Phil Flanagan and An Taoiseach

I don't tweet  or follow people on Twitter but Newton Emerson has picked up on a tweet from Phil Flanagan on Tuesday.  Phil, a Sinn Fein MLA from Fermanagh, tweeted: 'Note to all BBC journalists.  The 'Irish Prime Minister' is called An Taoiseach. '

 

Well Phil if you are going to use the Irish Gaelic term for the prime minister of the Irish Republic, then perhaps you will also accept the Irish Gaelic version of Ireland.  The country south of the border is then Eire and of course that was how it was named in many Northern Ireland newspapers through to the 1970s.

 

According to John Thomas Koch, in his book Celtic Culture: a historical encyclopedia, it is an early word meaning 'leader' and appears in a 5th or 6th century ogham inscription in both the Gaelic and Brythonic languages.

 

The term An Taoiseach was introduced by Eamon de Valera in the 1937 constitution and replaced the earlier term President of the Executive Council.

The word that Gerry Adams will not use

Gerry Adams has a weekly column in the North Belfast News and I think the same column appears in the Andersonstown News.  It carries the title 'Gerry Adams TD - He hasn't gone away you know', but of course he has gone away, south of border, to county Louth.  He has a new job in another country.

Today he deals with 'the killing of Adrian Donohoe' on 25 January and 'the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe and the wounding of Garda Ben O'Sullivan in Adare in June 1996'.  However the one word that Adams has refused to use is the word 'Murder'.   According to Gerry the Provisional IRA didn't 'murder' anyone.

He referred to his apology for the 'killing' of Garda McCabe by the Provos but criticised unionists who 'have demanded an apology for the deaths of members of the RUC and British Army.'  Adams then stated his position very clearly: 'I do not believe the fact that citizens took up arms against oppression in the North, and against those forces that inflicted violence on behalf of the British state, is a matter of apology.  I take no satisfaction  from the killing by the IRA of British soldiers and RUC officers.  and I am very conscious of the suffering of their families.'

Sinn Fein have condemned the murder of PSNI officers by dissident republicans and have apologised for the 'killing' of Garda McCabe by the IRA.  Such progress is limited but it is welcome and of course it only came because of pressure from politicians, from the media, from public opinion and from the families of victims.  That pressure on Sinn Fein must be kept up until Adams and his party acknowledge that the 'killing' of RUC officers and British soldiers was equally wrong and was indeed 'murder'.

The fact that Adams felt it necessary to write such a tortuous article about this matter shows that he and his party are troubled by this pressure and it must be maintained.  We must not allow them to succeed in their strategy of trying to rewrite history. 

Magdalene laundries

Magdalene laundry in Ireland

The report on the operation of the Magdalene laundries in the Irish Republic has been published and has been covered extensively in the media.  Around 10,000 women passed through the laundries between 1922 and 1996 and the conditions in them were extremely harsh.

 

The start date for the report is simply the start of the southern state but in fact Magdalene laundries were in operation long before 1922.  The first Roman Catholic home in Ireland for 'fallen women' opened in Cork in 1809 and the last asylum, which was in Waterford, closed on 25 Setpember 1996.

 

Former inmates have demanded an apology for the treatment they received and it has been a difficult day for the Roman Catholic orders that ran the laundries.

 

However this is not the first time that the Roman Catholic laundries have been the subject of comment and controversy. 

 

Indeed a century ago there were demands for the public inspection of the laundries.  Among those who campaigned for inspections was the South Belfast MP Thomas Sloan (1870-1941), an Independent Unionist, who was associated with the Belfast Protestant Association and the Protestant Alliance.

 

Convinced Protestants such as Sloan were to the fore in calling for the inspection of Roman Catholic laundries while the Roman Catholic Church argued that such inspections were interference and that they had the right to operate without 'interference'.

 

 

The Workers' Party and the Sunday World

On Saturday 26 January I posted on this blog about the Workers' Party and the Official IRA and in the course of the post I quoted from the standard history of the Workers' Party, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party.

 

This seems to have upset Richard Sullivan, a journalist with the Sunday World, who managed to devote an entire page in his newspaper yesterday (3 February) to attacking both me and the post.

 

The authors of the book from which I quoted are Dr Brian Hanley and Scott Millar.  Brian Hanley lectures in history in the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool and Scott Millar is a journalist.  The book itself is highly regarded and in 2010 the Political Studies Association of Ireland honoured the authors by awarding them the prestigious Brian Farrell prize for the best political science book published in 2009.

 

This is the book from which I quoted a short extract and it is this extract which has annoyed Richard Sullivan!  So what was the extract?  According to Hanley and Millar:

The Sunday World remained an outlet for WP publicity and its populist analysis of the political situation was often in line with the party's positions. The paper steered clear of any reference to the actvities of Group B [Official IRA], but its exposes of criminal activity by other loyalist and republican paramilitaries was not without its costs: its Northern editor, Jim Campbell, was badly wounded in a UVF shooting in May 1984.

Based on that short extract I commented:

The silence of the Sunday World about the criminality of the Official IRA contrasted sharply with its focus on the criminality of other paramilitary organisations and is therefore all the more remarkable. Moreover this was no accident. There were people on the staff of the Sunday World who were or had been members of the Workers' Party or the Official IRA. Are we to believe that they had sources of information about every other paramilitary organisation but no sources of information about the Official IRA? I think most people will find that rather hard to accept!

The question becomes all the more interesting in view of a document written in 1989 by Sean Garland to the Communist Party in East Berlin, admitting that the Officials were engaged in criminality to raise money for the party. The recent discovery of this document by the Irish Times sheds a new light on that era of the Officials and the journalists and others who were at various times associated with the Official republican movement.

Richard Sullivan had a whole page at his disposal, so did he mention Hanley and Millar or challenge their book?  No he never mentioned them at all and he did not respond to what they had written.  Here is what Richard Sullivan said in response to my post:

The Minister goes on to allege the Sunday World was a mouthpiece for the Workers Party and even suggests we covered up the activities of the Official IRA.  Both ludicrous statements, as the record of this paper will show.

In fact I merely quoted from a book which was written by two respected authors and which has been in print since 2009.  Whatever Richard Sullivan might think about the 'record' of the Sunday World, it certainly didn't convince the authors of The Lost Revolution.  Furthermore, if Richard Sullivan is so upset by what this book states, why has it taken him so long to deny something that appeared in print three years ago?

That is really the core of his article but in true Sunday tabloid fashion Sullivan manages to fill out an entire page with a lot of irrelevancies, a lot of distractions and a blatant untruth.  The irrelevancies I will dismiss as unworthy of comment but there is one particularly vile untruth.  According to Richard Sullivan: 'Nelson fails to condemn the killing.'

 

No, Richard, certainly not.  Here is what I said about the murder of Martin O'Hagan and it couldn't be clearer:

Before turning to the subject of this post let me be absolutely clear - human life is given by God and murder is a sin - it is always wrong and those who are guilty of murder should be punished.

Moreover, in regard to the murder of MartinO'Hagan, I used the word 'murder', the word that Gerry Adams did NOT use in relation to the murder of Garda Jerry McCabe.  It should not even be necessary to say that murder is wrong because murder is always wrong.  The use of the word 'murder' says it all.

So once again Richard Sullivan gets his facts wrong!  It is not the first time I have had to correct him and it probably won't be the last.

Murder after murder

Forty years ago, Ulster was in the midst of a cycle of sectarian violence and every day the death toll was rising.  In the year 1973 alone 250 people were killed, 5,018 bombs were planted and there were 1,007 explosions.

On one day, 2 February 1973, three people were killed in Belfast by paramilitary organisations, two on the Springfield Road and one at Ballysillan.

 

The two who died on the Springfield Road were James Greer, a twenty-one year old Protestant, who was shot dead by republicans.  He was a glazier and was working in the firm of Campbell Brothers on the Springfield Road when two armed men walked into the workshop and lined up the employees.  They singled out Greer, one of only two Protestants working at the firm, and murdered him.  The Protestant was killed and the Roman Catholic staff were ignored.

 

Also that day Patrick Brady, a twenty-eight year old Roman Catholic, was abducted and shot dead.  At the inquest a detective said it was a confusing case but according to Lost Lives 'reliable loyalist sources' said that the UDA were behind the killing.  Brady had been a member of the Catholic Ex-Servicemen's Association, a nationalist vigilante organisation which described itself as a 'people's army'.

 

The other victim that day was Robert Burns, an eighteen year old Protestant from the Sunningdale estate and an apprentice mechanic.  He and five others young people had just left the youth club at Eglinton Presbyterian Church and they were standing near the junction of the Oldpark Road and the Ballysillan Road.  IRA gunmen opened fire from a passing car and Robert was heard to shout to the others to get down.  Robert was shot dead by the gunmen and four of his friends were hit by gunfire but survived. Here is what Lost Lives says of the murder:

One of the survivors said the gunfire came from a yellow Mini with two or three people inside.  A short time later an army foot patrol  found two youths inspecting a yellow Mini in a garage in Ballycarry Street, off the Oldpark Road, a mile from the shooting.  A crowd throwing stones and bottles attacked the soldiers, forcing them to withdraw.  When the soldiers returned in an armoured vehicle they came under heavy fire from the same weapon used to kill Robert Burns.

An RUC detective-constable told the inquest that the two youths found with the car and its owner knew nothing about the crime.  The shooting appeared to have been a sectarian assassination, since all those shot were Protestants, he said.  He added that it was in all probability carried out by a republican grouping, probably the IRA.

Three days later, on 5 February, Seamus Gilmore, an eighteen year old Roman Catholic who worked at the Mount Pleasant filling station on the Ballysillan Road, close to Sunningdale, was shot by three loyalist gunmen, believed to have been members of the UVF.  Gilmore lived nearby in Rosscoole Park and it was suggested that the shooting was in retaliation for the earlier killing.

 

I have detailed the deaths on that awful day as a reminder of what Ulster was like in the early 70s.  There are still people in our society who are intent on violence but thankfully the terrible carnage of those days is in the past.  Nevertheless, in most cases, the perpetrators have not been brought to justice and the families of innocent victims are left with no sense of closure after the loss of their loved ones.

 

The events of that day are also a reminder of what the campaign by the Provisional IRA was really like.  Sinn Fein and other republicans often argue that there was a particular difference between the IRA campaign and those carried out by loyalist paramilitaries, that loyalist killings were sectarian but that republican killings were not.  Indeed such claims form one strand of the Sinn Fein strategy of rewriting history.

 

But the murder of James Greer at his workplace and the murder of Robert Burns as he stood with other young friends were as sectarian as they could possibly be.  Sinn Fein must not be allowed to forget and we must continue to press them to acknowledge that the campaign of violence by the Provisional IRA was indeed sectarian.  Republicans seem to think that Protestants are sectarian but that republicans couldn't possibly be sectarian.  The events of that terrible day forty years ago blow that fiction apart.

 

 

Alex Maskey at Auschwitz

Sinn Fein MLA Alex Maskey visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in September 2005 as part of a project involving the Belfast Jewish community and supported by Belfast City Council.

 

Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War and was described by Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler as the place of 'the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.'

This week at Stormont there was a small exhibition of photographs from Auschwitz as well as an accompanying booklet which contains photographs of Auschzwitz and as short introduction by Alex Maskey.

Jewish victims at Auschwitz

I welcome the fact that Maskey was brought face to face with the horror of Auschwitz and I welcome his visit for a number of reasons.

Recently Gerry Adams apologised for the killing of Garda Jerry McCabe by the IRA and he is now being challenged about the murders of many RUC men in Northern Ireland.  The murder of a policeman in Northern Ireland is no different from the murder of a policeman in the Republic.  Murder is murder and it is wrong.

 

But Sinn Fein has also to face up to earlier episodes in the history of Irish republicanism and one of those is the Second World War.  During that war, when many Ulstermen and Irishmen were fighting the Nazis and the Fascists in Europe, the IRA collaborated with the Nazis..  They collaborated with the people who were responsible for Auschwitz and every other evil of the Nazi regime.

 

That is part of the IRA story that republicans want to forget and of course they are good at forgetting what they want to forget.  I have posted before about the collaboration between the IRA and the Nazis and indeed books have been written about it and television programmes have been produced about it.

 

Moreover it cannot easily be dismissed by the current generation of Sinn Fein as merely some ancient aberration with which they have no connection.  The IRA emphasises and honours the idea of continuity with the past.  They see themselves as another stage in the struggle, building on the struggles of their forebears and they make much of those who can look bace to earlier generations in their families who perhaps fought in the War of Independence or in the ranks of the IRB. 

I hope that members of Sinn Fein will reflect not only on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps but also the fact that the IRA collaborated with the Nazis, albeit in a wholly incompetent manner.  That incompetence does not in any way minimise the guilt of the republican movement.

Seamus Heaney and the Union flag

Yesterday (28 January) The Times carried an exclusive interview with the poet Seamus Heaney.  The front page of the section was a photograph of Heaney over which the newspaper had printed one sentence from the interview.  That sentence was:

There is never going to be a united Ireland so why not let Loyalists fly the flag?
 

Seamus Heaney was born in county Londonderry in 1939 and is a poet, playwright, translator and lecturer.  He was the professor of poetry at Harvard and Oxford and his work was recognised in 1995 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

Although he was born in Northern Ireland, Heaney has lived in Dublin since 1972 and he once wrote: 'Be advised my passport's green.  No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.'

 

It is that background which makes his comment about the Union and the Union flag all the more important.  The sentence on the front page comes from the following paragraph:

'Loyalism, Unionism or Protestantism, whatever you want to call it,in Northern Ireland it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.  And they have an entitlement factor running: the flag is part of it.  There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know,' he says plainly.  'So why don't you let them fly the flag.'

Heaney recognises that there will NEVER be a united Ireland and I just wish that nationalist politicians would also recognise this fact.  Yes they have a right to hold an aspiration for a united Ireland but they should be honest enough to admit that it will never happen.

Many public speakers in Northern Ireland, including some nationalist and republican politicians, use quotations from Seamus Heaney.  However I doubt very much if this will be the one they use.