Ireland's political and cultural magazine
In a whitewashed barn decked out with Ulster flags, Union Jacks and pictures of the Queen, their leader in charge of this meeting sat at an old table. He pressed a button on a tape recorder. A voice boomed out: I address you as the commander in chief of the organisation, Silent Defenders. Author Ciarán […]
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March/April 2022 41Then a very terrible thing happened. In February 2017, he announced that he was joining Fianna Fáil which had: “the best team most closely aligned with my politics”. It was Roger Waters leaving Pink Floyd to join Foster and Allen. The young man with the enormous brain who had come racing in to […]
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March/April 2022 39Fine Gael commemorating Griffth and Collins at Glasnevin cemetery, 2016Fianna Fáil commemorating De Valera, Ennis 2021Sinn Féin commemorating Wolfe Tone, Bodenstown 2019All the nationalist parties misappropriate history, immaturelyImmationalismPOLITICSFianna Fáil and Fine Gael deny any historical analogy between their own party histories and the process which Sinn Féin/IRA are currently going through to make […]
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38March 2022externally. This was deemed to be incompatible with the EU directive. It was also found the requirement to “cooperate, as required” with an investigation into wrongdoing should be removed, as there could be valid reasons for not cooperating with such an investigation. This recommendation was taken on board.• That the new bill/Act should be […]
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March/April 2022 35IntroductionCounty Armagh, 1982. In just over a month six men, one only 17-years-old, were killed in controversial circumstances by a RUC Headquarters Mobile Support Unit (HMSU). On 11 November, Sean Burns, Eugene Toman and Gervaise McKerr, all members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) were killed after allegedly driving through an RUC roadblock in […]
March/April 2022 33THE BAN against naming Soldier F, one of the Bloody Sunday murderers, by his real name, remains in force, but only in the UK. Last July, Colum Eastwood, leader of the SDLP, got around the prohibition by naming him under privilege in the House of Commons. War criminal‘Soldier F’ shot a number of […]
After an inexplicable delay of five years, the public apology recommended in the final report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry will finally be made by the Northern Ireland Assembly (on 11 March). The announcement of the apology has been received with little enthusiasm by some of the abuse victims who say that they will […]