Northern Ireland

Random entry RSS

  • Posted in:

    Colin Wallace, the former British Army Psychological Operations officer, writes about Bloody Sunday in light of David Burke’s new book, Kitson’s Irish War, Mastermind of the Dirty War in Ireland.

    by 0 Comments

    By Colin Wallace. 1. Memories of Brigadier Frank Kitson. David Burke’s fascinating new book on Frank Kitson includes a comprehensive analysis of what has become known around the world as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Reading it has stirred a lot of memories of the time I spent at Army HQ in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.  As the new book reveals,  Brigadier Kitson sometimes used me as a sounding board while we were both based at Thiepval Barracks, Lisburn. I remember him well coming to my office where he sat in a red armchair.  Unlike other senior officers, he never once called me to his office, which was on the other side of the complex. Intriguingly, he never spelt out to me precisely what had triggered the questions he put to me. The book also describes how the brigadier – as he was then – was encouraged by the Ministry of Defence to sue a British newspaper, The Daily Mirror. It had erroneously claimed  Brigadier Kitson had developed the five techniques which had been deployed against internees while he had served in Kenya. The ploy, as Burke describes, was designed to dampen the confidence of the media who were attacking the Army over those interrogation methods. Inevitably, with the passage of time, many of those distant memories have now morphed into a collage of blurred images, but some remain painfully in focus because of their emotional impact upon me at the time.   ‘Bloody Sunday’ is one of those.  Burke’s book covers a lot of ground including a lengthy section on the Bogside tragedy. He demonstrates that despite two major inquiries into the event, new information is still surfacing some 50 years after it. I believe his book makes an important contribution to the overall debate about what has become one of the most controversial and divisive episodes of that traumatic period. He demonstrates that despite two major inquiries into the event, new information is still surfacing some 50 years after it. I believe his book makes an important contribution to the overall debate about what has become one of the most controversial and divisive episodes of that traumatic period. 2. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) attempted to mislead the media about my role in Widgery. The complexity of the events surrounding ‘Bloody Sunday’ is well illustrated by the fact the initial Widgery Inquiry lasted 24 days and heard evidence from 114 witnesses.  The subsequent Saville Inquiry lasted five years and heard evidence from 922 witnesses.  It became the longest inquiry in British legal history!  Why did the additional 800 witnesses not appear at the Widgery Inquiry when their memories of the event were more likely to be fresh and, therefore, potentially more accurate? At the time of ‘Bloody Sunday’, I was part of the Army’s Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) unit.  My role was gathering and disseminating intelligence information in ways to assist the work of the Security Forces.  The work was sensitive and totally deniable.  In 1990, the MoD approached a number of journalists in an attempt to mislead the public about my role in Widgery Inquiry.  That was a pointless attempted cover-up because my role at Widgery had little, if anything, to do with Psy Ops.   However, MoD documents disclosed by the Government make it clear that, on 11 February 1972, I took over responsibility from Colonel Tugwell, the officer then in charge of Psy Ops in Northern Ireland, for what was known as ‘The Opposition Case’.  Another document compiled at the end of the Widgery Inquiry by the Deputy Director of the Army Legal Services, Lt Colonel  Colin Overbury, stated that I: “provided detailed background information (to the Army counsel) throughout the hearing“.  The Army legal Team also included two very experienced members of the Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch who undertook ongoing research. It is now clear that some Government witnesses lied to the Saville Inquiry by falsely claiming that the Army had stopped using Psy Ops before ‘Bloody Sunday’ took place.  Why was that deception necessary and why was no action taken against those who committed perjury?  That failure tends to indicate that those witnesses were doing what was required of them by those in authority. Why was that deception necessary and why was no action taken against those who committed perjury?  That failure tends to indicate that those witnesses were doing what was required of them by those in authority. 3. An IRA ambush of a ‘distant cousin to the Queen’ during the Widgery tribunal was ‘quietly covered up’  One of my colleagues on the Army legal team was Major Henry Hugh-Smith of the Blues and Royals.  He was the team’s secretary and brought great energy and humour to his role.  He was described in Peerage News as “a distant cousin to the Queen”. All the members of Army team including the barristers stayed with the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets, at Ballykelly, which is about half way between Derry and Coleraine where the Widgery Tribunal was being held. On the night before the final hearing, the Green Jackets invited Hugh and me to join one of their mobile patrols into the Bogside to see at first hand some of the locations featured in the Inquiry.  The lead Land Rover in which Henry was travelling was ambushed by the IRA.  An official account in Guards Magazine of what happened records that in the attack: “lasted eight minutes with some 600 rounds exchanged“.  It was believed that the IRA were using a variety of weapons in the ambush, including an American M60 machine-gun.  It is amazing that Army casualties were not higher. Two members of the IRA were killed in the ambush and Henry was shot in the right arm. His hand was subsequently amputated above the wrist.  I went to visit him early the following morning – the final day of the Inquiry – at Altnagelvin Hospital on the outskirts of Derry.  He was still very ill and heavily sedated. Two members of the IRA

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Sinn Féin and the politics of the struggle

    by 0 Comments

    Ireland’s largest party of the left may soon have us at last, whether we like them or not By Rory O’Sullivan Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018, published five Audacity of Hope-style books – part-autobiography, part-political manifesto – during the most intense phase of the peace process in Northern Ireland. The last one, which came out in 2003, was entitled Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland. “Hope and history” is from those lines of Séamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy which are quoted constantly: “Once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme”. The Cure at Troy, first staged in 1990, is a version of the play Philoctetes by Sophocles, in which the Greek heroes Odysseus and Neoptolemus try to convince the wounded archer Philoctetes to return with them to Troy. A prophecy states that the Greeks will need Philoctetes’ bow of Heracles to help win the Trojan war, but at its beginning Odysseus had marooned Philoctetes on Lemnos; he had been bitten by a snake and his screams were distressing the crew. Heaney’s play is clearly about Northern Ireland, with the characters’ eventual conciliation a kind of symbol, and a roadmap. The Cure at Troy is really a play about getting over the wrong someone has done to you in order to share a future with them. But this is not quite what the Philoctetes is about, since in the end what Philoctetes agrees is to go back and fight a war which will end in destruction and massacre at Troy. During the sack of the city, all three men will commit sacrilegious acts, things which today we would call war crimes. They will in turn be punished by the Gods for them, and all of this is foreshadowed at the moment of conciliation with which the play ends. Philoctetes is not simply a guide to achieving peace or justice; it asks what justice can really mean in a world of endless conflict and guilt.  And it is out of these two sides of the mouth that Gerry Adams speaks in the title of his book: “Hope and History”, the man who put down the armalite to fight with the ballot box instead; “Making Peace in Ireland,” the man who did it, not to reconcile with Unionists, but to defeat them. Even in 2003, it would never be ‘Northern Ireland’.  Adams, now retired, has a blog called Léargas where he posts from time to time; he posted an entry last Friday, 24/1/20, entitled “Keep your eye on the prize”. He offers a Sinn Féin-centred view of the peace process, saying of the Good Friday Agreement that “we had in fact established an alternative – a peaceful way to win freedom for the first time in our history”. He closes by saying, “Unity is no longer an aspiration – it is achievable. It is a doable project. It is the prize. There for everyone on this island. All of this is part of the continuum of struggle”. Peace, or Irish unity: which is the prize? It depends who you ask; and if you ask Sinn Féin, it depends who’s asking. In the book, Hope and History, Gerry Adams describes the Sinn Féin tactic of “love-bombing”, which unnerved and bewildered Unionists during the peace process. When Adams and the UUP’s Ken Maginnis appeared together on America’s Larry King Show after the Ceasefire in 1994, Adams repeatedly tried to shake his counterpart’s hand and pat him on the shoulder. Maginnis stiffened up and didn’t know what to do. He looked out of date.  The standard Unionist charge against Sinn Féin is that they committed to ‘Northern Ireland’ in the Good Friday Agreement only in order to destroy it, and have spent their time in Stormont using power-sharing against itself. Of course, this is a regressive point on Unionists’ part since it amounts to a demand that, as a precondition of peace and power-sharing, Republicans profess loyalty to the Union. But it is also true that Adams and McGuinness had long-believed that the Republican movement needed to be mainstream to win, and that this meant putting the political above the military as a matter of strategy.  In his book, ‘Blanketmen’, the hunger-striker Richard O’Rawe claims that Adams ordered strikers to die so as to increase support for Sinn Féin and open the political theatre of the struggle. O’Rawe’s claim is disputed, but it is clear that by 1986 Sinn Féin’s leaders were carefully laying out the path that the Republican movement would follow through the 1990s and 2000s. In that year’s Ard-Fheis the party ended its policy of abstentionism in Leinster House. It was over precisely this question that Provisional Sinn Féin had split from the party in 1970; and the 1986 decision caused another split, with Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and the party’s Southern old guard breaking away and forming Republican Sinn Féin, whose military wing is the Continuity IRA.  Ó Brádaigh gave a fiery speech at the 1986 Ard Fheis, excoriating Adams and McGuinness for betraying the core values of Republicanism. He said that ending abstentionism meant recognising the ‘Free-State’ as the government of Ireland, and therefore its army as the Irish army. In other words, and in contrast to Unionists like Maginnis, he argued that Sinn Féin were repudiating the principles behind the armed struggle. He ended the speech by saying: “In God’s name, don’t let it come about…that Haughey, Fitzgerald, Spring and those in London and Belfast who oppose us so much can come out and say “Ah, it took sixty-five years, but we have them at last”.  Neither Ó Brádaigh nor the Unionists were wrong, exactly, in their criticisms of Adams and McGuinness, but neither had managed to see the pair from both sides. What drove Sinn Féin through the peace process and into Stormont was a pair of contradictory principles, each espoused in turn to different listeners. The only concession Sinn Féin made in principle

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Abortion on the march

    by 0 Comments

    After the abortion-repeal referendum, there is momentum for change in the North, though DUP-dependent Theresa May has indicated she will not not facilitate it. It has made reluctant bed-fellows of DUP traditionalists and Catholic moral conservatives. DUP Assembly Member Jim Wells has had the DUP whip withdrawn for openly criticising the party leadership. “I’m anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion. I would be conservative, and maybe that’s not the new image the party wants”, he has said. Wells went to Dublin to take part in the ‘Save the Eighth’ march. DUP leader Arlene Foster has noted support from former Sinn Féin voters disaffected by its stance on abortion, coming her party’s way. In early June Ian Paisley Jr tweeted: “I have a letter from a local priest in my constituency thanking the DUP for its stance on these issues and assuring me that he is urging his parishioners to vote DUP because of the stance we take on social matters”. Up to 50% of the North’s Catholics are estimated to be socially conservative, to varying degrees, with 2% to 3%, mostly urban, being fundamentalists. A minority of these actually vote DUP, for moral reasons. On the other hand, however, there are internal strains in the DUP, with some in favour of allowing abortion in certain circumstances and moving away from Paisleyite fundamentalism. Moreover, influence is not all one-way, with the recent West Tyrone by-election emboldening Sinn Féin to a Repeal stance. On May 3 Sinn Féin’s Órfhlaith Begley won that Westminster seat with a majority of just under 8,000. Pro-life campaigners ran a vigorous campaign targeting Sinn Féin in the election. The constituency is 68% Catholic, much of it rural and conservative. Sinn Féin calculates that it only lost approximately 1,000 votes on the issue. It accepts that not all its voters supported the right to choose, but most seem prepared to accept the party position. A factor was that Mary Lou McDonald came out clearly for repeal. Her statement may not have been as strong as most pro-choice campaigners would want, but it was clear. “Sinn Féin is campaigning in the upcoming referendum to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Constituion”, she said. “We are doing this because this is a public health matter. The Eighth Amendment should never have been put into the constitution because that was never the appropriate place to address issues of women’s health”. It’s a long way from the IRA in the 1930s which declared that it would take its social policy from Papal encyclicals. It’s even a big shift since the 2015 Westminster election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. There pro-lifers had targeted Sinn Féin. In response, it circulated a lea et in the name of Martin McGuinness: “I hold very strong personal views on the issue (abortion) myself and have always been and remain pro-life… As one of the leading parties in the Assembly, Sinn Féin will continue to block the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to the North”. Despite this letter, sitting Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew lost her seat. While there has been no vote in the North on the issue, the clear majority of ‘yes’ votes in Southern border counties is suggestive of attitudes in the North, even in rural areas. These are areas where communities straddle the Border, and most people have family on both sides. Ballyconnell, Co Cavan, is on the Border with South Fermanagh. It voted ‘yes’ by almost two-to-one. Clones, Co Monaghan, is surrounded on three sides by Fermanagh. All five polling booths had a ‘yes’ majority. The same was true of parts of North Monaghan, physically, economically and socially intermeshed with Tyrone. The villages of Emyvale and Glaslough were strongly ‘yes’. That could be seen in East Donegal. Lifford, on the Border with Strabane, where most residents in several housing estates are from Strabane, voted 51% ‘yes’. From Monaghan and Donegal, there are indications that many members of the Presbyterian Church, the North’s largest Protestant denomination, did not support their Church’s call for a ‘no’ vote. In Aghabog, Co Monaghan, with a strong Presbyterian community, ‘yes’ took 160 votes to 140 ‘no.’ Nearby Drum is as Presbyterian and Orange a village as any in Ulster. It voted ‘no’, but narrowly, with 110 ‘yes’ and 119 ‘no’. In Monaghan even more than Donegal Presbyterians congregations are rural and doctrinally conservative. Thus, urban Protestants in the North could reasonably be assumed to be more pro-choice. In the longer term, the Referendum result will modify attitudes in the North. A significant driving factor of Unionism is the genuine fear of ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’. Most Unionists would recognise there have been signi cant changes in the South, but would have certain doubts. This vote is proof of big change. In the foreseeable future it is unlikely that any significant proportion of the Protestant population will move to support Irish unity. A 2016 BBC poll showed 72% of them (and 47% of Catholics) against. But even in conservative Northern Ireland, now be sieged to the South and East by abortion liberals, a wave of change is rolling. Anton McCabe

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Avoiding League Relegation

    by 0 Comments

    In Ireland, North and South. In the last 50 years no pub or shop has changed its language from English to Irish. In recent years, in the last pockets of the Gaeltacht, the young people have been switching to English. Clearly, the time has come for the Gaelic League, Conradh na Gaeilge, to take its last, this time decisive, action to save Irish, our ancestral language, from becoming a revered dead language like Latin, and instead keep it for the future spoken, written and joked in by thousands. The Gaelic League’s original aim in its glory days when it nourished the mind of the Irish Revolution was to make Irish again the language of the entire nation. After Independence, as the League realised that this was not going to happen, its aim became to preserve the Gaeltacht and to ensure that through the schools system and its own classes many thousands in the rest of Ireland would be able to speak and write Irish. That last aim has succeeded and it is now time to reap the harvest and put it to use. Many individuals, North and South, in many different occupations are now able to speak and write Irish well, and because they are in many different occupations they possess the Irish language more fully than the merely rural Gaeltacht did. In many cases, North and South, these persons amount to families where Irish is the family language. The League must seek out, for a start, 1500 of these people from the general population North and South and the Gaeltacht remnants; people who would pledge to speak and write Irish with each other and, if they have children, as their family language. Each of them above the age of twelve would wear a discreet badge to identify themselves to others. That for a start. Then each year, the elected committee of this community, which might call itself Na Caomhnóirí (Guardians), would hold an all-Ireland rally to coincide with Oireachtas na Gaeilge. Spaced through-out the year. Four regional committees would organise provincial gatherings. At these various coming togethers, they would discuss and decide what joint ventures – publications etc, – they would engage in. Na Caomhnóirí would call for new applicants and hold an annual entrance examination as a big public event. That annual event would give the secondary Gaelscoileanna and the university courses in Irish a concrete and prestigious goal to aim at. The entrance exam would be held each year until the number of members would reach 10,000. In this way, whatever else happens, the future of Irish as a spoken and written language would be assured into the future – into the new civilisation which will succeed the disintegrating European civilisation. And in that achievement the Gaelscoileanna, as feeder schools, would have a concrete goal to aim at. Unless action along these lines is taken, the so-called Irish language movement will plough ahead without any concrete goal to aim at and with diminishing support from a State that has lost interest. Probably TG4 and Raidió na Gaeltachta would continue for a while to broadcast and Irish would be spoken occasionally in the Dáil and as a cúpla focal at formal dinners. Latin, too, has its news media on the internet, and English football results are broadcast on radio in Latin. At important ceremonies of the Vatican and of many universities formal Latin is spoken. But because Latin is not spoken and joked in every day by a substantial living community, it is reckoned to be a dead language. To save Irish from becoming that and the League from becoming a historical curiosity, it is necessary to act decisively now in the manner I have outlined. Desmond Fennell Dr Desmond Fennell’s latest book is his autobiography ‘About Being Normal: My Life in Abnormal Circumstances’ (Somerville Press).

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    The Right to have Rights

    by 0 Comments

    Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase ‘the right to have rights’ was coined in her 1958 book ‘The Human Condition’. The condition of being stateless, of being a displaced person, which began its modern history in Europe with World War I, has been experienced since by untold millions who have had to listen to the claim that ‘human rights’ are universal and fundamental – but not for them. Once we had the glamorous figure of the cosmopolitan, the person who belonged to the world, the global community; that figure has been displaced by the refugee, who belongs nowhere, but is to be found everywhere in the paradigmatic settings of the modern and contemporary world – the prison camp, the internment zone, the refugee camp, the ghetto, the jail, the arena of suspension where people live in a place that is always outside the country that it is inside. Arendt pointed out that the creation of such places and conditions is a political decision, not just a terrible catastrophe. It is the prevailing form of the penal colony, the new home that we have built to house the theory of human rights. Since Arendt, and most especially in the indebted work of Giorgio Agamben, it has become clear that the concentration camp of the twentieth century was not some historical anomaly, but that it is actually one of the paradigm sites of Western modernity. The internment camp is a zone of suspension, of ‘rendition’, a place that is always outside the country it is inside – Guantanamo is the best-known example, although there many such places – our best- known example was The Maze in Northern Ireland. Those entrapped there expose the hollowness of any claim to universal human rights, to having rights just on the basis of being human. Arendt said it plainly: the refugee, the displaced person, has regularly been denied the right to have rights. The denial is a political decision. It takes its most popular form in the denial that there are any ‘political prisoners’ in the denying country, although enemy countries are full of them. Its political nature has been counterpointed more clearly since 1948, since the United Nations began its series of declarations of Human Rights, unabated since that date; rights of men, women, children, of minorities, of the disabled, of all indeed who can be characterised as having been ‘excluded’, which means that even the ‘poor’, a constituency which enlarges globally by the hour, faster than ever since the almost perpendicular rise of neo-liberalism in the decades before and after the financial crash. Reading these rights, as ‘declared’ (whatever that means), in that bland United Nations universalistic rhetoric, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Such noble vacuities, such actual atrocities – produced by the same state systems that have prevailed since 1945. It was part of Arendt’s long argument, which began in 1943 with her essay “We Refugees” (about Jewish migrants who had become ‘stateless’, that condition in which they had no rights) that asked why European civilisation had so successfully produced the barbarism that made statelessness pandemic and human rights so unavailable to the millions of ‘displaced persons’ of World War II. Part of her answer was that this barbarism was so successful precisely because it was so concealed within or behind the declarations of universal rights and justice which the West, in the case of the American and the French Revolutions, had made central to the powerful ideology of what mutated into Western ‘freedom’. Arendt’s question then was: how could such an ideology be developed (as through the UN declarations) and simultaneously traduced (as in American foreign policy)? It is too feeble an explanation to put it down to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy on this scale occurs when the people who most sincerely believe in the peaceful principles are those who most regularly betray them in violent action. The British spent three centuries in perfecting their international reputation as hypocrites, a nation that believed itself to be peaceful even as it waged endless wars. Now that role has been assumed, largely, by the Americans. But, to achieve world domination is one thing; world hegemony is another. That’s what the World Wars were fought for. Arendt achieved notoriety with her reporting on the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which was published in book form as ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, where she developed the central figure of the ‘desk-murderer’, the bureaucrat who administered the death-camps. But her key point was that this was a show-trial, that pretended to be an example of universal justice triumphing over universal evil. Rather, it was in fact a national victory of the Israelis over their Nazi persecutors. In this exemplary instance, we are shown how the language of universalism can be used as a disguise for a state’s policies. The jurist who had the ambition to do that for a successful Nazi state, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), described in his ‘Nomos of the Earth’ (1950), how the European system of international law had been replaced by an American one, with the UN as its legislature and the International Tribunal or Court as its executive. In effect, the language of universal rights was used to ratify the aims of American foreign policy; Nuremberg, Tokyo, Damascus, the Hague were, like the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, elaborate pretences that something objectively true was being defended from the current version of sectarian betrayal – war criminality, terrorism, the new terms of ‘war crime’ and its flourishing neighbourly companions, such as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Danilo Zolo has demonstrated in Victor’s Justice how the Kosovo war of 1999, that infamous intervention (to be followed by interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan , Libya and elsewhere, saving the ‘people’ of those countries for democracy, largely by killing and dispossessing them), with its International Court at the Hague, which could try anybody but Americans, is the most egregious example so far of how the language of universal rights has been perverted

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Some devils got him

    by 0 Comments

    The Westminster terrorist attack on 22 March of last year, by lone attacker, Khalid Masood (52), who drove a car into pedestrians and fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer, is not the first time that terrorists have selected the Palace of Westminster, and its surrounds, to perpetrate an act of violence. 39 years ago, on 30 March 1979, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) murdered Airey Neave, Conservative MP and Margaret Thatcher’s shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, in a devastating car bomb attack. Apart from reaffirming Thatcher’s determination to defeat Republican paramilitaries, Neave’s assassination robbed the Conservative Party of one of its most open-minded, albeit controversial, thinkers on Northern Ireland. By the standards of the day, Neave was a remarkable figure. On the one hand, he was a public figure: war-hero, writer, barrister and politician. He had escaped from Colditz, a Nazi prisoner of war camp during the Second World War; was the author of five semi-autobiographical books; established a practice at the bar; and was Conservative Party MP for Abington, 1953-1979. On the other hand, he was an elusive and secretive individual, retaining close links to the British Secret Intelligence Service throughout his adult life. During the Second World War he worked for MI9, a subsidiary of MI6, later holding the rank of commanding officer of the Intelligence School 9, Territorial Army (TA). Neave’s greatest contribution to political life came in the autumn of his career, following his promotion as shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland in 1975. Neave’s appointment to Thatcher’s shadow cabinet, in the wake of her election as leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, had important ramifications for the Conservative Party’s Northern Ireland policy. From the moment he took up his new shadow cabinet portfolio, until his murder by the INLA, Neave’s “first priority”, as he noted in April 1978, was to defeat Republican terrorism. Although often preoccupied by security-related issues, and despite misguided arguments to the contrary, Neave remained committed to finding a workable solution in the hope of ending direct rule in Northern Ireland. As a pragmatist, confronted by the political reality that the mainstream political parties in Northern Ireland could not agree on the terms of devolution, he instead championed reform of local government in Northern Ireland, as an interim measure. By initially supporting the establishment of his so-called ‘Council of State’, subsequently followed by a proposal to create one or more Regional Councils in Northern Ireland, Neave sought to end, as he phrased it in November 1977, `’civil servants’ paradise`’, which existed under direct rule. Unfortunately, Neave’s assassination by the INLA robbed him of the opportunity to implement his proposals to reform local government in Northern Ireland.   New archival material from Neave’s personal papers and the National Archives of the UK iliuminate the events of 30 March 1979. Neave commenced his working day, like any other. Following breakfast, he left his at at Westminster Gardens, got into his powder-blue Vauxhall Cavalier saloon, and made the short journey to the houses of Parliament, the Palace of Westminster. His morning was spent preparing for the forthcoming British general election (scheduled for 3 May) and dealing with day-to-day constituency matters. Following lunch, he decided to stop for the day and return home to spend time with his wife Diana. It was in the members’ lobby that Neave held his last conversations, chatting to colleagues before crossing to the members’ exit and taking the lift to the five- floor underground car-park to pick up his car. At 2.58p.m., an enormous explosion engulfed New Palace Yard. Soon after, as Neave’s sole biographer Paul Routledge wrote, smoke was seen billowing from the smouldering wreckage of a Vauxhall car on the ramp leading up from the MP’s underground car-park. It was a “haunting image”, with sheets of headed house of Commons writing paper “blowing gently in the breeze”, recalled Lord Lexden, Neave’s former political advisor on Northern Ireland. Police officers rushed to the scene and came upon an unidentifiable man, dressed in a black coat and striped trousers. Initially, the victim was believed to be Alan Lee Williams, a Labour MP. In fact, in the car lay sixty-three-year-old Neave. Surveying the burning wreckage, the mangled frame of the car and the glassless windows, it was apparent that some type of bomb had exploded. “He’s still alive! Clear the area!”, a policeman shouted. Within minutes, an ambulance crew arrived to find the still unidentified figure, who was breathing, slumped over the steering wheel, his face burned beyond recognition. A doctor, nurse and firefighters soon joined the entourage, before Neave, with his right leg blown off below the knee, was eventually freed after half an hour. He was quickly taken to Westminster Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. It was too late. Neave died on the operating table. Thatcher received news of Neave’s murder while preparing for a party-political general-election broadcast at BBC headquarters. Her first thought was reportedly: “Please God, don’t let it be Airey”. When it was confirmed that Neave was indeed the victim Thatcher was described as “numb with shock”. Later that day she informed a BBC reporter that “… some devils got him and they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph, they must never prevail”. Following Neave’s murder, attention immediately turned to who had perpetrated this brutal crime. Initially, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) claimed responsibility. In fact, the real perpetrators were the INLA. Formed in 1975, with a pledge to establish a “republican and socialist” state, the movement had previously been known as the People’s Liberation Army, having sprung up in late 1974, when the Official IRA attacked members of the newly formed Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). At the time of Neave’s death, it was believed that the INLA had approximately 60 active members. The INLA basked in the publicity following Neave’s murder. A spokesperson for the terrorist organisation said that Neave’s assassination “had a tonic effect in Northern Ireland where there had been celebrations in Belfast,

    Loading

    Read more

  • Posted in:

    Dumb greens and unions

    by 0 Comments

    One of the things historians may dwell on is how the key December 2017 and February 2018 eu drafts of the Brexit agreement came to take the forms they did. It is all the more important since the inept UK Government of Theresa May failed to produce its own draft, though it might have been expected to do just that. Of course that suggests a lack of seriousness on the UK’s part about the agreement and perhaps that the EU Drafts may not go as far as we, and the EU, think, but that is a separate matter. In particular it is interesting that the drafts – the first a draft political agreement, the second a draft legal agreement with the same substance enshrine the EU’s rules for the customs union and single market but not its rules for multifarious other spheres of eu activity that bind the UK while it remains a member of the EU: most notably on the environment, labour and consumer affairs. The body politic and commentators have missed the following: the UK could become the trading neighbour from hell by ignoring EU environmental, health, labour etc standards – exploiting the competitive advantage over the eu you’d expect from a country saving money by keeping these standards low. It is interesting is that so many dogs have failed to bark. One might have expected the British trade unions to be shocked at the potential dangers to workers’ rights if EU standards are abolished and they become subject to the whims of a hawkish Tory party. But they didn’t because, like the British Labour party of course, they can only think of the superior standards Jeremy Corbyn will bring to the sphere. This is self- absorbedly naïve. Corbyn will not be in power for ever and the Tories won’t be going anywhere. When they return they will not have to observe the comfort blanket that EU standards provide. We know well the frustrations of the Tory party over the years with what used to be known as the EU’s ‘Social Chapter’. Nothing is as certain as that they will not observe its prescripts on issues like maternity and overtime if they return to power in some post-Brexit outturn. There are occasional insights into this thinking but mostly the protagonists remain mute. Surprising too that the Irish unions have made so little noise about it but then the Irish Congress of Trades Unions and SIPTU are both challenged by having members and remits both North and South of the border. You’d think they’d be on the warpath. Environmentalists and Green parties have said little perhaps because typically they languish far from the vehicles of power and tend not to be as forensic or aggressive as the circumstances here demand. Village tried to provoke the establishment media, most of RTÉ’s and the Irish Times’ Europe, Northern Ireland and Environment correspondents etc (by twitter) into recognising their failure to cover this issue but – to a man – they’re too complacent, and probably too immersed in politics and economics, to think about social and environmental rights and rules. The issue is clouded as terms like “a common regulatory area on the island of Ireland” and “a single regulatory space on the island of Ireland…” in themselves don’t do justice to the fact that there are important areas that will no longer be regulated by the EU. It’s also a bit difficult for many people to get their heads around as “regulatory alignment” of Northern Ireland with the EU is only envisaged as a ‘backstop’ if the UK can’t strike a more wide- ranging deal with Ireland and if a technological border solution proves impossible. Of course with only a year left to Brexit it’s looking increasingly like neither of the two contingencies will come to pass. The easiest way to avoid the backstop is for the UK as a whole to remain in the customs union and the single market. But the UK government insists this will not happen. Because the contingencies are uncertain they were left out of the draft Withdrawal Agreement which is a strictly legalistic document, thought they had appeared in the December political draft – and they remain politically possible. It’s complicating too that the Tories and Brexiteers so vociferously think the common regulatory area described in the EU draft goes too far rather than not far enough – though of course they are referring essentially to economic matters, not to environmental and social matters about which they may care little. It is clouded because it may well be that no deal is possible. It is important to note that, despite occasional diplomatic pleasantries, there has been little progress on the central conundrum of the negotiations: if the UK leaves the EU trading bloc, then a customs border is needed either on the island of Ireland or in the Irish Sea. One is ruled out by the EU drafts, the other by the UK. Theresa May asked Brussels if Britain could stay in the bits of the single market that she likes and exit the bits that she does not. The EU doesn’t have to, and won’t, run with that – no matter how self-righteous Brexiteers fume. On this basis it is very possible the EU’s draft terms form no element of the (WTO) arrangement that the UK falls back on. And it is clouded because confusingly the Draft Withdrawal Agreement refers, in its Article 12, to the Environment. Most people (not you dear reader) glaze over a little when contemplating the diktats of a customs union and single market. The customs union is an agreement among members to charge the same import duties as each other and usually to allow free trade between themselves. The single market guarantees the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour – the “four freedoms” – within the European Union. You couldn’t for example have goods which comprise some material, imported into Britain on the basis of a tariff-free agreement between Britain

    Loading

    Read more