The US is behaving like a consumer in a self-service, taking what suits them and rejecting the rest. The US has no right to decide who is a POW, only a competent tribunal can decide that. The US is making a mockery of an international convention which it has signed and undertaken to respect “in all circumstances”. Mary Robinson needs to do more.
— Le Temps.

What about the 1,000 foreigners arrested after September 11? They were encouraged to sign papers renouncing the services of their consulate, their right to a lawyer, and contesting the charges against them. They were promised in exchange a prompt expulsion home. They are still in prison.
— Le Temps.

The US attitude is an extremely dangerous precedent which cannot but inspire other states to act likewise. Kim Gordon Bates, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, quoted Article 5 of the 3rd [Geneva] Convention in support of these contentions.
— Le Temps.

‘Ireland on Sunday’ is living up to its unofficial title – ‘Little England on Sunday’ – judging by its recent coverage of the award-winning film Bloody Sunday.
— Phoenix magazine, February 1, 2002.

A recent Daily Mail attack on the film, entitled “Bloody Fantasy” which included a special piece from “expert on Ireland”, Ruth Dudley Edwards, incensed Derry citizens to the point of a boycott campaign. Posters went up across Derry city urging a boycott of Mail publications, including the Daily Mail-owned Ireland on Sunday, and the campaign has also spread to Belfast.
— Phoenix magazine.

A second-class infra-structure and poorly developed public services accompany this first-class economic performance. Social service expenditure, after allowing for our lower unemployment bill, is among the lowest in the EU as a share of national income . . . a widening gap between rich and poor.
— Irish Times Weekend, February 9, review of “The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland” by Peadar Kirby, published by Palgrave.

After tax, disposable income became more unequal during the boom largely because of biased tax and welfare policies which redistributed the fruits of growth upwards.
— Irish Times Weekend review.

. . . It remains vitally important to understand the extent to which British government involvement through the Unionist conduit, dictated the nature and identity of the province (sic), as we currently know it.

And in addition to this, how the Protestant working-class were exploited and used, to copper-fasten a middle-class unionist blueprint for the Six Counties. The recent redefining of political allegiances within the “unionist family” would further support this.
— Irish Times, February 11, 2002, article by Dr Paul Burgess from Belfast’s Shankill Road and lecturer, Dept of Applied Social Studies, NUI, Cork.

There is strict security surrounding this week’s visit of Prince Charles [of England?], which has been cut short following the death of his aunt, Princess Margaret.
— Irish Times, February 12, 2002.

This is despite the Weston park proposal for the appointment of an international judge to “thoroughly investigate” six cases, including Pat’s.
— Peter Madden, business partner of Pat Finucane’s, Irish Times, February 12, 2002, on why the family’s long campaign to find the truth will continue.

This [the Weston Park proposal] is a private, behind-closed-doors investigation similar to the Dublin/Monaghan bombing investigation, and probably does not meet the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Human Rights Commissioner, Brice Dickson, has recently said so.
— Peter Madden.

The call [for a public judicial inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane] was made in a joint statement by 12 non-governmental organisations including Amnesty International, British-Irish Rights Watch, the Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ), Human Rights Watch, International Commission of Jurists, International Federation for Human Rights, Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Liberty, Pat Finucane Centre, Relatives for Justice and Scottish Human Rights Centre.
— Irish Times, February 13, 2002.

For the record: [Provisional] Sinn Féin recognises the Garda and the Defence Forces as the legitimate forces of this state . . .
— Cllr Seán Crowe (Provo councillor and candidate in next 26-County General Election) in a letter to Tallaght Echo, February 28, 2002.

Meanwhile, the [House of] Commons Standards and Privileges Committee said yesterday that [Provisional] Sinn Féin MPs – who were recently granted office facilities and allowances at Westminster – should be required to list their interests in the House of Commons Register.
— Irish Times, February 14, 2002. Deeper and deeper into the system . . .

Normal, normality, normalisation: no matter what way it is expressed, it seems the appropriate way to describe the changing relations between Ireland and Britain that have made Prince Charles’s second official visit to the Republic (sic) a more accepted, almost a routine occasion.
— Irish Times editorial, February 15, 2002.

Protests by Republican dissident organisations were more or less normal too.
— Irish Times editorial. But publicity for the Republican Sinn Féin picket on O’Connell Bridge, Dublin was not “normal”. It was tantamount to a news blackout.

Thanks to our friends in Republican Sinn Féin for the service done to the nation in pointing out that the map of Europe depicted on the Euro coins features a rather large border between the Eurozone and non-Eurozone parts of this island.

“It reminds you that even if you will eventually be part of a united Europe whether you like it or not, your country is still divided,” explained the leaflet left helpfully in pubs for drinkers to consider.

The leaflet is accompanied by a card which features the words of the National Anthem in both first and second official languages, accompanied by the exhortation: “Stand and sing it with pride.” Published by the Irish Freedom Press, which is not registered with the Companies Office, strangely.
— Sunday Business Post, Last Post Column, February 17, 2002.

We feel it unlikely that she [Mary O’Rourke] told him [Charles Windsor] it was the greatest day of her life, as a certain former Fine Gael leader did in 1995.

What is it about the Blueshirts and the [British] royal family?

The great moral philosopher Oliver J Flanagan said it was the “greatest thing that ever happened to this country” when Princess Margaret popped by in 1977.
— Last Post column.

In another diplomatic gaffe by a member of Britain’s royal family, Prince Charles, on a visit to Áras an Uachtaráin, has asked when Ireland will “rejoin” the British Commonwealth.
— Sunday Business Post, February 17, 2002.

Charles’s aunt, Princess Margaret, whose funeral took place last Friday, once told the [Irish-American] Mayor of Chicago that the Irish were “pigs”.
— Sunday Business Post.

The family of Eddie Fullerton, the former [Provisional] Sinn Féin councillor in Buncrana who led opposition to gaming machines in the county and who was killed by a UDA gang in May 1991, want the garda investigation into his death reopened.
— Sunday Business Post.

Central to any notion of agreement [with unionists] is a comprehensive understanding of what either side doesn’t want. This is a debate whose time has come and it should be opened not as an impending threat but rather as a genuine attempt to advance all the political agendas in the island, both unionist and nationalist.
— Tom McGurk column, Sunday Business Post, February 17, 2002.

The Progressive Democrats received two separate donations of £50,000 [€63,490] during 2001 – one from Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary and the other from property company Treasury Holdings – the Sunday Tribune can reveal.
— Sunday Tribune, February 17, 2002. This was confirmed by the PDs in the next day’s Irish Times.

One of the most senior Stormont civil servants [Dr Robert Ramsay] from the 1960s and ’70s has described the role of the British government’s office in the north at the time of Bloody Sunday as “roughly akin to that of the Soviet Embassy in the Prague of the same era”.
— Éamonn McCann in the Sunday Tribune, February 17, 2002.

The thrust of the statement, and of others taken recently from former Stormont civil servants, is that security policy was dictated by London officials with little commitment to unionist interests. The implication is that blame for Bloody Sunday rests with Westminster, not Stormont.
— Éamonn McCann.

Ramsay said that [Stormont Prime Minister] Faulkner believed that opposition to internment without trial – the point of the Bloody Sunday march – had been intensified by “the army’s use, without the knowledge of the Northern Ireland government – of quasi-torture techniques during interrogations, involving, for example, the use of ‘white sound’ and other elements of sensory deprivation”.
— Éamonn McCann.

Why we need the police board: Pat Byrne’s house (bought from a criminal in 1994); Dean Lyons (a young heroin drug addict forced to admit to a double murder in 1997 – later released when the real murderer confessed. Lyons died from an overdose); Abbeylara (shooting of John Carthy); Donegal (none of several internal inquiries have been published); Colm Murphy trial (statement taken by two Special Branch was thrown out of court).
— Sunday Tribune, February 17, 2002.

Unionists can’t hold back the tide. Derry city’s council is already nationalist. Armagh is heading that way.
— Susan McKay article in the Sunday Tribune, February 17, 2002. Yes, but is it anti-British rule nationalist, or just reformist nationalist?

More than two decades after its first plan for the area was foiled by local opposition, the ESB is at last set to build a generating plant on Carnsore Point, Co Wexford [a wind farm capable  of powering approximately 10,000 homes].
— Irish Times, February 20, 2002.

In 1978, a proposed nuclear power station sparked a public outcry, culminating in a rally at the Point that attracted 5,000 people. The event was seen by some as the start of the green movement in Ireland. After further demon-strations in the following two years, the project was put on hold and quietly dropped.
— Irish Times. Republican Sinn Féin was at Carnsore Point in 1978 and again in 1979. The nuclear project was sponsored by Minister Des O’Malley, then in Fianna Fáil.

However, while gas from the Corrib field will also feed into the ring-main [Dublin-Galway section] the position of towns through Mayo and the north-west is less than certain.
— Irish Times, February 23, 2002.

But he [Jim McDowell] fails to ask him [senior RUC officer Kevin Benedict Sheehy, “Ulster’s top drugs-buster”] one rather obvious question: to what extent did the RUC over the years of the troubles, recruit drug users and drug dealers as police informants?
— Sunday Business Post, Agenda, February 24, 2002, book review of “Inside Northern Ireland’s drugs racket”.

It is an important question, because in Belfast and other affected districts many citizens find it highly improbable that [in such a heavily policed society] the police do not know the identity of almost all the key players.
— Sunday Business Post Agenda.

It [the RUC/PSNI Board’s decision to retain Ronnie Flanagan for another month] has also exposed the manner in which the Good Friday Agreement has been diluted across a range of its provisions since its inception four years ago.
— Sunday Business Post, Frank Connolly article, February 24, 2002.

Central to the Ombudsman’s devastating report was an implicit suggestion that the RUC Special Branch, which concealed documents from the bomb investigators and from O’Loan’s team, may have put the priority of its informer network over the protection of civilian lives.
— Sunday Business Post.

Of course, the Special Branch has always been part of the problem in the North. It is now widely suspected that police/British army informers played a role in the killing of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989.
— Sunday Business Post.

While his considerable public relations abilities have been widely noted, the chief constable [Flanagan] has supervised a force that has failed to deal with the most recent spate of prolonged gun and bomb attacks on nationalist civilians in Belfast and across the North.
— Editorial, Sunday Business Post, February 24, 2002.

Not one member of the loyalist gangs that prey on the lives and homes of residents in front-line areas has been convicted, despite the fact that the dogs on the streets know the identities of those responsible.
— Editorial.

For many years the Special Branch has developed extensive informer networks within the loyalist organisations. This is particularly so of the UDA C Company in west Belfast – a group that has been notorious for its savagery in recent years. Yet there appears to be no effective means to stem its activity.
— Editorial.

This force within a force [Special Branch] was to go as a consequence of the Good Friday Agreement, and its deconstruction was a key aspect of the Patten Commission report on policing. With the enthusiastic resistance of the main unionist parties, the Northern Ireland Office and senior police officers, the proposal was binned.
— Editorial.

“Do you accept that there is only one army as laid down in the 1937 Constitution?”

Adams’s reply: “Absolutely, I think there is only one army in the State and I think there is only one police service.”
—  Question put to Gerry Adams on RTÉ Radio News at One on Sunday February 24,2002 and reply given. Just prior to this question Adams stated his party’s “…   recognition, acceptance and support for the Garda Síochána as the only legal policing service in the State . . .”

There [in the Six Counties] New Sinn Féin [Provisionals] participates in private-public partnerships (the selling-off of schools to entrepreneurs), and hospital closures, just like everyone else. There is no sign of socialism in the chamber at Stormont.
— Susan McKay, Sunday Tribune, March 3, 2002.

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