Army issue SA80 rifles and two Browning 9mm pistols were handed over to a loyalist killer, believed to be Ken Barrett – the man convicted of shooting dead Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.

Quoting from the Da Silva report into the Finucane assassination Anderson says that Barrett was instructed by a Special Branch officer to go to Malone Road UDR barracks and collect the weapons.

A UDR corporal cited in the report claims he got a phone call from “the training department” on 30 January 1989 saying two “identified soldiers” would arrive to collect the guns.

The next day Barrett and another person arrived at the barracks and the corporal handed over the weapons.

When the corporal arrived back on duty on 2 February and was told the guns “were missing” he, instead of reporting this immediately, waited until the next day, 3 February before going to his superiors. His excuse for not alerting his superiors to the situation was that he hoped the weapons would “turn up”.

This report and others presents a clear body of evidence that exposes the central role of Britain’s intelligence services in the planning, organising and recruiting of loyalist killers for the sole purpose of mounting a campaign of sectarian terror on the nationalist community in the North.

This evidence is a clear indictment of successive British governments and proves again the intention of this present British government to close down all legal avenues of investigation into these actions. It is about burying the truth of their dirty war in Ireland. � ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

�

Tackling regional inequalities and making sure the voices of rural people are heard was always, and remains, one of my priorities

JEMMA DOLAN

�

SINN FÉIN HAS

STOOD UP FOR WORKERS AND FAMILIES

To say it came as a shock when I was first asked to consider running in the Assembly Election in 2017 would be an understatement. I was used to, and more comfortable, being part of the backroom team; whether it was working over in Europe with our then four-person MEP team or as a press officer behind the camera helping our candidates and elected representatives dealing with the media.

I didn’t like the thought of being out front and centre, being interviewed and being the one in front of the camera. But I was very proud to represent Sinn Féin knowing that my fellow members in Fermanagh had selected me and knew I was good enough to go forward as their potential MLA. And so, I was selected and the next thing we had to do was try and get three MLAs elected in Fermanagh South Tyrone. My default position was that I would be fighting for the fifth and final seat and my two running mates, Seán Lynch and Michelle Gildernew, would be returned as MLAs for the constituency.

I was so thankful to the 7,767 people who gave me their first preference votes. I was elected on the third count alongside Michelle, with Seán being elected on the fourth count.

On the 3 March 2017, I was elected MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone at just 26 years old. At the time, I didn’t think much of my age but looking back now, I realise just how young I was.

But my youth, my gender, and my rural background were all reasons why I anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

had agreed to run in the first place. My home is 112 miles one way from Stormont. If I was to travel there by public transport, I would need to get three buses. Thankfully, I drive and it is just the lack of decent roads that I need to contend with.

Tackling regional inequalities and making sure the voices of rural people are heard was always, and remains, one of my priorities.

Fermanagh doesn’t have one mile of dual carriageway or railway track and we have the poorest broadband in the North. And despite making up more than 6% of the north’s population and 11% of its land area, the Fermanagh and Omagh District Council area accounted for just over 5% of the jobs created by Invest NI in 2017-18.

I use my profile as MLA to showcase Fermanagh and put us on the map for all the right reasons. We have the most beautiful scenery in Ireland and have our own ice-cream, pottery, gin, and beer brands after all. I’ll fight tooth and nail so that my constituents get a fair deal.

In 2020, I called a debate with the Infrastructure Minister urging her to extend the A4 dual carriageway as far as Enniskillen and whilst she hasn’t yet committed, I won’t be giving up. I’ve also been lobbying the Infrastructure Minster on improving the rural road network, extending the rail network to the west, upgrading sewage infrastructure and resolving flooding issues.

I shall continue to state Fermanagh’s case to the Economy Minister when it comes to broadband and mo17

• The Bill to ban zero hour contracts will provide fairness and certainty for workers

bile coverage and, most importantly, when it comes to Invest NI funding.

Finance Minister Conor Murphy recently announced that a Civil Service Regional Hub will be based in Enniskillen. Whilst this is not job creation per se, it makes jobs that were Belfast-based more accessible to people in Fermanagh.

For the benefit of both individuals and society as a whole, everyone should be afforded equal opportunities, no matter where their geographical location.

Apart from representing rural people, I was also appointed as the Sinn Féin spokesperson on Employment and Workers’ Rights.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we constantly heard the phrase that “we are all in this together”.

In reality, the Covid Pandemic exposed the deep inequalities present in society, that we are not all in this together and we must all work together to change this. As the rich get richer, it is

�

The Covid Pandemic exposed the deep inequalities present in society

�

those on the bottom rung that are finding it harder and harder to cope.

A group who face one of the greatest challenges in the short and medium term are those in part-time zero hours employment.

They earn the least in the most insecure jobs whilst spending the most proportionally on food, accommodation, and energy.

If we are to truly tackle the legacy of unemployment, job insecurity, and low wages, we cannot continue with the policies that have failed so many of our society in the past. On behalf of Sinn Féin, I took forward a Private Members Bill to ban zero hour contracts and replace them with banded hours contracts.

Not only will this provide fairness and certainty for the zero hour contract workers employed in the North, there were 11,000 in 2019, it will also mean parity across the island. The Covid Pandemic laid bare the harsh reality of zero hour contracts for workers and their families.

In its report on Covid Clusters in Occupational Settings, the European Centre for Disease Prevention found that workers on precarious contracts were more at risk of presenting themselves to work while experiencing Covid Symptoms.

The lack of paid leave and uncertainty around their regular income was found to put them more at risk than workers on standard employment contracts if they were required to self-isolate.

This Bill may not make it through the various stages of Assembly scrutiny before the end of this mandate. If it doesn’t and if I am re-elected, I will finish the job of abolishing zero hour contracts in the next mandate.

I have also worked alongside my constituency colleague Seán Lynch in his Private Members Bill to ban fracking. As he stepped • Fracking would be disastrous for Ireland and Sinn Féin will do everything in our power to make sure it is banned across the whole island

18

down and Áine Murphy replaced him as MLA, she took over this important piece of legislation.

We all know fracking would be disastrous for Ireland. It has been banned in the 26 Counties and Sinn Féin will do everything in our power to make sure a ban comes into the SIx Counties too.

On top of my constituency work and my spokesperson role, I have represented Sinn Féin on the Finance and Justice Committees during this mandate.

Some ground-breaking work has come through the Justice Committee including the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Bill, the Protection from Stalking Bill and the Sexual Offences and Human Trafficking Bill.

It has been a hefty committee but passing these pieces of legislation will make a huge difference to people’s lives, particularly the lives of women. As my first term as an MLA comes to an end, I look back and can safely say it has not been without its challenges.

But as demanding and as stressful as it has been, it can’t have been that bad given that I have agreed to run in the Assembly Election in May 2022!

I am so proud to be part of a Sinn Féin Assembly team that has stood up for workers and families and I look forward to being part of a Sinn Féin Assembly team that will soon be surplus to requirements as we continue to campaign, discuss, and plan for Irish Unity. � Jemma Dolan is a Sinn Féin MLA for Fermanagh/South Tyrone and Assembly spokesperson on Employment and Workers’ Rights

NO TO FRACKING Keep it in the ground FRACKI NG BIL L CO NSU LTATIO N NO VEM BER 202 0

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

Pu

Vetoing The Protocol Protecti Restoring Cross-Community Consent

ons

Foreword by Baroness Kate Hoey Introduction by Jamie Bryson 5 January 2022

, ' K R O W T E N T IS L A N IO T 'ELITE NA G IN G N E L L A H C D N A N IO S U COLL THE STATE NARRATIVE

Published by Unionist Voice Publication

s Ltd on behalf of Unionist Voice

Policy Studies

EMMA McARDLE challenges the recent claims by Kate Hoey, of an ‘elite nationalist network’, highlighting the reality of how Hoey’s comments are another chapter in a long chronicle of brutal suppression of nationalist rights and voices in the Six Counties.

2022 might have gotten off to a slow start in a lot of houses, mine included, as the surge of the Omicron variant confined many to an impromptu 10 day ‘staycation’. It didn’t slow Baroness Kate Hoey though, whose proclamation in her foreword to Jamie Bryson’s ‘Vetoing the Protocol’ article, casts doubt on the constitutional aspirations of educated, successful and professional nationalists.

Hoey’s remarks were carried in the ‘Unionist Voice’ website on 5 January.

She wrote: “There are very justified concerns that many professional vocations have become dominated by those of a nationalist persuasion, and this positioning of activists is then used to exert influence on those in power”.

Behind the sneer, what Kate Hoey, recently elevated to the position of trade envoy to Ghana by Boris Johnson, actually denigrates is the growing demand for self-determination by the people of Ireland. Her claims of ‘activists’ infiltrating the professional class in order to pressurise those in power is a distraction. The truth is that the demand for

self-governance is growing among people of all backgrounds.

The people that Kate Hoey takes exception to have entered professional occupations due to hard work, intelligence, and the achievement of qualifications. The fact that some seek an end to British rule in Ireland is incidental.

• Kate Hoey and Jamie Bryson

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

The people that Kate Hoey takes exception to have entered professional occupations due to hard work, intelligence, and the achievement of qualifications Not content with her original remarks, the Baroness secured a platform in the ‘Irish News’ a few days later in which she doubled down on her assertion that an ‘elite nationalist network’

19

is at play in the North. She offers the absence of those in professional roles lobbying for the retention of the Union as justification that a covert nationalist network is in operation.

No one is preventing those who believe in the Union from putting forth their ideas and it would be a very welcome development if they did. Then we would have a proper debate about whether people’s interests, be they Irish, British or neither, are better served by remaining in the Union with Britain or in a new United Ireland.

The comments Kate Hoey makes are an attempt to silence those speaking about alternatives to the Union with Britain and to nullify the legitimate political aspiration of a United Ireland. She will not succeed.

The Good Friday Agreement guarantees parity of esteem for citizens who want Irish unity. It is entirely ap-

20

propriate for nationalists and republicans from any walk of life to espouse these beliefs and to use whatever influ-

ence they have on those in power. It’s healthy and it shouldn’t be painted as subversive or orchestrated when in fact it is the opposite.

Kate Hoey’s remarks are not the first time that upwardly mobile nationalists have been targeted in this way. In her 2013 tour de force, ‘Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland’, former journalist Anne Cadwallader uncovers irrefutable evidence of collusion between the sectarian Glenanne Gang and the RUC and UDR at the highest levels.

The documentary ‘Unquiet Graves’ is based on the book. The Glenanne Gang are believed to have been responsible for the deaths of 120 people and of that number only one, John Francis Green, was an IRA member, most had no political affiliations at all.

An extract from the book reads: “An analysis of those who died… shows one very significant pattern. In cases where the killers deliberately singled out their victims, they were almost exclusively from that increasingly confident, emerging Catholic middle class, reflecting the social change that was spurred by the British 1947 Education Act providing secondary level schooling for all children from the age of 11.

“In all cases, with one or two exceptions, targeted victims appear to have been selected because they were doing well, moving up, prospering economically, building a new home or renovating an older one, or setting up in business.”

This sectarian group’s murder campaign lasted from 1972 to 1978 and it was responsible for the infamous Dublin and Monaghan bombings which took place on 17 May 1974 and resulted in the deaths of 33 people and an unborn full-term baby, Baby Doherty.

Other bomb attacks were carried out

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

• Long lists of reports on collusion, including into the murders of Sinn Féin councillors Eddie Fullerton and Bernard O’Hagan, stretch all the way to the door of 10 Downing Street

'An analysis of those who died…shows one very significant pattern. In cases where the killers deliberately singled out their victims, they were almost exclusively from that increasingly confident, emerging Catholic middle class' ANNE CADWALLER in the 26 counties by loyalists before this date and while many people at the time of the murders believed that collusion was at play, the Irish government did not pursue, save for very limited public

statements, this line of enquiry.

In 1972, the Dáil was debating a controversial amendment to the Offenses Against the State Act which would permit conviction for membership of a proscribed organisation on the assertion of a Garda Chief Superintendent. Two bombs exploded in Dublin, Fine Gael changed their position and the amendment passed.

Last month saw the publication of the Police Ombudsman’s report into allegations of collusion in 19 murders and attempted murders, including those of Sinn Féin councillors Eddie Fullerton and Bernard O’Hagan.

This is the latest in a long list of reports which stretches all the way in the door of 10 Downing Street. Each report, from the Oireachtas report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, through Stalker, Samson, Stevens, Cory, de Silva, and now the Police Ombudsman’s report, indicate collusion between the British government’s armed forces and loyalist paramilitaries in hundreds of murders in Ireland.

At the end of 2021, relatives of the Miami Showband who were murdered by members of the UDR and UVF received compensation from the British Ministry of Defence when they proved collusion was at play in the murders of three band members.

The Dublin establishment has never been comfortable holding the British government to account for its policy of collusion, or for any of the other long history of atrocities it perpetrated against the Irish people.

Incredibly, the attendance, though welcome,

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

by Micheál Martin at the events in Derry to mark 50 years since Bloody Sunday, was the first time that a Taoiseach has been to that commemoration.

The British government’s response to these appalling atrocities in which they were complicit is an amnesty for those responsible for collusion and murder of citizens in Ireland. The Dublin government, as Mary Lou McDonald has said, must stand up for these victims and robustly challenge the British government’s amnesty plans.

I hope the government steps up to the mark but its lethargy on all things northern would give cause for concern.

In its constitutional obligation to reunite Ireland, the coalition government is also falling short. It fails to recognise the legitimacy of northern citizens. It will not let us vote in Presidential or any other elections. It will not give MPs in the North speaking rights in the Dáil.

Indeed, Fine Gael even describes its Northern members as ‘overseas members’! The establishment narrative equating the 26-County state to Ireland was also displayed through RTÉ’s inaccurate and insulting coverage of the centenary of the ‘end’ of British rule in ‘Ireland’.

The self-proclaimed ‘National Broadcaster’ has a long held the editorial line, that the state and the nation are one and the same. Access to RTÉ is not available in many parts of the North, most of the competitions are not open to entrants from the North, and Northern Gaelic teams don’t get their fair share of coverage.

RTÉ and the establishment would do well to remember that Ireland comprises 32 counties and our diaspora. The Irish border is the beach. � Emma McArdle is a Campaign and Policy Manager on Sinn Féin’s Uniting Ireland Project.

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NIALL MEEHAN who witnessed the British Embassy in Dublin burn down three days after the Bloody Sunday massacre writes on the ongoing implications and impact of that day’s events on the media and political culture of the 26 Counties.

f o t c a p im g in t s la The long

y a d n u S y d o Blo

It is the 50th anniversary of the 30 January 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre. That day, the British Parachute Regiment in Derry shot dead 13 anti-internment civil rights protesters. Another protester died later. In all, 26 were shot. The massacre sent shock waves around Ireland and the world. They were an expression of increasing frustration at British imperialism.

Internment without trial was introduced against the Six-County nationalist population six months earlier on 9 August. Though ostensibly targeted at the IRA and excluding unionist armed groups, political leaders like Michael Farrell of People’s Democracy were also picked up. The families of those snatched were attacked and their houses were destroyed. The exercise was accompanied by torture techniques, honed by British forces during the Cold War and in other colonial ‘emergencies’.

24 people were shot over the following two days, 17 by the British Army. This included nine civilians in Ballymurphy, Belfast, killed by members of the same Parachute Regiment.

Unionists in Belfast also burned out Catholics. As a result, over 7,000 were left homeless. Echoing pogrom attempts in 1969, about 2,500 mainly Belfast refugees fled south. In the four months before internment, 34 died. Four months later, 140 lay dead. Whereas ten British soldiers died prior to August 1971, 34 more were killed by the end of December.

Far from subduing protests and a growing IRA insurgency, internment had an opposite effect. Despite continuing brutal attacks, carried out at the behest of the discredited Unionist regime in Stormont, nationalists en masse were unbowed. They continued to protest and to resist. In the spirit of the times and reminiscent anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

of the War of Independence, British repression fuelled rather than subdued popular resistance.

On 18 January 1972, Unionist premier Brian Faulkner, who had pushed the internment policy, tried to drive nationalists off the streets by banning demonstrations. Mass mobilisation by the nationalist population was as explosive to those in power as IRA activities.

Four days later, a week before Derry’s Bloody Sunday, British soldiers batoned and beat anti-interment demonstrators off Magilligan Strand in Derry. One of those attacked, John Hume, was so alarmed by the troops' brutal behaviour, he decided not to participate in the Civil Rights Movement protest against internment in Derry on 30 January.

Thousands set off for the city centre from Derry’s Bogside on that fateful Sunday. The circumstances under which the victims died in broad daylight and within crowds of protesters were clear immediately. They were unarmed, shot dead by the British Army for the crime of being Irish protesters.

Widgery left London The British government with advice from needed time to distance itself and its forces from the massa- Prime Minister cre. Two days later, a tribunal Edward Heath that under Lord Widgery was set up.

Britain was “fighting He was packed off, not to ‘Londonderry’ as he termed it, but not only a military to nearby mainly unionist Cole- war but a propaganda raine. Widgery left London with

war”

23

advice from Prime Minister Edward Heath that Britain was “fighting not only a military war, but a propaganda war”.

Widgery did as he was advised and produced an immediately discredited report in April that exonerated his army and blamed protest organisers.

The official propaganda did not work.

The victims’ families, the people of Derry, and Irish people generally were outraged at this further outrage.

The families vowed not to rest until the British government officially recognised what everyone else knew, that the Bloody Sunday dead were unarmed civilians. Another inquiry, this time under Lord Saville, was set up in 1998. It took 12 years, and occasional attempts to deviate into felon-setting, to report as much truth as was then officially palatable. The British government required 40 years to declare that those killed were unarmed and were shot down in cold blood.

Holding anyone responsible was still a step too far. Plans to prosecute small fry, two low-ranking British soldiers, were finally abandoned in 2021.

As in 1972, it is a case of British law and British

order. Thousands of republicans were railroaded through brutal interrogations and one-judge star chambers. British transgressors were, almost without exception, beneficiaries of an unspoken pact between them and their government; do the dirty work on our behalf and you will be protected from prosecution.

Bloody Sunday had a large effect down south.

There were spontaneous strikes and demonstrations all over the 26 Counties, as the accompanying graphics show. The then Irish Government of Jack Lynch tried to keep a lid on protests by declaring a National Day of Mourning on 2 February.

Trade unions declared a general strike that day.

Thousands marched in a Dublin Council of Trade Unions protest and cheered as the British Embassy, that had been attacked continuously for two days and nights, went up in flames.

The Dublin Government had wanted to distance the South from the experiences and radicalisation of nationalists in the Six Counties. Censorship, which is also 50 years old, was imposed on RTÉ in September 1971.

That became a simmering crisis that erupted

Jack Lynch tried to keep a lid on protests by declaring a National Day of Mourning on the second of February. Trade unions declared a general strike

• Newspaper notices of bussiness shutting down as a mark of respect to the people of Derry

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ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

• Bernadette Devlin

• Protest in Dublin

Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote one week later in the London Observer that British Army Paratroopers ‘deliberately shot dead 13 unarmed men’ and repeated his troops out call. By 1985 he had revised his view into, ‘British troops fired on rioters’

• (clockwise) Conor Cruise O’Brien, Edward Heath, John Taylor and Reginald Maudling

later in 1972, when the Government sacked the RTÉ Authority. Plans to increase repression were interrupted by Bloody Sunday. Irish Press headlines the day before said, “Military courts could be introduced, Government crackdown on IRA”. It reported 40 republicans taken into custody in the Dundalk area, an action welcomed by Stormont Home Affairs Minister John Taylor (now Lord Kilclooney).

The politician most associated with the worst effects of repression and Section 31 censorship, Conor Cruise O’Brien, was swayed by public opinion. He had been moving toward the unionist position he later openly espoused and was a leading proponent of the fantasy that Fianna Fáil set up and financed the Provisional IRA. Bloody Sunday momentarily tripped O’Brien up.

Surprised Irish Press readers read a few days afterwards, “Get troops out, O’Brien tells British”. He put the demand to British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, then recovering from a violent attack in the House of Commons from Bernadette Devlin, who had been in Derry. O’Brien said, “nothing would be a help to the situation but for the British Government to set a date for the departure of their troops”.

Tracing the changes in O’Brien’s characterisation

of what happened on Bloody Sunday is instructive of a certain type of Dublin ‘liberal’, desperate to alter public perceptions in the medium to long term.

Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote one week later in the London Observer that British Army Paratroopers “deliberately shot dead 13 unarmed men” and repeated his troops out call. By 1985 he had revised his view to, “British troops fired on rioters”. In 1997, this morphed in the Sunday Independent into, “the ‘civil rights civilians’ were Sinn Féin activists operating for the IRA”. O’Brien portrayed support for democratic rights as IRA-linked subversion. In his war, as in Widgery’s tribunal report, propaganda took precedence.

While O’Brien prospered in the mid 1970s, those who failed to toe the O’Brien line in the media suffered. One casualty was Ireland’s then best-known mainstream investigative reporter, Joe MacAnthony.

His masterful four-page report on Bloody Sunday in the 6 February Sunday Independent became the template for all future investigation, including by the Saville Inquiry.

MacAnthony was the first to uncover Fianna Fáil political corruption in local government – in a frontpage 1974 expose featuring Ray Burke. By 1976, Ma-

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

25

cAnthony was forced out of the Independent by the attitude of its new owner and ardent Jack Lynch supporter, Tony O’Reilly. MacAnthony was banned from work in O’Brien-controlled RTÉ the same year. He then left for an award-winning career in Canada.

The immediate political impact of the reaction to Bloody Sunday was the abolition in March of the 50 year old Unionist Party regime at Stormont. From that point on, Britain took direct control of the conflict.

A process of attrition, Ulsterisation, security force collusion involving sectarian killings and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, judicial manipulation, and police beatings began.

It came to a head during the H-Block and Armagh crisis of the early 1980s. Refusal of the Irish people to bow was concentrated on the bodies of IRA prisoners in the H Blocks and in Armagh jail. As after Bloody Sunday, British

bloody-mindedness resulted in the death of ten hunger strikers and caused IRA support to grew significantly, this time combined with election interventions.

Throughout all of that period, families of the Derry victims and their supporters ploughed on, unwilling and unable to give up.

Their pressure plus conditions created by the IRA ceasefires and the peace process made British refusal to bend no longer tenable or acceptable.

Without the resolve of the Bloody Sunday families and the people of Derry, Britain might never have been forced, eventually, to admit a truth a clear as the daylight massacre itself.

The price of protest was high, unbearable for the family and friends of victims, but so too was the price paid by Britain for Bloody Sunday. �

• Dublin Council of Trade Unions held a march to the British Embassy, people cheered when it went up in flames

26

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

NA GAEIL ÓGA Gaelchlub i mBaile Átha Cliath

LE CONÁN GLAS Más rud é go mbíonn tú ag siúl leat i bPáirc an

Óga, atá ar an chumann spóirt is mó fáis in Éirinn

Fhionnuisce tráthnóna grianmhar éigin i lár an

ó shin. Faoi láthair tá 30 foireann ann le corradh is

tsamhraidh agus go bhfeiceann tú scaifte daoine

500 ball imeartha.

ag imirt peile ar cheann de na páirceanna fairsinge

An sprioc atá i gceist le gach imeacht de chuid

peile, b’fhéidir nach dtabharfá mórán airde orthu. Is

Na Gaeil Óga, bíodh seisiún traenála don fhoireann

é sin go dtí go dteann tú giota níos cóngaraí dóibh

Faoi láthair tá 30 foireann ann le corradh is 500 ball imeartha

agus go gcluineann tú daoine ag scairteadh “tá mé anseo” nó “tabhair pas dom anois”. B’fhéidir go smaoineofá ansin - “Cad chuige faoi Dhia a bhfuil an bhaicle seo uilig ag labhairt i nGaeilge?”

Dar ndóigh, is iad Na Gaeil Óga atá i gceist agam thuas. Daoibhse nár chuala iomrá orthu roimhe is

faoi 8, cluiche camógaíochta nó oíche amach

club CLG lán-Ghaeilge é Na Gaeil Óga atá lonnaithe

do na foirne fásta, nó go mbeadh Gaeilge

i mBaile Átha Cliath. Bunaíodh an cumann in 2010

amháin á labhairt. Ciallaíonn sé sin

nuair a tháinig grúpa daoine díograiseacha le chéile

go mbíonn ball foirne ag freastal

le plé a dhéanamh ar an dóigh a bhféadfadh siad

ar a laghad trí uair an chloig

saol níos Gaelaí a chruthú dóibh féin i mBaile Átha

d’imeachtaí Gaeilge gach

Cliath. An toradh a bhí ar an chomhrá seo - Na Gaeil

seachtain i rith an tséasúir.

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

27

Na Gaeil Óga Foireann iomána sinsir

Foireann Buachailli F'12

An fhoireann iomána i séasúr 2021, mar shampla,

acu ar dtús; daoine ó na Sé Chontae nach raibh

idir chluichí, thraenáil agus oícheanta sóisialta,

deis cheart acu an teanga a fhoghlaim ar scoil, agus

chaith siad os cionn 150 uair an chloig le chéile sa

daoine thar loch isteach a chuir suim sa Ghaeilge

chomhphobal Ghaeilge seo. Don té atá ag iarraidh an Ghaeilge a fhoghlaim nó a fheabhsú tá cuid mhór uaireanta teagmhála teanga i gceist anseo, rud atá thar a bheith tábhachtach sa phróiseas foghlama teanga. Thar na blianta tháinig cuid mhaith imreoirí chuig Na Gaeil Óga nach raibh mórán Gaeilge

28

Foireann Peil na mBan

ina measc, agus d’éirigh leo ardchaighdeán líofachta a bhaint amach.

Le roinnt blianta anuas tá an club ag díriú ar na foirne faoi aois atá lonnaithe i Leamhcán in Iarthar Bhleá Cliath. Tá an struchtúr seo ag brath go mór ar na Gaelscoileanna sa cheantar, Gaelscoil Naomh Pádraig, Gaelscoil Eiscir Riada agus Coláiste Cois Life. Leis an Ghaelscolaíocht tá sé rí-thábhachtach

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

Paistí san acadmh

go bhfuil a fhios ag na páistí go bhfuil an Ghaeilge

do phobail ar fud fad na hÉireann atá ag iarraidh a

á labhairt taobh amuigh den tseomra ranga agus

nGaelphobal féin a chruthú. �

go bhfuil faill acu í a úsáid i suíomh sóisialta. Seo é an ról a imríonn Na Gaeil Óga do na páistí seo i Leamhcán. Tá obair mhór idir lámha ag an chlub faoi láthair agus foirne suas go faoi 14 ag dul chun páirce sa gheansaí ghorm sa cheithre spórt.

Leanann fás an chumainn ar aghaidh go gasta agus beirt oibrithe lánaimseartha fostaithe acu ar na mallaibh le cuidiú le fás agus forbairt an chlub.

Gan dabht is eiseamláirí den scoth iad Na Gaeil Óga

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

Faoin údar - Is Oifigeach Rannpháirtíochta Pobail é do Na Gaeil Óga Conán Glas. Is as Falach Ghlún i gContae Dhoire ó Dhúchas é agus tá sé ina bhall imeartha do fhoireann iomána NGÓ ó bhí 2018 ann.

D’fhoghlaim sé a chuid Gaeilge agus é ag imirt leis an chlub agus anois tá sé fostaithe lánaimseartha ag NGÓ.

29

Nobody is safe until everyone is safe

BY PAUL GAVAN “Emergency Over” was the headline on the Irish Times the day after the Irish Government announced an end to most of the pandemic restrictions on 21 January. It was an announcement that was welcomed almost universally and certainly did constitute “a good day” for Ireland.

It would be easy to forget in the heady excitement of this good news that for much of the world the emergency, far from being over, continues to intensify. Covid-19 constitutes a global problem; it needs global solutions.

“Nobody is safe until everybody is safe” is the wellworn phrase to sum up why the whole world needs access to Covid-19 vaccines. It’s also a simple statement of common sense. Unless we vaccinate the world, the dangers of new variants will remain, posing a threat to every human being on our planet.

So, why is it that two years into the Covid-19 crisis, we still have vast swathes of our world where vaccination rates are running at just 8% or lower?

Because western powers, including the EU, have blocked attempts to allow developing countries to produce their own generic versions of the lifesaving vaccines.

In doing so, they have proposed a series of spurious and false arguments employing the most cynical of tactics, while the number of those dying from Covid-19 spirals. The Economist magazine, hardly a bastion of left-wing thought, has estimated that the true level of global deaths from Covid-19 is 17 million people, bearing in mind that six out of

The true level of global deaths from Covid-19 is 17 million people, bearing in mind that six out of every seven Covid-19 deaths are unlikely to be reported in the developing world

30

every seven Covid-19 deaths are unlikely to be reported in the developing world.

There has been an ongoing debate now for the past year over the call made by 100 countries, as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and many human rights and development NGOs, for a temporary waiver on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), a step that would allow the developing world the right in practice to vaccinate all its people.

In December, this debate came to the Seanad where I, along with Sinn Féin colleagues, was proud to sign a motion calling on the Irish Government to make a clear and public call for the EU Commission to end its policy of opposing a TRIPS waiver. The Government intended to oppose the motion, and even tabled an amendment to that effect, but faced with the overwhelming force of argument based on scientific facts and evidence, government opposition melted away in front of us. The motion calling for support for a TRIPS waiver was adopted without a single vote of opposition, despite the Government having a two thirds Seanad majority.

We hoped this vote might lead to the Irish Government finally finding the courage to speak out in support for vaccine justice for the world.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Instead, in a • World Health Organisation has called for a temporary waiver on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

COVAX initiative As of October, only 14% of donations promised by western governments to developing countries had been delivered

• Michael McCarthy Flynn from Oxfam

highly unusual move, a senior official of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment wrote to every member of the Seanad effectively re-stating the Government’s negative position on the TRIPS waiver, whilst also claiming that the issue really wasn’t the responsibility of that Department.

Having failed to convince people with patronising arguments over a lack of production capacity in developing countries, in fact 100 specific factories have been identified that could be producing Covid-19 vaccines within three months, the Government have moved on to argue that existing “flexibilities” within the TRIPS rules could be used instead. This is particularly disingenuous as it gives the false impression that EU Governments are willing to move on the TRIPS issue.

There are 100 key components in mRNA vaccines, many of which are IP protected, and produced in multiple jurisdictions. Thus, in order to manufacture a “generic” vaccine using existing TRIPS flexibilities, the producer would have to seek compulsory licences for each IP-protected commodity in its country of manufacture, a cumbersome and complicated legal process of licensing that would tie up producers for years. To suggest this pathway as a solution really is the most cynical of political arguments.

Another argument made against the call for a TRIPS waiver is that it would act as a disincentive for pharma giants to continue to research and develop new vaccines. This argument ignores the fact that it was €93 billion of public money that drove the speedy development of the vaccine. It also ignores the fact that a temporary TRIPS waiver would not prevent ‘Big Pharma’ from continuing to make massive profits from rich countries, it would simply allow developing countries to supply vaccines to their own populations, something that is simply not happening right now.

Pharmaceutical companies point to its own production anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

capacity as a reason to not need a TRIPS waiver, suggesting there will be a glut of vaccines later this year. However, the issues are not just around production but fair distribution. Despite recent increases in production, sub-Saharan Africa had only received enough doses to vaccinate one in eight people by last December.

Finally, the Irish Government points to its support for the COVAX initiative to supply vaccines. This is a programme involving a coming together of world leaders, foundations, and pharmaceutical companies, but it will in no way meet the needs of the world’s population. Writing about COVAX, Michael McCarthy Flynn from Oxfam Ireland said: “The promise of solidarity and working in co-operation to achieve vaccines for all globally died by the end of 2020. In its place a series of charitable promises by corporations, the G7 and the EU arose to give the impression that they were committed to filling the vaccine void.”

As of October, only 14% of donations promised by western governments to developing countries had been delivered. �

The motion calling for support for a TRIPS waiver was adopted without a single vote of opposition despite the Government having a two thirds Seanad majority

Paul Gavan is a Sinn Féin Senator and the party’s Seanad Spokesperson for Education and Workers’ Rights.

31

Grúpa Cónasctha den Chlé Aontaithe Eorpach • den Chlé Ghlas Nordach

GRÚPA PARLAIMINTEACH EORPACH

www.guengl.eu TREO EILE DON EORAIP ANOTHER EUROPE IS POSSIBLE

FUNDED BY THE EUROPEAN UNITED LEFT/NORDIC GREEN LEFT (GUE/NGL)

32

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

BY CHRIS HAZZARD

Chile votes for dignity As hundreds of thousands spilled on to the streets of Santiago in December, Gabriel Boric scaled one of the city’s barricades to address the jubilant crowd. The 35 year old former student leader had just secured the highest number of votes of any president in Chile’s history.

As if to amplify the significance of the occasion, the President-elect began his speech in the indigenous Mapuche language, declaring that a new generation of Chileans would finally lay the ghost of Pinochet in the grave and with him, the neoliberal economic architecture that stripped the Chilean people of their dignity.

The young leader of the Apruebo Dignidad political alliance was speaking not merely

The roots of Boric’s success are to be found on the burning streets of Santiago in the autumn of 2019, when more than a million protestors united in opposition to a swathe of regressive ‘cost of living’ charges to those gathered before him on the street, but to Chile’s rural mining heartlands in the north, to the wider Latin American region, and to progressive political forces around the world.

Undoubtedly, a sense of historical justice hung in the air in Santiago, as Boric’s victory made it impossible not to be swept away in the nostalgic promise of Allende’s Unidad Popular victory in 1970.

In reality however, the roots of Boric’s success are to be found on the burning streets of Santiago in the autumn of 2019, when more than a million protestors united in opposition to a swathe of regressive ‘cost of living’ charges that eventually sparked weeks of unprecedented social unrest.

• Gabriel Boric got the highest number of votes of any president in Chile’s history

Inspired by a similar experience of repression during the Pinochet dictatorship, cacerolazos (noisy protest) soon sprang up across working class neighbourhoods and the sound of pots and pans accompanied the arrival of curfew each night. It wasn’t long before the call went out on social media for the people to sing from the windows of their apartments. Unsurprisingly, they chose Víctor Jara’s beautiful ballad ‘El Derecho de Vivir en Paz’ (The Right to Live in Peace) to echo defiantly through the streets.

In the daytime too as they gathered in Plaza Baquedano - now renamed Dignity Square - collective inspiration and strength was drawn from the Allende era as protestors chanted; El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! (The people united, will never be defeated).

Significantly too, the flag of the Mapuche indigenous people was a prominent feature of the protests, reflecting the reignit• Salvador Allende ing of the centuries old struggle

As the situation deteriorated, the billionaire President Sebastián Piñera declared a state of emergency, introduced widespread curfews, and brought the Army onto the streets to support the infamous Carabinero police force. But it was too little too late, the protests spread out from Santiago as hundreds of thousands of protestors also mobilised in Valparaíso, Concepción, and Temuco.

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• Chile overwhelmingly voted in favour of drafting a new constitution, the old one dating back to Pinochet and the Chicago Boys — the right-wing Chilean ecomomists who backed Pinochet

for the recognition of the rights of Chile’s indigenous peoples.

Ultimately, at the core of the protests lay an incorrigible truth; the Pinochet regime had bequeathed a smouldering legacy of human rights abuses and a long litany of social rights that were stolen from the ordinary people of Chile. The time had finally come to address this unforgivable failing of the democratic transition.

The ordinary people of Chile want a stake in the political and economic process, but most importantly - as the name of Boric’s political alliance suggests - the people want their dignity back.

There is a sense that the transition to democracy was a false dawn, a mirage. That the

The Pinochet regime had bequeathed a smouldering legacy of human rights abuses and a long litany of social rights that were stolen from the ordinary people of Chile people were somehow conned by the political class. A constant refrain from Boric is that the ‘people of Chile were promised more than the rights of a consumer’.

Given the scale and endurance of the protests, Piñera agreed to hold a referendum on a new constitution - the incumbent being the heritage of neoliberalism in Chile, dating back to Pinochet and the Chicago Boys.

It was no surprise in April 2020 that the people of Chile overwhelmingly voted in favour of drafting a new constitution; one created by a new constituent assembly reflective of the diverse social fabric of the nation.

In the wake of the unrest, progressive social movements, trade unions, political par34

ties, and intellectuals continued to engage.

A central work programme became increasingly clear; a new constitution drafted by the direct representatives of the Chilean people, of indigenous communities, and with gender equality, justice at last for the victims of the dictatorship, and substantial reforms to the state’s education, health, and pension systems.

Young progressive leaders like Boric - who had learnt the art of protest as a militant student leader a decade before - were also now pushed to the fore as the liberal and centrist political forces struggled to relate to the demands of the social unrest.

Having secured the nomination to be the Left candidate, Gabriel Boric recognised that if he was to win, it would be on the shoul-

ders of those who coalesced on the streets in 2019.

It would be in collaboration with the social movements, the trade unions, the feminist organisations - and also too the Communist Party, who had much more established organisational roots in Chile’s working class districts and northern mining regions. This is why during his campaign he often used the phrase “entramos todos a La Moneda” (we all enter La Moneda) - La Moneda being the seat of the government in La Moneda Palace in Santiago.

In defeating the far-right Jose Antonio Kast, who is not only the son of a Nazi, but a lifelong Pinochet supporter and long-time friend of Brazil’s Bolsanaro, Boric was heavily reliant on this far-reaching progressive

• More than a million protestors united in opposition to a swathe of regressive ‘cost of living’ charges in 2019 ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

coalition in the final stages of the campaign once it became clear it was a head-to-head contest between the two candidates.

Trailing after the first round of voting, Boric turned to the Communist Party, especially dynamic and popular figures such as Camila Vallejo, to help mobilise Chile’s working class heartlands - such as the urban districts and the northern mining regions.

In steering the working class consciousness away from the anti-establishment, new-right populism of Kast, the Communist Party played a vital role in boosting Boric’s support in the final round of voting. In Antofagasta for example, where mining is the hub of the economy, Boric’s support swung from 20% in the first round to 60% in the second round.

In the feminist movement too, there was a crucial swing in favour of Boric following the first round of voting. Astonishingly, the increasing popularity of the feminist movement or ‘la potencia feminista’ (feminist power) helped mobilise a women’s assembly of 2,000 women who took to the streets and social media with a powerful call for Chile’s women to back Boric. Where once women had been the bedrock of Pinochet’s support, nearly 70% of women under the age of 30 supported Boric in December’s second round poll.

Boric’s victory, like that of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, David Arce in Bolivia, and Pedro Castillo in Peru, speaks to a moment of great opportunity and promise in Latin America at this time.

So too the unbowed resilience of the revolutionary bloc in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nic-

• Camila Vallejo

aragua - despite increasingly hostile and interventionist US administrations - sustains the dream of increased Latin American integration and regional solidarity.

Indeed, each victory in recent times has steadily built momentum ahead of huge electoral battles for the Left in Latin Ameri-

Boric’s victory, like that of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, David Arce in Bolivia, and Pedro Castillo in Peru, speaks to a moment of great opportunity and promise in Latin America at this time

• During the protests in 2019 President Sebastián Piñera declared a state of emergency with widespread curfews, and the Army on the streets

ca in 2022. Lula looks set to return to power in Brazil and former M-19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro is well placed to restore democracy in Colombia.

The increasing vulnerability of Castillo in Peru however is a timely warning for Boric that the struggle does not end at the ballot box; there will be many battles ahead.

Indeed with Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ returning as a ‘red wave’ in 2022, the US and its acolytes will undoubtedly seek every available opportunity to nurture internal dissent. They will seek to frustrate Chile’s external efforts to access international capital, to work in collaboration with international powers such as China, and to deepen regional solidarity with neighbours such as Bolivia, who have long sought fraternal diplomatic relations in order to secure access to the Pacific Ocean though Chile’s northern regions.

Chile’s social movements, trade unions, and Communist Party will have to remain vigilant. The internal and external forces which undermine Pedro Castillo in Peru will soon be felt along the Andes to the streets of Santiago.

But hope springs eternal in the land of fire and ice. The hope of eradicating the extractive, exploitative capitalist system; the hope of a society that prioritises the recovery of its natural resources, its indigenous heritage, and the wellbeing of its workers.

In his final address to the people of Chile from inside the barricaded La Moneda in 1973, Allende spoke directly to the ordinary people of Chile. He told them that “History is ours, and people make history.”

It is the ordinary people of Chile who have made history in carrying Boric into La Moneda. Now, he must lead them out from the shadow of Pinochet and into a better world.

Veneceremos! � Chris Hazard is the Sinn Féin MP for South Down

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The voices of disadvantaged and marginalised women must be heard NCCWN represents and works directly with women experiencing disadvantage through our 17 Grassroots Women’s Community Development Projects in Clare, Donegal, Dublin, Kerry, Leitrim, Limerick, Mayo, Monaghan, Roscommon, Waterford, Westmeath, and Wexford.

NCCWN addresses a wide diversity of issues impacting on the most disadvantaged women in Ireland. Our specific focus is support and capacity building for working class women, women without formal education, women living in poverty, older women, lone parents, women from the Traveller community, minority ethnic and migrant women, women with disabilities, lesbian and bisexual women, women living in rural areas, homeless women, and women experiencing domestic violence. NCCWN Projects recognise disadvantage in relation to women’s socio-economic circumstances. In addition, rural projects work with women who are often further disadvantaged through social isolation and lack of access to supports and services.

As a national organisation working specifically and directly with women from disadvantaged communities, NCCWN have demonstrated that we are an experienced and essential part of the infrastructure to support and advance disadvantaged women’s equality both locally and nationally, with a direct reach of over 36,000 women nationwide.

The focus of the NCCWN is on the empowerment of women and in building the capacity of women to contribute to benefitting their lives and the lives of their families and local communities. The main activities of NCCWN projects include: 􀊄

􀊄 􀊄 􀊄 􀊄 􀊄

􀊄

􀊄

􀊄

􀊄 􀊄

Women’s community development and community building

Pre-development, community education and training

The National Collective of Community Based Women’s Networks (NCCWN) is a national women’s community development organisation, core funded by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, to advance disadvantaged women’s equality, women’s leadership and empowerment. Here, they outline the work of the collective.

impacted disproportionately. Women living in poverty face barriers to health services, which in turn makes them more vulnerable to ill-health, both physical and mental, thus exacerbating health inequalities.

Furthermore, access to education is impacted by lack of finance, leading to multi-generational unemployment, poor health and poverty. While the management of wealth falls mainly to men, the burden of managing poverty is usually carried by women. Families headed by a lone parent, the majority of whom are women, are consistently and significantly more likely to be living in poverty than the general population. The income of women in paid employment continues to be significantly less than that of men. The concentration of disadvantaged women in parttime and low paid insecure work is of concern to NCCWN. NCCWN research and experience confirms that the Covid-19 pandemic has not only further revealed the extent of inequality in Ireland, it has also exacerbated it. Women, particularly those who are marginalised and living in disadvantage, have been hit hard by the measures taken to control the virus.

Domestic violence, unemployment, and mental ill-health have all increased in Ireland during this time and the burden of care has fallen disproportionally on women. As the pandemic unfolded, domestic violence reports grew.

Domestic and sexual violence remains a serious issue for women we work with which can be further intensified by social exclusion and poverty.

Women and children are all too often forced to stay in violent homes, as we have seen particularly during the Covid-19 restrictions. NCCWN support and refer women to • NCCWN International Women's Day event in Dublin March 2020

Supporting and providing pathways to education and training

Bringing a ‘gender lens’ to mainstream community and local development initiatives

Identifying and providing needs-based services and supports, including childcare Challenging gender-based violence

Promoting women’s equality, community leadership and empowerment

Promoting women’s health and well-being

Awareness -raising on gender equality and women’s human rights Highlighting and improving access to local services and supports

Networking of women at local, regional and national levels.

Through our work with grassroots women across the country, it is evident that while gender inequalities impact on all women, women experiencing disadvantage are 36

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

PICTURE: MAGGIE DOHERTY

the appropriate agencies at times of crisis in their lives.

Women have also been forced to cut hours at work or leave employment to take on more domestic and care duties. All this will reverberate for years to come in loss of income, mental wellbeing, and even wellbeing in old age due to pension inequalities that persist in Ireland.

NCCWN recognise that there have been positive impacts, including the ban on evictions and the pandemic payment to all who needed it, to name just a couple. As the country emerges from severe lockdowns, it will be more important than ever that any gains are retained and that the voice of disadvantaged and marginalised women is heard.

NCCWN are seeking to ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in the workplace, politics, and public life, particularly in relation to disadvantaged women.

Our participation on key national structures supports women’s equality and raises awareness on disadvantaged women’s gender equality and human rights.

NCCWN works from a feminist community development, social inclusion, and antipoverty approach and believes that in order to truly tackle persistent gender inequalities, policies and decision-making needs to focus on prevention – prevention of poverty, of violence, of all forms of disadvantage that women experience. NCCWN recognise the need for real and active consultation with women experiencing disadvantage; making visible and giving voice to women’s lived experiences; commitment to adequate funding of women’s community organisations.

Grassroots women have identified food poverty, heat poverty, access to public infrastructure, and the digital divide as key areas of concern.

Solutions to the coming climate crisis, which will further significantly affect women, should be combined with poverty-alleviation activities.

Women’s role in community development is transformative in its very nature and has made visible the critical role that women play as the anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

mainstay of local communities through their involvement in community development activities. The experience of the NCCWN projects is that investing in women’s empowerment and community development has lasting impacts on the social and economic fabric of society, in sustaining and building community cohesion and inclusion and the achievement of equality at a societal level.

The women’s community development movement has played a pivotal role in Ireland and many countries across the world in highlighting the factors that have shaped the lives and experiences of women living in poverty and disadvantage.

NCCWN will soon launch our strategic plan for 2022-2026 and a new name to reflect the challenges and work that we have been and will continue to do both on the ground and at representational level.

Our knowledge of what women face and understanding of how much of the disadvantage is structural and systematic, comes from work on the ground with grassroots women and through research enabled by our extensive reach and trust in the communities. Our aspiration in the coming years is to grow our community and reach, to unite more women to challenge the inequality and disadvantage that women experience in all forms.

NCCWN recognise that the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis has highlighted how the community and voluntary sector is crucial to the lives of many women in terms of combating disadvantage and isolation, social outlets, work, and community participation. In 2020, NCCWN carried out a survey throughout our 17 Projects’ areas to assess Covid-19 impacts and needs of women we work with. Findings from this survey, with 3,369 respondents, highlighted that women’s well-being and mental health will be one of the key areas of work for NCCWN local Projects going forward. �

If you want to make contact with the NCCWN, Miriam Holt is the National Coordinator. Her email is: 􀍘 national. coordinator@womenscollective.ie 37

WILLIAM MORRIS & IRELAND

BY JOE DWYER

“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make” WILLIAM MORRIS In ‘Labouring Men’, the historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that “the really interesting and original contributions to Marxist theory in these islands came from men like William Morris and James Connolly.”

His elevation of Morris and Connolly is revealing. Admittedly, in some regards, it would be difficult to find two more divergent characters. One born and raised in a sphere of privilege and comfort; the other spent their childhood enveloped in overcrowded, urban squalor. One prophesised about a world revolution that never materialised; the other went out and made revolution, ultimately meeting his end before a firing squad.

However, on closer inspection, the parallels are clear to see. Both William Morris and James Connolly were revolutionists first and foremost. Both men adhered to an educationalist revolutionary creed, placing their faith in the working class ahead of any other strata of society. Neither trusted parliamentarian-led movements, mindful of the vitiating compromise and moderation that comes from constitutionalism.

While perhaps most widely remembered today for his imitable Arts and Crafts design work – whether wall coverings, stained glass, carpets, furniture, or tapestries – in his own time, William Morris was equally known for his social activism and political pronouncements.

Morris was converted to socialism in December 1882 following a series of lectures organised by the Democratic Federation (later renamed the Social Democratic Federation).

The following month, he joined the Federation and so began 13

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The more unmanageable will not be asking for a mere Dublin parliament, but will be claiming his right to do something with the country of Ireland itself, which will make it a fit dwelling-place for reasonable and happy people WILLIAM MORRIS

�

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years of unfaltering activism, lecturing, and writing in aid of socialist revolution.

However, the SDF ultimately proved to be too stifling for the increasingly revolutionary Morris. Its founder, Henry Hyndman, treated the party as his own personal fiefdom and his controlling, domineering leadership ultimately drove away the SDF’s most capable personalities.

In December 1884, ten members of the SDF’s executive, including William Morris and Eleanor Marx, publicly denounced Hyndman and resigned from the SDF. The following month, in January 1885, this same breakaway grouping launched an alternative political vehicle: the Socialist League.

Four years later, the SL would be the first political organisation that a young James Connolly joined.

Connolly was there…

In April 1889, James Connolly - having just left the British Army - reunited with his brother John in Dundee, Scotland. It was there that he joined the SL. While the League was technically a splinter organisation, both the SL and SDF operated in Scotland as loose networks of social activists and trade unionists. Indeed, despite the opposition of both sets of leaderships, many Scottish activists even held joint-memberships.

John Connolly, James’s brother, was the secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation, the collective title adopted by several Scottish branches of the SDF. The Scottish Socialist Federation openly took in members of the SL also and - when John left for Edinburgh - James took over as secretary.

When assessing Connolly’s later political writings, it is important to appreciate these formative political forays and ideological groundings they provided. It was through the studygroups of the Scottish Socialist Federation that Connolly was first introduced to socialist and anti-colonialist theory.

In this environment of fertile exchanges of new ideas, Connolly first honed his analytical framework. In the words of Donal Nevin: “All of Connolly’s writings on economic and social issues are infused with the basic premises of Marxism as propagated in Britain in the last decade of the 19th century when he was imbibing his ideas from Marxist leaders of the British socialist movement in parties which were avowedly Marxist, the Socialist League and the Social Democratic Federation”.

Within such groups, the works of William Morris were to ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

the fore. Accessible and communicable, Morris provided a straightforward articulation of socialism, unencumbered by the clunky translations or verbose style of other socialist tracts.

His writing was complimented with an artistic flourish and often incorporated imaginative, allegorical story-telling. In later years, both James Connolly and James Larkin would often quote Morris in speeches or reproduce extracts of his writings – whether from Commonweal, A Dream of John Ball, or News from Nowhere – in the newspapers they edited.

The Irish Question…

In October 1877, before his subsequent conversion to socialism, William Morris travelled to Tullamore, Co Offaly, to decorate Charleville Castle. During this visit, his aristocratic employers informed him that the area had once been “the very centre of Ribbonism” and how “even last year, a man was slain there for ‘agrarian’ reasons.” Also purporting that “an old man had told them how he had seen the [1798] rebellion; twenty miles of country burning in a straight line, the cabins and villages fired by the Orange Yeomanry.”

Not yet politicised, Morris’ reaction to such tales was that of a bystander and, in almost stereotypical English fashion, responded, “and these unreasonable Irish remember it all.”

Despite such flippancy, however, on his journey from Dublin to Charleville Castle, he did make a note of passing the Curragh, “where our army of occupation sits...”

Even before his socialist awakening, Morris knew occupation when he saw it.

Morris’ appreciation of ‘the Irish Question’ developed further as he entered the arena of political organising. In an appeal to London’s Irish community, he addressed a packed meeting of the National League, on Blackfriars Road, in May 1883. As he later recorded, “I was able to please them by assuring them of my sympathy for their views, and also by telling them I had read and admired translations of their ancient literature.” anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

Enthusiastically adding, “one man who I spoke with afterwards knew all about the old stories and could speak Irish well.”

In April 1885, the SL’s newspaper Commonweal, which Morris edited, carried an ‘Irish Notes’ column. Written by the Irish novelist Elizabeth Casey (under her penname E. Owens Blackburne), the notes provided a detailed timeline of British misrule in Ireland from 1607 to 1798. However, the feature was ultimately a one-off initiative and Casey’s activity with the SL never progressed further.

During these early years, the SL unfortunately paid minimal attention to Irish affairs. Indeed, as late as 1885, William Morris was openly advising that, when it came to independence, the Irish people should “make up their minds that even if they have to wait for it, their revolution shall be part of the great international movement; [then] they will be rid of all foreigners that they want to be rid of.”

This suggestion that the people of Ireland shelve their freedom struggle - and instead wait on a fabled global uprising - was wholly detached from material conditions and grossly patronising.

In April 1886, Morris visited Ireland once again. This time for a series of lectures on art and socialism. This visit would prove a turning point in Morris’ attitude towards Ireland.

Addressing an audience of 600 in Dublin, the renowned public speaker made a rare faux pas; when he inadvertently referred to Dublin’s main street by its ‘official’ name, Sackville Street, rather than the popularly adopted O’Connell Street.

As he later recorded, “A great to-do followed this blunder, which, on a hint from the chairman, I corrected with all good will, and so was allowed to go on, with cheers.” The meeting continued with little further commotion, besides a spontaneous rendition of ‘God Save Ireland’ from the floor at the conclusion.

39

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Home rule by all means; but not as an instrument for the exploitation of the Irish labourer by the Irish capitalist tenant WILLIAM MORRIS

�

His time in Dublin decidedly convinced Morris of the necessity of Irish independence, particularly as a precondition for any meaningful advance for socialism in Ireland could take place.

His previously held position that the Irish should wait was dispelled. As he observed, “until the Irish get Home Rule, they will listen to nothing else, and equally so that as soon as they get Home Rule they must, deal at once with the land question.”

Commonweal began to cover Irish affairs more frequently and in greater detail. By July 1886, Morris was astutely predicting that the British government would ultimately look to divide Irish nationalists “into moderates and irreconcilables” and that “the more unmanageable will not be asking for a mere Dublin parliament, but will be claiming his right to do something with the country of Ireland itself, which will make it a fit dwellingplace for reasonable and happy people.”

Morris also defended Charles Stewart Parnell against the infamous forged letters, printed by The Times, purporting to show the Parliamentary leader’s support for the Phoenix Park assassinations. From the pages of Commonweal, he provocatively challenged Parnell’s accusers, writing, “Was it not at least a common opinion even in England at the time that Burke had got but what he had long been asking for?”

Although a supporter of Home Rule, Morris did not naively consider it a panacea for Ireland’s woes.

Arguably pre-empting Connolly’s later warning about raising the ‘green flag’ over Dublin Castle without installing a socialist system of government, Morris outlined in May 1888: “Home rule by all means; but not as an instrument for the exploitation of the Irish labourer by the Irish capitalist tenant; not as an instrument for the establishment of more factories, for the creation of a fresh Irish proletariat to be robbed for the benefit of national capitalists. Our Home Rule means Home Rule for the Irish people, that is to say equality for the Irish people”.

Bloody Sunday…

However, William Morris’ confidence in the politics of mass mobilisation, as the primary vehicle for revolution, was dealt a severe blow by the events of 13 November 1887.

A day subsequently remembered as London’s ‘Bloody Sunday’. A tragically all too common mantle in the history of British interference in Ireland.

On 8 November 1887, a public order was issued prohibiting political meetings from assembling in Trafalgar Square. However, a demonstration - in support of the imprisoned Irish Home Rule MP William O’Brien - had already been announced to take place in just five days’ time.

The demonstration on 13

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November thus became a rallying point for all defenders of free speech and assembly. Attendance swelled to 10,000 and every hue of the British left was represented. However, as demonstrators tried to enter Trafalgar Square, they were faced with 2,000 officers of the Metropolitan Police and 400 soldiers of the British Army determined to stop the meeting from taking place.

Morris witnessed first-hand the unprovoked violence meted out on demonstrators by the police and army. The severity shocked him, as he later conceded, “I confess I was astounded at the rapidity of the thing and the ease with which military organization got its victory.”

By the day’s end, 300 were arrested and 200 hospitalised.

Two men would subsequently die from injuries sustained. The following week, 40,000 rallied in Hyde Park to demand the release of those still under arrest and to condemn the violence of the police and army.

That evening, a small protest attempted to again gain access to Trafalgar Square again. In the commotion, a passing law clerk, Alfred Linnell, was trampled by a police horse. He would die a fortnight later.

Linnell’s funeral became a momentous occasion for the collective British left, with 120,000 mourners marching from central London to Bow cemetery. The Irish National League’s London organiser addressed the funeral and told those assembled that Linnell “fell in the same cause in Trafalgar Square that they in Ireland had fought for in Mitchelstown”, a reference to the ‘Mitchelstown Massacre’ of 9 September 1887.

As Morris later reflected, “the meeting on Bloody Sunday was called to protest against the wrong done to an Irishman and Ireland, and every man in the bludgeoned processions was an enthusiastic Home Ruler.”

A champion for Ireland…

As C. Desmond Greaves reminds us, “Connolly always spoke with admiration of the work of British socialists for Irish independence.” In Labour in Irish History, Connolly notes how, “In Great Britain amongst the Irish exiles [the Land League had] to depend entirely upon the championship of poor labourers and English and Scottish socialists. In fact, those latter were, for years, the principal exponents and interpreters of Land League principles to the British masses, and they performed their task unflinchingly”.

William Morris was one such champion. His eventual recognition that the Irish people would not wait – and, perhaps more importantly, nor should they wait – offers an important example for the British left.

As he wrote in May 1886, “the Irish (as I have some reason to know) will not listen to anything except the hope of independence as long as they are governed by England…”

It is still a recognition that many on the left in Britain – even in our own time – would do well to appreciate.� ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

LÉIRMHEAS LE LUKE CALLINAN

'Pluid' LE EOGHAN MAC CORMAIC

Is dearfach an mhaise é go bhfuil de dheis againn anois scéal na mBlocanna H a léamh i nGaeilge ó pheann duine a chaith aon bhliain déag dá shaol iontu, nach mór, mar chime polaitiúil. Cumasc den ghreann, dólás agus brúidiúlacht as éadan atá le fáil sa leabhar 'Pluid' le hEoghan Mac Cormaic.

Thar aon ní eile, áfach, is é an bráithreachas agus sprid na réabhlóide is cás don saothar seo.

Is maith gur 'Pluid' a baisteadh ar an leabhar nó cuirtear scéal riabhach na bhfear pluid i láthair go daonnachtúil tuisceanach ag duine dá ndream.

Tugtar aird fiú ar “na fir phluide dhearmadta” i Sciathán B, Priosún Bhóthar Chroimghlinne, a raibh coinníollacha níos measa acu ná an dream sna Blocanna, más fíor. Níl aon amhras ach gur deacair cuid den chur síos a dhéantar ar bhrúidiúlacht na gcoimhéadóirí a léamh ach is deacra fós gnáthaíocht an fhoiréigin i saol na mBlocanna a chreideamh. Ar a chéad lá sa gCeis Fhada a cuireadh an méid sin in iúl go neamhbhalbh don údar: “(…) léim triúr acu orm, do mo leagadh ar an úrlar arís agus ag ligint a racht feirge orm, le doirne agus bróga arís. Thréig siad mé ansin, mo bhéal lán d’fhuil, m’aghaidh, mo lámha, mo chosa, mo chorp

clúdaithe le rianta agus scríobanna, mo chuid gruaige tarraingthe agus tom di ag teacht amach i mo lámha.”

Is iomaí ainm, áit nó dáta sa leabhar a chuireann eachtraí stairiúla eile i gcuimhne dúinn agus luath go leor sa scéal tugann an t-ainm Pat

Cumasc den ghreann, dólás agus brúidiúlacht as éadan atá le fáil sa leabhar 'Pluid' le hEoghan Mac Cormaic. Thar aon ní eile, áfach, is é an bráithreachas agus sprid na réabhlóide is cás don saothar seo.

Livingstone aird an léitheora ar chás a dheirféar, Julie Livingstone. Cailín 14 bliana d’aois ba ea Julie, an duine ab óige de chlann as Leana an Dúin in iarthar Bhéal Feirste a maraíodh ag piléar plaisteach a scaoil sceimhlitheoir de chuid Arm na Breataine ina treo i mBealtaine 1981 agus í ar a bealach le cuairt a thabhairt ar chara léi. I bpodchraoladh de chuid “Guthanna 81” anuraidh,

Available from www.pluid.ie or from An Fhuiseog/The Lark Store, Falls Road, Belfast or from Sinn Féin Bookshop, 58 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. www.sinnfeinbookshop.com Price€10

Taken from: Pluid – Scéal na mBlocanna H 1976-81 400 women and men took part in the Blanket and No Wash protests in the H Blocks and Armagh Gaol which culminated in the Hunger Strikes of 1980 and 1981. This is the story of all of them, told by one of them.

An Galar Mar an gCéanna Ní raibh a fhios againn ná ag aon duine dár lucht leanúna ag an am, i 1978, ach bhí plé agus machnamh ar bun ag rialtóir an phríosúin le hinneall X-gha a lonnú san Fháiltiú agus tástáil a dhéanamh ar gach duine sa phríosún le stop a chur le leathnú galar anála mar gheall ar na coinníollacha maireachtála. Bhí na coimhéadóirí buartha faoi scaipeadh broincítis nó galar eile agus íocadh pá breise dóibh as na coin-

níollacha oibre, as an gcuardach scátháin agus eile. Sa deireadh níor cuireadh na hinnill isteach. Freagra seafóideach eile a bheadh ann, ar ndóigh, gan machnamh déanta ar fheidhmiú, costas, impleachtaí, comhoibriú uainne nó ónár gcuairteoirí.

Lean an plé faoi ghalair ar aghaidh, áfach, ní amháin leis na coimhéadóirí ach eadrainn féin.

Tháinig fear inár sciathán a raibh a

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

athair ina dhochtúir teaghlaigh. Iarradh ar ‘Doc’ ceist a chur ar a athair faoi na himpleachtaí a thiocfadh as tréimhse fhada ar stailc níochána. Bhí cuairt aige agus chuir sé an cheist. Tháinig an freagra lom, simplí ar ais: ‘Éireoidh sibh salach.’

Bhí fir a chreid go raibh a gcoirp ‘féinghlantach’. Pléadh teoiricí ag na fuinneoga faoin chorp ag athrú sraith craicinn go rialta agus an craiceann nua ‘glan’. Air sin

41

rinne deirfiúracha Julie cur síos uirthu mar “the life of the family”. Ruaig dílseoirí muintir Livingstone as a dteach i Sráid Dover sa gcathair i 1970, cuid thábhachtach eile de stair an stáit Sé Chondae.

Ach an oiread le '6000 Days' le Jazz McCann, tá ceachtanna go leor le foghlaim ag poblachtánaigh

a chloisteáil, dúirt duine greannmhar amháin gur thrua nach raibh sin ar eolas aige roimhe nó nach mbeadh sé á ní féin riamh.

Dúirt duine eile go mbeimis níos glaine ag deireadh na hagóide ná mar a bhí ag an tús.

Níor bhris an eipidéim amach a raibh na coimhéadóirí buartha faoi (agus muidne ag súil leis). Is dócha, áfach, go raibh eipidéim de shaghas ann, agus má scríobhtar leabhar riamh ag plé eipidéimí in Éirinn, beidh fonóta de dhíth faoi eipidéim H5, an Galar Mar an gCéanna.

Ní raibh muid ró-fhada ar an stailc níochána nuair a d’éirigh muid... bhuel, deirimis, salach. Bhí na coimhéadóirí ag pleidhcíocht leis an bhia, bhí an samhradh an-te, bhí cruimheanna agus cuileoga ar fud na háite, bhí na cillíní á bplúchadh, agus de réir a chéile bhí fir ag éirí tinn.

Bhí beagán comhbhá agus spéise ann (fiosracht mhífholláin, b’fhéidir) ag an tús

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an lae inniu sa leabhar seo. Tréithe na ceannaireachta, tábhacht na meithle, féin-mhuinín agus comrádaíocht ina measc. Díol spéise domsa ba ea neamhspleáchas na gcimí poblachtánacha i gcúrsaí poalitiúla agus straitéise, iad ag déanamh a machnaimh féin ar gach cinneadh, straitéis

nuair a thuairiscíodh fear go raibh sé tinn le linn cruinniú na nuachta agus scéalta ó na sciatháin a tharla gach oíche. De réir a chéile, áfach, níor cuireadh mórán spéise sa mhír ‘Fear amháin tinn’ nó ‘Fear amháin an-tinn’ i measc míreanna a dúirt gur buaileadh fiche fear le linn cuardaigh nó gur buaileadh duine go dona ar na Cláracha. Ní raibh ‘tinn’ chomh hard ar

Bhí na coimhéadóirí ag pleidhcíocht leis an bhia, bhí an samhradh an-te, bhí cruimheanna agus cuileoga ar fud na háite, bhí na cillíní á bplúchadh, agus de réir a chéile bhí fir ag éirí tinn.

an scála le ‘gortaithe’ in ord tosaíochta na bolscaireachta.

Ar ndóigh, nuair a bhí an tIonad Preas de chuid Shinn Féin ar an taobh amuigh ag fáil tuairiscí faoi dhaoine tinne, ní raibh siad chomh fuar- chúiseach, agus thiocfadh fiosrú isteach: ‘Cén tinneas?

Cé chomh tinn?’ Chuirtí freagraí ar ais ar nós ‘bolg tinn’ nó ‘sciodar’, ach i ndiaidh cúpla oíche bhí an ‘fear amháin tinn’ ag fás go dtí beirt, triúr. Bhí líon na ndaoine tinne ar aon dul le líon na ndaoine a buaileadh. Bhí eipidéim ag tosú. Ní raibh a fhios againn cad a bhí ann, ach bhí na comharthaí ar eolas againn. San áit sin ina bhfuil dímheas ar mhothúcháin féintrua, ní raibh am againn a bheith róbháúil, agus bhaist soinicí an sciatháin an Same Thing Disease air, nó an Galar Mar an gCéanna, de thairbhe go raibh gach íospartach ag fulaingt na rudaí céanna.

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht

mhór ag na cimí í. Téama uilíoch daonna é sin ar ndóigh agus ba chúis sóláis é radharc dá leithéid don réabhlóidí Rosa Luxemburg is í faoi ghlas mar chime polaitiúil i mBeirlín i 1917 mar a mhínigh sí i litir dá cara: “Yesterday, May 1st, I met - guess who? - a radiant common brimstone! I was so happy that my whole heart pounded. It flew up to my sleeve - I wear a purple jacket, and the colour probably attracted it - then it bobbed up and down the wall.” Ábhar uilíoch eile is ea an greann agus is ann dó ó thús deireadh an leabhair seo idir chás

Ní féidir an scéal a léamh i bhfolús polaitiúil, ar ndóigh, agus tá cruinneshamhail chaolaigeanta sheicteach an stáit féin le sonrú ar iompar na n-údarás príosúin trí chéile

• Rosa Luxemburg

agus beart de chuid na gluaiseachta “ar an taobh amuigh”. Sheas sliocht amháin amach go beo dom mar a ndéantar cur síos ar na héanacha a bhíodh le feiceáil “ag priocadh an tarmac” sna clósanna taobh amuigh agus an tsaoirse a bhain leo gur

truamhéalach “Danny Aiken”, na saighdiúirí cothrománacha, litir ón Athair Naofa nár ceadaíodh, nochtadh an daorghalair dhamanta agus tuilleadh nach iad.

Mar dhuine a saolaíodh sna naíochadaí, is cuid den stair – dhá thábhachtaí dom í – an stailc ocrais sa gCeis Fhada caoga bliain ó shin. Is léir gur fhág an stailc ocrais sin lorg faoi leith, mar sin féin, ar shaolta na bpoblachtánach a bhí sna Blocanna in éineacht leis na fir a cailleadh agus is mór agam an deis eolas éigin a chur ar thréithe pearsanta na bhfear cróga sin.

Ní féidir an scéal a léamh i bhfolús polaitiúil, ar ndóigh, agus tá cruinneshamhail chaolaigeanta sheicteach an stáit féin le sonrú ar iompar na n-údarás príosúin trí chéile. Is fíor gur d’fhonn na cimí poblachtánacha a bhriseadh a caitheadh chomh mailíseach sin leis na fir óga seo ach

‘Ceathrar tinn sa sciathán!’ a thiocfadh mar scéal istoíche. ’Cad tá mícheart leo?’ ‘An Galar Mar an gCéanna!’

Agus leis na focail sin, níor ghá don scairteoir mionsonraí a lorg. Ní raibh ann ach an Galar Mar an gCéanna.

Is fiú a rá go raibh difir suntasach idir an Galar Mar an gCéanna agus an Galar Sin É nó an Sin É Disease. Thosaigh an dara leasainm sin nuair a chualathas go raibh a leithéid de shean- duine ag fáil bháis taobh amuigh agus gur dúradh lena ghaolta: ‘Sin é, bí ullamh don deireadh.’

Ina dhiaidh sin, má bhí tuairisc faoi dhuine an-tinn, deirtí go raibh an ‘Galar Sin É’ orthu, nó go raibh siad ag fáil bháis.

Ní raibh an Galar Mar an gCéanna chomh dona sin, ar ndóigh.

Ní raibh aon leigheas ar an Ghalar, agus rith sé tríd an bhloc ar fad mar a rithfeadh pianta breithe tríd Fir Uladh sa Táin. B’in

anphoblacht  UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1

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gan an seicteachas córasach a bhí de dhlúth is d’inneach sa stát ní fhéadfaí réimeas mar sin a chur i bhfeidhm ná a choinneáil: “Laethanta sceimhle a bhí ann, agus sceimhlitheoir a bhí sa dochtúir.”

Ba bhreá an rud scéal aitheanta an raidió criostail a léamh leis an duine a bhí ina bhun nuair a fógraíodh toghadh Bhobby Sands (“béicíl, screadaíl, caoineadh áthais, buaileadh potaí ar dhoirse, ceiliúradh gan srian”) ach ar na laethanta coscracha sin mar a bhfógraíodh bás stailceoir ocrais chaithfeadh sé gur ualach trom a bhí ann (“Rinne mé cogar ag an doras: ‘Fuair Bobby bás

aréir.’ … ní raibh aon duine in ann codladh an oíche sin”).

Cuireann an saothar seo leis an tuiscint atá againn ar shaol na mBlocanna H agus ar an tréimhse is deireanaí den choimhlint in Éirinn.

Cothaíonn sé misneach agus bród. Seasann sé as féin mar shaothar stairiúil. Ina theannta sin uilig, áfach, nochtann sé nádúr an stáit agus an cur i gcoinne a chothaigh sé ar bhealach nach bhféadfadh aon staidéar eolaíoch a dhéanamh. Ar an mbonn sin is ceart é a aithint mar chuid de nualitríocht dí-choilíneach na hÉireann. �

Ós rud go raibh muid faoi ghlas 24 uair in aghaidh an lae, caithfidh gur ar thús cadhnaíochta sa scaradh sóisialta a bhí muid ár gcéad phaindéim agus ós rud go raibh muid faoi ghlas 24 uair in aghaidh an lae, caithfidh gur ar thús cadhnaíochta sa scaradh sóisialta a bhí muid. I ndiaidh roinnt seachtainí bhí a chúrsa rite agus ní raibh aon tuairiscí eile faoi. Nó má bhí sé fós ann, chinn ár gceannairí go raibh cúraimí níos práinní ann, agus bhí. Ós ár gcomhair, go fóill, bhí Geimhreadh 1978… � • Sliocht as an leabhar Pluid, Scéal na mBlocanna H 1976-81, le Eoghan Mac Cormaic (Coiscéim 2021). Buaiteoir saothar do dhaoine fásta, Comórtas Liteartha Oireachtas na Gaeilge 2021

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Thomas Leahy’s book on the intelligence war against the IRA provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of this aspect of the conflict. PEADAR WHELAN delves into the details of Leahy’s work, triggering his own personal analysis of Britain’s dirty war in Ireland

The intelligence war against the IRA

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“Ireland’s political hall of mirrors” This description of how “facts” about Ireland are distorted comes from the 1998 book ‘The Irish War’ by former Parachute Regiment soldier turned journalist Tony Geraghty. He used the term when recounting how, on the streets of Belfast in the aftermath of the 1969 pogroms, he witnessed senior British Army officers negotiating with the IRA to remove barricades and bring a semblance of normality back to the Falls area.

As chief reporter for the Sunday Times, his article on the situation carried some weight, but within the British political establishment, it was a ‘no-no’ mostly due to their wishful thought that there was no IRA and I suppose the hope of the British government that everything would go back to ‘normal’.

For Geraghty, the ‘political hall of mirrors’ was that “facts” in Belfast did not exist in London if they upset the political equilibrium.

Reading 'The Intelligence War Against the IRA' by Thomas Leahy, you get the real sense that the intelligence war or the ‘dirty war’ that Britain waged against republicans in the North was not only a ‘hall of mirrors’, but there was plenty of smoke in the hall also.

Leahy’s work, in challenging the accepted discourse ‘that the spooks defeated the IRA’, brings

the reader to a different way of assessing the conflict in the North and how it ended.

Leahy is very clear in his analysis that the IRA was not forced to bring its armed struggle to an end because it was penetrated by agents who had compromised the IRA’s

capacity to operate thus forcing the leadership to sue for peace.

What Leahy does is give the reader a step by step account of the major organisational phases that the IRA went through during the course of the war, not least the period of the mid-1970s, that saw the old battalion and company structures replaced by the more secure cell structure.

The old structures were easily contained within their defined battalion and company areas allowing for fairly basic counter-insurgency strategies to limit the IRA’s effectiveness.

Re-organising into the cell structures was an indication of the leadership’s ability to adapt and change and indeed stay ahead of the game.

By focusing on the political trajectory of the struggle, particularly in the aftermath of Sinn Féin’s successful intervention in electoral politics following the 1981 Hunger Strike, Leahy steers the debate away from the “we beat the IRA” refrain of former RUC and British intelligence types who need to believe they were “the good guys and they won”.

All too often, the names of agents such as Denis Donaldson and Freddie Scappaticci – who denies he is the agent codenamed Stakeknife – come into the narrative as proof that the leadership of the movement was

Leahy’s work, in challenging the accepted discourse ‘that the spooks defeated the IRA’, brings the reader to a different way of assessing the conflict in the North and how it ended

46

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“If the IRA was well infiltrated are we suggesting that in order to protect an informer the British allowed the IRA to plant the bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton? Are we saying that they allowed the IRA to mortar bomb Downing Street in order to protect an agent? If the IRA was so badly infiltrated, how come these things took place?” deeply penetrated, thus heralding the IRA cessation of military operations.

This is not the case in Leahy’s book.

Leahy counter-argues that “the IRA was not facing terminal decline by the 1990s and that the British state did not ‘win’ the intelligence conflict”.

In the case of Donaldson in particular, while a long-time senior activist, his role in Sinn Féin was not at a sufficiently high or influential level as to have the ear of the leadership, so to speak, therefore his value to the British would be questionable and his ability, as has been claimed by some, to steer the movement towards a flawed compromise would be limited.

However, when we look at how the echo chamber works with commentator after commentator repeating the refrain that the IRA was forced to the negotiating table, what we see are those who simply cannot stomach the political reality that the leadership of the republican movement outfoxed them by moving the struggle away from its military dynamic to embracing the “primacy of politics”.

Indeed, an important element of Leahy’s thesis is that the British, realising they could not defeat the IRA militarily, invested a lot in trying to cobble together a political settlement involving a compliant SDLP and the unionists.

So, while the British obviously continued their military efforts to overcome • Leahy counter-argues that “the IRA was not facing terminal decline by the 1990s and that the British state did not ‘win’ the intelligence conflict”

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DANNY MORRISON

the IRA through their own means such as covert shoot-to-kill operations and overt oppression, the arming of loyalists and collusion as well as quasi-judicial processes such as the paid perjurer or so-called super-grass system, Leahy addresses the inexorable movement towards a political settlement.

Where I disagree with him is that he argues the “IRA leadership only persisted in its campaign in order to bring the British state back to the negotiating table, albeit whilst obtaining the strongest possible electoral mandate to potentially extract maximum concessions”.

While the leadership of the movement accepted there had to be negotiations – the alternative being never ending war – it seems that Leahy is advancing the idea that republicans set their goals at a low level, that we were at end game as opposed to seeing the developing political/peace process as the beginning of a new phase of the struggle.

Leahy quotes Gerry Adams outlining republican thinking, “There was military and political stalemate. While Irish republicans could prevent a settlement on British government terms, we lacked the political strength to bring the struggle to a decisive conclusion. Military options were not a solution for either side”.

Of course, Leahy quotes numerous interviewees on both sides of the argument, many of these former IRA Volunteers and republican ex-prisoners who straddle both sides of the debate.

However, the decisive argument for me is that were the IRA so heavily infiltrated to the point of defeat and being forced to sue for peace and save face, as some put it, how could the British not prevent a bombing campaign in England, specifically targeting the City of London that sent real and metaphoric shockwaves through the world’s financial institutions?

In 1992, the IRA detonated a bomb at 47

• Thomas Leahy's book steers the debate away from the “we beat the IRA” refrain of former RUC and British intelligence types who need to believe they were “the good guys and they won”

London’s Baltic Exchange causing around £800m in damage. A year later in April 1993, the ‘Square Mile’, as it is called, suffered £1bn damage.

Danny Morrison, quoted in the book, puts it: “If the IRA was well infiltrated, are we suggesting that, in order to protect an informer, the British allowed the IRA to plant the bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton?

Are we saying that they allowed the IRA to mortar bomb Downing Street in order to protect an agent? If the IRA was so badly infiltrated, how come these things took place?”

Leahy also cites the huge arms shipments that arrived in Ireland from Libya in the mid-1980s as both a failure of the intelligence services, proving the lack of infiltration of the IRA especially at leadership level, and as evidence of the IRA’s capacity to carry on the war.

Again, he quotes Morrison saying “the IRA was armed to the teeth [they] called a ceasefire from a position of military strength”. Leahy favours the argument that 48

The Intelligence War Against the IRA

by Thomas Leahy, is published by Cambridge University Press, Price: €25.65

the intelligence war against the IRA didn’t achieve its objectives.

It is fair to argue then that the answer to the question as to why those in the leadership of the republican struggle agreed to a ceasefire lies in the move towards political actions and establishing the primacy of politics.

Those who see this change in tack as defeat are those who were in the forefront of the war on the nationalist community, those who were behind shoot-to-kill, collusion, torture of prisoners and whose moral code set them up as superior to their republican enemy, but as with the ‘hall of mirrors’, the images reflected back to them are a distortion of the political realities of the North.

They need to believe that ‘they won the war’, but as the calls for a United Ireland intensify and Sinn Féin grows in strength and influence, their fantasy is fading fast. � Peadar Whelan is a former republican prisoner and writer for An Phoblacht

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Available from 􀺑 www.sinnfeinbookshop.com

Warriors of patience and time

JIM GIBNEY reviews Laurence McKeown’s H-Block memoir In as many months towards the end of last year, six former political prisoners launched books detailing their prison experience and the years spent in the struggle for freedom – as IRA volunteers on active service on the outside and the inside of prison.

They were: Jim McCann’s ‘6000 Days’; Seamie Kearney’s ‘No Greater Love’; Eoghan (Gino) Mac Cormaic’s ‘Pluid – Scéal na mBlocanna H 1976-81’ (which will be released in English in April 2022); Gerry Kelly’s poetry collection, ‘Inside and Out’; Danny Morrison’s 'Then the Walls Came Down', and Laurence ‘Lorney’ McKeown, ‘Time Shadows – a Prison Memoir’.

All of the prisoners served time in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and Gerry Kelly also spent many years in various English prisons.

Lorney McKeown spent 16 years in jail; 1,621 days naked in a prison cell, 1,079 days without washing, and 70 days on hunger strike.

And all of the time on protest, he, along with hundreds of other political prisoners, experienced institutional torture and abuse at the hands of prison guards and the prison system including the women on protest in Armagh Jail. These included governors, doctors, senior civil servants at the Northern Ireland Office and at the very top in 10 Downing Street, Maggie Thatcher approved of and sanctioned the abuse of prisoners.

Reading Laurence’s book and Jaz McCann’s, which I reviewed for the Bobby Sands Trust website, I was filled with anger at the casual brutality the prisoners experienced.

A former political prisoner myself, I know the feelings of fear expressed in both books when a prisoner comes face-to-face with prison warders and an implacable administration.

However, there is no comparison between my experience

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of occasional assault by a small number of prison guards, while I was fully dressed, and to what is chronicled in Lorney and Jim’s books.

The brutality was orchestrated, prolonged, daily - sometimes hourly, systematic, planned but occasionally random.

It was psychological terror with a political purpose – to break the will and spirit of the political prisoners in the H-Blocks and Armagh and force them to accept a criminal status and that the cause of Irish freedom was a criminal enterprise with repercussions for the overall morale of the struggle and how the struggle would be perceived internationally.

It struck me reading the books that the British government has a legal case to answer for its brutality of the prisoners in the same way that the Irish and unionist governments and the Catholic Church had a case

The brutality was orchestrated, prolonged, daily - sometimes hourly, systematic, planned but occasionally random to answer regarding the sexual abuse of children in various institutions including the ‘Mother and Baby Homes’.

One of the north’s leading solicitors, Padraig Ó Muiri, is challenging the treatment of the political prisoners, based on the findings of the ‘Report of the Independent Panel of Inquiry into the Circumstances of the H-Block and Armagh Prison Protests 1976-1981’. That report was commissioned

by Coiste na nIarchimi which provides services to former political prisoners.

Lorney, now an academic with a doctoral thesis, is a

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writer, an accomplished author, poet, playwright, and filmmaker. The memoir is written in a matter-of-fact, chronological style, where an economy of words conveys the emotional power of the story from the time when Laurence, from an ‘idyllic, innocent and rural background’, joins the IRA in 1973 until he lapses into unconsciousness on his 70th day on hunger strike in September 1981.

Lorney writes: “I can recall the moments, good and bad, but I know I’ll never be able to fully capture the strength of emotions as I felt them in those moments, despite the fact that I can still break into tears of laughter, or feel rage or pride, at their recollection.”

The first four hunger strikers are dead - Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara -

� � We had adopted the consciousness of an army at war and our battle was with every manifestation of the system and its administrators, especially with the guard who opened and closed our doors. We were steeled for the battle

LAURENCE McKEOWN

and have been replaced by Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kieran Doherty, and Kevin Lynch.

Laurence is in communication with Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, the O/C of the prisoners, seeking permission to join the hunger strike. He says: “It’s difficult to describe the feelings in the Blocks, or put into words the depth of strength and determination we felt.

We had adopted the consciousness of an army at war and our battle was with every manifestation of the system and its administrators, especially with the guard who opened and closed our doors. We were steeled for the battle.”

And what an epic, heroic battle it was. It is an awesome, awe-inspiring story of resistance and endurance by highly-motivated political prisoners.

Lorney received a communication from the IRA’s Army Council, “Comrade, you have put your name forward for the hunger strike. Do you know that this means you will most likely be dead in two months? That means, comrade you will be no more. Reconsider carefully your decision.”

Although he said he hadn’t expected the communication and the words did startle him, especially “seeing my ‘death’ written in black and white appeared very stark, but it didn’t cause me to rethink my position. My earlier examination of the situation had been done seriously and responsibly. I was ready to go ahead.”

And when his father and Mary, a close friend, pleaded with him not to go on the hunger strike, he remained “ready to go ahead”. Laurence wasn’t callous with his family or his friends in carrying on with his hunger strike and the book reflects the emotional turmoil he was in and the feelings he had for his parents and family.

And these are reflected in his relationship with his mother.

When the judge was sentencing him to life in prison, he asked was there anyone in the courtroom who wanted to say anything about the ‘defendant’.

His mother, quiet and very soft spoken, on her own, in the alien surrounds of police, warders, and the court, stood up and said, “He’s my son.”

It reminded me of the story Tom Hartley told the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, set up by the Irish government in Dublin. Hilda, Tom’s mother, was seeking a visit with Tom who was being held in Musgrave RUC barracks in the early 1970s. When she told an RUC man she had a right to visit her son, he told her, “Mrs, you have no f…..n rights.”

It also reminded me of the occasions when my own

• THE HUNGER STRIKER: Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine 50

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• SUPPORT FOR THE PRISONERS: On protest, political prisoners, experienced institutional torture and abuse at the hands of the prison system. These included prison guards, governors, doctors, senior civil servants at the Northern Ireland Office and at the very top in 10 Downing Street, Maggie Thatcher approved of and sanctioned the abuse of prisoners

mother would send me a change of clothes in a brown paper bag when I was in custody, either in Castlereagh Interrogation Centre or Crumlin Road Jail. On the bag was her carefully written name in large letters. I felt her presence when I looked at her handwriting and drew strength from it.

When Laurence was weak and close to death and his mother was alone with him in his prison cell, he said to her, “I’m sorry all of this came about for you.” She leaned across to him and whispered, “You know what you have to do and I know what I have to do.”

And on his 70th day on hunger strike when he slipped into unconsciousness, his mother authorised medical intervention.

He woke up in the Royal Victoria Hospital to the sound of a female voice speaking his name.

He was alive. He was totally exhausted; physically, psychologically and emotionally.

In his cell in the prison hospital, he experienced the close by deaths of Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Tom McElwee, and Mickey Devine and the ending of the hunger strike by Paddy Quinn and Pat ‘Beag’ McKeown when their relatives intervened.

‘Time Shadows’ took 40 years to write. It is an ‘on the record’, minutely-observed account of a gruesome period where prisoners and prison staff battled it out over a fundamental issue – was the struggle for freedom politically motivated or was it, as the British incredulously claimed, a criminal enterprise.

The prisoners paid a heavy price but they won the moral and actual argument that they were political prisoners. The people also paid a heavy price outside the prison with over 60 people dying on the streets.

Lorney also deals frankly with the circumstances that led to the end of the first hunger strike in 1980 and which led

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inevitably to the second hunger strike. He makes the point that he is, ‘in general’, non-judgemental about those who left the protest but, in the book, he makes an exception in the case of the late Brendan Hughes and Richard O’Rawe.

Both left the protest shortly after the end of the second hunger strike.

He criticises Brendan Hughes for unilaterally ending the first hunger strike, without the authority to do so, and criticises Richard O’Rawe for his unfounded and

The prisoners paid a heavy price but they won the moral and actual argument that they were political prisoners. The people also paid a heavy price outside the prison with over sixty people dying on the streets discredited claims that the IRA’s Army Council had rejected a deal just before Joe McDonnell died.

Of this, he says, “We held firm. And it cost us a lot. It cost us an awful lot. And yet it was ‘one of our own’ who in one short sentence sowed division, animosity and doubt.”

On a blank page facing the prologue, Lorney has this single quote from Leo Tolstoy, “Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

The prisoners were truly “warriors of patience and time” and kept going when it was “hard and slow”. � Jim Gibney is a Republican activist, former political prisoner

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The long journey of

Unmanageable Revolutionaries To mark the publishing of a new edition of ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism 1880-1980’, MARGARET WARD writes of the journey she and her work has taken since the book was first published in 1983.

In the mid-1970s, as a postgraduate student in Queen’s University of Belfast, when I proposed researching the history of Irish women’s political involvement, I was told by senior (male) academics that Irish women had not done anything in history – the evidence being that nothing had been written about them. If they had done anything, it would have been written about.

There were no female academics in the Politics department at that time. It was a long struggle before I gained permission to begin my research. I was a feminist activist as well as a student, living through a time of intense conflict, and it seemed crucial that women in contemporary Ireland had a clear understanding of the nature of women’s past involvement in movements for political self-determination.

The more I discovered, the more talks I gave to feminist and socialist groups, all eager to learn about our ‘herstory’. The eventual outcome was not an academic dissertation, but a book written for a popular audience.

When ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism’ was published in 1983, it was widely reviewed and sometimes criticised for having been written “from the perspective of a socialist feminist with nationalist sympathies”.

Republican News found it “irritating at times, with its ultra-left reluctance to recognise the progressive dynamic in the nationalist movement”, but said it made a “convincing case for a strong autonomous women’s movement fighting alongside the national liberation organisations, to ensure women are not cheated of victory”.

Reviews from publications outside of the political arena were more on the lines of the Times Literary Supplement, which considered I had made “a real contribution to understanding revolutionary Ireland and…to our

Republican News found it ‘irritating at times, with its ultra-left reluctance to recognise the progressive dynamic in the nationalist movement’

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understanding of feminism as an aid to arriving at historical truth”.

One of the reviews I most appreciated was from C.S. Andrews, who had lived through those days as an active republican in the War of Independence and the Civil War and knew many of the women activists. He had published two highly-regarded autobiographical accounts of his experiences and his review in the Irish Press concluded “this is a book which must be read by anyone who is interested in the story of modern Ireland. It is well researched, well organised and well written”.

‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries’ was republished in 1989 and again in 1995, this time with a preface that included the campaigning work of Cumann na dTeachtaire, that coalition of republican and feminist women who, in the period of nationalist reorganisation following the Easter Rising, worked hard to ensure women were represented in political and public life and on the executive of Sinn Féin. Their minute book is contained in the Hanna Sheehy Skeffington papers in the National Library of Ireland. Although Hanna was in America for most of the lifetime of this group, it is thanks to her, our greatest feminist campaigner, that we have so many essential archives to inform us of our past. She kept everything in her home, determined that one day a feminist historian would write about those times.

It is interesting to consider how attitudes have changed over the years. In 1983, readers were urged “the book must be used with caution” and people queried why I would use a title that derived from de Valera’s unsympathetic attitudes towards women activists.

Now the phrase ’unmanageable revolutionaries’ has become common parlance to describe the radical nature of much of women’s participation in political movements and research on women’s role during the Irish revolutionary years has become mainstream within academia, thanks to the valiant efforts of many wom-

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• Sinn Féin MEP Bairbre de Brún makes a presentation to Margaret Ward at the party's 2009 International Women’s Day conference in Belfast

en, from the pioneering Margaret MacCurtain and Mary Cullen in the 1970s to the women who have developed the Women’s History Association of Ireland, supporting young academics and promoting new research.

While women continue to be underrepresented on government bodies concerned with the commemoration of events from the First World War to the end of the Civil War, there is a collective determination amongst feminists that women will no longer be ignored. It is because of this that the Decade of Centenaries was forced to include women as integral to all that took place in those years.

The commemorations in 2016 for the Easter Rising centenary were notable for the focus that was given to women. Researchers have also begun to raise other considerations. What does a truly gendered history look like? What does the existence of gendered and sexual violence perpetrated against women by men from republican, crown and loyalist organisations tell us about male attitudes towards women?

While research into the republican past is now a respectable pursuit within academia, this was not the case prior to the Peace Process. Partition remains an uncomfortable reality for many in the south of the country and research into the experiences of northern nationalists at the time of partition has only begun to enter the history books, helped by the Military Service Pension Archives which gives us the names of former republicans, many of whom suffered discrimination under the northern state or were forced to emigrate.

But how many see a connection between the abandonment of the north by the Free State and the re-emergence of conflict in the late 1960s? The

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original version of 'Unmanageable Revolutionaries' had a final chapter that briefly considered women’s experiences of those times, but it was written at a time when the conflict was at its most intense and when debate proved to be very difficult and often divisive.

The new edition, illustrated with 80 images embedded in the text, includes an introduction that considers the impact of new source material and advances in research over the past 40 years and a new final chapter on republican women in the north during the 1970s and 1980s.

This replaces the previous concluding chapter. Irish republican women at the start and at the end of the 20th century were engaged in military struggle and the chapter compares their experiences.

Women from both periods suffered arrest and hunger strike. Cumann na mBan organised a successful jail break from Mountjoy in 1921. In 1973, republican women attempted an unsuccessful escape from Armagh jail.

Women were once again arguing for greater equality of status within the movement. Now, with the ending of conflict, women from a variety of perspectives have become involved in the political process. There are many parallels between the past and present. And there are lessons we can learn from history. �

Irish republican women at the start and at the end of the 20th century were engaged in military struggle

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Songs have always played an important role in the struggle for Irish freedom. 50 years ago, as the republican struggle entered a new phase of resistance to British rule in the Six Counties, republican ballads became

widely popular and were even chart hits.

Governments soon clamped down and rebel songs disappeared from the airwaves. These conventions are still in force today.

JASON LAMBERT takes a wry look back.

Armoured cars and tanks and bans A question. What have ‘The Men Behind the Wire’ by Barleycorn and the Bing Crosby song, ‘On a Slow Boat to China’ got in common? They were, according to John Clarke RTÉ station manager in 2007, the only two songs to be officially banned by RTÉ itself and not covered by direct political censorship, such as Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. According to Mr Clarke, ‘The Men Behind the Wire’ was “glorifying the IRA during the Northern Troubles”. ‘On a Slow Boat to China’ was banned because of the single line “I want to get you on a slow boat to China”, apparently a wellknown phrase amongst poker players meaning someone who loses slowly but over a period of time. This writer does not see an issue with this in a love song, with the composer wanting to spend as much time as possible with his partner. But I’m not here to advocate for Bing!

The other song written by Paddy McGuigan of Belfast and recorded with his band The Barleycorn, ‘The Men Behind the Wire’ is a factual, historically correct account of the action of the British Army under orders from the British government when they mounted Operation Demetrius against the nationalist communities across the Six Counties on 9 August 1971.

Operation Demetrius was internment and involved the mass arrest and imprisonment without trial of people suspected of being involved with the IRA or otherwise enemies of the state. It was proposed by the Unionist government at Stormont and approved by the British cabinet. Armed soldiers launched dawn raids throughout 54

nationalist areas and arrested 342 people in the initial sweep, sparking four days of violence in which 20 civilians, two IRA members and two British soldiers were killed. All of those arrested were Irish republicans and nationalists, the vast majority of them Catholics.

Due to faulty and out-of-date intelligence, many were no longer involved in republican militancy or never had links with the IRA. Ulster loyalist paramilitaries were also carrying out acts of violence, which were mainly directed against Catholics and Irish nationalists, but no loyalists were included in the sweep.

If we are to examine the lyrics of this song, at no point does it “glorify the IRA”, it simply calls out for civil resistance to the indiscriminate internment of mostly young men based on their address, religion, and politics.

For centuries in Ireland, it was the bards and storytellers who announced the news in towns and villages and on many occasions archived these events in song. Songs and

music have always played an integral part of Irish life and for them to be banned for simply relaying history was completely wrong.

Around this time, many well-known bands were playing support gigs for An Cumann Cabhrach (republican prisoners aid committee) and other fundraising efforts, including the Dublin City Ramblers, the Wolfe Tones, the Barleycorn, and Belfast band the Flying Column. The last of whom had a hit with ‘Johnsons Motor Car’, which was also banned under Section 31.

Kerry republican Eddie Barrett, living in Dublin in the early ‘70s, recalls many packed gigs at Dublin venues such as The Shieling Hotel and The Embankment, with well-known ballad groups playing in aid of republican prisoners, a scene replicated across the state but not reflected by the ‘national broadcaster’.

And then there was Christy Moore. Has there been any Irish performer who has had so many songs ignored and removed from playlists by RTÉ and other radio stations for their outspoken content? Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act and the self-censorship

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• Christy Moore's recordings of ‘Back Home in Derry’ and ‘Mcllhatton’ were banned because they were written by Bobby Sands

regime it inspired caused a number of his songs to be never played on radio.

‘90 Miles from Dublin’ as it expressed support for republican prisoners in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. ‘Mcllhatton’ and ‘Back Home in Derry’ were banned as they had been written

by Bobby Sands. ‘The Time has Come’ was banned by RTÉ as it was written about 1981 hunger striker Patsy O’Hara’s grieving family. And naturally, the song ‘Section 31’ was banned for obvious reasons! Often these bans were informal, broadcasters simply did not play them. In the case of ‘The Time has Come’, it was initially broadcast and only taken off the air when they realised its subject.

Bizarrely, because Christy’s humorous song ‘St Brendan’s Voyage’ mentioned Gibraltar, the BBC banned it lest it evoke a memory of the killing of three IRA Volunteers there in 1988. I know it sometimes irks me to see some broadcasters lauding Christy so long as he only sings about his little Honda 50. Though in Christy’s case, his talent, integrity, and popularity have overcome all these barriers.

Christy recently took part in the relaunch of his banned H-Block album in Tar Abhaile in Belfast, surrounded by ex- prisoners. He

presented Fra Mc Cann with an original copy of the vinyl to mark his retirement, one of two records which were returned to Christy by an ex-Garda Special Branch man who confiscated it after the album launch. Good man, Git! Section 31 scared DJs and journalists and they shied away from rebel songs, afraid of losing their jobs. They became taboo, banned or blacklisted. In this manner, the media, both radio and press, were left in the hands of those who were indifferent to Ireland, its music and its heritage. Ironically, when RTÉ television began in the 1960s, it coincided with the folk music revival and the ‘ballad boom’ and rebel songs were featured as an integral part of the tradition - until actual rebellion broke out in the Six Counties.

Well-known songs were banned in the early ‘70s like ‘Four Green Fields’ and ‘The Patriot Game’, all covered by mainstream groups such as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and The Dubliners. Alongside the Section 31 bans here in Ireland from 1971 to 1993, other Irish bands based in England, such as The Pogues were also censored on BBC radio by the British broadcasting ban from 1988 to 1994.

‘Who Fears to Speak of ‘98, who blushes at the name?’ says the song. It seems the fear and blushes covered a multitude; the name of Wolfe Tone, the men and women of 1916, the freedom fighters of the Tan War and Civil War, nationalists in the Six Counties who stood firm as they were burned out of their homes and treated as second-class citizens, those who joined the ranks of the IRA and fought back against British oppression, who died on active service or died in the cages of Long Kesh...

Brian Warfield of the Wolfe Tones set a great ex-

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• Songs by mainstream groups such as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and The Dubliners had Section 31 bans

ample to me in conversation recently. In the lead up to the Fine Gael-led government’s disastrous plan to commemorate the Black and Tans, the band decided to re-release their 1972 hit, ‘Come Out You Black and Tans’.

Across Ireland and Britain, the song shot to the top of the download charts. That’s how it’s done these days; you would have needed to sell a minimum of 4,000 records back in the day to feature in the Top 20!

The band decided to donate all profits to the Fr. Peter McVerry Trust, while Brian was contacted by some newspapers and radio stations, he was never given any airtime and, lo and behold, neither was Dominic Behan’s ballad! I urge readers to listen to the Wolfe Tones song ‘Radio Toor-I-Li-Ay’ from their ‘Sing Out for Ireland’ as a good backdrop to this article.

So historic Irish ballads are still shunned, apart from a small number of DJs and local community stations. So, you know what to do folks, get on the phones, get on Twitter and email and request the songs of our nation and its freedom. Up the rebels! � Jason Lambert is a Sinn Féin activist, and parliamentary assistant to Sinn Féin TD Paul Donnelly 55

The creative spirit of republican struggle has been marked in words, song, poetry, and everything else from posters and wall murals to Christmas cards and bodhráns. Jack Clafferty, who died recently, made a unique contribution to the art of resistance and we mark this edition of An Phoblacht

by reprinting some of his work. Jack was one of the founders of the Troops Out Movement. His work regularly appeared in their publications, as well as for An Phoblacht, Republican News and Sinn Féin. Some of his work was repurposed for the cover of the third issue of this magazine in 2021.

REMEMBERING JACK CLAFFERTY: The legacy of republican art

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