We are  working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there’s a way to deal with their problems without going to war.
— President George W Bush quoted on Sunday Independent, January 13, 2002.

I’ve seen some very nice places in the Park, near the President’s Palace.
—Former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev jokes about his entitlement to graze sheep anywhere in Dublin as he received his Freedom of the City and quoted in the Sunday Independent, January 13, 2002.

 [Colonel] Wilford presents quite a serene picture. At once his eyes ask if anyone can understand the enormity of what has transpired. But on his lips there is no trace of a faint smile. He looks like a real soldier in the heat of battle. Simultaneously appalled and entertained by what he has just done. You cannot fake this sort of look.
— Damien Kiberd column, Sunday Business Post, January 13, 2002 on the new television drama/documentary Bloody Sunday.

But the part of Colonel Wilford is not played by an actor at all. It is played by Simon Mann, a former officer of the SAS regiment with distinguished service and now the head of a South African security firm. Mann is simply playing himself….
— Damien Kiberd.

I do not know what reassurance it will have for British viewers, but it will be hard for anybody Irish to watch calmly. It is also being released on video. Get it, before they get you.
— Damien Kiberd.

The credibility of the Garda Síochána rather than [Terence] Morgan could be the most telling factor in the [Colm Murphy] trial.
— Barry O’Kelly, Crime Correspondent, Sunday Business Post, January 13, 2002.

The murder and declaration of war on schools are the culmination of months of attacks on the Catholic population of the North – particularly that area of Belfast that already suffered more than 500 killings in the 30 years of the troubles.
— Editorial, Sunday Business Post, January 13, 2002.

Much as one would wish the contrary, this violence will invariably continue because the North’s underlying sectarian hatred has not been addressed. It has not been tackled by the architects of the Agreement. In fact, it is implicitly accepted in the voting system of the North’s government — the low-level sectarianism never went away.
— Editorial.

As the ending of the loyalist ceasefires and the collapse of the UDA’s political element have indicated, the success of the peace process has effectively cut loyalist paramilitaries adrift from any real political influence.
— Tom McGurk column, Sunday Business Post, January 13, 2002.

With prison convictions few are employable; unlike the Republicans, even fewer availed of the education possibilities while in prison, and even worse for them they do not enjoy the sort of status within their community that ex-IRA prisoners enjoy within theirs
— Tom McGurk column on loyalist ex-prisoners with ‘nowhere to go’.

The power and influence of its paramilitaries [loyalist], as they increasingly turn to organised crime, is at the heart of this crisis.
— Tom McGurk column.

Today we see the richest, most powerful country on earth setting up concentration camps, formally refusing to apply the Geneva Convention to men seized in the course of war and providing no legal justification for its actions.

There is no evidence against them, unless, of course, they can be induced to make various confessions before drumhead courts martial.
— Damien Kiberd column, Sunday Business Post, Agenda, January 20, 2002. Did we not see Irish Republicans dragged before such death courts in Collins Barracks, Dublin in the 1940s?

In 1998 he said: “I am glad to be an ally of Dr Paisley’s in defence of the Union.”

He advocates that unionists should join a United Ireland now.
— Last Post column, Sunday Business Post, January 20, 2002 on Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien’s political somersaults.

Many innocent people – women and children among a number now estimated at more than 4,000 and whose right to life was as important as those murdered in New York and Washington – have been slaughtered in bomb raids in Afghanistan.
— Editorial, Sunday Tribune, January 20, 2002.

Known as “the Loyalist Commission” the grouping consists of unionist politicians, community workers, Protestant clerics and leading members of both the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force in Belfast.
— Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune, January 20, 2002.

The leading Ulster Unionists involved are the former Stormont MP, Lord Laird, who has acted as a public relations adviser to the UUP First Minister, David Trimble and the Orange Order spokesman David McNarry, who is said to brief Trimble regularly on the Commissions work.
— Ed Moloney on the secret joint unionist-loyalist paramilitary think-tank to promote alternatives to sectarian violence, Sunday Tribune, January 20, 2002.

RUC sources have told me that the evidence in the Colm Murphy case could not have secured a conviction north of the Border.
— Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent, The Observer, January 22, 2002.

Nor can they [families of victims of the Omagh bombing] reasonably be expected to join in perplexed discussions of how the court was able to draw a cordon sanitaire around the activities of the two miscreants [Liam Donnelly and John Fahy, the two gardaí who falsified interview notes and then perjured themselves] and convict Murphy on the basis of admissions said to have been made to other gardai during the same period of detention in the same garda station.

Across a wide range of political and media opinion, something of the same feeling surrounds discussion of the issues emanating from the trial. To express doubt about the safety of the conviction is to risk being portrayed as insufficiently outraged at what happened in Omagh. If a couple of gardai did overstep the mark and conspire to fit up a prime suspect, their offence was as nothing compared to the cruelty of the Saturday afternoon slaughter in August 1968. So runs the implicit argument.
—Eamonn McCann, Belfast Telegraph, January 24, 2002 writing on the ‘trial’ of Colm Murphy in the non-jury Special court in Dublin.

[Tom] Paulin erupted at [Germaine] Greer’s intimation of sympathy for the Paratroopers who had shot unarmed demon-strators. “Rubbish,” snarled the normally affable Paulin. “They were thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people. They were rotten racist bastards!”
— Eddie Holt television column, Irish Times, January 26, 2002 on the January 11 clash in a Late Review discussion on the two films about Bloody Sunday.

Three police officers and two British soldiers were injured when a blast bomb was thrown at them in north Belfast early yesterday morning.

The device was thrown at a police vehicle as it responded to a call in the Whitewell Road area of the city at 4.30am. According to the police service a “hostile” group of nationalist youths attacked the officers until assistance arrived.

No arrests were made.
— Sunday Tribune, January 27, 2002.

Garda evidence in the Omagh bombing conspiracy case had led to claims that the resulting conviction is unsound and that, for gardaí, expediency is more important than justice.
— Sunday Tribune, January 27, 2002.

Kerry Republican Dan Keating has just celebrated his 100th birthday, having survived active service in the War of Independence and the Civil War, then internment by de Valera during World War II. Not for him the wishy-washy, watered down Republicanism of Gerry Adams, let alone the Dublin government. Dan sups yet of a headier brew.

As he neared his century, government officials got in touch and said that President McAleese would be in Tralee and would present him with the £2,000 cheque the government gives to centenarians.

“Dan told them she was not President of Ireland, his president was Ruairí Ó Brádaigh [President of Republican Sinn Féin] and that he would not be taking any money,” reports SAOIRSE (trans. “George”), the newspaper of Republican Sinn Féin.
— ‘Last Post’ column in the Sunday Business Post, January 27, 2002, under the heading “Stick it up your Free State”. (SAOIRSE in translation from Irish is “Freedom”.)

“To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressure of life, like clay in a season of drought.”
— James Baldwin, the black American writer, as quoted in Damien Kiberd’s review of Joanne O’Brien’s photo-journalistic book on Bloody Sunday: A Matter of Minutes in the Sunday Business Post Agenda, January 27, 2002.

So while ITV, TV3, Channel 4 and BBC 2 (with a repeat of Peter Taylor’s Remember Bloody Sunday) have all commemorated Bloody Sunday, our national broadcaster seems to consider it a sticky wicket.
— Television review, Sunday Business Post, January 27, 2002.

In “Sunday” written by Jimmy McGovern, General Ford (Christopher Ecclestone) who was in command in Derry on Bloody Sunday, is shown recording a memo “I’m coming to the conclusion,” he says, “that the only way to restore law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders of the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been given…”
—Television review, Sunday Business Post, February 3, 2002.

Jimmy McGovern’s “Sunday” however was a more traditional dram-atisation of the events of the day and afterwards. The film uncompromisingly took sides: ordinary decent people cut down by the brutal forces of the state. Afterwards the paras whoop it up over beers.
—Television review.

It is likely that McGovern’s picture will have irritated the British establishment or unconvinced British public more than the rather more cinematic Greengrass film.
—Television review.

The US Government has refused a leading [Provisional] Sinn Féin member of the [Stormont] Assembly, Conor Murphy, a visitor’s visa for entry to the United States in a move by the Bush Administration which is seen as a warning shot across the party’s bow as the next deadline for a decommissioning move by the Provisional IRA.
— Sunday Tribune, February 3, 2002.

Nuclear waste stockpiles and radioactive discharges in Sellafield are set to increase due to a new plan by authorities in the UK (sic) to ship tonnes of nuclear waste including 44 tonnes from Scotland to Sellafield over the next decade the Sunday Tribune has learned.
— Sunday Tribune.

Bernadette McAliskey … has branded the Bloody Sunday Tribunal as “pointless”. McAliskey …. claimed that the inquiry had become nothing but a “costly” and cynical” venture … “Nothing will come out of it other than the people on the street getting the blame – both soldiers and civilians.”
— Sunday Tribune.

Instead of marching through the Bogside this weekend Gerry Adams will spend it mingling with billionaire supermodels, politicians, kings, princes, bankers, academics and stars of the screen and stage from around the world, some 3,000 in all from 100 countries.
— Ed Moloney on Sunday Tribune. February 3, 2002, re World Economic Forum in New York which costs $25,000 for annual membership and a further $1,000 to attend the forum.

He [Adams] is the only one of this years delegates to trail a whiff of gun smoke behind him. Yassar Arafat, a regular attendee since the PLO eschewed violence, has been barred because of the trouble in the Middle East.
— Ed Moloney.

…this weekends trip paints the picture of [a] politician who cares less about ideology and more about repairing broken fences with powerful figures in corporate and political America.
— Ed Moloney

His [Michael Stone] exile [to Spain] reflects deepening divisions within the North’s largest loyalist paramilitary force [the UDA] which some months ago dissolved its political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party.
— Sunday Business Post, February 3, 2002.

The UN Relief and Work Agency in the Near East (UNRWA) said Israel’s 81 military checkpoints, prolonged curfews, incursions, house detentions and destruction of crops has taken an alarming toll in the 16 months since the Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation began. “… fully half the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is reportedly living in poverty.”
— Sunday Business Post, February 3, 2002, on the United Nations appeal for $117 million for food, medical care and jobs for 1.4 million Palestinian refugees.

At least 826 Palestinians and 249 Israelis have been killed since the uprising began. UNRWA said half the Palestinians killed were registered refugees.
— Sunday Business Post.

And as Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s new leader, was sitting in Capitol Hill [Washington] listening to the Bush address, his own government was evicting the main drugs control agency [State High Commission for Drug Control] from its headquarters in Kabul and confiscating its vehicles.
— Tom McGurk column, Sunday Business Post, February 3, 2002.

Unilateralist wrecking of the Kyoto treaty and the international criminal court; the ABM treaty is a done deal; nuclear testing is blithely listed for resumption. Even nuclear warhead reduction agreed with Moscow may be scuppered. And in the face of all that liberal yapping about Camp X-Ray Washington is beginning to ruminate that, like ABM, the Geneva Convention may be unsuitable to the new era.
— Tom McGurk.

(Picture) More people have now been slaughtered in bomb raids in Afghanistan then died in the September 11 attacks on the US.

The ISI [Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency] with American backing, was up to its neck in Afghan politics, promoting Bin Laden’s political fortunes directly before September 11.
— Damien Kiberd column, Sunday Business Post Agenda, February 3, 2002.

Mrs Robinson made a last minute decision to attend the forum, flying directly from Porto Allegro in Brazil where she told the rival World Social Forum that human rights had worsened since September 11 and called for the development of “ethical globalisation”.
— The Irish Times, February 4, 2002, report on Mary Robinson’s statement at the World Economic Forum in New York.

While combating terrorism was necessary, “it is also extremely important to maintain the standards we have built up – the rule of law, international human-rights standards, the Geneva Convention,” Mrs Robinson said, replying to a question about the treatment in Guantanamo Bay of prisoners captured in Afghanistan.
— The Irish Times.

Contents

NEWS FROM SAOIRSE (freedom). The Voice of the Irish Republican Movement. Republican Sinn Féin http://rsf.ie 223 Parnell Street, Dublin 1 229 Falls Road, Belfast

Web layout by SAOIRSE -- Irish Freedom February 11, 2002  Send links, events notifications, articles, comments etc, to the editor at: saoirse@iol.ie.