Archive for the ‘Six County State’ Category
Who Organised a Belfast Patrick’s Weekend Palestine March – Minus the Original Speakers? Bernadette McAliskey looks for answers
Bernadette McAliskey asks questions :
The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) should provide answers.
Bernadette McAliskey :
Was this march organised by Belfast ISPC? On what date did the platform change from the three speakers below and become a platform of primarily spokespersons for political parties of the NI Assembly,? On what date were the political parties first invited to speak? Why was the list of political party speakers including Sinn Fein not announced prior to the March and rally itself, allowing those who didn’t want to hear from political parties whose leaders were in the White House, or those doing little or nothing for Palestine to have stayed away? Who made these decisions, the consequences of which must have obvious to them at the time, given the depth of feeling from anger to disappointment? What did they expect from an unsuspecting audience when a Sinn Fein speaker was sprung on them? Did they, through naivety, expect Sinn Fein to decline or was the reaction foreseen and thought to OK?
Without some transparency and explanation of the who, when and why, the organisers have very little credibility left with independent activists who are daily raising awareness; building support for boycott of Israeli goods on the ground; fund raising for medical aid, for children, for food aid in Gaza and helping as best they know how, Palestinians living here to cope with the pain and trauma of their fear for family and friends at home as well their exile.
Either lack of foresight and transparency, intentional deceit, or plain old-fashioned elitism needs to be owned up to, unless the organisers have a better explanation. This is no way to build any principled unity on Palestine, or anything else for that matter.
Vincent Doherty :
This is a moment of decision nationally for the IPSC. Sinn Fein would prefer if we all forgot their treachery in fine wining and dining with Biden in the midst of the genocide. Just like a few years ago when they were meeting with Likud despite having signed up to the BDS campaign. It’s the elephant in the room, and one that needs to be addressed.
Patrick’s Day 2024 – Ireland, Palestine, the USA – Blood-Stained Shamrocks in Belfast while Irish-Americans turn against Joe Biden
John Hurson of Tyrone, a dedicated pro-Palestine activist, speaks for many :
Thought she was going to bring up Gaza when she met Genocide Joe? :
Publicity for a Belfast protest stated ” ‘As Irish political leaders prepare to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Joe Biden, the Gaza Genocide’s main sponsor, join us to show that the people of Ireland stand with the people of Palestine’” – but the event took a strange turn.
Read the rest of this entry »Freddie Scappaticci, a British Agent in the IRA, was publicly unmasked in 2003 – on March 8 2024 the British State publishes a cover-up report called Kenova – the authors refuse to name Scappaticci – and nobody will be prosecuted
Ed Moloney is the first journalist who publicly unmasked Freddie Scappaticci. A strange coalition issued denials : Scappaticci himself, the British Government, and Sinn Féin. Shortly afterwards extraordinary proof emerged, which proved beyond any shadow of doubt that Scappaticci was a British informer.
Questions remain – above all whether the state organisations and the then IRA leadership – responsible for many Scappaticci murders – can be made accountable for their actions. The British state is determined to prevent this happening.
On March 8 2024 a cover-up Kenova Report does not name Scappaticci. In the same week we learned that an innocent civilian called Seán Brown, an active GAA member, was killed in 1997 by loyalists, with help from 25 members of the British state security forces. An inquest into the assassination of Seán Brown was stopped because the British State, covering up its dirty work, issued Public Interest Immunity Certificates.
presiding coroner Mr Justice Kinney abandoned the long-running inquest in Belfast and confirmed he would write to Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris to ask for a public inquiry.
He said Mr Brown’s inquest could not continue due to material being withheld by state agencies on the grounds of national security.
The PSNI and MI5 have made applications for multiple redactions to sensitive documents connected to the murder under Public Interest Immunity (PII).
https://tomasoflatharta.com/2024/03/05/surveillance-operation-on-lvf-suspect-mark-swinger-fulton-lifted-the-day-before-sean-brown-murder-irish-news-report-lifts-lid-on-a-1997-sectarian-murder-facilitated-by-the-bri/
The stories below are recommended.
Stakeknife ‘told TV crew that McGuinness ordered killings’
Army mole in IRA allegedly told reporters they had not revealed enough about Sinn Fein leader
Rosie Cowan, Ireland correspondent
Monday July 14, 2003
Guardian
The Army/IRA double agent Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci told television documentary makers Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness was a ruthless terrorist leader who sanctioned murder, secret tapes have allegedly revealed.
Mr Scappaticci was exposed two months ago as military intelligence’s top spy within the Provisionals, for whom he was deputy head of the notorious internal security unit, the Nutting Squad, responsible for torturing and killing suspected informers.
So far, Mr Scappaticci, whom the government paid more than £80,000 a year and whom sources have linked to more than 40 murders, has brazened it out, denying everything and returning to his west Belfast home after his security force handlers failed to persuade him to flee the country for his own safety.
Although many IRA members believe he is Stakeknife, the republican leadership has stuck by him, albeit at a distance, perhaps reckoning that the secret services would capitalise further on any IRA attempt to harm or exile him.
Read the rest of this entry »The March 8 2024 Care and Family Referendums in Ireland – Which is better : the existing wording or the suggested replacements?
Let’s keep it very simple. These 2 constitutional provisions are symbolic.
The basic information is provided here : Electoral Commission Explanation of Care and Family Referendums in Ireland. We are concentrating on the Care Referendum, as some people on the Irish left are advocating a No vote, meaning that the existing reactionary sexist wording in DeValera’s 1937 Constitution will remain in place.
In any referendum you are only voting on the question you are asked – not on the question you would like to be asked.
Voters should ask themselves : Is the existing wording worse than the proposed changes?
Yes or No?
Any objective left-wing and feminist reading of the relevant texts can only come to one conclusion : The proposed changes are better.
Read the rest of this entry »“Surveillance operation on LVF suspect Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton lifted the day before Seán Brown murder” – Irish News report lifts lid on a 1997 sectarian murder, facilitated by the British State – “Inquest abandoned due to material being withheld on the grounds of national security as coroner asks for public inquiry”
Twenty seven years ago, and the British State is determined to prevent a true story being told.
Here is the Irish News report, published on March 5 2024.
A security surveillance operation on a leading loyalist and suspect in the murder of GAA official Sean Brown was lifted the night before the killing, a coroner has been told.
Details emerged as presiding coroner Mr Justice Kinney abandoned the long-running inquest in Belfast and confirmed he would write to Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris to ask for a public inquiry.
He said Mr Brown’s inquest could not continue due to material being withheld by state agencies on the grounds of national security.
The PSNI and MI5 have made applications for multiple redactions to sensitive documents connected to the murder under Public Interest Immunity (PII).
PII certificates are used by state agencies to withhold sensitive or top level security information they do not want in the public domain.
Last week the coroner heard that more than 25 people had been linked by intelligence to the murder, including several state agents.
Read the rest of this entry »“Frogs’ legs and lobster Thermidor – or the ABC of republican strategy” – Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh
Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh is one of the most interesting political writers in Ireland. The article below is a detailed analysis of Ireland’s peace process, which begins with a speech delivered by Bernadette McAliskey the year before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. I remember it well. (*)
John Meehan
About the author : Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh is a Belfast-based historian and the author of a number of important books, including Tyrone: the Irish Revolution, 1912-1923 (Four Courts Press, 2014).
As a young man, I listened to a speech by Bernadette McAliskey the year before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement – the pinnacle of what became known as the ‘peace process’. McAliskey did not object to peace, she had notoriously been subtitled by the BBC in a 1992 interview, when she said: ‘No sane human being supports violence. We are often inevitably cornered into it by powerlessness, by lack of democracy, by lack of willingness of people to listen to our problems. We don’t choose political violence, the powerful force it on us.’ (quoted in Curtis, 1998:297) By the time I heard her speak in 1997, the powerful had arrested her pregnant daughter, Róisín, with the intent to extradite her to Germany. By 2000, the powerful admitted that Róisín, who had never been charged, had no case to answer as there was ‘not a realistic prospect of convicting Miss McAliskey for any offence.’ (Guardian, 20 July 2000). What struck me at the time, was that the powerful had a vendetta against a woman and her family because she had stood up for socialist republican principles for thirty years at that stage. Last month, fifty-five years after the Burntollet march and her subsequent election as the then youngest female Westminster MP ever, McAliskey gave the main oration at the solidarity march in Dublin, where she told the crowd that ‘Palestine is the litmus test of our humanity’ and then urged those present not to vote for any politician who would legitimise the Biden administration, which was ‘enabling genocide’, by attending the St Patrick’s Day events in the White House (Irish News, 14 January 2024).
McAliskey’s speech from all those years ago stuck in my mind because in the questions afterwards she was asked about the peace process and used a powerful analogy that I hadn’t heard before at that stage, but I have heard and used myself on numerous occasions since. She welcomed an end to violence but warned that the provisional movement appeared to be going down a well-worn reformist path that would eventually denude it of any revolutionary potential. She compared the republican movement to a frog, which if placed in a pot of boiling water, will immediately sense the danger, and jump out to save itself, but, if immersed in tepid water brought slowly to the boil so that the change in temperature remains gradual, the frog does not realise it’s boiling to death. In line with their – soon to be – new mates in New Labour, Sinn Féin had swallowed TINA – there is no alternative. Plan A – armed struggle has failed, now we try Plan B. In Sinn Fein’s case, this meant the long march through the institutions, acceptance of the principle of consent and parliamentary reformism on the classical constitutional nationalist model. McAliskey had the temerity to ask for a Plan C, which might mean retaining socialist republican principles and challenging the powerful rather than getting into bed with them.
Read the rest of this entry »The Border Partitioning Ireland – Credible opinion polls, Brexit, and Perfidious Albion
A new credible opinion poll in the six county bit of Ireland states the following :
This matters, because under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA), if a six county (Northern Ireland) referendum results in a pro United Ireland majority, partition will be dead.
There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of this survey – it is consistent with many other recent opinion polls.
Under the GFA, the NI Secretary of State (currently Chris Heaton-Harris) has the power to call a referendum. This Westminster minister is not obliged to call a referendum unless a series of surveys indicate that a majority of voters in the six county statelet (NI) will vote for a change in the constitutional status.
This was a perfect arrangement for the Dublin and London governments in 1998 – a big majority of the people living in Ireland (on both sides of the border) voted to accept a Unionist Veto. No real prospect of a shift in attitudes seemed possible. But something big happened in 2016 which is having long-term results : Brexit.
Read the rest of this entry »Ultra-loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson live-tweeting “secret” DUP meeting
Ultra-loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson is live-tweeting the “secret” DUP
meeting where Sir Jeffrey Donaldson is trying to persuade his party to return to
Stormont.
Could you make it up?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-northern-ireland-politics-68031910
Our friends at the Cedar Lounge Revolution are also enjoying the DUP carnage :
Perhaps this is the best highlight :
Suggested now in meeting turn of electronics; someone mutters “but JD needs it for his power point”. Chaos
Irish Support for a Patrick’s Day 2024 Boycott of Joe Biden’s White House Shamrock-Drowning Grows
We wish to thank Joe Brolly for posting this image on his twitter feed :
Joe Brolly is tirelessly promoting the cause of the Palestinian people.
Readers familiar with political parties based in the six county state in the north of Ireland may be rubbing their eyes in disbelief – is it really possible that the SDLP is taking a stand on this issue, agreeing with most people on the Irish left, and against the Sinn Féin party? The answer is Yes.
The article below puts a remarkable story in context :
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 