More alcohol incidents at the Odyssey



Box nightclub

Two of our local papers on Saturday (22 February) carried front page stories about the Odyssey in Belfast.

The Irish News led with the headline Night out at drink-promo club almost kills teenager.  Robert Kelly (19) was found unconscious with hypothermia in the car park at the Odyssey complex just after 2.00 am having been ejected from the Box nightclub where £1 shots and half-price wine were being sold.

Robert Kelly is a cousin of Joby Murphy who died after falling in to the Lagan on 26 January 2012.  He had been drinking heavily at another nightclub offering similarly cut-price drinks.

The Thursday night promotion in the Box nightclub is advertised as LOKO THURSDAYS and Robert Kelly was ejected from the nightclub around 1.00 am.  A spokesman for the Box said, 'We had 450 people there last night.  A couple of people were asked to leave for having consumed too much drink.'  An hour later Robert was found outside lying on the ground.  Robert's father John Kelly said, 'There's going to be another one.  The next boy won't be so lucky.' 

Odyssey

The Belfast Telegraph lead with the headline Terrified kids caught up in Odyssey fights.  Their report started - 'Families fled in terror as drink-fuelled fights broke out during a rowdy darts tournament hosted in the Odyssey Arena.

One person at the event said, 'It was all just drink-fuelled, everybody was quite drunk towards the end of the night.'  Another said, 'It was a bit of a rough and ready atmosphere and the amount of booze at it was unreal.  I saw one guy take on about seven bouncers.'

These incidents come just days after the night when around 100 young people at the Odyssey were heavily intoxicated with some requiring hospital treatment.

A responsible retailing code has been introduced and health minister Edwin Poots has commissioned research on the benefits of setting a minimum price for alcohol but clearly there is nothing responsible about serving alcohol to someone who is so drunk that he has to be ejected and is soon unconscious.

Republican Flute Bands and their Volunteers



Vol Sean McIlvenna RFB colour party with paramilitary uniforms.

Members of the Vol Sean McIlvenna RFB with 'replica' weapons

The Volunteer Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band glorifies IRA terrorism but it is not the only republican band to use the word VOLUNTEER in its name and thereby associate itself clearly and unequivocally with an illegal organisation, namely the IRA.

 



There is also the Volunteer Martin Doherty Republican Flute Band, based in Glasgow, which is part of Cairde na hEireann and thereby aligned with Sinn Fein, as indeed is the Volunteer Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band.  Martin Doherty was shot dead on 21 May 1994 by a UVF gang who were attempting to plant a bomb at a pub in Dublin.  The pub was being used that night for a fund-raising event for IRA prisoners.  Doherty had joined the IRA in 1981 and the following year was given a 7 year prison sentence for terrorism.  In August 1994 the IRA shot dead Martin Cahill, a member of the Dublin underworld, who was said to have helped the UVF carry out the attack.

 

Cairde na hEireann has produced a CD of republican flute bands with such interesting tunes as 'Say Hello to the Provos' by the Volunteer Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band and 'Armalite Mary D' by CRFB, presumably Coatbridge Republican Flute Band.  For those not familiar with 'Say Hello to the Provos', the words of the chorus are - Say hello to the Provos, say hello to the brave, Say hello to the Provos, and Ireland shall be saved.

The Volunteer Ed O'Brien Republican Flute Band from Wexford commemorates a member of the IRA who died 'on active service' on 18 February 1996.  He was killed after a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely on a London bus.  Two other passengers and the driver of the bus were also injured and when police searched O'Brien's home they found 15 kg of semtex.  The inquest into his death heard that O'Brien was probably responsible for planting a similar bomb in a London telephone box on 15 February but it was deactivated by the police.  These explosions came just days after the London docklands bombing (Canary Wharf bombing) on 9 February, in which 2 people were killed

The Volunteer Billy Reid Republican Flute Band was named after Billy Reid from the New Lodge area of North Belfast.  He was killed on 15 May 1971 during a gun-fight with soldiers.  According to local sources he was the IRA who shot Robert Curtis, the first soldier to be killed by the IRA in the Troubles.  The band was formed in Scotland 1978 but has now been renamed the Parkhead Republican Flute Band because of disagreement with Sinn Fein and mainstream Irish republicanism.  Apparently the family of Billy Reid still back mainstream republicanism.

 

The Volunteer Patricia Black Memorial Flute Band was formed in the Garngad area of Glasgow in 2010, with the approval of members of Patricia Black's family.  According to a report on the Newry Republican blog, it is 'politically aligned to Eirigi, the Irish republican socialist political party'. 

The report also contained this observation: 'At a time when republican flute bands seem to be dwindling, it's uplifting to see a new RFB on the road, it's also a welcome development for Eirigi who are growing from strength to strength.'

It has also been referred to as the Volunteers Patricia Black and Frankie Ryan Memorial Flute Band - Black and Ryan were Provisional IRA volunteers who were killed on 15 November 1991 when a bomb they were handling exploded prematurely.  The two terrorists were killed by their own bomb.

The practice of incorporating the word Volunteer in the name of republican flute bands seems to be restricted to Scotland and the Irish Republic but such bands do come across to Northern Ireland and should be subject to the same rules as other bands, that they should not carry or wear anything that associates them with proscribed or terrorist organisations.  This is an issue that the Parades Commission has ignored for far too long.

Volunteer Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band

The Volunteer Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band is named after a member of the Provisional IRA.  Just in case there is any doubt about it the band include the word 'volunteer' in their name.

So who was Sean McIlvenna (1951-1984)?  He was born in the Docks area of North Belfast and grew up in Fortwilliam Park before settling on the Antrim Road.  After marrying Pat Burns he moved across the border to Dundalk and the couple had seven children.

He was killed on 17 December 1984 during a gun battle with the RUC in county Armagh.  McIlvenna was part of an IRA unit that had undertaken a landmine attack on a UDR patrol vehicle, with the intention of murdering the soldiers in it.

Today he is commemorated by the Vol Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band and the Sean McIlvenna Celtic supporters Club in Dundalk. 

As regards the band you can get a flavour of their activities on two Facebook pages.  The band's own page is entitled VSM - RFB

There is also a page for the 'Vol Sean McIlvenna - Female Cumann'.  It says, 'We are the first all female cumann and part of the Vol Sean McIlvenna Republican Flute Band and are based in Glasgow.  We work within Cairde Ne hEireann and are currently looking for new girls to join our cumann in 2012.'  One of their announcements (15 May 2013) is that the band has produced a new badge to raise funds and they kindly provide a picture of the badge, incorporating two rifles of the kind often used by the Provisional IRA.

 

This is the advertisement for their band practices and it is interesting that they are able to secure the use of a Roman Catholic secondary school for their band practices.

You can also visit the website www.vsmrfb.org which provides a history of the band and a picture of another badge, which incorporates a depiction of a masked IRA terrorist.  The website notes that 'the band has also enjoyed a special relationship with the close knit community of Bawnmore in North Belfast.'

Every Easter, for a number of years, the band has visited North Belfast for a Saturday parade down the Whitewell Road, past two Protestant churches and past an Orange hall, on its way to the republican memorial in Bawnmore.

This is not a parade that is solely within a nationalist community but rather it is a parade which passes places of worship and an interface.  Moreover it is a parade with which Sinn Fein has a close association.

That brings us to two questions.

1. Will Sinn Fein or the organisers of the Whitewell parade, who are clearly aligned with Sinn Fein, book Volunteer Sean McIlvenna RFB again this year for their Easter Saturday parade?  The very name of the band links it to a member of the Provisional IRA.

2. How will the PSNI and the Parades Commission respond to the parade this year?  Will they place any restrictions on the band and in particular as regards those things that associate the band with IRA terrorism and glorify IRA terrorism?

Time will tell .......

As regards the republican memorial in Bawnmore this commemorates republican activists who died in the Troubles and especially three IRA men who died on 7 April 1972.  They were preparing a bomb in a garage in Bawnmore Grove when the bomb exploded prematurely and they were killed instantly.  The three IRA men were John (Jackie) McErlean, Samuel Hughes and Charles McCrystal and the memorial was built in 2004.

Irish - 'a bullet in the freedom struggle' (3)

Belfast Media Group

In a recent post I exposed the claims put forward by the columnist Squinter in the North Belfast News (8 February) about the origin of the notorious phrase that 'every word spoken in Irish is another bullet in the freedom struggle'.  Squinter claimed that it was invented by someone in Thiepval barracks, a reference to the British Army, presumably as some sort of black propaganda.

However I was able to point out that in fact one of the first examples of the phrase, if not the first, was in a Sinn Fein publication, produced back in 1982, more than thirty years ago, at the point where Sinn Fein took to using the Irish language as a weapon in its cultural war.  It was an official Sinn Fein publication, reporting the proceedings of a Sinn Fein seminar and with an introduction by a young Sinn Fein cultural officer, now Belfast lord mayor, Mairtin O'Muilleoir.

The Belfast Telegraph reprinted my post as a platform piece in the newspaper and it was amusing to see that not a single nationalist or republican came back to rebut what I had reported.  Of course they couldn't rebut it or refute it because it was simply the truth.  Instead they kept their heads down and hoped it would soon be forgotten.  However the information is now accessible on the internet, rather than buried in the Sinn Fein archive or the shelves of a reference library.

Squinter logo

I thought that the North Belfast News might have had the honesty to print a correction in the next issue on 15  February but no.  Squinter got two pages in the paper but there was no mention of the matter and no correction. Clearly Squinter prefers to stick to the traditional republican line of 'blame the Brits' and ignore the fact that it was Sinn Fein strategists and propagandists who concocted and disseminated that ugly phrase and the equally nasty strategy behind it.

I wondered if it was pressure of space that prevented Squinter owning up and perhaps there might be something the next issue of the North Belfast News.  However that issue appeared tonight and there is no correction, no retraction and no apology.

Of course, if Gerry Adams can't remember being in the IRA, then perhaps Sinn Fein have really forgotten that they launched a cultural war with the Irish language as their main weapon!

Sinn Fein and their Nazi collaborator



McElduff & McGuinness hold the print of McGarrity

I must confess that I am not a regular reader of the various Sinn Fein constituency websites and it was purely by accident that I came across a post on the West Tyrone Sinn Fein website from 17 September 2010.

The report concerns the Sinn Fein cumann (branch) for the Carrickmore and Creggan area of Tyrone and its efforts to raise awareness of an Irish republican named Joseph McGarrity, who was born in Carrickmore.

 

According to the report: 'The Frank Ward Sinn Fein cumann which serves the Carrickmore and Creggan area has decided to add the name of Joe McGarrity formally to its title in recognition of his historical contribution.'

 

Then secondly the branch produced 110 framed prints of McGarrity and these were on sale at £40 each.

 

Sinn Fein also organised a talk on McGarrity, which was given in Carrickmore by a local historian, Damien Woods.  He had already given a talk on McGarrity earlier in the year at the local St Colmcille's GAA Club.

 

The article recommended a book entitled The McGarrity Papers, by Sean Cronin, which 'tells much about the life of Joe McGarrity (born in 1874) and his central role in pursuing the cause of Irish republicanism in the United States of America'

 

The picture above shows Sinn Fein MLA Barry McElduff handing one of the prints over to Martin McGuiness and indeed McElduff seems to be at the heart of this initiative for the commemoration and indeed glorification of Joe McGarrity.

 

Joseph McGarrity collaborated with the Nazis

Yes McGarrity was a central figure in Irish republicanism for many years.  He was born in Carrickmore in 1874 and emigrated from Tyrone to America in 1892 at the age of 18.  McGarrity settled in Philadelphia and the following year he joined Clan na Gael, the American sister organisation to the Irish Republican Brotherhood.  Clan na Gael provided support to the IRB in pursuing violent action to advance the republican cause of Irish separatism and independence.

 

For example Clan na Gael devised the Fenian dynamite campaign (1881-1885) when republican bombers attacked targets in Great Britain - a strategy that the IRA and then the Provisional IRA and Official IRA were to take up in later years.  Clan na Gael provided the IRB with money, arms and ideas.

 

However by the time McGarrity arrived in Philadelphia in 1892 republicanism was in poor shape.  In America Clan na Gael was stagnant and back in Ireland the IRB was moribund.

 

McGarrity certainly breathed life into Clan na Gael and remained the leading figure in the organisation and an unrepentant physical force republican for the rest of his days. 

He helped to finance the 1916 Easter Rising and later he continued to supply arms and ammunition to Irish republicans during the Irish War of Independence.  McGarrity is also remembered especially for his role before and during the Second World War.  In 1939 McGarrity worked with IRA leader Sean Russell in implementing the S Plan, a terrorist bombing campaign in Great Britain.  For McGarrity, Britain's difficulty was always Ireland's opportunity.

 

Hermann Goring

McGarrity also collaborated directly with the Nazis and sought their support for the IRA.  Indeed he was the initial link between Irish republicanism and the Nazis.  He met Nazi agents in America and travelled to Berlin, where he met the senior Nazi Hermann Goring.

This led on to Plan Kathleen, a plan for a German invasion of Northern Ireland, which would be supported by the IRA.  The plan came to nothing because the Nazis recognised that the IRA was a small, weak and incompetent organisation.  Nevertheless the IRA chief of staff at that time, Sean Russell, was another collaborator and so the IRA in Ireland and Clan na Gael in America were both controlled by men who were happy to collaborate with the Nazis.

 

While Ulstermen and Irishmen, Protestant and Roman Catholic, were fighting the Nazi war machine on the battlefields of Europe, Joe McGarrity and Sean Russell were happy to work with the Nazis and seek their support.

 

The way in which Sinn Fein has celebrated Sean Russell has been the cause of much criticism, because of his cooperation with the Nazis, but so far the parallel glorification of McGarrity has gone under the radar. 

However the decision by Sinn Fein in Carrickmore to name their cumann after a Nazi collaborator is now on the radar. 
 

The report on the Sinn Fein website ended by stating that 'The Frank Ward/Joe McGarrity Sinn Fein cumann has also pledged to undertake a commemorative project in the near future based on the historical contribution of another famous Carrickmore Republican, Dr Patrick McCartan' but that is a subject for another day.

 

Leo Green resigns from post in Sinn Fein

Sinn Fein know how to put on a polished conference but behind that polished façade Sinn Fein is a party in disarray.

 

They don't know what to do about issues such as welfare reform and education reform and there is clearly a lot of bitterness and struggle within the ranks of the organisation.

 

Ken Reid has just tweeted that Leo Green is not at the conference because he has resigned from the party.

Green was a very senior republican who belonged to a thoroughly republican family. 

He was convicted for the murder of a police officer and according to the West Belfast Sinn Fein website:

Lurgan man Leo Green went without food for 53 days during the 1980 hunger strike.  He is currently working as part of Sinn Fein's Assembly support team at Stormont.  Leo was arrested in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment.  He spent over 17 years in prison.

Three of his brothers spent time in prison, two in the North and the other in the 26 counties.  One of them John Francis, was interned, escaped in 1973 and was later assassinated by loyalists working in collusion with the SAS in a farmhouse just across the border in Co Monaghan.

The escape of John Francis Green in 1973 was noteworthy in that he managed to escape by exchanging clothes with his brother Fr Gerard Green, a Roman Catholic priest, who had come to visit him.

But back to Leo Green himself.

Leo Green was at the very heart of the republican movement but has now resigned from the party.  Was his resignation due to a personal dispute or an issue of policy or is it part of a wider unrest in the ranks of republicanism?

 

Now that I think about it I haven't seen him in the corridors at Stormont for the past few weeks and indeed the more that I think about it he is not the only Sinn Fein advisor who has been noticeable by his absence.  So clearly all is not well in the world of Sinn Fein. 

 

Well done to Ken Reid for highlighting the departure of Leo Green.

Perhaps journalists will now question Sinn Fein and Leo Green himself about his departure and the reasons for it.  We could expect that Monday's newspapers will carry extensive coverage of the resignation of such a senior party member but full scrutiny and analysis but then that may be too much to expect.  You can well imagine the coverage there would be if a senior party member resigned from the DUP and indeed we have seen the coverage when significant figures have left other parties.  Even a minor difference within another party can merit a full page or more in a tabloid newspaper.  So how much coverage will the resignation of Leo Green receive?

Earlier this week Sinn Fein moved quickly to remove from their websites a number of articles about Sinn Fein Councillor Catherine Seeley - I wonder how long the interview with Leo Green, from which I quoted, will stay on their website.

 

 

Irish - 'a bullet in the freedom struggle' (2)

Squinter devoted his entire column in the North Belfast News (8 February) to the Irish language and some recent comments about the language.

In it he said:

The most common argument among those who oppose the learning of the Irish language is that it has been politicised by republicans.  And to back up that argument they threw about with gay abandon a line that vividly backs up their thesis: 'Every word of Irish spoken is another bullet fired in the struggle for Irish freedom.'  It's hard to imagine a turn of phrase more likely to send you average Prod into paroxysms of fear and anger.  But wait a minute.  Just who was it that said these dread words?  When were they said?  Where?  Why?  The truth is that nobody knows.  The line just seemed to appear from nowhere ... The line - colourful and inflammatory at the same time - has all the hallmarks of the Thiepval barracks Christmas press party , when blokes in green jumpers would feed sloshed journos with the most outrageous propaganda which would find its way unchecked on to the page and on to the airwaves and thus into the public discourse.

So Squinter claims that 'no one knows' who used 'these dread words' or when or why.  Then secondly Squinter suggests that the sentence was concocted by the British Army in Thiepval barracks - blame it on the Brits!

I find that disappointing because, although some Sinn Fein MLAs do read my blog, clearly Squinter didn't bother.  If he had read a post from Wednesday he would have the answers to his questions.  It was not invented by the British Army but was used at a Sinn Fein cultural seminar back in 1982 and then published later that year in a Sinn Fein booklet.

Once again Sinn Fein are trying to rewrite history.  In those days back in 1982, when the Provisional IRA were bombing and murdering in a wholesale campaign of terrorism, Sinn Fein found it perfectly acceptable to say that every word of Irish was like a round for an armalite rifle.  But now, when they are trying to become more mainstream they want to distance themselves from such 'colourful and inflammatory' rhetoric.  Unfortunately they put in in print back in 1982!  This was not some British Army invention but an example of the crude and inflammatory nature of Sinn Fein's cultural war, in which the Irish language was their primary weapon.  

Someone might suggest that the Andersonstown News has forgotten about the 1982 Sinn Fein booklet but that doesn't really stand up as an excuse since Mairtin O'Meuilleoir, who has had a long standing association with the Andersonstown News, wrote the forward to the booklet that contained the phrase.  Perhaps he or one of the Sinn Fein MLAs who read this blog will take the opportunity over the weekend to pass the word on to Squinter!  However I won't be holding my breath on that one.

Towards the end of his column Squinter also wrote:

In other words, and to use a fine Ulster-Scots phrase that surely George would approve of, it's all a lot of ballix.'

Well Squinter, it doesn't seem like Ulster-Scots to me so here is a genuine Ulster-Scots phrase for 'the numpty wha scrieves the airticle' - 'ye wudnae hae a gleed o wut, wud ye!'

So if anyone wants to see the full background to this inflammatory phrase and its roots in Sinn Fein, they have only to look back to my post from Wednesday.