Irish Republican Newsbriefs 11/3/97 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source:Paddy Newell Republian News 03 November 97 *************************************** RUC cover up continues Larne attacks continue Young people targeted An Gorta Mor remembered in the US Analysis: Among the diaspora *************************************** >>>> RUC cover-up continues despite court hearing Sinn Fein has welcomed an appeal court ruling that the RUC police were negligent in their failure to prevent the murders of three people in Sinn Fiin's offices by one of their members. But Belfast Sinn Fein councillor Fra McCann said it still fell short of providing his party and the bereaved families with the truth about the circumstances immediately prior to the killings. The court finding held that "a duty of care" may exist to the victims of RUC member Allen Moore, who tricked his way into the Sinn Fein centre on Belfast's Falls Road five years ago and opened up with a pump-action shotgun. Mr McCann said Friday's verdict "allows the families to take one more step in their pursuit of justice for their loved ones". But he added: "It is clear that the RUC continue with their attempt to prevent the disclosure of the full facts and events surrounding the murders. It is clear from today's judgement that the RUC are involved in a cover-up." The shooting in the Sinn Fein Centre on February 4 1992, was one of the deadliest attacks on the party by a member of the Crown Forces in recent years. RUC member Moore, from Ballymena, had been arrested and had his gun seized after he fired shots in paramilitary style over a colleague's grave. But the next day he was allowed to leave Newtownabbey RUC station with his pump-action shotgun which he used to kill Patrick Loughran, Michael O'Dwyer and Patrick McBride, and wound Patrick Wilson and Nora Larkin. He then drove to the shores of Lough Neagh and used the shotgun to kill himself. The apparent involvement of Moore and other RUC members with loyalist paramilitaries had fuelled suspicion that the RUC hushed up the true circumstances of the multiple shootings, said McCann. "The RUC have attempted to cover up the links, activities and the role of RUC killer Alan Moore with loyalist death squads, he said. "People are well aware of the extent of RUC links with loyalists. They are far reaching and in this case go beyond the role that Moore played. He did not act alone and the RUC know this." "There are many unanswered questions relating to these murders which call into question Moore's role, who acted with him and the prior knowledge the RUC had about his activities. They need to be answered." ________________________________________________________ >>>> Larne attacks continue A Catholic man whose home was petrol bombed by Larne loyalists on Thursday of last week says he, his girlfriend and two young children were lucky to get out of the blazing house alive. This was the second time in as many months that the family of four from have come under loyalist attack. In September the man's house was wrecked and his car and his girlfriend's car were wrecked, with loyalist paramilitary slogans being spray painted on the cars. This time their house came under petrol bomb attack and Lee Conkey, his girlfriend Paula Kinkead and their two children Megan (6) and Clarissa (2) were in bed when the device was hurled through the window of their sitting room. This attack comes at a time when loyalist harassment of Catholics is increasing. Young people in the mainly loyalist town say that on every street in Larne, Catholics are greeted with Union Jacks, Loyalist murals and red, white and blue painted kerbs. One boy had his school uniform sprayed red, white and blue while it hung on the washing line and the walls of his house sprayed with the slogans of the loyalist death-squads. His windows were also smashed. In one staunchly loyalist district, loyalists have issued a curfew on young Catholics warning them not to play hurling. The loyalists go out of their way to enforce this curfew and in one of the most extreme cases loyalists armed with baseball bats chased a group of young boys. One of the young Catholics involved told O'Hagan that they had a lucky escape as they found refuge in one of the boy's houses just in time. ________________________________________________________ >>>> Young people targeted RUC harassment of young nationalists across the Six Counties has risen dramatically during the last number of weeks. Both Sinn Fiin Youth activists and ordinary nationalist youth have been targeted. On 2 September several young people from Ardoyne in North Belfast claim that both the RUC and British Army threw stones and bottles from the inside of landrovers. On 20 September British paratroopers stationed at the Old Park Barracks physically assaulted four youths aged 15, 16, 14, and 15, and made derogatory remarks about their families. On 3 October a North Belfast youth was hospitalised after being hit on the head with a rock which had been thrown from a British army landrover. This was followed by three days of constant petty harassment from the 6th to the 8th as youths were stopped and threatened with legal action for jay walking. On 10 October a young nationalist was badly beaten by the RUC as he left a city centre bar. The man left the bar and was waiting for a taxi when he was attacked by several RUC men. He was subsequently brought to Grosvenor Road barracks and charged with disorderly behaviour. The 20 year old received stitches to his head in the Royal Victoria Hospital several hours later, and is currently seeking legal action. On 23 October, thirteen year-old Sheena Officer was assaulted by an RUC man during a peaceful Sinn Fein Youth picket on the Oldpark Road in North Belfast. During the incident, in which the picket was prevented from reaching Oldpark RUC barracks, RUC men shouted sectarian abuse at the protesters. Reports have also been received that British army soldiers stationed in North Belfast continually provoke young people coming from youth clubs with verbal harassment and waving of Union Jacks, while in Lurgan a sixteen-year old boy is recovering after an RIR soldier pushed him through the front window of a hairdresser's shop. Sinn Fiin Youth spokesperson Eoin O'Broin said that "what seems to be developing is a pattern whereby young people are being constantly harassed and provoked by members of both the RUC and British army. The situation is particularly bad in North Belfast, where in Ardoyne and Old Park this is a nightly occurrence. Why at a time when we are all working so hard to build the peace process and resolve this conflict are crown forces intent on provoking our young people. It should stop immediately." ________________________________________________________ >>>> An Gorta Mor remembered in the US By Cari Zall Dr. Christine Kinealy, author of "The Great Calamity" and "A Death-Dealing Famine" spoke to a gathering in Washington DC recently. Her lecture, a historical view of the Irish Famine and its effect in Ulster, was her first stop before participating in a Famine Forum in New York. "Famine is obscene," she said. "And there is no excuse for how the Irish Famine occurred." She challenged the four main arguments of revisionist historians in Dublin and England regarding the Famine: 1) They say that the Famine was inevitable, 2) that the Famine was NOT a watershed event in Irish history, 3) that the British Government did all it could to help so we shouldn't blame them, and 4) it wasn't as bad as folk history would have us believe. These, according to her years of in-depth research into the Famine, are all untrue. She disproved each point in her re-telling of the events of the Famine. Dr. Kinealy closed with the poignant story of Gary White, an artist from the Choctaw Tribe of Native Americans (who sent help to the Irish during the Famine) visited Ireland. He went to Andrew Jackson's historical home in Ireland, the president who's policies forced the Choctaws out of their homeland and eliminated great numbers of their people. While there, Mr. White planted a tree to begin "reconciliation." "You don't have to forget," Dr. Kinealy finished, "and you may not want to forgive, but there is room to move on." ______________________________________________ >>>> Analysis: Among the diaspora By Mary Nelis More than half the people born in Ireland since the famine have left the country. In the plane from Dublin to New York last week, I was seated beside a group of some 25 young men from Cork going on a school trip to New York. If the current emigration trends continue, two thirds of those on the schooltrip will leave Ireland permanently over the next few years, to resurface in Britain, Europe, the US, Australia and even Japan. In 1992, 55 million Irish emigrants were "invited home" by Bord Failte and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. It was a cynical exercise by the tourist strategists of the two governments who hoped that those emigrants who had "made it", particularly in the US, would repatriate some of their accumulated wealth to the island they had been forced to leave. The mass exodus of the Irish has continued almost unabated since the 19th century. We cannot be confident that the latest figures are a blip and we will see a return to the "normality" of high emigration. The millions who left at the time of the great starvation did not diminish with partition and the establishment of the Free State in 1922. Although emigration from the South has always been greater than that of the North, it was only the disproportionate rate of Catholic emigration from the North which created and has maintained the Protestant majority in the Six Counties. The emigration debate in the North has never been separated from the issue of sectarian head counting but both parts of the island have regarded people as an export commodity. In the South, the emigration debate has created a climate whereby emigration is accepted as a fact of Irish life and relied upon by government as a safety valve, both economically and socially. In other words exporting our young people has become the government's solution to unemployment, to the degree that many young Irish people now accept that Ireland is a place where they are born, educated and leave. This "final solution" for the problem of lack of work in Ireland was clearly illustrated recently by the suggestion that 50,000 "Green cards" for the USA could be part of the "peace dividend" for the North. The Centre for Research and Documentation in Belfast has published an excellent factsheet on emigration which makes stark reading for those who put forward the notion that Irish people don't emigrate, they just choose to work away from home. Very few of the young Irish I have met in the US have chosen to be there. The same could be said of the Irish in Britain or Europe. For many of them, emigration is nothing more than swapping poverty, unemployment and uncertainty and almost as poor, in the countries, which they now call "home". They form a vast pool of labour, skilled and unskilled in the service industries of Britain, Europe and the US. You will find the Irish everywhere; in the hospitals, building works, in the pubs and restaurants, in the shops and schools. They look after children, care for old ladies, walk dogs, clean streets, and voluntarily give their time off work to teaching their native culture in language and dance to the people of the land who took them in. They are versatile, hard working and competent. They are also highly political and being forced out of their native land has given many of them a newly discovered sense of their Irish identity. They are proud to be emigrant Irish, for they left a country where an Irish identity was akin to that of a neo-colonial clone, a paler shade of green with a Dublin 4 accent. The Celtic Tiger has not roared for them, the Irish Diaspora, as former President Mary Robinson called them. They will not, like that other dispossessed group, the Northern Nationalists, be allowed to vote for her successor. The Irish emigrants have been pushed out of their native land, and abandoned by its governments, concerned lest they become the radical voice of the New post-British, post-colonial Ireland. Their leaving has produced a crisis in the conservative state they left behind, manifested by the current political atmosphere where the Presidential election campaign has been turned into the Irish equivalent of the Nuremburg Trials. We who remain live in a country where all that is good and noble in the North is the subject of a McCarthy witchunt and all that is young and radical in the south is exported, expelled and forgotten. 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