North Belfast housing need (2)

During oral questions in the Assembly on Monday I responded to a recent statement by Dolores Kelly (SDLP) about housing need in the North Belfast constituency.

Nigel Dodds also issued a press statement with a detailed breakdown of the waiting list for social housing in North Belfast, figures which had been obtained from the Housing Executive.

In both cases we rejected and refuted the myth about waiting lists which has been manufactured by nationalists and republicans.

Now the North Belfast News, a sister paper of the Andersonstown News, has devoted much of page 6 to the subject.  One article carries a lengthy statement from Sinn Fein's Caral Ni Chuilin in which she asks for more 'evidence' but nevertheless goes on to say, 'These attempts by the DUP to gerrymander the housing figures in North Belfast and claim a majority of people in need are Unionist, beggar belief.'

In fact we did not manufacture or massage any figures, we merely used the figures provided by the Housing Executive". Moreover. We actually said that the waiting list and the stress list for both communities was roughly the same.

The newspaper then included some material from a recent post on this blog, which explained how nationalists and republicans had manufactured their myth that the overwhelming need is among Roman Catholics.

In the article Ms Ni Chuilin's stance was supported by Practice and Participation of Rights (PPR), which is supposed to offer help to both unionists and nationalists but which has actually lobbied against the interests of some of the most marginalised and neglected unionist communities.

The fact is that in relation to the North Belfast waiting list, SDLP and Sinn Fein politicians and their allies have been completely exposed by the DUP and they don't know what to do.  Hence Sinn Fein has issued a statement which is big on bluff and bluster and short on facts!

It is absolutely essential that the truth is repeated again and again until nationalist and republican propagandists are forced to face up to the truth and abandon their manufactured myth about the housing need being overwhelmingly nationalist.  The need in the two communities in North Belfast is roughly the same.

For years Sinn Fein have talked about waiting lists in the North Belfast constituency and about the numbers who are in housing stress.  Now the whole basis of their propaganda has been swept away and exposed for the sham that it really is.

There is a need for social housing among both unionists and nationalists and that need should be addressed, along with the need elsewhere in Northern Ireland, but there has been no discrimination against nationalists and if anything the discrimination has been against unionists.  Thankfully those days are over. 

Diane Dodds - 'Dublin armed the IRA'

The following article appeared in the NewsLetter yesterday (6 February):

Dublin armed IRA, says MEP

A Northern Ireland MEP has told a European Parliament discussion on the arms trade that the Irish state armed the IRA.

DUP MEP Diane Dodds was speaking the day after her party leader Peter Robinson called on the Irish government to face up to its “hidden history” in what the DUP said was “founding and arming the Provisional IRA”.

Mrs Dodds was responding to the Arms Trade Treaty voted upon by the European Parliament yesterday, which seeks to regulate the trade in weapons.

In her official statement she said: “Mr President, it is right that this Parliament is today debating the proposed Arms Trade Treaty, which has as part of its scope the aim of eradicating illicit trade in weapons. However, for many living in my own constituency, Northern Ireland, this discussion and this treaty will serve to remind innocent victims of the role played by the Irish government in founding and arming terrorists of the Provisional IRA.

“The First Minister of Northern Ireland recently called on the Irish government to face up to its “hidden history”.

“I repeat that call and it is time that government opened files relating to the arms trial of 1970 for public scrutiny.” Dublin wished “to draw a blind” over certain issues, she added.

It is right that when the EU is discussing the arms trade, an Ulster MEP should remind the nations of Europe that one of their member states, the Irish Republic, had a central role in forming and arming the most violent terrorist organisation to emerge in Europe in the past fifty years, the Provisional IRA.

The Irish Republic and especially Fianna Fail must be confronted with that truth, again and again, until they acknowledge that fact, apologise for what they did and open up the files that relate to the birth and the arming of the Provisional IRA.

Irish - 'a bullet in the freedom struggle'

I have a particular interest in minority or lesser-used languages and regard them as part of the cultural wealth of a people.  However here in Ulster the Irish republican movement has, for more than a century, used the Irish language as a cultural weapon.

 

In the current post I want to show when and how the Provisional republican movement came to that position of turning a cultural wealth into a cultural weapon.

 

In 1982, in the wake of the IRA hunger strikes, Sinn Fein formed a cultural department to promote the use of the Irish language.  In the years that followed it was very active in promoting the language for political ends and it became part of the Sinn Fein strategy of 'broadening the battlefield'.  This was a strategy which regards republican activity in the political, cultural and social fields as complementing the 'armed struggle' of the Provisional IRA.

 

As part of its programme Sinn Fein organised a 'Public Seminar for People Learning or Planning to Learn the Irish Language' and it was held in Conway Mill on the Falls Road on Saturday 26 May 1982.  The first speaker was Padraig O'Maoicraoibhe, a Sinn Fein cultural officer and a teacher in Belfast (later Cathaorieach of Scoil Ghaelach Bheal Feirste).  He told those who were present at the seminar:

I don't think we can exist as a separate people without our language.  Now every phrase you learn is a bullet in the freedom struggle.

Padraig O'Maoicraoibhe also said that the restoration of the Irish language was part of the process of the decolonisation of Ireland.

The process of decolonisation will have stopped half-way if, the day we succeed in driving the English from our shores, what is left behind is an Irish people possessed of the language, culture and values of the English.

Here he linked the learning of the Irish language to the campaign to 'drive out the Brits'.

 

The second speaker was Gearoid O'Caireallain, later editor of the Irish language newspaper La.

 

These speeches were followed by four workshops on Irish and the National Struggle, Why Learn Irish?, Irish and the Community and Difficulties with Learning Irish.

 

At the workshop on Irish and the National Struggle:

Everyone was agreed that there was a definite link between the National Struggle and the Cultural Revival.

Indeed the chairperson of that workshop, Sinn Fein activist Tarlach MacIonractaigh, joined together IRA terrorism and the Irish language when he said that:

The armed struggle is the highest point of the cultural revival.

Afterwards and in order to give the content of the seminar some permanence, Sinn Fein produced a bilingual booklet entitled Learning Irish - a discussion and

information booklet.  It had an introduction by another Sinn Fein cultural officer Mairtin O'Muilleoir, the speech by Padraig O'Maoicraoibhe, including the quotes given above, and reports on the workshop discussions.

 

The author of the introduction, Mairtin O'Muilleoir has gone on to greater things.  He was a Belfast councillor, went off to head up the Belfast Media Group and the Andersonstown News, and has now returned to Belfast City Council, serving one term as lord mayor.  Thirty years have elapsed but he was a central figure in the birth of Sinn Fein's cultural war and provided the introduction for the booklet which helped to launch that cultural war.

 

The author Camille O'Reilly makes reference to a variant of the notorious 'bullet' statement in her book The Irish Language in Northern Ireland, which was published by the Ultach Trust in 1997.  There she reports a prominent member of Sinn Fein, who was also an Irish language activist, as saying that:

Every word of Irish spoken is like another bullet being fired in the struggle for Irish freedom.

The inclusion of the 'bullet' phrase in the booklet and the reference in O'Reilly suggests that the phrase was fairly widely used at that time by republican Irish speakers.

 

Earlier this week I heard a presenter on Radio Ulster question a unionist politician who had quoted the phrase about 'a bullet in the freedom struggle'.  He asked the politician who had said it.  Well here is the answer about the origins of the phrase and if anyone wants to check it out, the little Sinn Fein booklet is long out of print but there are still copies of it in various libraries and collections.

 

There has been a lot of comment on the Irish language in the media in recent times, some of it well-informed and some of it ill informed.  This is just the first of a number of posts on various aspects of the Irish language and I hope that readers will find them to be informative.

 

 

 

North Belfast housing need

On Saturday 1 February the North Belfast Civil Rights Association marched from the Antrim Road down through the New Lodge area down to the University of Ulster building in York Street.

 

There is a report on the Ardoyne Republican blog, which is associated with Martin Og Meehan and the Republican Network for Unity, and there is also a youtube film of the event.  The film lasts 17 minutes and is of very poor quality but it is worth watching if you want to get a sense of the NBCRA event.

 

The NBCRA is a front for some of the smaller republican groups in North Belfast and is chaired by Paul Little of the Irish Republican Socialist Party.  It is also supported by the Republican Network for Unity and the Sean MacDiarmada 1916 Society.

 

Although the organisers notified that there would be five bands, it was a small ramshackle parade with just two bands.  One of these was the Henry Joy McCracken Republican Flute Band, which is aligned with the RNU.  The other band was impossible to identify.

 

The organisers had estimated that there would be 500 participants but by the time they reached York Street the bands had disappeared and the group that remained for the speeches appeared to number around fifty or sixty.

 

The two main speakers were the two 'dissident' republican candidates in the Oldpark area in the forthcoming council elections in May - Sammy Cusick of the RNU and Dee Fennell, who is to stand as an Independent Republican.

 

Their speeches complained of discrimination and the main slogan was 'One family, one house'.  Cusick read his speech, poorly, and Fennell is clearly the more articulate of the two.  He attacked Sinn Fein and other politicians as well as myself, claiming discrimination in housing and leisure provision, and denouncing welfare reform.

 

This was simply part of the election campaign for the two republican candidates but must have been something of a disappointment.  They will certainly be hoping for more voters than there were marchers.

 

The truth is that there is no discrimination against Roman Catholics in housing in North Belfast - the number of Protestants on the waiting list is roughly the same as the number of Roman Catholics - but the myth of discrimination is so deeply embedded in the nationalist and republican narrative that it will take some time for the truth to prevail.

According to figures obtained from the Housing Executive the waiting list for the North Belfast constituency in September 2013 was 5304 with 2059 people self-designated as Protestants and 1986 designating as Roman Catholics.  There were also 28 people registered as mixed, 140 as no religion, 239 as other, 9 refused to answer and a further 917 were unknown.  So of those who designated as Protestant or Roman Catholic, 51% were Protestant and 49% were Roman Catholic.

This is very different from the nationalist and republican myth of a constituency where the waiting list is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and nationalist!  The number of Protestants waiting for houses is roughly the same as the number of Roman Catholics and the when it comes to considering the number in housing stress (over 30 points) the numbers are again roughly the same - 48% Protestant and 52% Roman Catholic.

So how did these nationalists and republicans manage to manufacture their myth about housing need?

The North Belfast constituency is served by four Housing Executive offices - Shankill, North Belfast, Newtownabbey 1 and Newtownabbey 2.  They simply took the figures for the North Belfast office, which includes large nationalist areas such as Ardoyne, New Lodge and Ligoniel, and presented them as being for the whole North Belfast constituency.  They ignored other areas such as Woodvale, Mid-Shankill, Rathcoole, Rushpark and Queen's Park, where the need is overwhelmingly Protestant.  They manufactured their figures by ignoring many Protestant communities and then peddled their myth about housing need.

Well at last the truth has been established and the myth has been exposed.

 

 

The Communist Party of Ireland, the ANC and the IRA

The following is copied from the Belfast Telegraph today (7 December 2013).  It relates to contact between the Communist Party of Ireland, the Provisional IRA and the MK [Amkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation], the military wing of the African National Council in South Africa.

Some details of IRA aid to MK, ANC's military wing were revealed by Kader Asmal, a South African minister, in a biography published in 2011.

While living in exile in Dublin, Mr Asmal was a member of the ANC, but opposed IRA violence and had no links to Sinn Fein.

So, when the ANC asked him to secure military training from the IRA, he turned for help to Mick O'Riordan, leader of the Communist Party of Ireland.

He wrote that after Mr O'Riordan contacted Gerry Adams, IRA explosives experts gave MK militants a fortnight's training at camps in Angola.

IRA members later carried out reconnaissance on south Africa's Sasolburg oil refinery in preparation for an MK attack.

This raises a number of points:

(1) The Communist Party of Northern Ireland and then the Communist Party of Ireland kept a low profile in the years leading up to the Troubles and indeed throughout the Troubles.  They played a significant role in the early years, particularly in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, but generally stayed under the radar.  Nevertheless any study of the civil rights movement and the early years of the Troubles must take account of the CPI, including those members who transferred to the Official IRA.

(2) This revelation by Kader Asmal, who also played a role in the civil rights movement, is another very tiny piece in the jigsaw of the Troubles and probably that is how the jigsaw will develop.  As the years go by one little piece after another will emerge.  However many of the pieces will never emerge and will be taken to the grave as more and more of the protagonists die.

(3) Gerry Adams was able to supply IRA explosives experts to the ANC.

(4) While he was in Ireland, Kader Asmal was a member of the ANC and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement.  He was not a member of Sinn Fein but he was one of the people involved in the formation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, along with members of Sinn Fein and the CPI.

Murder bid outside Holy Cross

On Thursday night dissident republican gunmen fired at three PSNI vehicles driving up the Crumlin Road.  They used automatic weapons and the vehicles were hit by a number of rounds.  This was the attempted murder of police officers but thankfully none of them was wounded or killed.

 

It seems that the gunmen fired from within Ardoyne and were hidden behind a wall at Herbert Street, opposite the grounds of the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church.

 

There is a certain irony about this terrorist attack.

 

Republicans, including dissident republicans, complain about traditional Orange tunes being played when loyal order parades pass Roman Catholic churches.  Yet dissident republican gunmen have no problem attempting to murder police officers outside a Roman Catholic church!  Obviously they regard a tune played by a band as a greater offence than attempted murder. 

 

And Sinn Fein are in no position to moralise on this matter.  During the course of their terrorist campaign the Provisional IRA murdered several people, including Mary Travers, as they were entering or leaving Roman Catholic churches.

 

The next time that republicans complain about parades passing Roman Catholic churches I am sure someone will remind them that there is a history of republican gunmen attempting to murder people outside Roman Catholic churches.  Surely murder is a more serious matter than music?

Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) and Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist)

Sometimes when I read a news story my mind goes off at a tangent and that is what happened yesterday.

 

It started with the report of the elderly couple in London who were alleged to have held three women as slaves for around thirty years.  They were named as Aravindan Balakrishnan (76) and his wife Chanda (67).

 

During the day it emerged that back in the 1970s they had been part of a small Maoist cult, the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedung Thought, which they led and which was formed in 1974 when they were expelled from the larger Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), another Maoist organisation.  Balakrishnan had been a member of the central committee of the CPE (ML).

 

This was a time when there was a proliferation of extreme left groups, some of them mainstream Marxist, some of them Stalinist, some of them Trotskyite and a few of them Maoist.

 

The CPE (ML) had a sister organisation, the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist), and they worked together very closely.  For example, on 12 May 1973 the CPE (ML) and the CPI (ML) organised a rally in London.  One of the speakers was David Vipond, an official representative of the CPI (ML) and a report of the rally states that 'after each speech the participants rose to shout enthusiastically “Hail the tenth anniversary of the founding of The Internationalists' and 'Long live the revolutionary spirit of youth and students.' 

 

Organised Maoism was introduced into Ireland on 9 December 1965 by Hardial Bains, who was working at Trinity College Dublin.  He formed a group known as Internationalists in Ireland and in 1969 they renamed themselves the Irish Communist Movement (Marxist-Leninist).  The group was relaunched on 4 July 1970 as the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist).

 

Both Maoist organisations, the CPE (ML) and the CPI (ML) supported the terrorist campaign of the Provisional IRA and their slogan was 'British Imperialism Get Out of Ireland!'.  The CPI (ML) even formed the Spirit of Freedom Committee to work with Irish republicans.  Indeed many of the plethora of far-left groups supported the Provos.

 

On 10 October 1974 the CPI (ML) fielded three candidates in Northern Ireland in the UK General Election.  David Vipond (South Down) secured 152 votes, Alan Evans (Fermanagh-South Tyrone) got 185 votes and between them the three candidates gained a total of 540 votes.  David Vipond also stood in a by-election in Monaghan in November 1973, securing 157 first preference votes.

 

Other prominent members of the CPI (ML) included John Dowling, Arthur Allen and Carole Reakes

 

At that time the CPI (ML) published the periodical Red Patriot and for a period of time it devoted many pages to the works of Mao.  However in 1978 there was a split between China and Albania and at that point the CPI (ML) rejected Mao and upheld the writings of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha.  They also supported the Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.

 

In he early 1980s the CPI(ML) was a major force in student politics with Brendan Doris becoming president of the Union of Students in Ireland and Tommy Graham becoming president of the College of Technology (Bolton Street) Students Union.  Graham is now the editor of the journal History Ireland.  After a long period of passivity the CPI (ML) was disbanded in 2003.

The tragic story that has emerged in London will be reported in the media and over time more details of the case will become known but some time in the future I will post rather more about some of the far-left organisations which proliferated in Ireland, north and south of the border, in the 1960s and the early years of the Troubles, as well as their counterparts in Great Britain.