Irish Tribesman

Adams recalls terror of plastic bullets

Stepping stone to unity

Adams keen on truth commission

Bloody legacy of internment and the Troubles still live on

Children failing to gain from Belfast's peace dividend

£1 million won't go far in weaning UDA off crime

Brother of Nelson says families face being vilified

The long goodbye

The wrong force in the wrong place for 38 years

Belfast’s forgotten Bloody Sunday

UDA cash now indefensible

March for Truth will highlight collusion

Getting in the way of a good story

Labour pact has made SF kosher in south

The flag wars are over but there are still plenty of flags flapping this summer. Well, flopping in the rain might be a better description. Ninety-nine per cent of them droop in what are known as loyalist areas – in other words, pockets of poverty controlled by UDA gangsters.

Yet, only two years ago a large proportion of the north's highways and byways were festooned with Irish tricolours, Palestinian flags and on the other side of the fence a vast array of UDA, UFF and UVF flags, the unionist version of the Ulster flag, Israeli flags and so on. Now only impoverished unionist districts are defaced with bedraggled remnants of flags.

What happened? For a start, Sinn Féin opted out of the whole nonsense after the IRA decommissioned and stood its members down.

It was a smart move because it instantly improved the appearance of republican districts and at the same time drew attention to the general chaotic struggle in loyalism between the UVF and UDA and within the UDA as each faction marked out its territory.

It also pointed up the question why the police allowed gangs of men, who were clearly members of those illegal organisations, to take over roads with ladders, hoists and even cherry-pickers to erect the flags of their illegal organisations.

No-one was fooled by the UVF's lying excuse that its flag was actually the flag of the 1913 UVF.

Eventually in 2005 both groups were persuaded to stop flying UFF, UDA and UVF flags and replace them with 'official' flags – namely, the Union flag, their version of the Ulster flag and strangely, the flag of Scotland.

So that's what you see now – or for the most part don't see because only people who live in districts like Rathcoole, the Kilcooley estate in Bangor, the Wakehurst estate in Ballymena and similar salubrious locations across the north have to endure the fly-blown tawdriness their local loyalist terror gangs inflict on them.

Add in too a few feet of dirty bunting dragging across a wall with a wondrously creative mural of masked loyalist killers breaking in the doors of Catholic families and you have a typical loyalist enclave.

There are exceptions like Bushmills where, instead of having the flags confined to the more rundown areas, the entire miserable, cheerless town is transformed into your typical loyalist enclave with flags and emblems everywhere and placards of alleged unionist luminaries screwed to lampposts. What an uplifting sight for the tour buses coming in to visit the distillery – a glimpse of the full flower of genuine loyalist culture. You can only wonder what the guides say to explain the whole tasteless display.

Presumably the smart guides take the buses into the distillery at the edge of town and leave the same way without letting any visitors gawp at the mess the natives have made of their own town.

Yet a place like Bushmills is a perfect illustration of the fate of unionism.

What should be an outstanding tourist site, a cash cow for the district, is instead an embarrassment because of lack of local leadership, political cowardice and bloodymindedness.

It's more than that, of course.

The whole flag culture in unionism signifies a lack of confidence, a crisis of identity, an absence of vision for the future.

Once the ability to hang flags outside Catholic schools and churches with impunity used to demonstrate the dominance of unionism and its control over the levers of policing and justice. Now the flying of flags confined to loyalist districts is a sign of weakness, the retreat of unionism into itself.

To reinforce this point there is a direct correlation of flag-flying and poverty.

Where the flags and emblems and murals are at their most dense is on loyalist housing estates

where unemployment and hopelessness is highest and mainstream unionist politicians have walked away, leaving people to the paramilitaries and their drug dealing.

If they vote at all they vote DUP, a party that ignores the drug problem. Drugs? What drugs?

The flag-waving in those places is reminiscent of Stevie Smith's poem Not Waving But Drowning:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Ireland in danger of being cut off due to its reliance on Britain

2007-07-31T09:26:00.000-04:00

John Kennedy:

A major failure or a catastrophic event in the UK could have dire implications for Ireland and its growing community of e-commerce and other knowledge industries, an expert said yesterday.

Ireland has been warned that it must expand its international data connectivity and be less reliant on the UK in order to ensure security of supply for the next generation of knowledge-intensive industries.

Strategically independent, diverse international telecommunications connectivity is extremely important to the social and economic fabric of society, PA Consulting said yesterday. Without international connectivity a nation is unable to effectively partake in international commerce or the global society.

“The impact that electronic communications is having on the nation’s economy and society is immense,” said Kevin Gleeson of PA Consulting. “It has enabled Ireland to position itself as an efficient and effective cog in the global financial and technological services sectors among others.

“One of the most important enabling factors to this developmental era is the provision of high-speed, high-bandwidth telecommunications connectivity to the island.”

However, Gleeson warned that the vast majority of Ireland’s e-commerce, mobile and fixed-line communications traverse the submarine telecoms systems that connect the country with the UK.

“All save one of Ireland’s international submarine cables connect to the UK,” added Gleeson. “We need to be able to confirm security of supply of these communications to inward investors and indeed the indigenous business community. We also need diversity of supply to guard against unforeseen events which can cause outages.”

Gleeson pointed to events such as undersea geological disturbances, accidents at sea involving commercial shipping or submarines and the risk of terrorism as compelling reasons for putting in place alternative connections to countries other than the UK.

He said developing alternative paths and reducing our dependence on the UK for international communications would reduce the risk for the Irish economy in the event of major failure or catastrophic events in the UK.

He recommended Ireland construct a direct link to mainland Europe by 2010.

“This would reduce our dependence on the UK as well as reducing our dependence on the North American links to act as a backup, and strategically position the island as a close, off-shore option to mainland Europe,” Gleeson said.

He added that such a move would also ensure that replacement international connectivity is in place before the existing cabling’s natural life cycle has ended.

Let's hope that Ireland's government and business leaders take Mr. Gleeson's advice.

UDA’s Belfast brick scam

2007-07-31T08:58:00.000-04:00

Alana Fearon:

Despite a generous government grant of £1.2 million as an incentive to turn its back on extortion and criminality, the North Belfast News has learned that the UDA is cashing in on yet another scam – this time in the Tiger’s Bay area.

In March of this year it was announced that the government would provide £400,000 a year as part of a conflict transformation initiative to the UDA-linked Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG).

The project, which will run for a period of three years in six loyalist communities, is providing funding in a bid to move the UDA away from violence and crime.

But violence last weekend in Carrickfergus between feuding factions of the UDA, during which a policeman was shot in the back, coupled with the alleged extortion in Tiger’s Bay, could mean funding will be withdrawn.

We can reveal that the UDA is taxing budding entrepreneurs who have been cashing in on a Housing Executive (HE) regeneration scheme in the Mountcollyer area.

The latest UDA scam, which has been ongoing since the demolition of derelict houses began almost four years ago, involves extorting money from small businessmen who have beencollecting Belfast’s famous red bricks and selling them on to builders.

The Housing Executive has already cleared a significant number of houses in the area to make way for 35 new social houses provided by Clanmil Housing Association.

The remaining houses are due to be demolished as quickly as possible but the HE says ‘brick bandits’ are delaying the process and say they want the PSNI to take action.

Brick bandits have operated in other areas such as the Shore Road, Glenbryn and the Shankill.

A pallet of 500 bricks in the Mountcollyer area can fetch up to £110, but it is believed the UDA are cashing in on the scam by taxing the brick gatherers as much as £20 a pallet – and residents in the area have had enough.

A local source said: “This is just another UDA racket and residents down here aren’t happy about it.

“We are talking about young lads of 17 out trying to make a few pounds and they are being charged for their hard work. Imagine men coming round to your house after a hard working week and demanding some of your earnings.

“It wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else and it shouldn’t be tolerated here.

“Residents around here can’t say anything because they’d get their windows put in so everyone is keeping quiet.”

Funding for the conflict transformation initiative is being administered by Farset Community Enterprises and is being closely monitored by the Department for Social Development (DSD).

A spokesman for the DSD said: “The objective of the funding is to help reduce criminality and violence and free loyalist communities from the influence of paramilitaries.

“The department has made it clear that continued funding is dependent on a demonstrable reduction in crime and paramilitary activity and is working closely with the PSNI and the IMC on monitoring UDA activity.”

A brutal truth

British Army website discusses ways to kill Adams and McGuinness

'Why are we funding violent UDA?'

UDA feud proves loyalism has a long way to go

Funding linked to UDA 'must stop'

An economic forecast from Davy Stockbrokers predicts the Irish economy will grow by 4% in 2007 and 3% in 2008

2007-07-26T08:33:00.000-04:00

Ireland Digital:

While it says that 35,000 jobs will be lost in the construction sector over the next 18 months, according to an economic forecast by Davy Stockbrokers, the report predicts the losses will be offset by 15,000 new jobs in building of infrastructure and commerical property developments.

It also predicts general economic growth will remain strong.

Irish shares are currently underperforming European stock markets for the first time in years.

While London is up 8 percent this year, the Dublin market is down 5 percent.
Davy Stockbrokers says the main concern is the housing slowdown and it says construction output will fall by 25 percent.

This represents one of the lowest economic forecasts published recently.

While Ireland's economic growth remains substantially higher than Britain and other countries using the euro, Davy says growth in jobs will be 20,000 next year, down from 80,000 in recent years.

Irish Economy: Davy says economic growth will fall to 3% in 2008; unemployment will rise to 6% but performance will still rank among best in Eurozone

Hurling in America Has a Problem -- Too Few Irishmen

Economic growth to slow down, says Central Bank

NIO kid-glove treatment of UDA loyalist terrorists disgraceful

2007-07-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

It's time for the UDA to go away

Army review unsurprising

SF Seanad win will 'rebuild' party

Good UDA/ Bad UDA

"Those within loyalism who refuse to move away from criminality have absolutely nothing to offer their own community or anyone else. I would urge anyone with information on this deplorable incident to contact the police."

That's the sum total of the response from the British administration here to the events in Carrickfergus last Saturday night.

Now, do you not think that was to say the least a trifle muted considering a policeman had been shot in the back, 150 thugs had taken over a street in the town, converged on a particular house, then confronted a large number of police in riot gear?

Elsewhere, police stopped a carload of heavies carrying the accoutrements for doing a serious degree of grievous bodily harm.

Suppose that series of events had happened in Wythenshawe and Sale East, the English constituency of the man who is amusingly referred to on no constitutional grounds whatever, as 'security minister'?

Do you think the home secretary might have said something?

You might think that the events in Carrickfergus were serious enough for an appearance by our new proconsul but then he was jet-lagged from swanning around New York.

Maybe the 'security minister' was absent too in England and it was one of the thousands of NIO press officers who concocted the shamelessly inadequate boilerplate statement reeking of emptiness and cynicism. All the minister had to do was OK it. Look, no hands.

Whoever advised our 'security minister' that the off-hand sigh of official boredom he exhaled on Saturday night was all he needed to do betrayed absolutely accurately the NIO attitude to loyalism in general but to the UDA in particular.

The UDA is the NIO's favourite terrorist gang – not declared illegal until the dying days of the Troubles in 1992 after they'd killed about 370 people. It's now an accepted fact that the British administration developed and sustained the UDA as a classic counter-gang acting as the state's proxy killers so they couldn't crack down on them.

If they had done, they would have had to create another murder gang and it is always a case of the devil you know.

Still, you would think the relevant minister should by now at least have sounded as if he could take the murderous activities of the UDA seriously.

The snag is that the UDA got used to being treated with kid gloves and takes great offence at attempts to push it off the stage.

So, instead of trying to round its members up the NIO continues to treat them with kid gloves.

In one of the most scandalous uses of public money in the north, and that's saying something, successive proconsuls have been advised to try to bribe the UDA out of racketeering and extortion.

It's tantamount to saying, look lads, you don't have to batten on the local shops and building industry, we'll just give you the same amount of money out of public funds, but just stop shooting and thumping people.

As a result, we have the ludicrous attempt to manufacture a 'good' UDA with a front called the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG), which does no research and is a political joke.

But the deal is they have to wear suits and condemn violence to get the money.

Listen to this hogwash about Saturday night from their spokesman: "The UPRG would, on behalf of all people in our community, totally condemn the criminal acts last night by a minority of people who carried out intimidation against people in the Larne and Carrickfergus areas and shot a policeman in the back."

Sounds great, doesn't it?

Except the risible UPRG can't speak on behalf of anyone except the UDA and they don't mention it was their 'good' UDA who descended on Carrickfergus to defend their newly appointed 'brigadier' agin the bad UDA who were trying to oust him – and note the 'would' in the statement.

In fact the UPRG nonsense dovetails precisely with the 'security minister's' garbage.

In his statement he implies that if the UDA 'move away from', not give up, criminality, they have something to offer their community.

Disgraceful – the UDA should get rid of its weapons and disband but then the 'security minister' can't say, "we don't need you any more".

UDA loyalist feuding in the north of Ireland

2007-07-24T08:37:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

Five people are now under arrest in connection with violence in a County Antrim town at the weekend.

One man is being questioned about the attempted murder of a policeman on the Castlemara Estate in Carrickfergus.

The officer was shot in the back during disturbances between gangs of rival loyalists on Saturday night.

One man was arrested on suspicion of possessing an offensive weapon and three others arrested under terrorist legislation.

The officer's injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. A civilian was also stabbed and is in hospital.

Weapons, including CS spray, a crossbow and baseball bats, were found in the Castlemara estate. The trouble is being linked to UDA feuding.

Officers were called after reports that a large crowd had gathered in Castlemara Drive at about 2230 BST.

The three men were arrested after police stopped a car.

Security Minister Paul Goggins said those within loyalism who refused to cease criminal activity had "nothing to offer their own community or anyone else".

Superintendent Mark Gilmore condemned the attack.

"We are very serious about how we are going to respond operationally to this and we will be taking full measures to reassure the community and bring anyone to justice who feels that they want to further break the law," he said.

'Nothing to learn' from Paras role in killings

Policeman shot in Northern Ireland

PSNI have still much to prove

Residents ‘intimidated’ by marchers

Council funded bonfire slammed after UVF address

American honour for Joe Cahill

A report on the economy from consulting group PwC forecasts Irish GDP growth of 5.2% this year, easing to 4% in 2008

2007-07-17T08:39:00.000-04:00

RTE Business:

It says Ireland is likely to top the euro zone growth league this year, before dropping to third next year.

The report says the strength of the euro zone economy should help boost exports growth this year, though this will be partly offset by the impact of a strong euro and the high rate of inflation in Ireland.

PwC says consumers are likely to remain cautious in the months ahead because of higher interest rates and the housing slowdown. It adds that the construction sector should remain 'reasonably strong' due to increases in spending on infrastructure.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report says Ireland to remain on strong growth path over the next 18 months at least

Drugs and bonfires in the north of Ireland

2007-07-17T08:30:00.000-04:00

New Northern politics rubbish unionist myths

Army 'not taking into account loss of human life on Bloody Sunday'

Council funded bonfire slammed after UVF address

Davy was looking forward to the Twelfth celebrations on the Shankill last week, especially the eleventh night bonfire. Davy is not an Orangeman, but ‘‘I suppose I’d be a loyalist supporter,” he said.

It wasn’t politics that had him excited last week, however - it was the opportunity to make some easy money.

‘‘This is one of the biggest nights of the year for me. In fact, after New Year’s Eve, it’s probably the biggest. I’ll be busy all night; it’ll pay for me and the missus to go to Ayia Napa in August,” he said.

Davy sells drugs, mainly ecstasy and speed, and he had a ready market among the hundreds of young - and not so young - who gathered at the huge bonfire on the Shankill Road. He didn’t have to worry about the police. They keep their distance. And the paramilitaries wouldn’t interfere either; they ‘‘tax’’ him on what he sells.

For many Protestants in the North, especially in working class areas, that is how the Twelfth celebrations begin. The biggest cheer of the night is normally reserved for the UVF and UDA, groups involved in wholesale drug dealing and crime.

When the huge fires are lit often burning tyres and other toxic materials - tricolours are burned. Slogans such as KAT (Kill All Taigs) are often daubed on the tricolours. In 2005, one bonfire trumpeted the suicides of several young men in the nationalist Ardoyne estate.

This year, GAA shirts were put on top of the bonfires too. Chris McGimpsey, a Shankill Road Ulster Unionist councillor who is regarded as a moderate, said last week that the GAA should look at why Protestants see it as sectarian.

With the power-sharing deal in place in the North, many people are now asking what the future of the Twelfth should be, and are looking to the 50,000-strong Orange Order to take the lead. The question is whether an inherently sectarian and triumphalist celebration which for decades has been the most vivid display of unionist dominance over Catholics - can be re-moulded in a post-Troubles, power-sharing North?

In simple financial terms, the Twelfth has been a disaster for the North since the mid1990s. Disputes around the marching season almost singlehandedly crippled the region’s tourist industry, which was expected to take off after the ceasefires.

Instead, the fortnight around July 12 became the time of the year when local hoteliers took their holidays. Much of the heat has now gone out of the marching season, and the mass protests appear to be a thing of the past, but shops, bars and restaurants still close on the Twelfth.

The Orange Order is trying to promote the Twelfth as Orange Fest, a tourist attraction for the North.

But it is questionable whether this can ever succeed, especially when no alternative ways of celebrating the occasion have emerged, aside from a firework display.

More fundamentally, the Twelfth marches have a deep sectarian symbolism and, unless Orangeism’s relationship with the state changes, the parades will always have the potential for violence and menace.

David Scott, the education officer of the Orange Order, is responsible for finding ways to promote the ‘new face’ of the organisation.

‘‘There is a lot of good work going on with the Orange Order and the community which people don’t see,” he said. ‘‘We are going out to schools and interacting with young people. We have the Williamite display on, which is attracting a lot of interest from tourists.”

However, Scott’s definition of ‘the community’ does not include Catholics, and he said the ban on Catholics joining the Orange Order would not be removed. The group has about 50,000 members, the vast majority of whom are male.

While the Orange Order enjoyed a surge in applications for membership during the stand-offs over marches at Drumcree, anecdotal evidence suggests that its membership has slipped in recent times. The group last week found itself criticised over the practice of building up huge, environmentallyunfriendly bonfires in urban areas.

Thousands of car tyres were burned last week, along with other hazardous materials, leading to calls - even from some unionists - to stop the practice.

In a pointer to how things may go in the future, the village of Stoneyford, a few miles outside Belfast, had a beacon instead of a bonfire.

The key mover in that plan was, somewhat surprisingly, Mark Harbinson, an ‘ultraloyalist’ who in recent years, led loyalist bands around a newly-built, mixed-religion housing development in the village.

‘‘I’ve been pushing this for two years,” he said. ‘‘There has been opposition to it, but people have started to see the benefits of having a type of bonfire which is clean and doesn’t leave the town with a big mess to clean up after. It also makes it more accessible for families.”

That theme of families was picked up on by Dawson Bailie, the leader of the Orange Order in Belfast.

‘‘We want to get back to what the Twelfth was before the Troubles, when families would come along and Catholics would as well,” he said.

Ironically, if unionists do want to change the Twelfth, they may find themselves following the example of republicans who, almost 20 years ago, ended the practice of burning bonfires to commemorate the introduction of internment on August 9.

Throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s, republican bonfires became flashpoints for rioting, and Catholic communities were left with dirt and rubble from the fires.

In 1988, the west Belfast festival, Feile an Phobail, was introduced as a replacement.

Since then, it, and other such festivals in republican areas, have established themselves as part of the summer calendar in the North.

The festivals feature music, debates between unionists and nationalists, workshops on politics and literature, and debates about global events and Irish history.

A few years ago at the festival, Jeffrey Donaldson, the arch-unionist sceptic, talked directly to Seanna Walsh, the IRA man who announced the formal ending of the group’s campaign in 2005.

Guest speakers in the past have included the US documentary film-maker Michael Moore. Whether unionism and the Orange Order in particular - can envisage the Twelfth broadening out in such a fashion remains to be seen.

In the meantime, Davy reckons he has made about stg£700 for his night’s work, and the people of the Shankill are left with the charred remains of the bonfires.

Altogether, the night cost the taxpayers in the North stg£1 million in clean-up, medical, and police bills.

The socially-deprived communities of the area celebrate their ‘dominance’ over Catholics by spending the Twelfth marching onward with their leaders in the Orange Order.

Those leaders seem to be more comfortable dealing with the past than the realities of life in the North today.

Ireland's economy will grow by about 5% this year, before slowing down to 4% in 2008, according to the annual report by the country's central bank

2007-07-12T09:37:00.000-04:00

Agence France-Presse:

"This level of growth remains favorable by comparison with other economies with broadly similar levels of incomes," said bank chief John Hurley, reporting the growth rate in GDP terms.

Hurley said data for the early part of this year suggests that growth was probably in excess of these levels but more moderate consumer spending and a fall in house building would act to reduce growth later this year and next year.

According to official figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Ireland's economy grew by 5.7% last year in GDP terms and by 6.5% in gross national product (GNP) terms. Gross National Product is the more favored Irish growth measurement. It is regarded as a more accurate barometer of the country's economic performance since it strips out substantial profits repatriated by foreign investors.

Central Bank still sees 'soft landing'

Worst over on inflation - economist

Behavior of British troops is just like old times

2007-07-12T08:27:00.000-04:00

Row as banner honouring UVF killer carried at march

The Spanish philosopher Santayana said: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

It's that trap the three officers who wrote the British army's 2006 analysis of military operations in the north were trying to ensure the army would avoid in any future campaign.

Of course their take on the history of the past 40 years is self-serving and self-congratulatory. What else would you expect? Of course it's full of elementary errors, wrong dates and so on.

They're not so hot on contemporary British history either, when they talk about Blair's attempt in 2005 to extend the 28-day detention period to 60 days when it was in fact 90 days.

However, as it says in the foreword, "It is not intended as a history" of the Troubles.

They probably didn't care too much if they got certain details and events wrong.

What they were concerned about was strategy and tactics at the highest level and here the report is very instructive and candid.

One central point is repeated again and again, perhaps half a dozen times in different words. It's this: there was no-one in overall charge here.

The authors point out that the GOC here was not responsible to the secretary of state but to the chief of the general staff (CGS) who issued directives to the GOC.

Indeed the report itself is for the CGS who contributed a foreword. CGS was responsible to the secretary of state for defence.

As the report says, the "net result was incoherence".

There was a "lack of a single military authority for the campaign" here.

There was "no thread of purpose" in the campaign.

This absence led to "purposeless activity".

For example, troops often patrolled for the sake of patrolling.

There was a "lack of coherence" between the secretary of state and NIO and the security forces.

At the very top, in the Northern Ireland joint security committee where politicians and the various security forces met, for years there was no agenda circulated and no minutes kept.

Each branch just went about its own business.

In 1972-4 the secretary of state was releasing internees while the army was busily arresting men for internment: 60% of internees released in 1972-3 rejoined the IRA immediately. It was a merry-go-round.

A strong sense of frustration with politicians runs through the report. Apart from incoherence and no political direction, the complaint is that no British politician could see the big picture: social and economic or political.

In one telling example they say that instead of sending three battalions into Divis in the seventies the NIO should have sent in a bulldozer and replaced the flats with decent, respectable homes for people. That didn't happen until 1986.

Another candid admission and warning for future exercises is that the army can make any situation worse.

The report's authors accept the British army did exacerbate matters here by alienating the Catholic community in 1970 and 1971 in acting at the behest of the unionist regime in Stormont. Repeated house searches, heavy-handedness, then internment itself produced an insurgency which lasted until the mid-seventies.

Only then did IRA activity take on the shape of a long-term terrorist campaign.

The question asked is why, when so much had been learned and all the procedures were in place by 1980, did it take another 18 years for the Good Friday Agreement to emerge?

The answer, which the report does not provide, is that the Thatcher government wasted the eighties in the futile search for a military victory. It was not until she was gone that the new Conservative leadership in 1991 felt able to explore the contacts republicans had tried to open up after the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.

Have any lessons been learned?

In the foreword, the then CGS Sir Mike Jackson says the lessons have already been put into practice in the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere. Hard to believe when you see British troops beating and torturing Iraqis, kicking in doors and wrecking peoples' homes in what are euphemistically called house searches.

In Kosovo in 1999 those famous community relations workers, One Para, shot and killed three Albanians celebrating the arrival of NATO. Just like old times.

British army report says it did not defeat the Irish Republican Army

2007-07-10T08:45:00.000-04:00

Eoin Burke-Kennedy:

The 98-page analysis of Operation Banner , the army's code name for its activities in the North, describes the Provisional IRA as "professional, dedicated, highly skilled and resilient" and one of the most effective terrorist organisations in history.

While the loyalist paramilitaries presented themselves as the protectors of the Protestant community, it said, they were in practice often little more than a "collection of gangsters".

But the study, which covers the period between 1968 and 2005, makes no mention of alleged British army collusion with loyalist paramilitaries.

[snip]

The analysis cites Bloody Sunday, however, where 13 innocent civilians were shot dead in 1972, as an example of poor military decision-making. It concludes simply that the manner in which the arrest operation was conducted, using vehicles to approach the crowd was with hindsight "heavy-handed".

The report, which was commissioned by then chief of staff, General Sir Mike Jackson, also describes the introduction of internment in the early 1970s as a "major mistake" which had a major impact on popular opinion across Ireland, in Europe and the US.

Glaring omissions from analysis

Wrongly accused local man finally has his name cleared

DUP demands will weaken links with Britain

2007-07-06T08:32:00.000-04:00

Pattern of systemic inequality must be reversed

Catholics call on Brown to repeal Act of Settlement

Mother hopes for justice for shot son

Catholics attack Brown over discrimination law

In the early 1970s Gerry Fitt used to say the republican slogan 'Brits out' was tantamount to telling your partner to get out of the house but "leave your wallet on the mantle-piece".

In many respects that is exactly what the present executive is asking with their ridiculous demands for reduction in corporation tax and a goodie-bag as a reward for finally clinching a deal.

A demand for a reduction in tax is not in itself ridiculous of course but in the context of the UK as a whole it is, especially with Labour under threat in Scotland. Furthermore, a financial peace dividend is preposterous after more than a decade of peace.

The parties have allowed the NIO to waste any extra cash between 1998 and now. The message from our new proconsul is unmistakeable if not clear. Norn Irn has got a three-year financial settlement, he said, and Scotland would be delighted with that instead of having to wait for an annual budget.

So that's it then.

Paisley and Robinson's big election play turned out to be a by-ball. Naturally Sinn Féin are only delighted to go along with it all because anything which would bring the north's tax system closer to the Republic's and different from Britain's is a plus in their eyes, even though for most of their election campaign in the Republic SF were arguing for a rise in corporation tax. Confused? So were the Republic's voters.

That's by the by. The point is that the DUP and Sinn Féin are having such a great time agreeing with each other because they both share the same attitude but have different aims. Neither of them likes the Brits. Take for example the hostile response of both Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness to our previous proconsul's doomed 'consultation panel' about victims of the Troubles. Harrumph, said Paisley.

I hope the NIO's going to pay for it, for we're not.

He regarded the panel as an impertinence, an interference in the assembly's affairs. The DUP and SF are busily negotiating about a new Victims Commissioner.

Nobody else's business.

Martin McGuinness was also annoyed but for different reasons. He too objected to the NIO's presumption and arrogance but was furious that the panel was announced as a transparent attempt to absolve the British state of any complicity in the violence here.

You'll also notice there was a pretty restrained welcome for the new proconsul from the two main parties at Stormont. The main actors were in Washington and at the Somme when he was appointed but they see themselves in the driving seat and any blow-in from England as a fifth wheel on their car.

It's going to take our local media some time to adjust to this change where Westminster is secondary, local MPs are the second 15 and any questions they ask will be referred to Stormont ministers. Northern Ireland Question Time first will become redundant, then will be abolished.

Again, both the DUP and SF will be delighted but for different reasons.

Some unionists have become a bit queasy about all this and have warned Paisley about the dangers of 'Ulster nationalism' and using the same contemptuous tone for British ministers as Sinn Féin does. They worry that the DUP approach of emphasising the differences between the north and Britain encourages the separation of the north from the UK. Needless to say, that's exactly why Sinn Féin ministers agree with every word the DUP says.

The plain fact is that the DUP is an 'Ulster nationalist' party which has always wanted maximum devolution – Paisley even flirted with independence.

Now Paisley sees himself as the equivalent of the taoiseach. That's why he loves wandering around the Boyne with Bertie and being treated as a head of state at Farmleigh House. Fundamentally Paisley's brand of unionism never trusted the British not to do some dirty deal with Dublin.

He believes that can't happen now that he controls the fate of unionists.

Enoch Powell was right – the more powers Stormont has, the weaker the link with Britain.

So, the more DUP demands are frustrated, the more they will seek common cause with SF against Westminster.

Where will it all end?

Ireland's GDP grew 7.5% in the first quarter compared with the same period of 2006, with gross national product up 6.4%

2007-07-03T08:49:00.000-04:00

Irish Times:

For 2006 the CSO said it had revised down earlier growth data, putting the annual rise in GDP at 5.7 per cent versus a preliminary estimate of 6 per cent. Final numbers for GNP put growth for last year at 6.5 per cent versus 7.4 previously.

The CSO found that consumer spending (personal consumption of goods and services) in was 5.4 per cent higher in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period last year.

Industry output increased by 14.4 per cent compared with the same period in 2006 and output of distribution, transport and communications was up 7.1 per cent.

Net exports (exports minus imports) were €278 million higher in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period of 2006.

Irish Economy Q1 2007: GDP rose at annual rate of 7.5%; GNP rose by 6.4%

Growth still strong in first quarter

Downturn predicted for economy

Netherlands is 3rd richest in EU

Accountants call for all-Ireland corporate tax

Finucane case decision went against advice of top lawyers

2007-07-03T08:32:00.000-04:00

We are still waiting for justice over the Finucane murder

18 years of investigation, three inquiries, not one prosecution

Finucane murder is the ‘mother of all cover-ups’

Finucanes Furious Over No Prosecution

Reflecting and deflecting

The decision by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) in the North last week not to prosecute anyone in connection with the Stevens Inquiry into state collusion with loyalists in the North goes against the advice of top lawyers in London.

The PPS said no security forc e members would be charged in connection with the murder of Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane, or any other victims examined by Sir John Stevens in his inquiry, which was passed on to the PPS in 2003.

The decision caused outrage among the victims’ families and human rights groups.

The small portion of the Stevens Inquiry which has been made public states that the investigation found evidence of collusion between the security forces and loyalist in a series of murders in the North, including Finucane’s, from the mid-1980s onwards.

It also emerged that RUC officers gave weapons back to loyalists which were later used to murder nationalists, including the 1992 Ormeau Road betting shop massacre, in which five Catholics were killed.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and British government have so far not revealed if any of the officers implicated in serious allegations of collusion with killers are still serving members of the force.

Some Northern human rights groups fear that at least two of the officers are serving in the PSNI. The Finucane family said they were ‘‘perplexed’’ at the PPS decision not to take prosecutions.

The Sunday Business Post understands that before Stevens passed the findings of his inquiry to the PPS in 2003 he sought legal advice from two top barristers in England. The barristers told him that of 40 cases examined in his inquiry, 25 were strong enough to bring a prosecution.

Based on that advice, Stevens handed the files to the PPS in the North. However the PPS, after having the files for more than four years, decided that nobody would be brought before the courts due to a ‘‘lack of evidence’’.

In 2003, the North’s PPS was heavily criticised by the European Court of Human Rights over its handling of the Finucane case.

In a damning report the court found that the PPS did not provide information in any of its decisions relating to Finucane which would ‘‘reassure the public that the rule of law had been respected’’.

John Finucane said his father’s murder can only be properly investigated through a public inquiry.

‘‘This PPS decision vindicates our family’s repeated calls to have my father’s murder investigated through a public inquiry,” he said.

‘‘That is the only forum for the investigation. We have already put in a request to meet Gordon Brown and that will be our central message.”

Victims of collusion also called for the British government to release the Stevens Inquiry in its entirety now that the PPS decision has been made public.

Ireland's population growth rate up till 2010 will be the highest in Europe, at 1.3%, according to United Nations projections

2007-06-28T08:53:00.000-04:00

Angela Long:

Figures just released by the UN Population Fund say our urban growth rate, at 1.8%, also outstrips all countries in northern and eastern Europe. In all of Europe, only Albania has a higher forecast, at 2.5%.

Most countries have growth expectations of around half a per cent, while Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania are expected to shrink by that amount.

The population of the world's cities is increasing by more than one million people every week, UNFPA says, and this presents a huge challenge to governments, especially health authorities.

By next year, more than half the global population, 3.3 billion people, will be city-dwellers.

The increasing 'urbanisation' could create a crisis if sensible measures are not taken now, the UNFPA warns in a comprehensive report, Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.

Sean Hand, who is Irish and head of human resources at the Population Fund headquarters in New York, said governments had to act now, by measures such as making basic serviced land available around urban centres.

"If we don’t plan now for that rate of growth, major difficulties will occur, even catastrophic consequences," Mr Hand told the launch of the report in Dublin.

"Urbanisation is inevitable, and the majority of people living in cities will be poor," he said. Even in countries where governments had made determined efforts to keep or relocate people in the countryside, such as India and China, the trend was too great to reverse.

The UNFP says mega-cities of more than 10 million people, such as Seoul or Sao Paolo, will continue to grow, but most people will be living in cities of 500,000 or fewer.

Of 31 countries across Europe, Ireland came 18th in health expenditure, as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in the report. Ireland spends 5.8% of its GDP, less than countries such as Serbia and Montenegro (7.2%). The UK spends 6.9%.

Life expectancy of Irish men now is 75.9 years, the report says, while for women it is 81.

Luxembourg : GDP first preliminary estimates for 2006

Taxation in EU: Rise in overall tax burden in the EU27 to 39.6% of GDP in 2005: Stamp duty and capital taxes have pushed Irish burden up since 2001

Pat Finucane's murder is part of the last conflict demon

2007-06-28T08:42:00.000-04:00

Michael Finucane:

The decision by the director of public prosecutions not to prosecute any army or Royal Ulster Constabulary officers over the role in the murder of my dad, Pat Finucane, is disappointing but not surprising. Perhaps the most curious thing about the decision is that it makes a perverse kind of sense. After all, why prosecute people for doing the job you asked them to do in the first place?

This is what is at stake in the issue of collusion, and prosecuting people would have opened a murky world the government wanted kept hidden. In fact, the word "collusion" has become the adjective of choice for what was, in reality, British government policy in Northern Ireland since the 1970s.

The official version was that state agents were infiltrating Loyalist paramilitary organisations in order to prevent what they were planning to do. There are problems with this explanation. Firstly, the activities continued despite the existence of agents, and many people were still being murdered. Secondly, this explanation conflicts with the internal reports of one of the main agencies responsible for running the agents.

State collusion with paramilitaries remains a festering sore in the way of rehabilitation from conflict-riven wasteland to modern, autonomously governed democracy. The responsibility here lies firmly with the government, which has never accepted that the state was a participant in the conflict.

This is the last conflict demon to be exorcised in Northern Ireland and if the society we hope to create is to have the best chance of overcoming the past then the truth must out. The answer is to expose and confront the facts. An independent public judicial inquiry, invested with all necessary powers and autonomy to do the job required, is the only vessel capable of bringing Northern Ireland across its last Rubicon.

Hibs want McGuinness to skip festival

Victims angry at remarks

RUC whistleblower calls for collusion prosecutions

Ahern unhappy over Finucane move

Families of five UDA victims to take civil actions against police

Smithsonian snubs Irish nationalists

2007-06-26T08:37:00.000-04:00

Cahir O’Doherty:

DEMOCRATIC Congress-man Eliot Engel of New York, the co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, has written a strongly worded letter to the organizers of the Smithsonian’s Northern Ireland Folklife Festival in Washington later this month, protesting what he calls the lack of equal community representation at the forthcoming Northern Ireland Folklife Festival, citing the inclusion of the Orange Order without equal participation from the Nationalist community.

In his letter the Congress-man said, “It is important to note that the Orange Order is known for its violently anti-Catholic sentiments and actions. I question whether inviting them as representatives from the Protestant community is an action that expresses neutrality and emphasizes resolution. Because the Folklife Festival takes place on the National Mall, there is potential for this strictly cultural event to unintentionally appear political.”

Nancy Groce, the Smithsonian’s curator of the Northern Ireland program at the Folklife Festival disagreed with Engel’s partisan assessment however, noting that it is a cultural program and not a political program, and that the Smithsonian’s organizers have already sent a reply to his letter.

“The congressman is voicing very real concerns, and it is a question of balance, but we don’t want to get into a situation of tit for tat,” Groce told the Irish Voice. “We don’t want label people Nationalist or Unionist, and we don’t want to say that the GAA participants are a balance for the participation of the Orange Order – because that’s not accurate. The truth is no politicians have been invited except to open the ceremony – and they are Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein.”

It understood that both the Sam Maguire and McCarthy Cup, the trophies for winning the All-Ireland football and hurling titles, will be displayed for the first time during the festival.

Said Groce, “The Sam Maguire Cup and the Liam McCarthy Cup are both national treasures. We will display them in a limited way during the Folk Festival, but they will be available for viewing at the Irish Embassy. The Northern Irish Bureau and the Irish Embassy have been closely involved in the planning of the event.”

The program is being produced in partnership with the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure of Northern Ireland and with the cooperation of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Councillor claims snub over USA festival invite

British colonial students are leaving the north of Ireland

2007-06-26T08:27:00.000-04:00

News Letter:

ALARM has been expressed at the low number of Protestant students choosing to attend higher education institutions in Northern Ireland.

Tom Elliott, Ulster Unionist Fermanagh and South Tyrone MLA, said he was shocked to discover just how many more Roman Catholics are staying in the Province to study - suggesting a Protestant brain drain.

As a result of an Assembly question on university students, he discovered that the number of Protestant full-time and part-time students in 2004/2005 was 12,761 compared to 17,207 Roman Catholic students.

And in the year 2005/2006, the number of Protestant students was 13,806 to 18,798 Roman Catholic students.

“These figures show 5,000 more Roman Catholic students each year are studying in Northern Ireland,” said Mr Elliott.

“They clearly illustrate that a large number of Protestant students are choosing to attend universities on the mainland rather than attend universities in Northern Ireland.

“This is an important issue as many of these students who travel to mainland universities do not return to work in the Province, hence the long established debate about the ‘Northern Ireland brain drain’.”

Good riddance to the British colonial scum!

Unemployment among Catholics is twice that of Protestants in the north of Ireland

2007-06-22T08:18:00.000-04:00

James Stinson:

The gap has narrowed since 1990 but in employment as in many other areas, Catholics are still worse off than Protestants, according to official figures.

They are contained in the latest edition of the government's 'Labour Force Survey Religion Report'. The survey was carried out in 2005 but the figures have just been released.

It shows that in 2005 Catholics accounted for around six out of 10 unemployed people in Northern Ireland with 19,000 Catholics

unemployed compared to 12,000 Protestants – despite Protestants making up the majority of the population.

While there is an obvious disparity in the fortunes of the two communities and their success in finding work, the same report does highlight an improving situation over the last decade and a half.

Unemployment rates have decreased significantly in both communities with the fall greatest among Catholics.

The gap between the respective unemployment rates has fallen from 9% in 1992 to 4% in 2005.

Still, ironing out the inequalities between the two communities will not happen overnight. In almost every area covered in the report – from housing to employment – it paints an unbalanced picture for the minority community.

Protestants are more likely to have a job and own their own house whereas lone parent families are more common among Catholics. Catholics are also more likely to be on disability or sickness benefits.

Both communities fare badly in this respect, with one in five adults in Northern Ireland claiming to have a disability.

Catholics make up a greater proportion of the population than they did in 1990. Among the young they are now the majority.

The Protestant population is older, accounting for more than six in 10 people aged 60 or over.

At the other end of the age scale, Catholics account for 47% of people aged between 16 and 24 – up from 44% in 1990. That compares to 46% Protestants – down from 49% in 1990.

Another area where Catholics are in the majority is in education where a far higher proportion (9%) are full-time students compared to Protestants (5%).

Protestants account for 53% of the aged-16-plus population (down from 56% in 1990), while Catholics account for 40% (up from 38%), with 7% other.

Labour Force Survey Religion Report

Major's dealings with Ireland a total failure

British urged to honour Irish vow

Young men face soaring suicide rate as Ulster leaves the Troubles behind

Wage inequality rises in 18 of 20 OECD countries - Ireland and Spain are only exceptions

2007-06-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

Finfacts:

Rather than seeing globalisation as a threat, OECD governments should focus on improving labour regulations and social protection systems to help people adapt to changing job markets.

That is the message from the 2007 edition of the OECD’s annual Employment Outlook. It reviews the possibility that offshoring may have reduced the bargaining power of workers, especially low-skilled ones. Whether real or threatened, the prospect of offshoring may be increasing the vulnerability of jobs and wages in developed countries.

Wage inequality is also rising. In 18 of the 20 OECD countries where data exist, the gap between top earners and those at the bottom has risen since the early 1990s. Ireland and Spain are the only exceptions to this trend (see graph attached).

The OECD report makes a number of recommendations on policies governments should put in place to create more and better jobs.

In countries where social security contributions are high, such as Belgium, France and Sweden, the OECD suggests moving to broader sources of financing public social protection. Social contributions are largely based on wages and act as a tax on labour, limiting job creation. Given the falling share of wages in national income, it is key to reduce the role of social contributions and increase that of broader tax bases, such as income taxes and/or VAT, to fund social protection.

Globalisation requires mobility to ensure that workers are not trapped in jobs with no future. The report praises the so-called "flexicurity" approach adopted in Austria and Denmark to address this. In Austria, for example, workers have individual savings accounts, instead of traditional severance pay schemes, that move with them as they move jobs. If they lose their job, they can choose to withdraw funds from the account or save the entitlements built up towards a future pension.

Job losers should be compensated through social protection systems which are employment-friendly, the report notes. This can be done by providing adequate benefits hand-in-hand with "activation" policies which increase re-employment opportunities. Experience of Nordic countries and Australia shows that such policies, if well-designed, improve the job prospects of laid-off workers, thereby easing their fears about globalisation.

Monthly Minimum Wage Earnings in EU 27 - 2007: Varies from €92 to €1,570; Ireland ahead of France but 17% of French workforce at lowest level compared with 3% in Ireland

Ten years after the main paramilitary ceasefires the north of Ireland remains divided, a BBC survey into children's attitudes has indicated

2007-06-18T08:19:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

State of Minds: The Children is the largest survey of its kind.

It reveals the results of the survey which probes children's attitudes to their national identities, friends, political awareness and sports.

Professor Paul Connolly, from Queen's University, said that prejudices are still there.

"The key message emerging from our research is that many Catholic and Protestant children here still tend to live parallel and separate lives," he said.

"Our research raises fundamental questions for us as a society in terms of how we should deal with the segregation that exists."

Here is how indigenous Irish (i.e. Catholic) and British colonial (i.e. Protestant) children see themselves:

Among the findings of the study was that Catholic children were five times more likely to see themselves as Irish compared to Protestant children (51% compared to 10%).

Conversely, 58% of Protestant children saw themselves as British compared to 15% of Catholic children.

British Seek to Block Inquiries

A leading medical officer has found that genetic make-up puts Irish women at risk of cancer

2007-06-15T08:20:00.000-04:00

John Fallon:

Professor Michael Kerin, Director of the National Breast Cancer Research Institute (NBCRI), says that specific elements in the genetic profile of Irish women leave them predisposed to certain breast cancers.

Professor Michael Kerin said researchers at the Galway-based institute have been looking at the genetic profile of 1,000 Irish women with breast cancer. They have been comparing it with the genetic profile of a similar number of older Irish women who never had breast cancer. Both profiles are then compared to international studies, with a view to identifying specific areas that leave Irish women more predisposed to certain breast cancers.

Although the study is yet to be completed, early indications are that its findings will be significant.

"In our own assessment of the situation, we have found individual changes in the Irish population that are related to breast cancer," said Professor Kerin.

"What we've done is we've targeted individual areas that are likely to prove responsive and we have identified specific issues in the Irish population in relation to that which corroborate some other work that's being done internationally," he added.

Prof. Kerin said they were looking at specific areas of the genome - the complete DNA sequence of one set of chromosomes - when making comparisons.

He said the major issue now in terms of breast cancer treatment is to individualise therapies.

"We now know that there are very many different types of breast cancer. There are at least six different types based on the genetic profile and one of the key issues now is to target and individualise therapies for women based on the kind of breast cancer they have.

"In an effort to individualise treatment, what we are doing is we are growing some cells from individual people's breast cancer in the laboratory to address what individual therapies they respond to," he said.

Up to 2,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in Ireland each year. As yet, breast cancer cannot be prevented; its incidence can only be reduced by early detection. The cause and mechanism of action of breast cancer remain unknown.

The National Breast Cancer Research Institute which was launched in 1991, is a voluntary based charity located at the Clinical Science Institute, University College Hospital, Galway.

SURVEY OF CANCER GENES UNCOVERS VIKING ROOTS

Ireland: Real GDP growth will come in at between 5.0% and 5.5% in 2007

2007-06-15T08:08:00.000-04:00

Conor Keane:

THE Exchequer will be in surplus by around €500m as against a deficit target for the year as a whole of €546m (0.3% of GDP), according to Bloxham’s quarterly economic review.

Bloxham economist Alan McQuaid said that while much of the media focus has been on the property/construction sector, the major area of concern at the moment in is inflation.

“Headline inflation appears to be stuck around the 5.0% level, and indeed is now forecast to average that level for the year as a whole. The bottom line is that if inflation is let get out of control, it will have serious negativeconsequences for competitiveness.

“However, the problem is that we have no control over what happens to interest rates and/or oil prices, and as such we are very much at the mercy of the gods as regards developments on these fronts. Therefore, there is an onus on the next government to do everything in its power to contain the price rises in the public service, and that includes pay,” he said.

Mr McQuaid added that judging by the amount of negative media coverage in recent weeks one could be forgiven for thinking that the Irish economy is headed for a serious slowdown.

“We think that the majority of official statistics released in the year to date point to an economy that is still growing strongly in 2007, although GDP growth is unlikely to be as high as last year’s 6.0%.”

Mr McQuaid said that while the doom and gloom merchants have pointed to the fact that the export side of the economy looks increasingly vulnerable as a result of rising domestic costs and an appreciating euro, CSO figures paint a different picture.

“Official CSO data for the first three months of 2007 show the merchandise trade surplus running €300m higher in value terms than in the same period in 2006. On the output side, manufacturing production was 13.5% higher in January-April 2007 than in January-April 2006, again according to the latest CSO numbers.

“Meanwhile, on the personal spending front, retail sales in the first four months of 2007 were up 7.2% in volume terms on the same period in 2006 while new car sales in the January-May period were 7.0% higher than in the first five months of last year,” he said.

“Labour market trends also remain positive, with the opening quarter of 2007 posting an annual increase in employment of 76,800 or 3.8%. These numbers taken together hardly reflect an economy heading for a major downturn. At this stage, we see little reason to change our view that real GDP growth will come in at between 5.0% and 5.5% in 2007.”

A word to the wise

The DUP's double standards are nauseating

2007-06-15T07:55:00.000-04:00

Sinn Féin strategist slams leadership's performance

SF must learn from election result says Gerry Adams

Every few days some DUP MLA or MP, or someone who's both, comes on the airwaves to announce how the DUP is going to monitor Sinn Féin, or make sure Sinn Féin reaches democratic standards, or hold Sinn Féin to account or decide whether or not justice and policing powers can be devolved, and so on in that vein.

Strangely, they manage to get away with this superior attitude. Interviewers seem to accept that DUP members can speak with some authority on such matters.

For example, Jeffrey Donaldson appears to believe that his assembly committee will be critical in deciding whether summer 2008 is the right time to transfer justice powers to the assembly, or at least that's the pose he struck on BBC at the weekend. Yet the DUP leader has already committed the party to that date and it will happen and Jeffrey Donaldson knows it will.

Besides, how would anyone in the DUP, no matter how sanctimonious they may sound, know anything about policing and justice, let alone democratic standards?

The very thought would make a cat laugh.

The holier-than-thou-stance the DUP has adopted since becoming top dog in unionism has successfully airbrushed away its unsavoury past. In fact the DUP is a party oozing with hypocrisy.

This is a party which refused to talk to anyone in Sinn Féin but happily voted for members of the PUP in Belfast City Council while the UVF was engaged in a campaign of sectarian murder. The party even helped elect a PUP member lord mayor at the height of the UVF campaign. DUP councillors regularly hob-nobbed with senior UVF members in Belfast's lord mayor's parlour for drinks after council meetings.

Both UVF and UDA men have had dual membership of the DUP.

DUP members still happily march behind UDA and UVF bands whose drums are emblazoned with the names of men who killed Catholics, solely because they were Catholics. In elections the DUP remains the party of choice of UDA members. Why would that be?

Perhaps because of their love of justice and policing?

As for democratic standards, well, it's not simply a matter of sharing power with nationalists, something the DUP has still not officially subscribed to despite sitting round the table at Stormont with SF and the SDLP.

It's a matter of the DUP's whole attitude to the principles of modern liberal society as it has developed in Europe since the Enlightenment and inspired revolution in the US and France and produced democracy all over Europe – principles like religious toleration, the separation of Church and state, meritocracy, abolishing hereditary privilege, not to mention the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

The DUP opposes all of these principles and much else besides. In short it is not recognisable as a modern political party.

Being led by a clergyman self-appointed for life does not do anything to demonstrate the party's democratic credentials.

The attitude of people such as Jeffrey Donaldson and Gregory Campbell, and many other DUP figures who appear on TV, gritting their teeth at having to be civil to Sinn Féin people is best described in an Afrikaans word – Staatsvolk.

It means the people who own the state as the Afrikaners did.

Not anymore they don't.

Nor does the DUP, even though it still hasn't come to terms with its loss of caste.

With the DUP, as with the deposed Staatsvolk in South Africa, there is no repentance for discrimination, both political and economic, which, given the opportunity, members exercise still in councils.

There is no repentance for the collusion between the police and UDR and loyalist murder gangs, some of whose members the DUP knew as friends.

Any danger of the great party of Laurna Order giving evidence to the police about its knowledge of loyalist killings?

On the contrary, Raymond McCord stood in the recent elections to protest at the inaction of unionist politicians. Yet it constantly repeats demands for Sinn Féin members to give evidence about IRA killings.

The truth is that DUP double standards are nauseating.

Let's hear no more nonsense about keeping any other party up to scratch on any matter.

Let's hear someone in the DUP admit they are part of the problem.

The SDLP risked a major split in the party if it had supported a Sinn Féin Lord Mayor

2007-06-12T08:25:00.000-04:00

Ciarán Barnes:

On Monday night Ulster Unionist Jim Rodgers was elected Belfast’s first citizen with SDLP and DUP support.

He beat off the challenge of Sinn Féin councillor Tierna Cunningham, who had been favourite for the post.

Had the SDLP supported Ms Cunningham, rather than the Ulster Unionist, Ms Cunningham – who is originally from Ladybrook but represents the Castle ward in North Belfast – would have taken the top job.

The Andersonstown News understands half of the SDLP’s eight City Hall councillors were prepared to back the Sinn Féin candidate, but vocal opposition from other councillors resulted in a change of heart.

Rather than risk a split in the party, the SDLP group voted for Jim Rodgers.

In return for this the Ulster Unionists backed SDLP councillor Bernie Kelly’s successful bid for Deputy Mayor.

Despite having only eight councillors and being one of the smallest parties in the City Hall, the SDLP has dominated the top jobs over recent years.

Pat Convery was Deputy Mayor in 2005, Pat McCarthy was the 2006 Lord Mayor, and now Bernie Kelly is Deputy Mayor.

Sinn Féin’s Paul Maskey accused the SDLP of doing a “dirty deal” with the Ulster Unionists.

“They [the SDLP] were determined to stop Sinn Féin getting the Lord Mayor’s post,” he said.

“We have been meeting with the SDLP for weeks but they struck a deal with the Ulster Unionists 30 minutes before the vote. Despite being the largest party in the City Hall, Sinn Féin has once again been denied the Mayor’s job.

“Had Tierna been elected she would have been only the second female mayor in the City Hall’s 110-year history, and only the second republican.”

This just shows what a mess the SDLP is when it is considered less controversial to support a Unionist politician over a fellow Nationalist.

There have been vitriolic attacks on Sinn Fein in the Irish media since the recent election because of the party’s poor performance

2007-06-12T08:21:00.000-04:00

Niall O’Dowd:

Sinn Fein won only four seats, a major setback as they were widely expected to have at least 10 seats after the election. Of course, that led to an outburst of doom and gloom among hostile commentators. The Sunday Independent, long a bitter enemy of Sinn Fein, attacked the party in several articles on Sunday, mostly along predictable lines.

Much more remarkable was this comment in The Irish Times from Ed Moloney, former Northern Ireland-based journalist and author, who now lives in New York.

“It would be no exaggeration to say that the strategy carefully crafted and implemented by the Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams to underpin the IRA’s move from war to peace effectively lies in ruins this week in the wake of Sinn Fein disastrous performance in the Republic’s general election,” Moloney wrote.

The statement it so ridiculous that it can hardly be taken at face value. Last time I looked the Sinn Fein peace strategy was resulting in worldwide headlines as leaders gathered in Stormont to announce a new era, with Sinn Fein in power with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in the North. The Irish elections are hardly likely to impact on that development in the slightest.

The English-born Moloney is an important figure, however, whose book on the IRA, A Secret History of the IRA, has received widespread praise from reviewers.

But he is also indicative of a breed of journalists and commentators who have had it in for Sinn Fein ever since they had the temerity to embark on the risky road called the peace process, wrong-footing numerous media folk in the process.

There are more than a few in the media who made their livelihoods out of bashing Sinn Fein and the IRA. The Sunday Independent made it their signature issue, and much to their dismay have since been desperately trying to justify their criticism in light of the success of the peace process,

Others have made their careers as self-styled experts on the IRA and their campaign in Northern Ireland. When that campaign stopped it proved highly inconvenient.

Moloney certainly wrote knowledgeably about the IRA and their inner workings, as well as quite bravely about Loyalist paramilitaries groups. For many years he was considered an exceptional journalist on the topic.

However, he called the peace process wrong, seemingly believing it had little hope of success. As a result he was constantly predicting it and Sinn Fein’s doom. The problem was, that never happened.

It will hardly happen now that an election has gone against the party. The Sinn Fein strategy which now sees them in power in Northern Ireland and winning the allegiance of almost one-third of a million voters on the island of Ireland is actually an incredibly successful one which can absorb the occasional inevitable setback.

When you consider that Sinn Fein had less than 2% of the vote in the north and a negligible presence in the south as recently as 1980 that is quite an incredible climb.

Indeed, 140,000 people voted for Sinn Fein in this most recent election, an increase of over 20,000. Contrast that with the Progressive Democrats, who have been in government with Fianna Fail during a period of huge prosperity, yet saw their vote shrink to just 56,000.

The Green Party, a darling of much of the media, has a total of 100,000 votes, still putting them behind Sinn Fein in the south. As Sinn Fein official Jim Gibney noted in the Irish News last week, putting the totals of all the political parties on the island of Ireland together, Sinn Fein comes in third after Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

Nonetheless, the party does have to reconsider its role in the Irish Republic. The results were disappointing on several levels, not least the expectations that had been raised after the successful peace deal in the North.

Sinn Fein in the south, however, still needs coherent and individual economic policies that reflect a post-Celtic Tiger era which Ireland seems to be heading into. They also need to develop figures in the south who can rival leaders such as Adams and Martin McGuinness, who tower over the current crop of leaders there.

None of that is impossible, however, and the party is exceptionally good at the type of internal critical analysis which will be vital after this election.

As other parties have learned to their cost when it comes to Sinn Fein, it is never over. There is merely another phase.

Over there comes over here

Equality fault-line opens

Rival loyalist terrorist groups may have joined forces to murder a Catholic teenager in Antrim almost six years ago

2007-06-08T08:19:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

A detective told the inquest the killing of 19-year-old Ciaran Cummings was "absolutely brutal".

Mr Cummings was shot with a sawn-off shotgun as he waited for a lift at Greystone Road roundabout in July 2001.

The inquest was told that there were four separate claims of responsibility after the shooting.

Two came from the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name sometimes used by the UFF, another by the Orange Volunteers, while a fourth from the Loyalist Volunteer Force denied any involvement, but blamed the rival UVF.

Detective Chief Inspector Frankie Taylor told Belfast Coroner's Court: "It indicates to me that there was perhaps one, maybe two organisations involved.

"Perhaps one organisation carried it out with the logistical support of another.

"It would be my assessment that the Red Hand Defenders were involved. They would have had support from the mainstream UVF."

Mr Cummings tried to flee after being hit by the first blast from the shotgun fired by a man on the back of a motorcycle.

The pillion passenger then get off the bike and chased him.

After he stumbled and fell the gunman pinned him down with his feet and fired again from point-blank range.

Despite nine arrests, no-one has been convicted of the welder's murder and DCI Taylor said a new review of all evidence is to be carried out.

The murdered teenager's father, Robert Cummings, told how he rushed to the scene, thinking his son had been knocked down.

Mr Cummings said: "I checked Ciaran's pulse, but there was nothing.

"Then I took a mobile phone out of Ciaran's pocket as it was ringing. It was his girlfriend Catherine."

Coroner John Lecky said the murder was sectarian and he hoped the police's efforts to bring the killers to justice would be successful.

AOH Says No to Orangemen in D.C.

UDA gangsters shouldn't have it all their own way

2007-06-06T08:22:00.000-04:00

Susan McKay:

There was a moment of bleak hilarity in a documentary the BBC made a few years ago about the UDA, when a furious woman vented her indignation against the hard men of the faction which had shot into her home in a bid to kill her husband. "Youse have shot the chihuahua, youse bastards," she said.

It came to mind this weekend, with reports of a new 'crisis' in the UDA over the threat by the SDLP's minister for social development, Margaret Ritchie, to withdraw the money her direct-rule predecessor gave the UDA in yet another bid to wean it away from its guns. The verb is apt. Expect much bawling from these babies.

The minister's harsh words are said to have shocked the sensitive souls of the UDA's 'inner council', at a time when they were already upset because one of the former 'brigadiers' had been seen to shake hands with a former IRA man.

"You know many people probably thought something like this would happen but it's it actually happening that threw them," one of them told a journalist. "It's hard to explain."

Evidently so. The drama of this handshake might, the distraught source went on, might have so 'spooked' people that they had started putting up Ulster 'independence' flags in Ballymena, in the territory of 'the Mexican', as the local 'brigadier' is styled.

Meanwhile, another news report gave details of a falling-out in Rathcoole which led to a young man being beaten up while his home was wrecked.

A spokesman for the 'inner council' spoke of the need for the "regime of terror" in the area to be dismantled so that the "good guys" can regain control.

It is quite obvious that, apart from everything else, these people are just far too emotionally unstable to be in charge of lethal weapons. There is no need for us to listen to any more tiresome blather about what differentiates the 'good guys' from the 'bad guys'.

Rule of thumb – 'good guys' get to play golf with Martin McAleese and he gives them grants to paint nice pictures on gable walls to replace the nasty ones they put there before.

Speaking of the president's husband, the SDLP does not like to speak ill of the saintly dentist but the truth is he has a lot to answer for in regard to the dishing out of lollypops to the 'good guys' of the UDA. His initiative was misguided and naive and based on the same principles as the one Ritchie is now opposing.

Ritchie has spoken out bravely and it is great to see one of the few women on the executive being the first to do so.

"If this funding is to continue, then the UDA will have to decommission their arsenal," she said.

She said that she was demanding this as the minister responsible for delivering the money and that the public was also demanding it.

She is right that there was no popular support for the grant but it remains to be seen if she will be able to carry out her threat. The contract for the three-year project to transform UDA men into community leaders has already been signed and £1.2 million has been committed.

The UDA said all along that decommissioning its weapons wasn't even being considered.

"I am deeply concerned about this. I inherited it – I wouldn't have done it," she said yesterday (Monday).

All she can do is to scrutinise the contract and, if she can't find a legal loophole, insist on a rigorous process of evaluation.

She said she is currently consulting the PSNI, the Community Relations Council, the Independent Monitoring Commission and Farset, the organisation which has undertaken the weaning, and that she will bring her findings to the executive.

Yes, the UDA must transform. We don't need a band of paramilitary killers and we could do without drug dealing, pimping and extortion too.

It is safe to say that the UDA will make far more than £1.2 million on these activities over the next three years.

It won't willingly hand over its guns to save this project.

In the world of community development, decent pay and three-year contracts are rare, even for highly skilled, well-trained staff who have given years of committed service. They work for low pay on short-term contracts within communities ruined by decades of conflict and gangsterism. Why should the UDA have it both ways?

Support for Bloody Sunday view

Major push for Irish language law

Dan McLaughlin, Chief Economist at the Bank of Ireland, says that he expects the Irish economy to grow by 5% in the medium term

2007-06-05T09:36:00.000-04:00

The Post:

A leading economist has stated that Irish economy is currently in a “very strong shape” and slammed reports that did not give a true picture of how the economy is performing.

Speaking on RTÉ radio, Dan McLaughlin, Chief Economist at the Bank of Ireland said that that he does not know where all the negative talk about economy is coming from because he feels that the situation “very healthy”.

He was echoing recent comments made by the Bank of Ireland’s chief executive Brian Goggin who warned about the dangers of “talking the country into a recession”.

Mr McLaughlin said that “misleading headlines” in the media were not giving a true reflection of economic reality and were “taking things out of context”.

He said that reports about the rising number of redundancies, was one such example.

He said that the number of redundancies in Ireland per is currently 2,000 per month, or 24,000 per year.

“That has been pretty constant over the last five or six years,” he said, adding that tens of thousands of new jobs have been created over the same period of time.

“Redundancies are a fact of every modern dynamic economy, even one as successful as Ireland's,” he added. “Newspaper headlines are one thing the reality of the economy are another.”

Mr McLaughlin said it was “completely ridiculous” to suggest that “suddenly in 2008 that the economy will fall off a cliff.”

He said that the available indicators are that the economy is broadly growing at the same pace as last year at around 6%, and that he expects that the economy will grow by 5% in the medium term.

He said that in the first three months of 2007 retail spending, car sales, employment and exports and industrial production are up.

He said that he has no problem with predictions that things will slow down over the next five to 10 years, but said it was “difficult to believe that it will decline sharply in the next few years”.

He added that a slowdown in the rate of economic growth does not mean that the economy will decline.

“People see recessions around every corner,” he said.

'Dumbed down' exam claim denied as higher grades soar

There was only one question on the minds of Sinn Fein activists across Ireland last week - what went wrong?

2007-06-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

Warning to UDA: give up your arms or the money runs out

'uda blackmailer' loses £107,000 in assets to Agency

UVF victim's family believe collusion is at the heart of murder

The general election was supposed to be the breakthrough election for the party, which expected years of work cultivating its vote in the Republic to pay off.

The restoration of the Assembly in the North on May 8 was expected to boost Sinn Fein and make the party at least kingmakers in the next Dail, if not coalition partners.

For a party that has orchestrated electoral victories in the North and the Republic over the past decade, defeat and losses weren’t in the script.

But the party is now facing the reality that the vast majority of the electorate in the Republic has rejected it, even with the historic deal in the North completed.

In Belfast, the engine room of the party, Sinn Fein activists were left scratching their heads. Electoral success in the Republic is of such paramount importance to Sinn Fein’s strategy that the results of the election cannot be ignored or glossed over.

And the importance of electoral success in the Republic cannot be overstated. Entry to the Dail was what led to the split in Sinn Fein in the mid1980s, resulting in the creation of Republican Sinn Fein.

Even then, in the midst of the violence in the North, Adams had identified gaining power - or at least real influence - in the Republic as a key objective.

Since the 1990s, and certainly since 2002, when the party had its first real taste of success in politics in the Republic, the idea of Sinn Fein holding power north and south has been a lynchpin of its strategy.

Difficult issues, especially policing in the North, were partly sold to the party on the basis that electoral success beckoned in the Republic.

Some party activists complained last week that the policing debate was rushed through earlier this year with the general election in mind.

Working solely within the Stormont Assembly has limitations for Sinn Fein. The party wants to emphasise the notion that the Assembly operates in a wider all-Ireland context and there would be no better way to do that than by being in power in the Republic.

More importantly, Sinn Fein would have real power if it was in government on both sides of the border. The party had hoped that good election results would allow it to push through its proposals for speaking rights in the Dail for northern politicians, but that is now in cold storage.

As part of its strategy in the Republic, Sinn Fein has consciously portrayed itself as the ‘can do’ party and has targeted certain groups - the young, the urban poor, the marginalised - with some success. But it has not been enough to move the party beyond its current support base.

Undoubtedly one of the biggest problem areas for the party is its economic policies, which are at best confusing and, at worst, scaring off voters.

The party’s willingness to ditch its corporation tax policy just weeks before the election suggested desperation.

Privately, Sinn Fein acknowledges that getting its economic policies in order is a key priority. Economic policies were never central to Sinn Fein strategy and while the party is beginning to address its shortcomings, its commitment to left-wing policies means it will always be vulnerable to accusations that it will damage the Celtic Tiger.

The party’s failure to attract any significant numbers of transfer votes was a key factor in its failure to capture seats. Even in the North, Sinn Fein has found that attracting transfers from SDLP-inclined nationalists is still a real issue.

While Sinn Fein claims that the strong performance of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael lessened its vote in the election, it has not explained why floating voters did not give the party second or third preferences in any real numbers. The lack of transfers was a crucial factor in the failure of Mary Lou McDonald and Pearse Doherty to win seats.

The public perception of Sinn Fein as a northern party with no understanding of issues in the Republic is widespread, and was not helped by party leader Gerry Adams’ admission that he did not get around to dealing with certain issues in the Republic because of events in the North.

While Sinn Fein has won some recognition and praise for its work on the peace process, it has still to prove its credentials as a party that understands the electorate in the Republic.

Nearly all of its best-known members are from the North, so the failure of McDonald and Doherty - two fresh-faced southerners - was a blow, not just in terms of seats, but overall strategy. Sinn Fein must now try to achieve credibility on issues in the Republic such as the economy, while still putting Irish unity at the top of its agenda. It must do this as one, cohesive, all-Ireland party.

That won’t be easy. Irish unity and partition are real, live issues that affect almost all aspects of civil and political society in the North. For many in the Republic, however, Irish unity is an abstract notion, an aspiration rather than a reality of day-to-day life.

Sinn Fein has been sustained in the North by the appetite of a significant section of the population to end the existence of the state. But that is simply not the case in the Republic and the party will have to recognise that reality.

There is no single reason why Sinn Fein’s vote did not materialise, just lots of smaller ones, which need to be addressed.

Some of those reasons are within the party’s power to change - its economic policies, Adams’ performance in live debates, the public perception that it is a single issue party.

Others are outside of the Sinn Fein leadership’s control - the hostility of all the major parties to Sinn Fein being in power in the Republic, the fact that for many, the republican leadership is still ‘beyond the pale’, the fact that events such as the Northern Bank robbery and the McCartney murder are still routinely used against the party.

How then will Sinn Fein seek to get its strategy back on track in the Republic? Clues may be found in its strategy in the North since the early 1980s,when it entered local councils and gained a reputation for hard-work and exposing widespread malpractices.

Until the late 1970s, Sinn Fein was a weak party that was subservient to the IRA. But by building up local political networks and a reputation for on-the-ground work, the party had, by the 1990s, developed into probably the best organised, most sophisticated political machine in the North.

To this end, Sinn Fein will focus on the 2009 local elections as an opportunity to significantly strengthen its party machine in the Republic for the next general election. The Assembly will also be used as a ‘shop window’ for Sinn Fein when the next elections are called.

If all goes according to plan, the party will by then have experience of government, of delivering on issues other than the peace process, and the North will quite possibly boast a healthier economy. Sinn Fein will claim credit for any of those successes and hope that the experience will make it more electable.

All the while, the party will look to develop its policies in the Republic, promote its candidates in the Republic and position itself as a party in tune with issues in the Republic.

The challenge for Sinn Fein is to do that without abandoning its electorate in the North or its emphasis on Irish unity.

A new study has ranked Ireland as the fourth most peaceful nation

2007-06-01T08:17:00.000-04:00

RTE News:

The Global Peace Index, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, looked at 24 factors to determine how peaceful each country was.

The study ranked Norway as most peaceful country in the world.

Norway, which brokered the 1993 Oslo Middle East accords and has also sought to resolve fighting in Sri Lanka, is followed on the list by New Zealand in second place and Denmark in third.

121 nations, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, were assessed on factors including levels of violence, organised crime and military expenditure.

Iraq was rated as the least peaceful, with Russia, Sudan and Israel also faring poorly. The US was placed at number 96.

The authors say it is the first attempt to produce such a wide-ranging league table of how peaceful countries are.

Overall the study found that small, stable countries, which are part of regional blocs such as the EU, were most likely to be peaceful.

It was found that income and education were crucial in promoting peace, while countries which had turbulent times in the 20th century, such as Ireland and Austria, were found to have emerged as 'peace leaders'.

10 Most peaceful

1. Norway
2. New Zealand
3. Denmark
4. Ireland
5. Japan
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Canada
9. Portugal
10. Austria

10 least peaceful

112: Angola
113. Ivory Coast
114. Lebanon
115. Pakistan
116. Colombia
117. Nigeria
118. Russia
119. Israel
120. Sudan
121. Iraq

First Global Peace Index Ranks 121 Countries

More Catholic than Protestant children are leaving school without a single qualification in the north of Ireland

2007-05-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

Simon Doyle:

More Catholic than Protestant children are leaving school without a single qualification, new statistics reveal.

While Catholic schools have more pupils leaving without GCSE or A-level passes their pupils are still the most likely to achieve three or more A-levels.

Universities also accepted a greater number of Catholic than Protestant students last year, according to statistics published by the Department of Education.

The figures, which are the results of the 2005/06 school leavers survey, detail the qualifications and destinations of school leavers by gender, religion and school sector.

The results revealed:
more than 40% of Catholics went on to university last year compared to just 33.6% of Protestants

Catholic school leavers were more likely than Protestants to go straight from school into employment – 11.6% compared to 11.1%

two-thirds of Protestant school leavers continued their studies at further education colleges compared to just one quarter of Catholics.

In addition, 3.5% of Catholic children left school with no formal qualifications last year.

The figure for Protestant children was 2.9%.

A total of 7.8% of children from ethnic minority groups, including the Travelling community, left school without a single GCSE or A-level.

Prof Bob Osborne, an expert in social statistics and education from the University of Ulster, said the figures were consistent with earlier data that showed Catholic school leavers were doing less well at the bottom.

He said there appeared to be a gap opening up at the top end – those achieving A-levels – between the attainments of those in Catholic and 'other' managed schools.

"However, previous research suggests that Catholic-managed schools do better for their pupils from poorer backgrounds than those in other managed schools," Prof Osborne said.

"This 'school effect' in Catholic schools partially offsets the fact that Catholic managed schools have a much higher number of pupils from poorer backgrounds than is the case in other managed schools."

Prof Tony Gallagher, head of the Queen's University Belfast's School of Education, said he believed a better indicator of low performance was the proportion of school leavers with less than one good GCSE.

"On this indicator the Catholic schools have also switched the pattern as now, for the first time, there are more leavers from other schools with less than the equivalent of one good GCSE as compared with leavers from Catholic schools," he said.

'Sunday' victim's brother welcomes 'innocent' admission

A former senior Orangeman has lost an appeal against a conviction for the 2001 murder of a Protestant man he thought was a Catholic

2007-05-23T11:33:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

Trevor Lowry, 49, was beaten to death in an alley in Glengormley.

Harry Speers, 47, Carntall Road, and Ronald Craig, 22, Richmond Avenue, both Newtownabbey, were convicted of his murder in 2004.

A judge described Speers as a dominant figure who encouraged younger people and then lied to exclude himself.

Craig, who was only 16 at the time of the murder, also lost his appeal.

Mr Lowry was a Protestant, but police said at the time that his attackers believed he was a Catholic and had been lured into the alley in Harmin Drive where he was attacked.

Appeal Court judge Sir Michael Nicholson said the picture that emerged of Speers, a former Orange Order district master, clearly pointed to someone who was not merely a callous bystander but was a participant or encourager.

Speers did not give evidence at his trial and Sir Michael said: "The only sensible explanation was that he had no answer to the case against him, or one that could stand up to cross-examination."

Speers had been ordered to serve at least 15 years in jail and Craig 11 years. Their appeals against the sentences will be heard later.

UDA prison stand-off

Families expelled from the Chagos Islands by the British have won their legal battle for the right to return home at the Court of Appeal

2007-05-23T10:49:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

Some 2,000 residents were forced out when the British colony in the Indian Ocean was leased to the US in the 1960s to build an airbase at Diego Garcia.

The government took the case to the Court of Appeal after two earlier rulings declared the actions unlawful.

It has a month to decide whether to appeal to the House of Lords.

Many former residents of the Chagos Islands now live in Mauritius or in the UK.

They were evicted from their homes on the Chagos archipelago between Africa and Indonesia, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Lord Justice Sedley, giving the lead ruling, said the government's use of the Order in Council under the Royal Prerogative - powers that allow action without reference to Parliament - was an unlawful way of preventing the islanders from returning.

Lord Justice Waller said the decision had been taken by a government minister "acting without any constraint".

The UK Chagos Support Association welcomed the court's decision and also urged the government not to appeal again.

Chairman Robert Bain said: "The government knows the Chagossians have no independent means to resettle the islands.

"To accept the islanders' right to return but do nothing about it - as it did between 2000 and 2004 - would be meaningless and immoral."

The Diego Garcia base, which was crucial during the Cold War, has gained new significance in recent years as a launching point for bombing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2000, the courts ruled that Chagossians could return to their homes in 65 of the islands, but not to Diego Garcia. The then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, said the government would not appeal.

But in 2004 the government used the royal prerogative to effectively nullify the decision.

Last year the High Court overturned the order and rejected government argument that the royal prerogative, exercised by ministers in the Queen's name, was immune from scrutiny.

The government took the case to the Court of Appeal, saying the High Court ruling seriously affects the government's control over security matters and its legal relationship with overseas territories.

Will Chagos Islanders' Return Mean Problems for U.S. Base?

UK Government broke law over Chagos exiles

Britain is continuing to erode fundamental human rights, Amnesty International claimed in its annual report

2007-05-23T08:32:00.000-04:00

Unionists defeat equality motion

London's "continued failure" to set up an inquiry into the 1989 killing of Northern Ireland human rights lawyer Patrick Finucane was listed among the reasons for its findings.

The human rights organisation said the UK government was also damaging the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary - particularly in relation to its anti-terror legislation.

The allegations, contained in the charity's annual breakdown of human rights around the globe, focused on the Terrorism Act 2006, which doubled the amount of time terror suspects can be detained without charge to 28 days.

"Some of its provisions were inconsistent with fundamental human rights," the report said.

It also criticised the UK's emphasis on deporting terror suspects or placing them under control orders rather than subjecting them to criminal prosecution.

Control orders are a controversial measure which places suspects under a loose form of house arrest. The report said: "Consequent judicial proceedings were profoundly unfair, denying individuals the right to a fair hearing, including because of heavy reliance on secret hearings."

Amnesty's document also criticised the record 80,000 prison population in England and Wales, which it said was "linked with self-harm and self-inflicted deaths".

Bank of Ireland chief economist Dr Dan McLaughlin has dismissed claims that Ireland's economy is set for a slowdown

2007-05-16T08:34:00.000-04:00

Ciara O'Brien:

In a speech to the Irish Home Builders' Association, Dr McLaughlin said he expected 6 per cent growth in 2007 and 5 per cent in 2008, despite a spate of forecasts projecting a slowdown for the economy.

He told the gathering that most of the macro-indicators - including retail sales, industrial production, foreign travel and unemployment - did not support the idea of a softening in the pace of growth.

He also rejected suggestions that Irish economic growth was unbalanced. "There are a number of economic viewpoints about the Irish economy which are often voiced but have little in the way of support from the facts," he said.

Dr McLaughlin conceded the housing market had slowed, with mortgage lending falling to 22 per cent in March 2007, from a peak of 28 per cent in spring of 2006.

Annual house price inflation, currently at 7.4 per cent, has also slipped, according to the latest Permanent Tsb index, and now trails the pace of growth in private sector rents.

"This is a very unusual situation and suggests that the demand for housing has not fallen but that the decision to rent or buy is now biased to the former," said Dr McLaughlin.

He said that uncertainty over stamp duty had made an impact on the market but said it was a "secondary market issue" because few first-time buyers qualify to pay it. The interest rate cycle was a more fundamental issue, he said.

Bank of Ireland's Dan McLaughlin delivers sanguinity on the Irish Economy to the builders as forecast housing output in 2007 is cut to 75,000 units

Economist rejects slowdown suggestions

Clinton Supports McAllister

2007-05-07T08:16:00.000-04:00

Irish Voice:

MALACHY McAllister is a Northern Ireland native who is in limbo in the U.S. at present. He fled Northern Ireland after being involved with the INLA, and for years has fought his deportation battle in the U.S. with the help of the Irish American community.

He attended the Irish American fundraiser for Senator Hillary Clinton last week and spoke publicly for several minutes about his case to President Bill Clinton.

Clinton listened sympathetically and stated that his view was that McAllister, similar to many other combatants on every side in Northern Ireland, should have his case resolved in his favor now that the war was over.

He specifically noted that America should not lag behind Ireland and Britain, which have resolved many such cases in favor of the former paramilitaries. Clinton asked for specifics on this case to be sent to him and Senator Clinton in order to pursue it.

The Belfast Telegraph, however, reported the encounter in a manner that has had many shaking their heads. They reported that Clinton refused to help and was hostile to the McAllister request. Nothing could have been further from the truth as the 100 or so in attendance at the fundraiser can bear witness to.

It was after all, Clinton who ensured that many former paramilitaries were allowed to stay here during the peace process. McAllister, unfortunately, was not among them as his case had not come up at that time.

The Belfast Telegraph, it seems, is outraged that the war is over, that peace has broken out and that people like McAllister now have a shot at a decent life in the U.S. Their reporting was scandalous on this occasion.

It wouldn't be the first time that the Belfast Telegraph engaged in shoddy journalism.

The writing is on the wall for 'Britishness'

2007-05-04T08:22:00.000-04:00

SF members vow to go on despite threats

On Monday one of Tony Blair's former doormats, Jack Straw, was waffling on again about 'Britishness' – what it is, how it can be strengthened and developed.

He reckons there is need for a stronger 'British story' that everyone in Britain can identify with and feel part of.

What he said on Monday was in fact a shortened repetition of a lecture he gave in Oxford in January.

He cited examples such as Magna Carta and the civil war where people were fighting for 'British values' like freedom and fair play. Total rubbish.

For a start, the civil war was an English civil war in which the Scots intervened and secondly, anyone who associates Oliver Cromwell with freedom and fair play must be nuts.

As for Magna Carta, again it was an exclusively English matter, a deal King John made with his barons to stave off civil war and which he repudiated as soon as he left the scene of the deal.

Who knows why Straw comes out with such unhistorical nonsense? Maybe it's part of the desperate thrashing around in the British Labour party to find a fig leaf to cover Gordon Brown's very obvious Scottishness, now generally believed to be the single biggest reason he's going to lose the next general election.

It may also be that Straw has timed the repeat outing of his sole idea on the subject to coincide with the Scottish elections which take place tomorrow.

Perhaps he was trying to help Brown, who looks as if he is going to be seriously embarrassed in those elections by Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party.

All the polls point to the SNP becoming the largest party and Labour being too small to form a coalition with the Lib Dems.

It's clear that people in Scotland feel Scots and not British, whatever that means.

Perhaps Straw and Gordon Brown, who has also made an eejit of himself proclaiming his Britishness, don't realise it but regularly trying to find ways to describe Britishness simply shows that people don't know what it means or what constitutes Britishness.

Few will ever forget Brown's pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with the English electorate, who will reject him in a couple of years' time, when he said his favourite moment in sport was Gascoigne's goal against Scotland in Euro '96. Yuk. All he managed to do was to disgust his fellow Scots.

What is equally interesting is that no-one, but no-one, tries to include the members of the poor lost tribe here, who are the most vociferous in protesting their Britishness.

Sadly for our diminishing number of Union flag-wavers here, when Jack Straw and Gordon Brown and their ilk talk of Britain, they mean England, Scotland and Wales, excluding Norn Irn, which is a semi-detached part of the UK now firmly attached to all-Ireland bodies in a North-South Ministerial Council and run by the British-Irish Intergovernmental Council.

Needless to say, no politician in GB wants to remind anybody of the sort of 'Britishness' that manifests itself here. All they will say is that it has no place in modern British society: not much consolation for unionists.

Tomorrow's election results in Scotland are going to increase the isolation of unionists in Ireland even more.

Scotland was the place most northern unionists closely identified with, some even wearing tartan on special occasions. Many still even read Scottish newspapers like the Sunday Post. Tomorrow (Thursday) it seems most Scots will vote for a party which wants a referendum on independence from the rest of Britain.

For many who will vote that way their vote will not necessarily be a vote for independence but will certainly be a vote to assert their Scottishness, and reject Britishness.

Do unionists here realise that they have also voted for structures which emphasise their separateness from Britain, that point them towards the rest of the people on the island they live on?

Next month the first meeting of the North-South Ministerial Council for several years will drive home that point.

Can it be long before unionists are sitting in the NSMC with Sinn Féin ministers from both north and south? Can it be long before unionists support SF's demand for representation in the Dail?

IICD has expressed concern that the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had dealt with the issue of its weapons on its own

2007-05-04T08:14:00.000-04:00

UVF must match words with actions

UVF stand down - Guns should be put beyond use

Loyalist duo jailed for extortion

The body overseeing paramilitary disarmament in Northern Ireland today expressed concern that the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had dealt with the issue of its weapons on its own.

Following a statement today by the UVF about its intentions to move away from paramilitarism and criminality, Gen John de Chastelain's Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) urged the loyalist group to work with it to destroy the arsenal.

An IICD spokesman said: "We note the statement by the UVF and the Red Hand Commando regarding their future intentions.

"We welcome and are encouraged by the proposal to end their involvement in paramilitarism and reject criminal activity. We are concerned by their intention to deal with their arms without the involvement of the IICD.

"Without the commission's involvement their action on arms does not meet the requirement of the decommissioning legislation and the agreement reached by the parties in the Belfast Agreement," the spokesman said.

"We are prepared to meet with the UVF representative to discuss how we can work together in dealing with arms."

Ireland climbs above Britain in European Union life expectancy table

2007-05-02T08:47:00.000-04:00

Ireland Online:

Figures released by the Ireland Central Statistics Office on Monday show Ireland moving rapidly up the EU life expectancy league table.

In 2005, Ireland had the 6th highest male life expectancy out of 27 countries in the enlarged EU and the ninth highest female life expectancy.

For both males and females, life expectancy in Ireland is now higher than in the United Kingdom, the first time this has occurred since records began.

Jobs boom, but euro affects trade - CSO

Measuring Ireland's Progress 2006 report: Benchmarks against other EU countries in economic, social and environmental areas

The British loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) has been called on to cease all criminal and terrorist activity

2007-05-02T08:28:00.000-04:00

Adams predicts Irish poll success

UVF boss covered murdered informer

Subsidy a scandal

Raymond McCord case on European stage

Allowance may mean party sues council

Maginness questions home deals

‘Killer was controlled by cops’

After meeting Northern Secretary Peter Hain and PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Peter Sheridan at Stormont to discuss recent threats to individuals from the UVF, the SDLP's Patsy McGlone insisted the paramilitary group needed to deliver an end to drug dealing, extortion, targeting and violence.

The Mid Ulster Assembly member, who joined SDLP deputy leader Dr Alasdair McDonnell, South Antrim MLA Thomas Burns and Magherafelt councillor Kate Lagan at the meeting, said they had also sought assurances about the safety of the hundreds of people who had been warned recently their security was under threat from the UVF.

"Any statement emanating from the UVF must reflect the need to move away from paramilitarism and crime for good," he said.

"It needs to bring to a close all activities from drug dealing to extortion to threats or violence.

"Mr Hain was very sympathetic today towards those who have received threats and assured us he was at one with us in wanting to see a complete end to such activities from loyalist paramilitaries."

In recent days the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which is linked to UVF, has met Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde and Mr Hain amid mounting speculation that the paramilitary group will make a statement on its future.

Northern Ireland's ceasefire watchdog, the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), last week urged the UVF and the other main loyalist group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), to respond to the changing political circumstances in Northern Ireland by following the Provisional IRA's lead in winding down their criminal and paramilitary activities.

Over 100 people were warned about their safety recently by the UVF and a man was charged by police following the seizure of documents allegedly relating to the group.

Justice that works would be a step forward

2007-04-27T08:27:00.000-04:00

Unilateral initiative could help marching impasse

UVF statement 'worthless' says mother

It's now exactly four years since the Stevens Inquiry presented its report to the British administration here.

The public, in whose interest the inquiry was supposedly carried out, got a summary of a bit of the report which amounted to a fraction of one per cent of what we're told was in excess of 3,000 pages.

Stevens released enough information for us to know that collusion between the security forces and loyalist terrorist groups was routine, endemic and systemic.

He stopped short of saying it was institutional but certainly among sections of the British army and RUC Special Branch, it was.

Stevens was mainly concerned with events surrounding the killing of Pat Finucane but he ran a couple of other inquiries as a result of which we know that there was also a different kind of collusion with republicans, particularly members of the IRA.

Stevens submitted a file to the prosecution service here, or perhaps it should be called 'the non-prosecution service', because four years after receiving the file with Stevens's recommendations the outcome is zilch, nathin' – which is pretty much par for the course from the non-prosecution service when it comes to sensitive matters. True, it could be said that prosecutions could prejudice the outcome of any inquiry into the Finucane killing but since the British government have taken steps to ensure there is not going to be one, that argument falls down. Besides, the British administration used to say there could not be an inquiry because it might prejudice a prosecution.

Anyway, it is all to do with events nearly 20 years ago, so what?

Fair enough, except that there's not much evidence to show anything has changed.

For example, we are told to hold ourselves in readiness for a UVF statement saying their war is over or some such grandiose nonsense. We're also told they're keeping their guns. We know the UDA has no intention of packing in its activities or of handing over or destroying any weaponry.

Yet not a week goes by without the exploits of publicly-named UDA leaders being described in drooling detail in the Sunday press.

The UDA is supposed to be illegal, its ceasefire is not recognised, it is engaged in extortion, racketeering and drug-dealing but its acknowledged gang boss, unrepentant convicted extortionist Jackie McDonald, is an honoured guest at public occasions and an occasional golfing partner of President McAleese's husband.

To what end? At every opportunity he states the UDA will not give up its weaponry.

It is also taken for granted that the leadership of the UDA is collectively employed as agents of MI5, Special Branch and military intelligence. Why not? They always have been.

It is widely accepted that the overall UVF leader for many years has also been on the take from British intelligence of various stripes, perhaps even simultaneously.

Of course they know where he lives on the Shankill and that his organisation has been responsible for the deaths of many loyalists in recent years, long after the UVF ceasefire was announced.

What do the authorities do with all this knowledge? Precisely nothing. What is the point of it? Did they prevent the death of a single member of the LVF in 2005?

On the contrary, no-one in the UVF has been arrested or charged with directing terrorism.

On a monthly basis we watch the laughable revolving door policy of the courts and non-prosecution service as senior and publicly infamous UDA men are charged and released on bail or just released to terrorise their own communities – for it is those communities which have always borne the brunt of loyalist gangsterism.

The disgraceful stance of the British administration here is perhaps understandable considering the trouble they have taken to sustain loyalist terrorist groups over the years – especially supplying their favourite terrorist group, the UDA, with modern weaponry in the 1980s.

Now, instead of supplying loyalists with superfluous weaponry, the NIO has managed to persuade visiting British ministers that the best way to sustain their loyalist friends is to designate a front organisation for them to receive public money up front.

The incoming executive can stop their money and should, instantly. The first real evidence of change will be a justice system that jails them.

A top British loyalist has sensationally been named as the killer of Irish Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane by the Stevens Inquiry

2007-04-25T08:34:00.000-04:00

Martin Breen:

William 'Mo' Courtney, who was recently jailed for killing Johnny Adair's henchman Alan McCullough, has been accused in a court document of being one of the two gunmen who shot the lawyer in 1989.

The claims about Ulster's most controversial murder are made by Detective Chief Inspector Graham Taylor, of the Metropolitan Police, who is the senior investigating officer in the Finucane murder.

The top cop, who runs the team set up by Lord Stevens to probe collusion between security force members and loyalist terrorists, reveals the information comes from a highly-placed UDA mole.

In a sworn affidavit filed in a Belfast court, he alleged that Courtney and another man, who we can only identify as R, were the triggermen.

DCI Taylor said: "The investigation team have in their possession information that Courtney and R were the gunmen in the Finucane murder.

"However, this information is not admissible as the source is not willing to testify as a witness."

The top cop also claims he has information that Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair hijacked the car used in the killing.

The affidavit from DCI Taylor has never been read out in court and was part of other proceedings brought by the Stevens Inquiry to obtain documents for its investigation.

We have obtained the document from a source not involved in the Stevens Inquiry or Crown Prosecution Service.

This is the first time the inquiry has identified any of those it believes killed the lawyer at his North Belfast home.

It is now thought the same claims will be aired in the coming years at the public inquiry to be held into the murder and into allegations that the British Army's secretive Force Research Unit colluded with the UDA.

Army agent Brian Nelson, who died three years ago, provided the UDA with the intelligence needed to target Mr Finucane. Nelson insisted that he kept his handlers fully-briefed on the Finucane plot but they ignored his warnings.

Eventually, his undercover work was exposed and in 1992 he was jailed for 10 years on five counts of conspiracy to murder.

Amazingly, the affidavit doesn't name one of the gunmen as Ken Barrett — the man who was convicted of the murder after he boasted that HE shot Mr Finucane.

Last year the News of the World tracked down ex-RUC Special Branch agent Barrett to a sleepy English seaside town on his release from jail after serving two years of a life sentence for the killing.

In an interview with Courtney in Maghaberry jail, we put it to him that the police believed he killed Mr Finucane.

Courtney admitted he was a suspect and that he had DNA samples taken, but he protested his innocence. "I didn't do it," he told us.

The 43-year-old, a former lieutenant of Adair before defecting during the 2003 UDA feud, was jailed for eight years last month after admitting to the manslaughter of 21-year-old Alan McCullough.

McCullough was shot dead in May, 2003, after returning home to Belfast from Bolton where he had been holed up with Adair's family and friends.

His body was found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Belfast.

In 1991 Courtney was jailed for seven years for his role in a UDA armed robbery. When Adair was first returned to prison five years ago for breaching his licence, Courtney was pictured menacingly aiming an imaginary rifle at a police officer in the street.

He has spoken openly about his involvement in the UDA in the past.

UVF spy ring had dossiers on 116 people

O’Loan should look at state role in McGurk’s bombing

Loyalists must leave the stage

Jimmy McKenna and his killer gang

Delay on collusion charges 'inexcusable'

The Neo-Nazi website, 'Redwatch', has published pictures of local members of Ógra Sinn Féin

2007-04-20T08:36:00.000-04:00

Anton McCabe:

Redwatch's motto is "Remember places, traitors' faces, they'll all pay for their crimes." Its founder was expelled from the far-right British National Party for being too extreme. Redwatch is linked to paramilitary Nazi group Combat 18, which in turn has links with the LVF.

West Tyrone Ógra has said they will not be intimidated. Spokesperson Barry McColgan said they had hoped the days of political intimidation were over.

"We hoped we were moving towards a situation where Ógra members, like members of any political grouping, should be able to operate in any area they wish without intimidation," McColgan said.

"We were photographed at a march outside the BBC offices in Belfast, which was organised in protest at against the media's portrayal of events in the Middle East last summer."

"The march was organised by the Anti-War Movement in conjunction with the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Friends of Palestine society at QUB.

"We won't be deterred; in fact it will make us more resilient.

"We are getting stronger, more young people are joining Ógra and more people are voting for Sinn Féin.

If the might of the British war machine and its death squads couldn't deter republicanism then neither will a website representing a minority, fascist view."

Matthew Collins from Anti-Fascist magazine Searchlight has studied the far right for years.

"Redwatch is dangerous and sinister," he said.

"People put on the site have been attacked and have been harassed.

"Combat 18 has set up this idea of leaderless resistance. They themselves don't organize attacks. They'll set out a menu on the internet."

Collins said Redwatch was international, with similar sites in several other countries.

"If your face is on Redwatch, you must be doing something right," he said.

Call to ditch loyalist funding plan

Parades appointment is 'helpful'

Neal Leads Bipartisan Delegation to Ireland

RUC conduct unacceptable

Court told of city parade rioting

Disastrous nomination is latest UUP mistake

Red hair gene more common in Celtic areas such as Ireland, Scotland, Wales and regions of south west England

2007-04-18T08:54:00.000-04:00

Spirit India:

A study funded by the Wellcome Trust and aimed at developing a genetic map of Britain has begun to shed light on how the ancient populations of Britain – the Celts, Anglo Saxons and Vikings – moved into and across the country. Initial findings, presented in the Channel 4 series Face of Britain, support the notion that the Viking invasion of Britain was predominantly from Danish Vikings, with particularly Orkney being invaded by Norse Vikings.

Volunteers from across the UK have been donating samples of their blood to help scientists at the University of Oxford study genetic differences, known as genetic variation. Some of this variation contributes to inherited differences in susceptibility to many common diseases, such as cancer and heart disease.

Working with researchers across the country, Professor Walter Bodmer and colleagues have already collected some 1,500 samples from volunteers and are looking to more than double that figure. In particular, they are interested in collecting blood samples from volunteers living in rural areas whose four grandparents were born in the same location, within a radius of approximately 30 miles.

"Our aim is to characterise the genetic make-up of the British population and relate this to the historical and archaeological evidence," says Professor Bodmer. "We are collecting samples from people in rural areas with all four grand parents from the same area so as to avoid the recent mixing up of populations in urban areas and to reach back in time as far as possible.

"Our samples will provide a valuable control for studies on disease susceptibility which depend on comparing the frequency of genetic markers in disease groups with that in control groups. If we are able to eliminate genetic markers linked to geography rather than disease, then we should be able to minimise the risk of finding spurious associations."

The researchers have already carried out some analysis of the samples they have already collected and will be presenting their initial results on Face of Britain. By studying the Y chromosomes from their male volunteers, the researchers have been able to show where the Viking invasions of Britain originated. One variant of the Y chromosome, known as M17, is found in 20% of people from Norway, but is very rare elsewhere in Western Europe. However, in the Orkney Islands, almost one in three men have this variant, supporting the belief that Norse Vikings settled there. In contrast, the M17 variant is not found in areas where the Danish Vikings settled, suggesting that Norse and Danish Vikings were significantly different.

In other findings to be presented in the series, the researchers have found that two rare versions of the gene MC1R occur with a much higher frequency in areas where the Celts were settled than where the Anglo Saxons settled. These rare versions of the gene, found predominantly in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and regions of south west England, are associated with red hair.

Genetic differences between Britain and Ireland

Red hair is most common in Ireland

Gene geography: Do you have Viking ancestry in your DNA?

Celtic ancestry, HLA phenotype and increased risk of skin cancer

Why Did the Anglo-Saxons Not Become More British?

Fianna Fáil says the Irish economy will grow at an annual rate of 4.5% over the next 5 years

2007-04-18T08:32:00.000-04:00

Finfacts Team:

Fianna Fáil has launched its economic policy for the next five years, which the party says will lead to a debt free nation.

Their policy document Protecting Prosperity, The Next Steps Forward was launched by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Minister for Finance Brian Cowen. (The FF website had not been updated with launch material at time of this news report.)

The document, which outlines how the party will fund many of its election promises, is designed to bring Ireland close to a zero net debt in five years time.

Fianna Fáil says it can achieve economic growth of 4.5% annually over the next five years if it is re-elected to power. Public spending is forecast to grow at a 6% annual rate compared with 12% currently.

The party also said it could increase employment by 2.5% per annum.

Central Bank issues optimistic outlook for Irish economy

The Department of Education has come under fire over a document seeming to compare British loyalist terrorist groups to children's charities

2007-04-18T08:22:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

The UDA and UVF were described as "voluntary organisations" and bracketed with Barnados and the NSPCC.

The document is a note of a meeting between a group of principals and senior figures in the department.

Dolores Kelly (SDLP) said it was outrageous. The department there was a "mistake" in drafting the minutes.

Ms Kelly, whose party has accused the department of "illegal sectarian discrimination" through an action plan which allegedly favours Protestant neighbourhoods for additional funding, said she was stunned.

"It beggars belief that anybody would compare the UDA and UVF with Barnardo's and the NSPCC," she said.

"Indeed it beggars belief that the UDA and UVF would be asked to help contribute to a plan to help children's education.

"It is, at the same time, ludicrous and insulting. "

The comparison was made in minutes of a meeting between school principals in Protestant areas of north and west Belfast, the chief executive of the city's education and library board and a deputy permanent secretary at the Department of Education.

Called as part of Renewing Communities, the government's response to a taskforce report on working-class Protestant communities, it lists a series of actions needed to develop service delivery integration.

One point states: "Maintain/establish good working relationships with voluntary organisations (Barnardo's, NSPCC, UDA, UVF)."

SF warned not to barter away residents' rights

Our day comes as festival boldly goes where no festival has gone before

Don't count on peace in the north of Ireland just yet

2007-04-09T08:37:00.000-04:00

Andrew Greeley:

Ireland finally made it big in the American media last week. It was on the front page of The New York Times Newspaper (as Jimmy Breslin calls it) and on the evening news for three minutes. Protestants and Catholics had made peace in Northern Ireland.

The heads of both warring political factions sat at a table and made statements about political cooperation. In their weirdly different accents, both the Rev. Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams invoked the name of God.

Finally a conflict that went back to Oliver Cromwell had come to an end. It was as though two of Nigeria's tribes had at last made peace in a conflict the American media could not expect their consumers to understand.

The conflict in fact dated back to the time not of Cromwell, but of Elizabeth I, who had "planted" the first lowland Scottish colony in Ulster with the goal of eliminating the "savage" local Catholics. Moreover, this was not the first such announcement of peace.

The scene, with different characters, had been performed several times since the original Good Friday agreement in 1998. It was different this time in two respects: Adams and Paisley represent the extremes of Catholic and Protestant sentiment; and the British and Irish governments were willing to pour major subsidies into Northern Ireland to help it catch up with the prosperity of the rest of the island.

Also, if the two parties are not able to form a coalition government, the newly elected Assembly would be prorogued and its members would no longer be able to collect their salaries for doing nothing. Anyone who has studied the history, even the very recent history, of Northern Ireland can only cross his fingers and hope this agreement will hold.

It would be wise for Americans to understand the history of the rump state of Northern Ireland as racial, with religion a symbol of race. Ireland is the only country in Western Europe with a foreign colony imposed on it, a colony with gerrymandered boundaries that permit a minority in the whole island to impose its will on the part of the majority group that lives within its artificial boundaries.

The descendents of the Protestant genocidal colonizers believe as self-evident that they are morally, intellectually and humanly superior to the descendents of the Catholics who were not quite eliminated. It is very difficult for them to accept any agreement that constrains them to share power with Catholics, just as whites in the American South found it so difficult to share power with the racially inferior blacks.

Paisley is very sensitive to the emotions of his hard-line constituents. He knows he must humiliate the Catholics by cooking up new requirements, added to the substance of the Good Friday agreement, to prove their good faith.

You really can't trust Catholics, you know. Nor can you permit them to take over your country without forcing them to jump repeatedly through hoops.

The Ulster Protestants share this conviction of the racial inferiority of the Catholic Irish -- slovenly, ignorant, superstitious, lazy and responsible for all their problems -- with a substantial proportion of the population of Great Britain. There are not many people left in the world the English can feel superior to, so it's a good thing the Irish are still around. That the standard of living, as measured by per capita gross national product, in Ireland is the highest in Europe (save perhaps for Norway) and higher than that of England has yet to penetrate English consciousness.

The small print in the recent agreement is that power-sharing will begin only after two months. That gives Paisley and his allies time to discover the Catholics are still violating some of the conditions for power-sharing, new conditions they will have dreamed up. The history of the past 10 years of negotiations in Northern Ireland has been a story of "just one more thing you have to do," thus establishing that the Protestants are still in charge.

The security agencies of the British government have cooperated with this stalling process. They raided the Sinn Fein party's offices in the Ulster Parliament and removed carloads of "evidence" that Sinn Fein was back working with the IRA. The evidence oddly disappeared. Then the Ulster police blamed a big bank robbery on the IRA, though they never did get around to arresting any suspects.

It would be unwise to bet against more of such delaying tactics before May 21.

Bombs: a damning report

Former head of civil service says united Ireland may be better for northerners

Tánaiste: Every reason to believe collusion between the British security forces and some of those responsible for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings

2007-04-06T08:14:00.000-04:00

RTE News:

The Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has said there was 'every reason' to believe there was involvement at some level between security force personnel in Northern Ireland and some of those responsible for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

Meanwhile, the Justice for the Forgotten Group, which represents many of the families of those killed or injured in the attacks, has urged some gardai to consider their position in the wake of the MacEntee report, published yesterday.

Mr MacEntee concluded that most of the Garda files on the investigation had disappeared.

Church ads blast Paisley decision

North Set for U.S. Money?

The people have spoken in the north of Ireland, like it or not

2007-04-05T09:08:00.000-04:00

UDA rules out imminent disarmament

'Too soon to judge' UDA on crime

Irish Inquiry Faults Handling of Day of Attacks in 1974

Garda apology for investigation into atrocity demanded

SDLP’s dossier of amazing history of loyalist sentences

Hot flushes and delusions

De Brún welcomes Euro rap for British on Irish language

Northern economy needs boost

Comment: Executive has tough economic choices

More speak Irish in the North than speak Chinese

Questions raised over sword-wielding Orangeman

War Peace, what is it good for?

It was Mark Twain who coined the phrase "The people have spoken – the bastards". Some attribute the remark to Dick Tuck, a Democratic Party dirty tricks specialist who said it when asked for his reaction after he lost a California state senate primary in 1964.

Whoever said it first, it's a refrain that has been on the lips of many of the members of the defeated parties in our recent assembly election.

Obviously the people couldn't care less what the SDLP or the UUP did in 1973, 1985 or 1997. That only matters to long-suffering members of those parties. Voters are concerned with the realities of 2007 and 2008. All of that you'd expect.

What is astonishing is that there are still commentators who can't accept that Sinn Féin and the DUP are carrying out the wishes of the voters.

Ruth 'Deadly' Edwards, the clairvoyant Kevin Myers and the venerable Conor Cruise O'Brien have all been railing against last week's events.

O'Brien, who has been completely wrong on everything to do with the north for more than a generation and who even supported Bob McCartney's vanishing party to prove how wrong he could be, predicted just over a week ago that there would be no agreement between SF and the DUP, indeed that there could not ever be. To be fair, he was writing before the events of Monday week ago.

It's the other two who are truly astonishing. They were writing after the events.

Edwards has accepted that there has been a sea change, that Paisley has done a volte-face and therefore compares him to tricky Bertie Ahern who spun around within a fortnight. First he castigated Fine Gael and Labour for engaging in 'auction' politics and then shamelessly outbid them in his own ard fheis speech.

Nevertheless, she can't accept that Paisley has done what his voters voted for, which is surely a step ahead of Ahern who is promising the voters something they didn't ask for and, on Ahern's previous record, won't get.

Poor old Ruth: all her heroes have failed or failed her – Trimble, the Orange Order and now Paisley. Still, at least she acknowledges that things have changed even though she finds it impossible to eat crow.

The most amazing of the trio is Myers who, writing the day after the event, can't believe it, insists that the famous deal on March 26 was 'an exercise in mutual delusion'.

He thinks May 8 is another final deadline which like all other 'final deadlines' will endlessly shift. He says that 'May 8 now shimmers before us as the last-ever date for the restoration of political institutions. I believe that that date is as likely to see a joint government between Sinn Féin and the DUP as it is to see Dana become world heavyweight wrestling champion.'

The one aspect all three of these writers have in common is their disgust with the form the peace process has taken since the day and hour it began. They strained might and main since the early nineties to prevent any accommodation with the republican movement.

There used to be a fourth member of this cabal, Eoghan Harris, but he has fallen by the wayside.

Harris, who was originally vehemently opposed to the Hume-Adams dialogue, has belatedly come to realise that the accommodation between republicans and loyalists that has taken place is what the people of the north have wanted.

Now, as the parties who will form the executive here amicably allocate the departments a month early and the new ministers prepare to read themselves in, what will Myers, Edwards and O'Brien do as they watch their vitriolic campaigns of nearly 20 years disintegrate in ashes?

The answer is very simple. They will blame the people who voted for Sinn Féin and the DUP. Obviously the voters know no better than to support these dreadful people who will be running the north. In all those years it has never occurred to any of these writers that their position has been fundamentally anti-democratic, that they have consistently opposed the shifts that have taken place in the north in the last generation as evidenced in every election. They seem to agree with Mark Twain and Dick Tuck.

Irish economic growth in 2006 was the best since 2002

2007-03-29T08:50:00.000-04:00

Eoin Burke-Kennedy:

The Irish economy grew by 6 per cent last year - the highest level since 2002, according to the Central Statistics Office.

The CSO's quarterly national accounts shows Gross Domestic Product at constant prices rose 6 per cent in 2006.

Gross National Product (GNP) - which includes income arising from investment and assets owned abroad - for the same period was 7.4 per cent.

GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2006 was 5 per cent compared with the same period in 2005 while the corresponding growth in GNP was 7.5 per cent.

The CSO noted consumer spending in volume terms rose by 6.2 per cent in 2006 compared with the previous year but this represented a slight slowdown in the rate of growth.

Capital investment, at constant prices, was 3.9 per cent higher in 2006 than in 2005 while the volume of industrial output accelerated from 3.4 per cent to 6.1 per cent.

Net Exports (which is exports minus imports) in constant prices were €569million higher in 2006 than the previous year.

Separate CSO figures show the balance of payments deficit increased from 4.2 billion in 2005 to 5.7 billion last year.

This was in part due merchandise exports of €21,644m which were almost €1 billion lower than for the same quarter in 2005 but remained relatively flat throughout 2006, the CSO said.

Minister for Finance Brian Cowen said the figures confirm that economic activity remains "particularly buoyant".

Mr Cowen said: "The figures are in excess of what most commentators had been assuming. There was an improvement in our export performance last year mainly due to higher services exports."

"In terms of this year, my Department is forecasting a continuation of strong economic growth, with GDP and GNP both expected to rise by 5.3 per cent," he added.

Aid 'nothing to do with Ireland success story'

Economy growth continues - CSO

Irish 2006 GNP +7.4% On Year In 2006 Vs 5.3% In 2005

Poll indicates boost in Sinn Féin support

2007-03-26T08:03:00.000-04:00

RTE News:

The latest opinion poll shows a drop in support for both Fianna Fáil and Labour, and a boost in support for Sinn Féin.

The Red C poll, in today's Sunday Business Post, indicates a narrowing in the gap between the current Government and the alternative coalition of Fine Gael and Labour.

Since the last in the series of monthly tracking polls by Red C was taken at the end of February, there have been a number of political developments.

Fine Gael published part of its taxation proposals for the General Election, and both the Greens and Sinn Féin held party conferences.

Sinn Féin also enjoyed a successful election in Northern Ireland and has been central to negotiations to re-establish power-sharing institutions.

This month's poll was taken before this weekend's Fianna Fáil Ard Fhéis but the party will be disappointed to be down two points to 36% support.

Fine Gael are up one point to 23%, but their partners in Labour are down two to 12%.

The Greens are unchanged at 8% and the PDs lose one point, down to 3%.

The biggest winners are Sinn Féin, up three points to 10%, while Independents and others are up one to 8%.

Funding for UDA can't be justified

Self denial at a local level only adds to the SDLP’s woes as party’s decline continues

PSNI lied over Bone shooting

SDLP slam UDA £1m funding package

UDA 'still involved in extortion'

Monaghan bombing to be reinvestigated

It's time PSNI was accountable for its actions

2007-03-22T08:31:00.000-04:00

Loyalist group to get over £1m govt funding

It was the French politician Georges Clemenceau who said "war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men".

It's a pity the British administration here wouldn't take that maxim on board and apply it to both the police and army.

In the past week we've had two very serious incidents involving these organisations.

First, in Ardoyne, when police blazed away in a densely populated area firing an unknown number of shots, one of which went through the glass in the door of an occupied house and embedded itself in a wall inside.

Secondly, in Crossmaglen, when a helicopter came down in playing fields yards from houses.

The pilot seems to have done an excellent job in minimising injuries to his crew and passengers and avoiding any of the nearby homes. All very well but why were four police being ferried around in a military helicopter?

Here's what Chief Superintendent Hunniford said in February as the fortifications at Crossmaglen barracks were being removed: "The police are committed to delivering an effective service to the Newry and Mourne area and are already policing in the area without military support and delivering a policing service using vehicles and beat patrols. We want to work with the community and we want to deliver policing in south Armagh in the same way that policing is being delivered anywhere in Northern Ireland."

So people can look forward to helicopters and Keystone Cops charging around housing estates firing shots into homes?

There's supposed to be accountability from the police but there isn't.

It's exactly 11 months since a policeman shot dead a man at Ballynahinch in mysterious and disputed circumstances.

The local MP Eddie McGrady called for the policeman to be suspended. He was wasting his breath. The chief constable palmed off powder-puff questions from the Policing Board. The Police Ombudsman will report this year, next year, sometime, whenever.

It's the same with last week's Ardoyne shooting. As far as we know, the ombudsman's office still hasn't even questioned the policeman who opened fire.

On the face of it, the actions in Ardoyne contravened the PSNI's own policy, supposedly at one with the European Convention on Human Rights, namely forbidding lethal force "simply to prevent the escape of a person".

Firing a gun was maximum force despite no suggestion there was any other weapon involved.

Will we ever find out what happened and why?

As for the helicopter crash, the British army will investigate that. They are a law onto themselves as we witnessed last week with the failure to convict any soldier of the murder and serious assaults of Iraqis in Basra. Oh yes, except the guy who pleaded guilty.

Contrary to Clemenceau's advice, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was allowed to do exactly as it pleased here since the day and hour British soldiers walked onto the streets in August 1969.

Despite the appalling damage military misbehaviour here caused the Northern Ireland Office never had any say in MoD decisions – still doesn't.

There's no hope of having any influence on the British army so we'll never know what happened that helicopter or why.

Is there any more hope with the police?

It's clear that so far the PSNI are still unable to see themselves as public servants.

Statements from the Police Federation attacking the ombudsman's office and the whole concept of open policing are profoundly disturbing.

It seems the Police Federation believes its duty is to protect the tawdry, discredited reputation of the defunct RUC rather than to embrace a new style of police service.

It's going to be a long haul.

Only with some prospect of local control from a minister in charge of policing is there likely to be the sea change in attitude needed to prevent the sort of scenes that terrified people in Ardoyne.

At the very least people were entitled to a police press conference to explain what police thought they were doing. Instead – silence and the excuse that it's all under investigation.

Sadly senior PSNI people still think it's OK to charge into a place, fire shots and drive away without explanation.

When will they learn that's not normal policing?

Irish business leaders: 74% are positive about the Irish economy

2007-03-21T08:28:00.000-04:00

RTE Business:

A survey of Irish business leaders has found that the cost of complying with regulations is their top concern, despite high levels of optimism about the Irish economy.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers annual survey of 200 chief executives also found a fall in support for social partnership and an increased level of satisfaction with the Government.

More than 60% of CEOs thought the cost of business regulation was higher in Ireland than in other EU countries, while 90% thought reducing these costs was a priority.

74% were positive about the Irish economy, but 71% were dissatisfied with the general cost of doing business in Ireland. 78% were happy with the quality of labour in Ireland, but 75% were unhappy with its cost.

67% felt the Government was in touch with their needs, up 13 points on last year. 72% said social partnership was necessary - a drop of 10 points.

On future investment, 81% of CEOs in Irish companies said they would not re-locate existing activities abroad, while 75% of multinational CEOs said they were considering additional investment in Ireland.

Two-thirds of CEOs believed that Northern Ireland was not as attractive a location for investment compared with the Republic.

PwC's Irish CEO Pulse Survey: Controlling costs biggest challenge - 67% of 229 respondents happy with Irish Government

Financial future of the north of Ireland could be bleak

2007-03-21T08:21:00.000-04:00

BBC News:

An economist has warned NI's financial future could be bleak if a major financial package is not secured as part of a deal to restore devolution.

Professor Mike Smyth from the University of Ulster said the government plans to slow down public spending over the next five years.

Professor Smyth said NI had become too reliant on public expenditure.

Meanwhile, SF's Gerry Adams is to meet Bertie Ahern to discuss any Irish government input into a financial deal.

The talks are due to take place in Dublin later on Tuesday.

Professor Smyth said giving Northern Ireland an increase in public expenditure would not provide a long-term solution to its economic problems.

"To give us more public expenditure is like giving a drug addict a final fix," he said.

"What we need are some self-help measures, some tools to make us competitive, and if our parties don't secure some kind of additional industrial development enhancements they will have failed."

Assembly members are also scheduled to meet later for their first debate since this month's elections.

The politicians will discuss proposals for a new ministerial code and changes to the Stormont standing orders.

Both the Irish and British governments want a power-sharing executive in place by 26 March.

If an executive is formed, it will have four DUP ministers, three Sinn Fein, two UUP and one SDLP.

The rising of the Celts

The Emerald Isle Gets Greener

2007-03-19T08:50:00.000-04:00

Chris Edwards:

Ireland has boomed in recent years, and it now boasts the fourth-highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. In the mid-1980s, Ireland was a backwater with an average income level 30 percent below that of the European Union. Today, Irish incomes are 40 percent above the EU average.

Was this dramatic change the luck of the Irish? Not at all. It resulted from a series of hard-headed decisions that shifted Ireland from big government stagnation to free market growth. After years of high inflation, double-digit unemployment rates, and soaring government debt that topped 100 percent of GDP, Irish policymakers began to cut spending in the late 1980s in a desperate bid to recover financial stability.

Irish government spending fell from more than 50 percent of GDP in the 1980s to 34 percent by 2005. For Europe that is a triumph of restraint, given that the average size of government across 25 EU countries today is 47 percent of GDP.

And Ireland has steadily reduced its tax rates. The top individual income tax rate was cut from 65 percent in 1985 to 42 percent today. The capital-gains tax rate was cut from 40 to 20 percent in 1999.

However, the key to Ireland’s success has been its excellent tax climate for business. In 1980, Ireland established a corporate tax rate for manufacturing of just ten percent. That low rate was subsequently extended to high-technology, financial services, and other industries. More recently, Ireland established a flat 12.5 percent tax rate on all corporations — one of the lowest rates in the world, and just one-third of the U.S. rate.

Low business tax rates have helped Ireland attract huge inflows of foreign investment. Given the country’s modest size, it boosts a high-tech industry second to none. Intel, Dell, and Microsoft are among the island’s biggest exporters. Ireland also hosts booming insurance, banking, money management, and pharmaceutical industries.

US multinationals in Ireland to present Irish Government with proposals to retune the economic "growth engine"

Investing in Your Backyard: Ireland

The portrayal of Sinn Féin as a reluctant partner in peace is a fiction that did not fool the Irish voters

2007-03-19T08:41:00.000-04:00

Ronan Bennett:

Does Sinn Féin deserve no credit for the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the north of Ireland over the past 15 years? From Peter Mandelson's account of the prime minister's handling of the peace process, one would think that the British government had to drag a stubborn republican leadership kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, and that once there they could only be kept on board by repeated capitulation to republican demands.

The former secretary of state for Northern Ireland has played no significant part in Irish politics since his forced resignation in 2001 over the Hinduja affair, but his portrayal of republicans as reluctant partners in peace - which the British media has eagerly picked up - not only rewrites history but helps to perpetuate an atmosphere of distrust and bad faith as the March 26 deadline for the return of power sharing approaches. For this reason alone it is worth getting the facts straight.

The peace process pre-dated the advent of Tony Blair to power by almost a decade. It does not detract from Blair's commitment to a settlement to recall that in 1988 Gerry Adams and John Hume, the former leader of the nationalist SDLP, began a series of private talks in an attempt to agree a joint strategy to take the gun out of Irish politics.

When the so-called Hume-Adams document was delivered in June 1992, it was greeted not as a promising avenue but with hostility. Hume, who went on to become a joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, reacted with hurt incomprehension. A man of Gandhian commitment to non-violence, he was accused of being everything from an IRA stooge to an outright villain. Unionists reviled him, and his British allies in the Labour party deserted him. The message from John Major's government was clear: there could be no negotiation with "the men of violence", only more war, more death, more misery. If the enemy was genuine about peace, all it had to do was surrender. This may have made Major feel strong, but as a strategy for peace it wasn't going to work.

Reflecting on the response to the Hume-Adams initiative, republican leaders could have been forgiven for falling back on the old dictum that nationalists in the north of Ireland never achieved anything by politics. It could easily have been the signal to give the physical-force tradition its head. But, undeterred, the IRA called a three-day ceasefire, on December 23 1993.

The intention was to show that the IRA had the discipline and cohesion to maintain a ceasefire and that the republican leadership was serious about finding a settlement. But such was the fury provoked by the Christmas ceasefire that Adams wondered aloud if the IRA had declared an intensification of the war. The message was the same: peace had to be on British/unionist terms.

When the IRA declared a "complete cessation of military operations" on August 31 1994, the response was no less hostile. Adams in particular came in for vicious and sustained criticism, including on these pages. Gerry Adams "is a coffin-filler strategically deciding to desist from filling coffins", wrote Edward Pearce in 1994. "Even if his heart is in peace, his words and his actions suggest a man who has neither the confidence nor the courage to drive events," an Observer editorial claimed in the same year. Later Roy Hattersley reflected in the Guardian that "Gerry Adams is part of the Troubles ... by treating him as if he is essential to a permanent settlement, we glorify intransigence, bigotry and extremism". It was as though nothing whatsoever had changed from a year earlier when the Sunday Telegraph, for example, declared that Gerry Adams was "one of the ... most formidable enemies to peace in Ireland's bloodstained history".

Given subsequent events, what lesson do we take from these quotations, apart from evidence of the writers' prejudice and inaccurate judgment? It is the same one that echoes throughout Mandelson's interview, which is that the British government is a patient, reasonable, much put-upon and disinterested party to the whole sorry affair.

In this smug, patronising and valedictory view, the British government can maintain the fiction that the conflict arose of nothing, that the nationalist community never had genuine grievances, that the whole thing was - to quote Jeremy Paxman during his coverage of the recent elections - "tribal" and therefore irrational, beyond politics. Or as the former Tory MP Edward du Cann said: "The English find [the Irish] impossible to understand - why they fight each other, why they speak with such a total lack of logic. There's no reality in Ireland. It's a land of fairies, of pixies and leprechauns."

Mandelson's Ireland may be inhabited by "bloody hard" people, but he colludes with Du Cann in propagating the self-exculpating myths that allowed both Labour and Conservative governments to shore up one side - the unionists - while waging war against republicans and still claiming to be impartial.

The elections last week saw Sinn Féin register its largest vote since partition. The lesson Mandelson and those who nod so approvingly at his interview have still to learn is that the party's success is an acknowledgment by voters that the republican leadership drove the peace process, while the British government and unionists have proved - and in the case of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist party continue to prove - dilatory in pursuit of a settlement.

We want the truth over 1972 bombings

Doubters in DUP try to thwart devolution deadline

IBEC:The Irish economy will grow by about 5.5% in 2007

2007-03-16T08:51:00.000-04:00

Irish Independent:

Growth will be boosted mainly by buoyant domestic demand, with consumer spending growing by 7pc. IBEC economist David Croughan said the economy will turn in another strong growth in 2007 of the order of 5.5pc, only a little slower than 2006.

"The impetus will continue to come from the domestic sector with consumer spending expected to grow by a strong 7pc," he said.

But he also warned that turmoil in global equity markets and greater concerns about the weakening US economy are likely to make trading conditions more difficult.

"Nevertheless we should not be too quickly influenced by the most recent downbeat indicators from the US," he added, pointing put that many US indicators are subsequently revised.

For instance, recently there were disappointing employment increases of 97,000 for the US in February, but bad weather was a big factor for construction jobs and in addition the December/January numbers were revised upwards by 50,000, Mr Croughan pointed out.

IBEC says strong Irish economic growth in 2007 will be fuelled by construction and consumer spending

Emerald Miracle

Economists predict inflation falling to 3%

Neo-Nazis and British loyalists in the north of Ireland

2007-03-16T08:36:00.000-04:00

Owen Bowcott:

Northern Ireland's first ethnic minority lawmaker has been targeted with racial abuse and threats on a UK-based website and on the internet site YouTube.
Anna Lo was elected last week as an Alliance Party candidate in the multi-member constituency of South Belfast. She is also the first ethnic Chinese politician elected to a legislature anywhere in Europe.

Ms Lo first contacted police in January about comments being posted on a racist, neo-Nazi website called the White Loyalist Guestbook. Most of the users are from Northern Ireland or England.

According to Ms Lo, detectives said they could do little about the material and instead gave her three personal alarms for her safety. "The police haven't done anything about it as far as we can tell," she said yesterday. "Giving the victim an alarm and telling them to step up their security is a bad message for people who experience racism or domestic violence."

In one posting on the website she appears alongside naked oriental girls and is associated with prostitution. The website carries Nazi insignia. One photograph shows a figure in a balaclava giving a Nazi salute in front of a Red Hand of Ulster flag. The YouTube site showed her posters being torn down and mocked her accent. YouTube has now removed the video which was posted on the comedy section of the website.

White Loyalist Racists in Northern Ireland

A good news election story for republicans

Results of the election in the north of Ireland reveal more than obvious conclusion

2007-03-15T09:24:00.000-04:00

MLAs new, old and very old have collected their passes, the keys to their offices, signed the register and designated themselves.

The dust of the election has settled and all the parties will carry on as if nothing has happened.

You could argue of course that nothing did happen, that the election merely confirmed what we all knew and expected – the DUP and Sinn Féin are top dogs.

However, the results revealed more than that obvious conclusion.

They signify a tipping point for the defeated parties, the UUP and SDLP.

True, both parties have been in decline against their rivals for some years now, in the case of the UUP a more precipitate drop than the SDLP's.

It's more though than the drop in numbers of voters and seats and percentage share that tells the tale, decisive though those figures are.

What was exposed at last week's election was the amateurishness and lack of human resources available to both the UUP and SDLP.

Neither party has enough members to mount a serious challenge to Sinn Féin or the DUP in the districts they used to contest.

The UUP's membership is tiny and mainly over 60, a bit like the British Conservative party that William Hague inherited.

The SDLP is argueably in worse shape.

In parts of north, east and west Belfast they have no members at all. The same is true in Fermanagh and Tyrone.

For both parties canvassing means the candidates, their families and a couple of friends traipsing around houses every night of the week.

It's demoralising and debilitating.

Yet both parties refuse to cut their coats according to their cloth.

They continue to pretend they are major players.

They nominate too many candidates in the wrong places and make matters worse by failing to divide the constituencies effectively.

Take the UUP in South Belfast, where in some streets each of the two candidates had posters asking voters for first preferences.

Take the SDLP in West Tyrone where they fielded three candidates with the prospect of one quota.

Who's to blame for this sort of nonsense?

That dynamic duo Sean Farren and Jim Nicholson, the directors of election for SDLP and UUP respectively.

When they saw the number of candidates selected, a cursory glance at the results in 2003 should have shown them a cock-up was inevitable. You can only divide up votes in a constituency if you have the votes to divide.

Can the party leaders escape blame?

At any stage did Mark Durkan or Sir Reg Empey step in and say, 'Whoa'? Not a bit of it.

In fact party SDLP HQ reinstated a third candidate in West Tyrone where there were neither the resources nor votes to warrant three. Empey's own campaign in East Belfast was pitiable.

How was it that SF's sharp election directorate, led by Pat Doherty and Sean Begley, and the DUP's equally effective team, led by Peter Robinson, triumphed in places like North Antrim, Strangford, West Belfast and Mid Ulster while Farren and Nicholson bombed everywhere?

First, Farren and Nicholson occupied largely titular roles – responsibility without power.

Both the UUP and SDLP are highly undisciplined parties with weak central organisation, if you can use that word. Local candidates paid virtually no attention to either Farren or Nicholson.

You might ask who can blame them?

Secondly, SF and the DUP played to their strengths. Did SF stand three candidates in South Belfast?

Did the DUP stand two in West Belfast? Why not?

It would have been stupid, that's why.

Third, SF and the DUP could stop local candidates fighting each other. SDLP and UUP couldn't.

In both the UUP and SDLP nothing will happen to change any of this. Both promised thorough-going inquests in 2003 and 2005. The result? Last Wednesday.

As Lady Sylvia Hermon said of the UUP's performance, it was "woeful". Unfortunately there is no-one in the SDLP with her stature who is critical.

This election has shown that whatever fantasies both parties entertained, there's now no way back.

They'll deny it, but next time there'll be new constituency boundaries and the results will be even worse.

The wisest course of action would be for the SDLP to merge with Sinn Fein and for the UUP to merge with the DUP. Of course, both the SDLP and the UUP are too arrogant to pursue this strategy.

The election in the north of Ireland has produced the most polarized assembly there has been since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998

2007-03-13T09:37:00.000-04:00

An Irish champion of human rights

So, Dr No, what exactly were the last 40 years all about?

St Patrick’s day snub for RFJ

There was a lot of talk during the North’s election campaign about ‘bread and butter’ issues, claims that for the first time so-called ‘real politics’ were occupying people’s minds and exercising the candidates.

As the results show, such claims were far from the truth.

The facts are that the election has produced the most polarised assembly there has been since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

This is the third election following the two held in 1998 and 2003.

the first, David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and John Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) dominated with per cent and 21 per cent of the vote respectively.

The Democratic Unionist Party DUP) and Sinn Fein (SF) followed with 18 per cent and 17 per cent.

Seats in the executive when it was eventually established, divided fortuitously five unionist and five nationalist. Five years later in 2003, Ian Paisley’s DUP had overtaken the UUP with 25 per cent of the vote to the UUP’s 22 per cent.

On the other side of the fence the SDLP had slumped to 17 per cent, while Sinn Fein had risen to 23.5 cent. That assembly never sat and therefore no executive was ever created.

The results of Wednesday’s poll gave the DUP 30 per cent of the vote, Sinn Fein 26 per cent, the SDLP 15 per cent with the UUP bringing up the rear at 14.9 per cent. The DUP and SF now have the lion’s share of ministries in the executive: the First and Deputy First Minister offices and seven of the ten ministries, with four going to the DUP. As you read here last week, the DUP has already expressed its intention to hold the purse strings with the Ministry of Finance.

That leaves three ministries between the once dominant SDLP and UUP: the UUP will have two, and the SDLP one. How the mighty are fallen.

The d’Hondt system, which governs the allocation of ministries, favours the big battalions. Not only will the DUP and Sinn Fein take the majority of ministries, they will bag the big money-spending departments such as education and health and leave the crumbs such as culture, arts and leisure to the defeated UUP and SDLP.

The DUP’s deputy leader Peter Robinson, obviously looking forward to being Minister of Finance, pointed to a rare item of agreement between himself and Gerry Adams.

He agreed with Adams that if an executive were established it would be ‘‘a battle a day’’.

When David Trimble and Seamus Mallon were First and Deputy First Ministers it was difficult enough to get them to agree on anything, even down to the design of number plates for Northern registered cars.

They operated from opposite ends of the huge Stormont building and communicated as little as possible.

How much more improbable will communication, let alone agreement be between the putative First and Deputy First Ministers, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness? The assembly operates on cross-community consensus. However, the election results mean that the DUP and Sinn Fein control their respective community assent.

Either of them can veto any important matter affecting society in the North. In the first assembly in 1998 the SDLP needed the cooperation of Sinn Fein to exercise that power. Back then the UUP also fell short of complete control of unionist assent. It’s all different now with the DUP and SF ruling the roost. How will an assembly work with two parties, whose leaders do not speak to each other, controlling its business?

The two governments are adamant that there must be a working executive established in 15 days’ time. Peter Hain, Northern Secretary, wrote to all newly elected assembly members on Friday reminding them that the legislation requires the assembly to be dissolved if no executive is elected by March 26.

Under the governments’ timetable, by Wednesday, parties are expected to beg in discussing nominations for ministries.

Publicly at least Ian Paisley is having none of it. He insists the British government must cough up major financial concessions, including reducing corporation tax to the Republic’s level of 12.5 per cent, if the DUP is to agree to share power.

Jeffrey Donaldson has said this financial package is a deal-breaker.

Sinn Fein’s position is diametrically opposed: there can be no financial package until an executive is established and that it is the executive which should negotiate it.

Underlying the demand for a financial package is the opposition to increased domestic rates and the imposition of water charges by Hain. It is as plain as a pikestaff that these unpopular measures were introduced and timed to come into operation in April to try to blackmail Paisley into sharing power.

Only a working assembly can repeal these charges. However, without the charges, some way has to be found to fund water and rates and a raft of expenditure on infrastructure, especially roads and rail.

Hence the demand for a package from the British Treasury, a peace dividend, the DUP now calls it, conveniently forgetting there was a peace dividend nine years ago after the Good Friday Agreement which the DUP then opposed.

There will be frenetic negotiations beginning tomorrow on all these matters as both governments try to bring the DUP over the line.

However, the very fact that Paisley is concentrating on the financial aspect of a power-sharing executive and no longer objecting to sharing power in principle is a fair indication of where he’s heading.

At present the betting is that, having seen off his own dissidents on Wednesday, his increased mandate will give him the confidence to press on to a deal, though not to the full deal by March 26.

Even so, any sort of a deal is only a first step on a long journey. It took David Trimble years before he even shook hands with Gerry Adams.

The North’s divided society has thrown up a sharply divided assembly in which the daily battles will be a wonder to behold.

Two of the most historic bastions of unionism have fallen to the inexorable rise of Sinn Fein

2007-03-09T08:31:00.000-05:00

Noel McAdam:

The republican party siezed an Assembly seat in South Antrim for the first time — and look set to follow suit in Lagan Valley later today.

Mitchel McLaughlin topped the poll in South Antrim, the former citadel of ex-Ulster Unionist leader Lord Molyneaux.

He came in almost 300 first preference votes ahead of the DUP's Rev William McCrea, who was also elected on the first count.

Both were newcomers to the constituency but it had been widely predicted Mr McLaughlin would have to slug it out for the sixth seat.

Other parties had claimed the Sinn Fein machine was less visible on the doorsteps than they had expected, but Mr McLaughlin revealed his canvassing had even included the rather "desolate communities" of the Rathenraw and Spring Farm estates.

Mr McLaughlin generously explained his topping of the poll was more the product of other parties vote management strategies than anything else.

But he also argued his party had built on the "very strong performance" of his predecessor candidate Martin Meehan who inadvertently claimed to have been elected last time — before the count was over.

Meehan seemed to have picked up enough votes lst night but gained only 24 transfers over the next nine counts. Yesterday McLaughlin had no need of transfers.

In contrast, however, Mr Butler was kept waiting 20 miles down the road. Even after a fifth count, as exhausted election officials in the Lagan Valley Leisureplex called it a night, he was still just over 800 votes shy of the 5,976 quota.

But the elimination of his SDLP rival Marietta Farrell should put Mr Butler over the mark when counting resumes this morning.

While McLaughlin, Sinn Fein's national chairperson, had been parachuted into South Antrim from Foyle where he had failed to unseat the SDLP's Mark Durkan in the last Westminster election, Butler had slowly built on his base as a Lisburn councillor.

Back in South Antrim, Mr McCrea said: "I am sad Sinn Fein have been elected in this constituency but I am absolutely thrilled that we have two excellent candidates well positioned to join me as elected Assemblymen."

Lagan Valley: Sinn Fein secure first seat

DUP and Sinn Fein on top

Ruane tops poll and urges DUP to end excuses

Upper Bann: SF leapfrogs over Simpson

South Antrim: McLaughlin tops the poll in sweet victory for SF

Battle for the green vote: Sinn Fein just keep on climbing

Mid Ulster: Sinn Fein trio take seats in first count

SF capture record fifth West Belfast seat

Diane Dodds squeezed out of seat

West Belfast: Deeper shade of green but no Rainbow

Gerry Adams Re-Elected

IBM has announced it is to locate a new research and analysis institute at its campus in Dublin

2007-03-08T09:17:00.000-05:00

Big hike in all-Irish schools as Gaeilge becomes trendy

The IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), which will bring a number of high-end jobs to the Blanchardstown area, is part of the €46 million investment IBM announced last year.

IBM said then it intended to create 300 jobs in Ireland as part of that investment but it is unclear how many of those jobs will be located in the new Blanchardstown facility.

The institute is designed to research global economic development and trends.

There are IBVs already located in the US, China, Australia, the Netherlands.

Labour TD Joan Burton said IBM's plans would come as "a welcome relief" to workers in the region.

"What is now needed by Government is a complimentary strategy to get more young people in Dublin 15 to stay on at school and go to college and more opportunities for older workers to re-train and upskill," she added.

IBM backs Ireland Inc

Demand soars for all-Irish schools

2007-03-08T09:12:00.000-05:00

Niamh Horan:

THE demand for Irish-speaking schools has surged with one principal saying a reason for the increase was that they ruled out a "certain element" present in other local schools.

But the Gaelscoil principals deny "anecdotal evidence" that some parents are sending their children to all-Irish schools to avoid having contact with the growing number of immigrant children in the national school system.

With waiting lists for some all-Irish schools stretching as far as 2011 and 65 more all-Irish schools opening in the past 10 years, a number of principals at Irish schools have been slow to go on the record to discuss the reasons behind the upsurge in demand for places.

When asked if some parents were enrolling their children into Gaelscoileanna because of the number of immigrants in ordinary national schools, one principal said it was "very possible".

"I know it has been said to me before, not in relation to the new nationals but in relation to the general problems that would be in certain deprived areas. In that you wouldn't get the same sort of problem mix or problem spectrum in a Gaelscoil and there might be a certain element involved in sending your child to a particular school."

He went on to confirm that "it was mentioned to me in passing" that it was a way of avoiding the local school if some parents weren't happy with it.

Another All-Irish school principal said his school had been inundated with hundreds of applications from eager parents trying to enrol their children.

"We would be turning away at least one class every year. We just don't have the room. I can take in 30 people next year and I have 110 on the list for those places. And I have every class full up to 2011. I have twice as many trying to get in as the number I can take in."

Ireland and the slave trade

2007-02-22T09:08:00.000-05:00

Child study finds big divisions

British children: poorer, at greater risk and more insecure

Apologies seem to be our proconsul's latest cheapo wheeze, especially for events long ago for which he has no responsibility. Most laughable and incredible was his "apology" in the United States for Northern Ireland's involvement in the slave trade. As Newton Emerson pointed out in this paper, Norn Iron didn't exist at the time of the slave trade and, as historians hastened to protest, Belfast was always opposed to the slave trade.

As a matter of fact Ireland's involvement with the slave trade was in providing slaves. In the 1650s Cromwell sent thousands of Irish men and women to Barbados, Montserrat, St Kitts and Antigua. The minimum figure was 12,000. Others put it as high as 50,000. The Irish, not surprisingly, proved to be lousy slaves in the Tropics with an inconsiderate habit of dying quickly from malaria. The English sugar planters turned to our proconsul's friends the black slaves in the 18th century.

Any chance of our slippy, orange-tinted, opportunist apologising to the Irish for England's experiments in white slavery on one of his flying visits or perhaps when he's in Croker?

Don't hold your breath.

All the same, you might have expected someone born in Nairobi to know something about colonialism.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps not.

Still, he's not stupid. You'll notice he craftily offered his meaningless, cynical apology on behalf of Wales and Norn Iron. He knew he was skating on thin ice because black groups in Britain are trying to organise a claim for compensation from companies they believe benefited from slavery.

So he didn't apologise on behalf of the government.

New World Celts

Ireland has been ranked ninth out of 21 industrialized countries in a report assessing the well-being of children

2007-02-14T10:29:00.000-05:00

RTE News:

UNICEF said the assessment looked at 40 separate indicators to gauge the quality of the lives of children in the majority of economically advanced nations.

But the study found there was no consistent relationship between a country's wealth and a child's quality of life.

Northern European countries dominated the top half of the table, with child well-being at its highest in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

The United Kingdom came bottom of the list.

The study found Britain lagged behind on key measures of poverty and deprivation, health and safety, relationships, risk-taking and young people's own sense of well-being.

Britain received better ratings for education but languished in the bottom third for all other measures, giving it the lowest overall placing, behind the United States.

Ireland's economy will be the fastest growing in Europe in 2007, according to Pricewaterhousecoopers

2007-02-13T09:54:00.000-05:00

Aoife Carr:

The analysis shows shows Ireland's economy growing by an estimated 5.9 per cent in 2006 and a projected 5.1 per cent in 2007, keeping the country at the top of the Euroland growth table in both years.

The pace of growth for the euro zone economy as a whole is estimated at 2.7 per cent in 2006 and a slightly slower 2.1 per cent in 2007.

The report identifies domestic demand as continuing to be the main driver of overall growth, despite slowing consumer spending in 2007. Consumer spending is expected to slow as interest rates rise further and employment growth weakens.

However, the release of funds from maturing Government-backed savings schemes is likely to provide a boost to disposable incomes and underpin consumer spending growth over the course of the year.

The report warns that high inflation and rising labour costs could lead to a continued erosion of Irish export competitiveness in 2007.

It predicts a slowdown in euro zone economic growth in 2007 owing to tighter fiscal policy in a number of member states, the lagged effects of past ECB interest rate rises, further possible appreciation of the euro and an expected slowdown in the United States, affecting euro zone exports growth.

Yael Selfin, senior economist at Pricewaterhousecoopers, said: "The Irish economy looks set to continue as the Euroland's top growth performer this year. Unfortunately Ireland is also likely to remain at the top end of the inflation league table, to the detriment of the important export sector and some areas of domestic demand."

Irish eyes smiling for good reason

Unexpected growth for euro zone

British implicated in Belfast murders

2007-02-13T09:21:00.000-05:00

Commemoration to mark murder of Pat Finucane

A former Ulster Volunteer Force man alleged that he and British military handlers organised and took part in a gun attack that left six Catholic men dead.

The attack took place in Belfast, in 1974, during a period in which he claimed to be working with British military intelligence. The man, who uses the pseudoynm John Black, said he was one of a team of four gunmen who opened fire on civilians in the New Lodge area of North Belfast on February 3, 1973.

Six unarmed men from the New Lodge area were killed during the 45 minute attack.

The six killed were Jim Sloan, Jim McCann, Tony Campbell, John Loughran, Brendan Maguire and Ambrose Hardy. Black said that a member of the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) led his three-man UVF team that night and told loyalists to be on stand-by for the attack.

Black, who served two prison sentences for UVF activities and is in ill health after a stroke three years ago, said he would stand over his claims in a public forum.

The families of the victims said the claims opened the possibility of legal action against the British government.

The deaths were the subject of a community-based public inquiry in 2002. It was led by an international panel including human-rights lawyer Gareth Peirce and American lawyer Ed Lynch. The inquiry found evidence of British army collusion in the night’s events.

The inquiry dismissed the British government’s official version of events, which said the deaths were the result of a gun battle with the IRA. Black told The Sunday Business Post that his FRU handler, ‘Mike’, phoned him on the day of the shootings. ‘‘He rang and told me that something was planned for that night, and our role in it was to create the impression that the New Lodge was under attack from loyalists,” Black said.

‘‘Later I listened with him to the military radio until a code came over it, which was the cue for us to start shooting. Me and two other UVF men were positioned in an entry close to Edlingham Street, beside the New Lodge and Mike was in charge. The four of us fired shots for around 15minutes, then we went to a different point at Edlingham Street where regular British soldiers were firing into the area.

‘‘We stood with them and Mike fired shots from there.” Black said that the attack was designed to draw the local IRA into a gun battle with the British troops, who were using a new night vision telescope, known as a ‘star-scope’. Spokesman for the families John Loughran said he was hopeful that Black’s claims could help ‘‘uncover the truth’’.

‘‘It is the families’ view that these killings were sanctioned at the highest political levels in Whitehall,” he said. ‘‘Now that this has been acknowledged by someone involved in the murky underworld of British military intelligence, this must be considered as new evidence. This is the basis for a new investigation into the killings of six innocent men.”

O'Loan report just the tip of collusion iceberg

2007-02-09T08:24:00.000-05:00

Jim Gibney:

It was ever so cosy. Great company and place to have a bit of R&R. A refuge to escape from the pressures of the job. Somewhere to relax in the company of very obliging friends – mates really. They were very protective, generous with their time, advice and, of course, money. They provided much needed accommodation for a night or two to get away from it all, wholesome food and a friendly chat. All pals together.

That sort of commentary you will, understandably, not find in Nuala O'Loan's devastating and withering report about the Mount Vernon UVF. An organisation who moved in and out of the RUC/PSNI Special Branch and Castlereagh interrogation centre as freely as they moved about north Belfast killing hapless victims at will, Catholics and Protestants.

For me that sort of commentary was inescapable as I read O'Loan's report. There was an old boy's bonhomie club atmosphere about the interplay between the state forces and those deemed illegal as they shared cells in Castlereagh or met in unnamed locations to collaborate over the many acts of violence under discussion. It was akin to 'shooting the breeze' with your buddies.

O'Loan's report is refreshing for its frankness and clarity. Its precise, to the point, use of language exposes senior and middle ranks of the RUC/PSNI, its Special Branch and CID and their direct involvement in murder, plotting to murder, attempted murder, extortion and drug dealing.

O'Loan's style of investigation and its presentation brings you into the centre of a sordid and secret world which relatives, human rights organisations, solicitors and Sinn Féin have been trying to expose for decades. A world where there is contempt for life and the law is manipulated to protect the perpetrator. O'Loan draws back the heavy black curtain and shines a beam into crevices and reveals disturbing and frightening behaviour.

In the 160 pages of her report you meet dark, sinister, Machiavellian people in the uniform of the RUC/PSNI who protected, paid and praised UVF personnel responsible for a 10-year catalogue of crimes against defenceless people. Senior RUC personnel who knowingly and wilfully provided glowing references for murderers as if they were applying for a prestigious job.

In fact, they provided the Director of Public Prosecutions a 'get out of jail' card for many UVF personnel.

This report reveals a powerful, elaborate, carefully constructed, tried and trusted system which with ease expertly concealed the killers, the planners, the bank-rollers of a state-sponsored, controlled and directed killing machine. A system which, until the publication of this report, was virtually impenetrable. A system which was a law unto itself, run by people who played God with the lives of individuals they were paid to protect and did not.

The report strikes you in so many different ways, in particular the intrinsic immorality and corruption of the Special Branch. There is no personal or operational distinction between the UVF killers and the Special Branch. There is no informer/handler relationship. There is no 'them and 'us'; police officer and loyalist; no thin blue line protecting citizen and society. There is just 'us'; UVF and Special Branch, Special Branch and UVF.

Even though I have known and read extensively about collusion this report shocks on practically every page.

Most shocking of all is the cloak of protection the Special Branch weaved around those involved in killing as many as 15 people.

The killing of Sharon McKenna screams out of the pages of the report for justice as you read how the Special Branch carefully erected a fortress around the killer which even his own admission to them for killing her failed to dislodge.

Their influence even stretched into the H-Blocks into the very cell where they protected the person who killed Raymond McCord junior, whose father's campaign was to lead O'Loan's report.

Murder files and investigations lost or deliberately destroyed, falsified statements, sham interviews, concocted alibis for killers, withholding vital information, frustrating O'Loan's inquiry – the active hand of the Special Branch behind every obstacle.

It represents the tip of the collusion iceberg. The perpetrators are in the spotlight but where are those who shaped and set the policy – MI5 and their paymasters in 10 Downing Street?

Don’t force the DUP into government

‘Collusion was going on in the early ’70s’

2007-02-05T08:39:00.000-05:00

Andersonstown News:

This week’s Ombudsman’s report revealed collusion was rife between the RUC and the UVF in Mount Vernon for over ten years from 1991, but the mother of a 14-year-old-boy who was murdered by a UDA gang in 1973 insists that it has been happening throughout the conflict and across the North.

Philip Rafferty was abducted by a UFF gang in January 1973 close to his Tullymore Gardens home as he made his way to band practice. The teenager’s body was found hours later in the Giant’s Ring, close to Shaws Bridge, with his coat wrapped around his head and with three gunshot wounds.

“That night the last thing I said to him was, ‘Philip avoid being on the main road because they are shooting out of cars.’ ‘Nothing will happen to me mum, nothing.’ But he never came back,” said Maureen.

Maureen is certain that there was collusion in her son’s death, as the area was normally saturated with soldiers and RUC officers during that period, but on that night there were none.

“Andersonstown was flooded with army, and they were in full force, yet that night when I went looking for my son we could not find a soldier, not for love nor money. We walked from Tullymore Gardens to Andersonstown police station and not one policeman was about. We knew there was something happening on the road because there was nothing moving.”

Maureen’s assertions that the road had deliberately been cleared of RUC and British army to enable the death squad to enter and exit the area without hindrance are substantiated by the murder of 17-year-old Gabriel Savage on the same night.

“They [the UDA gang] came back and a boy who was standing with his girlfriend outside the Busy Bee was taken and murdered that night, and his body was left at the M1 at the Donegall Road, and the inquest proved that the same gun killed the both of them.

“So they were able to go up the Andersonstown Road, into Shaws Bridge where they murdered my son, come back to the Andersonstown Road and [take Gabriel Savage and] shoot him on the Donegall Road – so if that road wasn’t cleared, I’ll eat my hat.”
The mother-of-three was impressed by Raymond McCord Senior’s success in achieving official recognition that there was collusion, at least in terms of a 12-year period in North Belfast.

“Not if Sinn Féin had’ve talked until Doomsday would they have believed them, or would anyone have believed me that I know that that road was cleared. So it took a Protestant man to bring it to the forefront, and he’s the only one who could do it.”

Next Wednesday marks the 34th anniversary of Philip’s murder and Maureen has not had any contact from the Historic Enquiries Team, or spoken to the Ombudsman’s office, but she still hopes to have the truth uncovered.

“I would like it to happen because it is something which should be told.

“I do believe that night, that road was cleared and nobody can tell me anything different, but can I prove it? No.

“I would like to see anybody who had anything to do with murder, especially the murder of my son, to come and tell me who did it. I have this awful feeling to this day that I am going to meet the person who murdered my son, but it is wishful thinking.

“I think that from higher up, they were ordered to do that. They don’t go out off their own bat to do that.

“Somebody up there knows all about it.”

SDLP launches all-island economy plan

Election results show moderates’ decline

Troops 'colluded with Mad Dog'

New evidence of collusion in Dublin and Monaghan bombings

O’Loan facing new demands over loyalist murder of teenagers

Hibernian predicts Irish GDP growth of 5.4%

2007-02-01T08:54:00.000-05:00

Geoff Percival:

HIBERNIAN Investment Managers (HIM) is predicting growth of 5.4% in gross domestic product (GDP) this year before a slowdown in growth to 3.9% and 3% over the next two years.

The company estimates the final growth percentage for 2006 to come in at 5.8%.

HIMs figures differ slightly from the most recent forecasts - put out by Bank of Ireland Global Markets, last week. BoI suggested that GDP growth for 2006 would come in at 6.5% and that growth would slow to 6% this year and to 5% in 2008.

"The main swing factor will be how rapidly house building adjusts to a level more in keeping with long-term demand. We estimate a soft landing or gradual decline over the next three years. From an investment perspective, the important question is what happens during 2008 and thereafter. We're pencilling in a couple of years of softer GDP growth before the economy recovers to trend. The SSIA effect will have washed through, returning consumer spending to a more normal pace of expansion," said HIM economist and senior fund manager, Fiona Hayes at the launch of the company's investment outlook for 2007 yesterday.

HIM is forecasting consumer spending growth of 6.8% this year and 3.3% in 2008 and is expecting - in line with most economists - two further 0.25% hikes in European Central Bank interest rates to 4% this year.

"We're confident our forecast is pretty secure. In Ireland, we expect consumer spending to be supported by SSIA releases - about 30% of those accounts set to mature this year to be spent - with late joiners more likely to be big spenders than those who were first in line to join the scheme," she added.

Hibernian's latest investment outlook also suggested that 2007 has the potential to be a bumper year for international merger and acquisition activity. It said that the British market could be a geographical M&A hotspot, with the banking and financial services sector an obvious source. HIMs senior investment manager, James Forbes said that M&A activity could spread to the Irish market also.

"At the moment, it would be easier to suggest the company's who will probably not be involved than those who could be," he said. "Barring Anglo Irish Bank and Ryanair, virtually any Irish company is a potential target for M&A activity," he added.

Irish consumer sentiment improves

Sinn Féin can sit and watch intra-unionist bigot-fest

2007-02-01T08:34:00.000-05:00

SF meet Blair on police collusion

House calls for Finucane probe

Getting away with murder

Yesterday's (Tuesday) statement by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Prime Minister Tony Blair fired the campaign starting gun for the March 7 assembly elections.

The statement is also an indication that as far as both the Irish and British governments are concerned, the election is a two-horse race between Sinn Féin and the DUP.

It is going to offer slim pickings for the SDLP and UUP as both parties struggle to find an answer to the question 'What are they for?'

The result of the governments' posture is to maximise support for SF and the DUP.

In effect both governments are asking the voters of each of the north's two communities to endorse the respective positions of their tribal leaders – encourage the DUP to share power and encourage SF to support the police and criminal justice system.

They think these encouragements are necessary because it's far from clear that the DUP will be able to deliver its part of the bargain Dublin and London have concocted.

Since Sunday's vote Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have both already encouraged people in nationalist districts to report serious crimes to the police – assaults, rape, aggravated burglary, causing death by dangerous driving.

On the other side of the fence Ian Paisley is paralysed by the bigots his lifetime of inflammatory rhetoric has encouraged to join his party.

He has so far proved unable even to convince a majority of the MPs in his party to support sharing power. As soon as one like Jeffrey Donaldson suggests it is a possibility, another one like Nigel Dodds tries to postpone the prospect indefinitely.

Within the party there is a grim tussle going on for selection for assembly seats.

There is a distinct possibility that Paisley will end up with an assembly party opposed to the verbal assurances their leader has given Mr Blair. For those reasons Sinn Féin made their ard fheis motion highly conditional on the DUP delivering the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement.

For those same reasons both governments are appealing to SF to help what are laughingly called the 'modernisers' in the DUP.

They want SF to move on support for policing institutions before the election: in other words to breach the terms of the resolution passed on Sunday which says that 'only when the power-sharing institutions are established and the ard chomhairle is satisfied that the policing and justice powers will be transferred' will the motion be implemented. SF will not move. Here's why. The DUP will not enter this election campaign with a manifesto advocating power-sharing. They can't, because a majority in their party opposes the concept, and why wouldn't they, since Paisley spent the last 37 years railing against it? What Sinn Féin has done is set the scene for another set of negotiations in the period from the election results on March 8 to the proposed establishment of the executive on March 26 – a crucial 16 days.

Quite right too. Only when they see the election results will they know whether Paisley can deliver power-sharing.

Will Paisley need the support of the surviving UUP assembly members to complete the Good Friday institutions which, remember, the DUP has never agreed? Or will Paisley be able to ride roughshod over his dissenting bigots, secure in the knowledge that seats in an executive and committee chairs are in his gift and that the lure of filthy lucre has proved just as tempting for his hot gospellers as it is for fenian sinners?

The DUP is afraid of its voters so its manifesto will be cowardly, full of bombast and bluster, castigating Sinn Féin as the great evil over whom Protestant voters must triumph despite the fact that not one DUP vote will have the slightest effect on SF's vote.

Only when the election is safely over and the DUP has consigned its UUP rival to oblivion will Paisley be able to contemplate delivering on his political obligations.

Suggesting that SF can in any way help in this intra-unionist bigotfest is fanciful in the extreme.

SF has delivered on all its obligations. How would they join the Policing Board between now and March 7 anyway?

Now they can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Paisley on the frying pan. There's plenty of him to roast.

Central Bank predicts Irish economic growth of 5.5%

2007-01-31T08:48:00.000-05:00

RTE:

The Central Bank has predicted that the economy will grow at a rate of about 5.5% this year, which is only slightly slower than the growth recorded for last year.

The bank said that growth will be driven by strong consumer expenditure on the back of the encashment of SSIA savings accounts.

The forecast is for about 71,000 net new jobs to be created in the economy.

Central Bank expects economy to grow 5.5%

Not enough change, say victim's family

2007-01-31T08:37:00.000-05:00

Marie Louise McCrory:

The family of the first civilian victim of the Troubles – who died after he was beaten by the RUC – have said they don't believe there had been enough change in policing.

Samuel Devenney (42), a father-of-nine from Derry, suffered internal injuries, a possible fracture to the skull and damage to his eyes and mouth when he was beaten up in his own home by members of the RUC in 1969.

He had been standing at the front door of his home in William Street on April 19 when RUC officers burst in chasing a number of young people, several of whom ran into the house.

Other members of the family were also injured in the incident.

It was said Mr Devenney and his family were beaten with batons. He died three months later.

The inquest attributed the death to natural causes.

An investigation into the death by Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan in 2001 found there had been a wall of silence by police officers during an investigation at the time of Mr Devenney's death.

On the day Sinn Féin asked its members to support policing in Dublin, Mr Devenney's son Harry last night (Sunday) said he did not believe there had been enough change in the police.

"These people are telling us they've changed, that they are not the RUC any more," he said.

"There is a chunk who are still the RUC.

"There was a conspiracy of silence in 1969 right up to the British government. That conspiracy of silence is still holding.

"Nuala O'Loan found massive, massive barriers. It was very, very disturbing."

Disgusting justification for sectarian murders

The buck stops where exactly?

Collusion evidence: trickle becomes a flood

Collusion officer gets PSNI promotion

2007-01-29T08:43:00.000-05:00

How collusion was built into the system

The victims deserve justice

Turning a blind eye

MP: Flanagan’s position untenable

The hidden role of the SAS

State terrorism was used to uphold the Union

At least one of the four serving policemen implicated in the Police Ombudsman’s report into collusion between the RUC and loyalists has been promoted within the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

The four were described as junior officers on the ‘‘periphery’’ of the investigation, by Ombudsman sources. The Ombudsman’s report found evidence of collusion between RUC members and a north Belfast UVF unit, run by Special Branch informer Mark Haddock, in at least five murders between 1990 and 2003.

Raymond McCord Sr, whose son’s murder sparked the four-year inquiry, said he was ‘‘disturbed’’ by the development.

‘‘I don’t think any officer who was implicated in this inquiry should be serving in the PSNI,” said McCord. ‘‘If they are implicated in wrongdoing, then they have no place in policing, especially if people’s trust is to be restored.”

Senior sources told The Sunday Business Post that arrests are expected in the coming days in relation to the ombudsman’s report, and specifically the 1997 murder of Raymond McCord Jr. However, it is understood that no former RUC officers will be arrested.

The four year-long investigation was made public in Belfast last Monday, causing huge embarrassment for the British government and the PSNI.

In a separate development, sources within the Ombudsman say that their request for a further stg£1.25 million in funding - needed because of the complexity of their investigation - means that future inquiries may be under-funded.

The report has prompted calls for Ronnie Flanagan to resign from his post as chief of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies.

Flanagan was head of RUC Special Branch in 1996 and RUC Chief Constable until 2002. He was made aware of the concerns about the running of agents in north Belfast, but it is claimed he took no action to remedy the situation.

British politicians remain silent despite revelations

2007-01-25T09:06:00.000-05:00

Ahern calls for British action on collusion

Collusion with loyalists was British security policy

Here we go again. Another report of another inquiry years after the events took place. No prosecutions recommended or likely.

Chief constable, prime minister, current proconsul all throw up hands and say as one: "Nuffink to do with me, guv." All in the past. Couldn't happen now. Let's move on.

So far so predictable. At least there's one minor difference this time. The one lesson that's been learnt from previous reports like Stevens' in 2003, and it's a small mercy, is that politicians no longer automatically 'call for a public inquiry'.

The penny's dropped even with our local geniuses that it's pointless, first because the British government has acted shamelessly to prevent inquiries revealing awkward truths by introducing the 2005 Inquiries Act to wreck the powerful 1921 Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act.

Second, and more important, is the reason the British government emasculated the inquiry process.

They'll tell you it's because of the vast expense over the years of inquiries like the Saville Tribunal which if you laid them end to end would never reach a conclusion. Needless to say that reason is far from the truth.

Guys like Mark Haddock, coyly referred to as 'Informant 1' in the ombudsman's report, were up to their dirty work during the first five years of this Labour government's tenure of office and indeed for the first year of Hugh Orde's time as chief constable.

It was only after the Stevens report that rapid and radical changes were made in handling what are known as covert human intelligence sources [agents]. If it hadn't been for the doggedness of Raymond McCord would any of this disgusting immorality have come to light?

Will anything ever be done as a result? Nuala O'Loan concluded that in dealing with the Mount Vernon UVF, "the most serious failings are at chief officer level particularly those chief officers who were responsible for Special Branch".

Now do you imagine for one minute that if prosecutions were taken against senior police officers that they would not immediately point the finger upwards and show that even more senior figures at Stormont were well aware of the dirty war going on?

Lord Stevens felt he could trust the taxpaying public with only a tiny fragment of his 3,000-page report which showed military intelligence, Special Branch, 14th Intelligence Company, MI5 and the even more infamous Force Research Unit, all competing for agents. We know some agents were operating for two agencies.

Mrs O'Loan tells us that Haddock was paid "in excess of £79,000" of taxpayers' money between 1990 and 2001. Who knew? Who was in charge? A policeman or a senior securocrat at Stormont?

Does anyone imagine that the RUC-protected murder gang operating out of Mount Vernon was anything other than one tiny fraction of the total British administration's conspiracy operation across Belfast, let alone across the north and in the Republic? Does anyone think you wouldn't uncover exactly the same stomach-turning sights if you knew which stone to turn over in say, Portadown or Lisburn or Armagh? We know that after the Security Services Act of 1989 the director and coordinator of intelligence (DCI) at Stormont was responsible to the secretary of state. We know that intelligence provided by top agents was read by British cabinet members of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Are we seriously expected to believe that successive secretaries of state did not know of their agents' unsavoury misdemeanours? Does anyone believe senior intelligence officers did not ask for such behaviour to be sanctioned at cabinet level? If the proconsuls from 1997-2003 did not know what Special Branch was up to or ask the DCI for reports, why not? Apart from murder and racketeering, what was the outcome of this policy? Mrs O'Loan concludes that, "As a consequence of the practices of Special Branch, the position of the UVF, particularly in north Belfast and Newtownabbey, was consolidated and strengthened over the years".

In his report the then Sir John Stevens concluded that the intelligence services, far from advancing the cause of peace, actually prolonged the Troubles.

In short, the behaviour of the security forces in the north and their political masters produced the opposite of what the British administration claimed to intend. Yet no British politician has accepted responsibility never mind apologised.

Bank of Ireland: Irish economic growth is at a five year high

2007-01-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

Ireland Online:

Average Irish income (GNP) is now rising faster than output (GDP), a departure from the historical norm, reflecting the strength of income earned on Irish investments abroad, according to Bank of Ireland’s quarterly economic outlook, which was published today.

The country is now a high-income economy and exports a substantial amount of capital, the return on which has boosted Irish incomes. GNP growth was estimated at 7% in 2006, with 6.2% forecast in 2007 and 5.2% in 2008.

Bank of Ireland’s chief economist Dan McLaughlin said: “A few years ago we noted that the Irish economy was in transition to a new growth phase, which would see the economy at full employment, with output constrained by a scarcity of labour, so limiting potential growth to around 6% with domestic demand taking over from exports as the main driver.

“As we enter 2007, it is clear that this transition has successfully taken place where growth has averaged 5.3% over the five-year period to 2006, despite export growth of circa 5% per year with a notable acceleration evident in the past 18 months.

“Indeed, annual growth rose to 7.7% in the third quarter of last year, although for the year as a whole, we estimate GDP growth of 6.5%, the best performance since 2000, with 6% forecast for 2007 and 5% for 2008.”

Overseas assets boosting growth - BoI

Bank of Ireland says average Irish income (GNP) is now rising faster than Irish output (GDP) reflecting the strength of income earned on Irish investments abroad

Irish economy to grow by 6.2pc in 2007

Genes reveal West African heritage of Englishmen

2007-01-25T08:39:00.000-05:00

Roxanne Khamsi:

Gene tests on a sample of “indigenous” Englishmen have thrown up a surprise black ancestry, providing new insight into a centuries-old African presence in Britain.

The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, identified a rare West African Y chromosome in a group of men from Yorkshire who share a surname that dates back at least as far as the mid-14th century and have a typical European appearance. They owe their unusual Y chromosome to an African man living in England at least 250 years ago and perhaps as early as Roman times, the researchers say.

Mark Jobling at the University of Leicester, UK, and colleagues recruited 421 men who described themselves as British and analysed their genes as part of a survey of British Y chromosome diversity. To the researchers’ surprise, they found that one individual in the study carried a very rare Y chromosome, called hgA1.

This particular variant has previously been identified in only 26 people worldwide, three African Americans and 23 men living in West African countries such as Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. “It’s so distinctive, it really sticks out like a sore thumb,” Jobling says of the chromosome’s unique sequence. He adds that it is virtually impossible for this sequence to have coincidentally evolved in Britain.

The white British subject with the hgA1 variant, however, knew of no African family connection.

To explore the mysterious origin of his Y chromosome scientists recruited 18 other men that shared his rare surname, which dates back to the first use of surnames, hundreds of years ago, and was first recorded in the county of Yorkshire, in northern England. The researchers have not disclosed the surname to maintain the men’s privacy.

The team hoped that this would help them pinpoint when the hgA1 had variant entered the lineage, since Y chromosomes, like surnames, are passed from father to son.

Of the 18 men with the Yorkshire surname, six of them carried the hgA1 Y chromosome – including one man in the US, whose ancestors had migrated from England in 1894.

Genealogical records linked these men to two family trees, both dating back to the 1780s in Yorkshire. Jobling believes that these two genealogies are connected by a common male ancestor of West African descent living in England at least 250 years ago.

The British men carry an hgA1 Y chromosome that closely matches the one identified in men presently living in West Africa. This suggests that the former group’s black ancestor arrived in Britain within the past few thousand years. Had their hgA1 Y chromosome been introduced any thousands of years earlier, when humans first migrated from Africa to Europe, its sequence would have shown greater divergence from the one currently found in West Africa.

The hgA1 Y chromosome could perhaps have entered the gene pool in northern England 1800 years ago when Africans fought there as Roman soldiers, Jobling says. It also might have been introduced in the 9th century, when Vikings brought captured North Africans to Britain, according to some historians.

But scientists note that the majority of black men with the hgA1 variant currently live in Guinea-Bissau and nearby countries in West Africa. Because many slaves from this area came to Britain beginning in the mid-16th century, it is likely that the white men with the hgA1 variant have a black ancestor that arrived this way, researchers say.

This ancestor could have been a first-generation immigrant African or one whose family had lived in Britain for generations.

Jobling says his study provides the first evidence of a long-lived African presence in Britain. He adds that it raises the possibility that relationships among black and white people was perhaps more historically acceptable in Britain than some people might believe.

Vincent Brown of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, agrees and points to the example of Olaudah Equiano, a slave from West Africa who bought his freedom in Britain in the mid 18th century and achieved fame for his writing. Equiano lived in London and eventually married a white woman, notes Brown, who studies the history of slavery.

The new findings are unusual because they reveal the hidden African ancestry of white men, Jobling says. He notes that it is much more common for studies to discover or confirm the reverse. For example, gene tests gave strong evidence that the black descendents of the slave Sally Hemmings could also trace their ancestry to her "owner", the third US president, Thomas Jefferson (Nature, vol 396, p 27).

And several years ago, Jobling’s team found that more than a quarter of British African-Caribbean men have a Y chromosome which traces back to Europe rather than Africa.

Yorkshire clan linked to Africa

UK men discover long African lineage

First Genetic Evidence Of Long-lived African Presence Within Britain

Rare African DNA Discovered in White British Males

Tracing the route of our shared DNA from Africa to Yorkshire

Tykes are out of Africa

Sub-Saharan African Y chromosome haplogroup A in white British surname

Now it's official: the British state sponsored loyalist death squads for years in the north of Ireland

2007-01-23T08:31:00.000-05:00

Beatrix Campbell:

Nuala O'Loan is a heroine. None of us should under-estimate the moral courage this fastidious lawyer has mobilised merely do her job as Northern Ireland's police ombudsman: to tell the world that collusion describes the relationship between the British state and loyalist gunslingers.

Raymond McCord is a hero. When his own loyalist leaders and militias refused to acknowledge his quest for justice for his murdered son, he risked his life by turning to the purported enemies of his state - the human-rights organisations.

McCord joins the band of relatives who become heralds for their lost loved ones, whose journey confronts them with the state itself. McCord didn't retreat when he found himself in a web of special branch and loyalist assassins.

The human-rights advocates are heroes too, because they would not bow to the slur that they were mad, bad or Provo agents provocateurs for investigating the state's patronage of death squads. Lest we forget, the ombudsman's investigation was prefigured by an earlier report naming the guilty men, published by Jane Winter, the forensic director of British Irish Rights Watch.

None of these people are republicans. But the sectarian slur ricocheted across the ombudsman's bows again yesterday when Lord Maginnis - a liberal in the unionist firmament - dismissed her report not only as "rubbish" but as having "an alternative agenda" - code for Provo propaganda.

The devastating McCord report that was published yesterday tells us that allegations of collusion once dismissed as rubbish are true. But that epochal admission risks being swamped by an old paradigm: tribal paddies dragging the reluctant Brits into their dirty war. It is time for a paradigm shift. It is time for Britain to be brave and tell the truth about itself. It must narrate a new story about that 30-year conflict.

The ombudsman tells us that the collusion prevailed between the prelude to the ceasefires and the new millennium. Her investigation was constrained by the narrow focus imposed on her: she was only able to investigate the murder of Raymond McCord Jr, a 22-year-old RAF cadet. But Mount Vernon, his north Belfast neighbourhood, is both the local and the larger story of collusion.

Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, acknowledges that this is very embarrassing for the state. This is progress - when O'Loan published her heart-stopping chronicle of the RUC's disastrous role in the Omagh bombing of 1998 she was insulted by unionists, abused by the chief constable and abandoned by Downing Street. The ombudsman was being warned by No 10 that she was on her own.

At least this time Hain has accepted her critique. Even so, he consigns it to the past. But the past lives on - the ombudsman insisted yesterday that Ronnie Flanagan, the former chief constable, had responsibility for everything that happened in the police force he commanded, whatever he did or did not know. He has not been called to account before a public tribunal, and no one expects him to be now. Indeed, after his retirement he has been reincarnated with her majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Flanagan wasn't alone. He was part of an entire system. Who were the civil servants who staffed that security system in Northern Ireland during the Mount Vernon terror? Where are they now? What else were they doing to thwart justice while the state was investing in the Mount Vernon boys? What did these civil servants think they were doing? What did they tell the politicians sequestered in Hillsborough Castle? And the biggest question: what was the overarching agenda?

The Mount Vernon boys were state-sponsored assassins. Special branch ran their local leadership. We now know that British security services had penetrated all the paramilitary organisations. Was there ever an audit of all the murder, rape and pillage?

Collusion tells us about our institutions and their purpose. After 1987 - when the loyalist paramilitary organisations were beginning to contemplate peace - Britain re-armed, reinvigorated and refocused them, taking control through its proxies among the warlords, and prolonged the war. Their reputations as ruffians, religious maniacs and pumped-up thugs merely gilded the reputation reserved by the British as law-abiding peacemakers.

But by enlisting the Protestant militias as auxiliaries while presenting itself as a neutral arbitrator, Britain left itself vulnerable to exposure. It could not stop a father seeking justice for his son wherever he might find it - not from the UVF or Protestant politicians, but among the human-rights groups, in Dublin, in Washington and at the United Nations.

All these pressures are bearing down on Britain. It has been exposed not as peacemaker but as perpetrator, spreading terror and spilling blood; as the most powerful presence among the warlords. That is the national narrative we need to contemplate before we can consign collusion to the past.

Collusion report - The truth has finally come out

Report: N. Ireland Police Shielded Killers

RUC special branch had 'serial killer on books'

Pressure mounts on Ahern

No prosecution of police officers who aided killers

Collusion evidence missing or destroyed

Remnants of RUC have much to fear from SF move

Fine Gael demands that British come clean over loyalist attacks

Victims of loyalist violence meet O'Loan

RUC collusion officers still in police force

RUC was running UVF gang

Haddock on the bottom rung of collusion ladder

O'Loan uncovers RUC collusion with killers

Report to confirm collusion: SDLP

Over ten years of cover-ups left nineteen people dead

Red hair is most common in Ireland

2007-01-19T13:53:00.000-05:00

Robin McKie:

Red hair today is generally associated with the Scots and Irish, but there have been no consistent efforts to establish the prevalence of the condition.

“It has actually become harder to find the prevalence of red hair today,” said Rees. “More and more women — and some men — now dye their hair and we simply have no idea if a redhead is a real one or if a blonde is a redhead under the dye. As a result the incidence of red hair in Britain is still a bit of a mystery.”

Enter the scientists of the People of the British Isles project: thanks to their efforts, this most distinctive characteristic is now opening up its mysteries for the first time. Testing their white cell samples for two of the half-dozen red-hair versions of the MC1R gene, they were able to show their frequency in each area of the British Isles. The results were intriguing.

Where one is the maximum value, they got figures of 0.16 and 0.23 for the frequencies of red-hair genes in Cornwall and Devon. The frequency in Oxfordshire was 0.07; in Sussex and Kent 0.13; in northeast England 0.11; in Lincolnshire 0.07; and in Cumbria nil. In Wales the figure was 0.21, and in Orkney a high 0.26. But the highest was in Ireland. Using data from other research studies, the team got a figure for Ireland of 0.31, confirmation of the stereotypical image of the red-haired Irishman.

The results are remarkable, as Sir Walter Bodmer, the Oxford geneticist leading the project, acknowledges: “I was amazed at them. I didn’t expect to see something like this.”

The research gives us, for the first time, an insight into the startling numbers of native people who have been described as having red hair in ancient times.

Here is why red hair is so common in Ireland:

But why do we have such numbers in these parts of the British Isles today and not others? The answer, says Bodmer, is that red-hair genes were common among the first Britons and that populations in the archipelago’s fringes still carry their bloodline.

“Genes for red hair first appeared in human beings about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago,” agrees Rees.

These genes were then carried into the islands by the original settlers, men and women who “would have been relatively tall, with little body fat, athletic, fair-skinned and who would have had red hair”, says David Miles, of English Heritage.

Redheads therefore represent the land’s most ancient lineages. So if you want an image of how those first people appeared, don’t think of a hairy savage with a mane of thick black hair. Contemplate instead a picture of a slim, ginger-haired individual: Prince Harry, perhaps, or the actress Nicole Kidman who has Scottish and Irish descent.

Why did those early Britons have so many redheads in their midst in the first place? Is there an evolutionary advantage to having red hair in this part of the world? According to Rees, the answer may be yes.

The MC1R variants that cause red hair also have an effect on the skin. As a result, redheads do not make enough of the dark pigment melanin to protect them against the sun’s powerful ultraviolet rays. Their skin rarely tans. It just burns or freckles.

In Africa, where modern humans first evolved 150,000 years ago, this would have been fatal. In northern Europe, however, melanin-free skin could have provided an advantage because we make vitamin D in our skin when sunlight shines on it.

Dark-skinned people were protected against the African sun, but their ability to make vitamin D would have been badly affected in relatively gloomy northern Europe. This could have caused rickets, resulting in weak bones and curved legs — bad news for a hunter-gatherer. Rickets is particularly damaging for women, as it increases pelvic deformations, raising the risk of death in childbirth. So, the theory goes, we evolved white, melanin-free skin that has no dark pigment to block sunlight and cause rickets. Red hair was a side effect.

So there it is: being a redhead could mean you possess an evolutionary advantage over non-red-haired people.

Genetic differences between Britain and Ireland

Nearly two-thirds of voters want to see an English parliament set up as a counterweight to increasing autonomy for Scotland and Wales

2007-01-16T08:31:00.000-05:00

Severin Carrell:

The poll, commissioned to mark today's 300th anniversary of the former Scottish parliament voting for full political union with Westminster, suggests that 61% of voters in England want their own parliament, with the support of roughly half of all Scottish and Welsh voters.

The Labour leadership is already mounting an increasingly bitter campaign to counter a resurgence by the Scottish National party, which appears on course for a historic victory in May's elections for the devolved parliament. Polls suggest the SNP is likely to be the largest party at Holyrood, and in a position to form a ruling coalition with either the Liberal Democrats or an alliance of Green and leftwing minority parties.

On Sunday Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, confirmed that his party would publish a white paper within 100 days of taking power which would set out its plans for a national referendum on independence within four years.

Yesterday Labour ministers accused Mr Salmond of watering-down his original promise to publish a parliamentary bill for a referendum, saying this "flip flop" was intended to persuade the anti-independence Lib Dems to forge a new alliance.

Strengthening demand for an English parliament - an answer to the conundrum where Scottish Labour MPs vote to pass controversial England-only legislation, complicates Labour's attempts to defend the union. Mr Brown insisted at the weekend that union made all members of the UK far stronger, calling for a debate on reinvigorating "Britishness".

The Tories, only the fourth-largest party in Holyrood with about 14% of the vote, launch their Scottish election campaign in earnest on Thursday when David Cameron will take the entire shadow cabinet to Scotland to rally support.

Today the Royal Mint unveils a new commemorative coin to mark the 300th anniversary of the Union, although the official event is being held on May 1 to mark the tercentenary of the first sitting of the joint parliament at Westminster.

The new survey, carried out for the BBC's Newsnight, gives the government some cause for optimism. While several earlier surveys said that a majority of Scots favour independence, the BBC poll shows most voters are opposed to ending the union. Asked if they would favour seeing both Scotland and Wales breaking away from England, only 32% of Scots favoured independence. It found that 56% of Scots wanted to maintain the union, although voters in all three countries were evenly split about whether it would last for another 100 years.

Labour officials insisted yesterday that support for an English parliament was based on a misunderstanding of Westminster's wider influence on Scottish and Welsh affairs, as spending on English policies directly affected spending for the devolved administrations.

"After a better look at the arrangements, once the union is properly explained, the demand for an English parliament will die away," said one senior Cabinet adviser. "There is not a clamour for independence. We might be unpopular, but the SNP is a bin for protest votes and once people begin to see what they've to offer things will begin to crack."

However, Scilla Cullen, chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament, said the poll proved their stance was gaining support. "The Act of Union was appropriate for its time 300 years ago. Things have moved on and it seems to us that we've got to go back to basics and renegotiate the union, see what the nations want and what they want out of the union."

The Big Question: What would happen if Scotland achieved its independence?

After 300 years, is there a future for the Union?

Catholics question 'discrimination'

MSP: Irish in Scotland are hidden migrants

Celtic tiger/Celtic kitten

The number of companies set up last year was up 11% at 19,221 compared with the same period last year, according to a survey from Bank of Ireland

2007-01-11T08:23:00.001-05:00

Irish Times:

The bank's business start-up barometer said that larger cities remain the most popular sites for start-ups.

Last year, over 7,000 of the new firms were based in Dublin, with 1,524 in Cork and 1,93 in Galway. More than 600 companies registered in Limerick last year.

The busiest month for start-ups was June.

Dr Dan McLaughlin, B of I chief economist: "The strong level of business start-ups is testimony to two factors. The first reflects the buoyant nature of economic activity in Ireland - GDP growth last year exceeded 6 per cent, and 2007 looks set to deliver something similar, which is supportive of business confidence.

"The second point is that the Irish tax system is now much more conducive to risk-taking than it was, thus encouraging entrepreneurial activity".

Property dominates the start-up sector with the construction and civil engineering sectors accounting for the most new firms.

Last year was saw real estate management firms opening their doors in this sector. A further 1,131 real estate development and sales companies were set up last year.

New Irish company registrations rose 11% in 2006 but level of early-stage entrepreneurial start-ups fell

Irelandian economics

Collusion evidence — trickle turns to flood

2007-01-11T08:18:00.001-05:00

David Granville:

You'd think that a substantial – and growing – body of evidence supporting long-standing allegations of British state involvement in the murder of its own 'subjects' and those of a 'friendly' neighbour might warrant the kind of media treatment that, let's say, recent events in Ipswich, or the alleged murder of just one ex-KGB agent have attracted.

Unfortunately, this is the British state and Ireland, its very own partially-occupied colonial fag end, that we're talking about. Instead of pages of indignation, outrage and a scandal so large that senior heads – political, secret service and military – would have to roll, the silence has been almost deafening.

At the end of November an Irish parliamentary committee published its report into a number of incidents which took place on both sides of the Irish border in the mid-1970s, claiming the lives of 18 people. The Irish parliamentarians concluded that collusion was involved in many of the nine attacks under investigation.

The report is the fourth to date to be published in the wake of the Irish government-commissioned Barron report, which itself identified the possibility of widespread collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.

Particularly disturbing is the conclusion that successive British governments, including those of Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, were aware of the situation, as were the Irish authorities, but did nothing about it.

At the end of October, another report, prepared by a panel of independent, international investigators, concluded that there was "strong and credible evidence" of British state collusion in 24 of the 25 cases, involving 74 murders, it had investigated.

Both of these reports join a growing body of evidence pointing to substantial British state involvement in acts of criminality and murder in Ireland throughout the conflict from the early 1970s.

Among other damning evidence to have emerged in recent months has been:

the unearthing of documents by the Pat Finucane Centre and the Irish News revealing that, in 1973, the British government knew that between five and 15% of those serving in the Ulster Defence Regiment, a unit within the British army, were linked to loyalist groups and that the regiment was "the best single source of weapons" for loyalist terror gangs.

a report by police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan's team, which concludes that the Royal Ulster Constabulary's special branch had allowed loyalist informers to carry out around a dozen murders

claims made in October by a former police colleague that Chief Superintendent Harry Breen, the highest-ranking RUC officer to be killed by the IRA, had been involved with the mid-Ulster loyalist gang responsible for a number of attacks across the border, including the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, which resulted in 33 deaths and several hundred injuries.

Almost as damning as the growing body of evidence itself has been the British government's unwillingness to co-operate or assist the work of various investigations into collusion between the British state and its agents and loyalist paramilitaries.

Despite this lack of co-operation it is clear that attempts to keep the truth buried can never be wholly successful.

Indeed, some of those involved in the important initiatives concerned with bringing about individual and community reconciliation have spoken of the truth 'seeping under the doors'.

However, despite the trickle of evidence of evidence of collusion becoming more of a flood, outside of the Irish editions of the mainstream British media and their associated websites, very little has been reported. Even where it has, reports have elicited little or no comment from the public or politicians outside of Ireland.

As fellow campaigner and Englishman, Ken Keable, wrote recently:

"The result is that the British state is getting away with murder, the Blair government actively covers up these crimes, and so inured is the public to the whole mess that even when some of the information gets into the mainstream media, hardly anyone in Britain bats an eyelid."

Of course, had it been criminal activities and human-rights violations of the Syrian, Iranian, North Korean or perhaps the Venezuelan, states and their agents that had been under investigation, things would have been different.

Such attempts to ignore the crimes of the British state, carried out in our name, are themselves an outrage and a scandal. Apart from the dastardly nature of the crimes themselves, the implications for civil liberties and human rights in every part of Britain are enormous. It just goes to show how thin the veneer of 'democracy' in Britain really is.

Amazingly the oul' curmudgeon can't deliver

The Queen of England’s official historian in Scotland has sparked a political row by claiming that the country could flourish as an independent state

2007-01-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

Marc Horne:

Professor Christopher Smout, the Historiographer Royal, said it was “perfectly feasible” for Scotland to go it alone and that it could prosper in the same way as eastern European republics have done since the break-up of the Soviet Union. He claimed voters south of the border would be happy to see the break-up of the United Kingdom.

He also criticised claims by John Reid, the home secretary, that Scotland’s national security would be compromised by independence, describing his argument as “a complete non-starter”.

Smout, who is emeritus professor of history at St Andrews University, will this week chair a conference in Edinburgh, organised to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union. Ministers have condemned his intervention claiming that, as a member of the Royal household, he should remain politically neutral.

Senior Labour figures said his comments, so close to an election when the future of the Union will be a key issue, were “naive and destabilising” and would be an embarrassment to the Queen.

“It is unfortunate that someone this close to the Queen is coming out with these frankly shallow and not very significant arguments in favour of independence,” said Tom Harris, the Glasgow South MP.

“Politically, it would be better for us to stay in the Union and I would have thought that if a senior member of the Queen’s household did not share that view then they would just keep their mouth shut.

“I wouldn’t want to anticipate what Her Majesty’s view on this is, but I would expect she would be the first and foremost defender of the Union. I think he should be careful about coming out with destabilising and naive views without the express authority of the Queen because it does put a question mark over the royal family’s position on all of this.”

Allan Wilson, the deputy Scottish enterprise minister, said: “An adviser to the head of state should not be trying to destabilise it and jeopardise the jobs and prosperity of millions of Scots.”

Smout said the current constitutional settlement is unstable and it will be resolved either by the break-up of the Union or by Scots MPs being stripped of their voting rights at Westminster. Scottish independence, he said, would be welcomed in England, although he admitted that it would sadden the Queen.

Smout, who has advised the Queen on Scottish history since 1993, rejected Reid’s suggestion a separate Scotland would be a soft target for Al-Qaeda and would require frontier guards.

“There are no border patrols between Belgium and Holland and security there is no worse or better than it is here. There is no reason to think security would be slacker in an independent Scotland. Dr Reid’s observations are a complete nonstarter.”

He added: “The English would probably not be awfully upset if the Scots decided to go it alone. I think the Queen would be sorry, but I can’t see many other people south of the border being too regretful.”

Meanwhile, Archie Stirling, the founder of Scotland’s newest political party, the Scottish Democrats, has played down suggestions he could save the Union.

Professor ‘right to speak out’

Yet more double standards from Labour

Companies backed by state agency IDA Ireland injected almost €15bn into the Irish economy last year

2007-01-05T08:39:00.000-05:00

Ireland Online:

The agency revealed the workforce in supported companies increased by 3,795 last year, bringing total employment to 135,487.

Sean Dorgan, chief executive of IDA Ireland, said companies spent almost €15bn in the Irish economy from their annual sales of €77bn and paid over €2.8bn in corporation tax.

“The quality of investments from global companies into Ireland is of the highest standard, reflecting the remarkable evolution of the business ecosystem in Ireland as international competition and Irish economic conditions have changed,” Mr Dorgan said.

“Investments in the past year, such as those by Amgen and in R&D by Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, PepsiCo and Georgia Tech, are clear evidence of this evolution.

“There has been a rapid transformation in what Ireland offers international investors since the year 2000, which was the last year of volume-based growth. Now our growth is quality-based.”

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin said the strong performance of IDA-supported companies showed Ireland was continuing to attract quality jobs.

“What is particularly welcome is the regional spread of investments attracted by the IDA, with 89 new investment projects, including 46 R&D investments, occurring outside of Dublin,” Mr Martin said.

“The R&D strategy published during 2006 will help ensure that Ireland remains competitive and will continue to attract high-profile R&D projects in the future.”

Last year almost 60% of new greenfield projects, including six out of every seven R&D investments, took place outside Dublin.

During 2006, the IDA negotiated 71 new business projects involving a total investment of €2.6bn over a number of years. Around 54 R&D projects were supported by IDA with almost €470m up from €260m during 2005.

Over half of jobs in new IDA-supported projects in 2006 have wage levels of over €40,000 a year.

Mr Dorgan said it was vital the country strongly invest in infrastructure, such as roads, airports and public transport, provide competitive energy supplies and create an innovative research environment.

“These will be the basis of our future success. If we fail to provide essential infrastructure quickly, Dublin may falter and regions fail,” Mr Dorgan said.

The IDA said the country’s position in information and communications technologies was reinforced with new investments from Cisco, IBM, Netgear, Sandisk and Trend Micro, while biopharmaceuticals Amgen and Eli Lilly also chose to locate to Ireland for their bases outside the US for the development and manufacture of drugs.

“The very strong investment achievements of 2006, combined with the ongoing collaborative national efforts to continue the transformation of Ireland into an ever more advanced knowledge economy, gives us great confidence in our ability to win exciting new investment projects in 2007,” Mr Dorgan said.

“We have a good pipeline of potential investments and we are optimistic of winning quality new investments from new and existing clients for locations across Ireland.”

End 2006 Exchequer data underscore strength of Irish Economy

Company collapses hit 20-year low

Surplus in Ireland’s 2007 budget, even with voted spending growth

DUP's mindset is fossilized in 17th century

2007-01-05T08:31:00.000-05:00

We Say - Hardly a surprise

BBC's Today programme holds an annual poll to find out which law its listeners would like to repeal.

One of the options this time was the 1701 Act of Settlement, which requires Britain's monarch to be a Protestant and forbids the monarch or heir to the throne marrying anyone not C of E.

The man proposing the repeal of this particular piece of discriminatory legislation was award-winning author and historian William Dalrymple, an expert on Asian religions as well as being the presenter of a prize-winning radio series on British spirituality and mysticism.

You probably won't have heard this interview because it was broadcast about 7.25 one morning last week but Jeffrey Donaldson came on to say why the Act of Settlement should not be repealed. It was priceless stuff.

Poor Jeffrey claimed the law had to be retained because, among other things, a Catholic monarch would have to give allegiance to the pope who is also a head of state and, wait for it, that would mean a diminution in British sovereignty.

So that obviously means the real ruler of Spain is a German pope. The same goes for Belgium.

You thought Zapatero was elected to govern Spain and Guy Verhofstadt Belgium? No, according to the DUP mind, the real ruler of these modern democratic states is not the elected head of government but the hereditary monarch who's in thrall to the pope.

Can Jeffrey really believe that? Sadly it seems he can.

Dalrymple, who was supporting his proposal in the same interview, claimed that the BBC had to dredge up a unionist – who else? – to support the retention of this discrimination because they couldn't find anyone in Britain to defend it.

Dalrymple's exasperation was obvious to all listening because our wee Jeffrey just didn't geddit. It just never occurred to him that Dalrymple, a noted expert on the religions of the Indian sub-continent, was talking in the context of modern Britain, a context that remains eternally beyond the grasp of unionists.

For people like Dalrymple it's important to repeal the Act of Settlement not only to demonstrate equality before the law to Catholics, a concept unionists have never come to terms with, but even more important in Britain nowadays, to demonstrate equality to Muslims, Hindus and Jews.

Our Jeffrey never thought for a second that by supporting the Act of Settlement he was advocating discriminating against Jews and Muslims and Hindus, now a sizeable proportion of British society. Jeffrey could only see the Act of Settlement in its 1701 context when the only bogeyman was the pope.

You have to laugh.

The interview provided a crystal-clear example of the gap between unionists' idea of Britishness and current thinking in Britain.

Stand by this year for an outpouring of books and articles and programmes on the concept of Britishness. May marks the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union between Scotland and England which officially invented Britain as a state.

Westminster is intent on formal commemoration of the event, unlike with the 1801 Act of Union anniversary six years ago.

Will the SNP use opposition to the anniversary of 1707 as a springboard for the Scottish parliament elections the following week? Do most Scots see themselves first and foremost now as British, or Scottish? The indications are most Scots have had enough of being run from London.

One certainty is that in all the analysis and soul-searching this year about the meaning of Britishness there'll be no place for the lost tribe in the sick counties.

As far as the majority of people on the other island is concerned the sort of embarrassing nonsense professed by Jeffrey Donaldson is an unrecognisable form of Britishness, a version fossilised in the 17th century which everywhere else was dissolved in the melting pot of 20th century Britain.

Perhaps the most dispiriting observation you can make about Jeffrey Donaldson's bizarre defence of the Act of Settlement is that he is representative of the next generation of unionist leaders.

The current leadership is a political Jurassic Park but if the mindset exhibited on the Today programme is anything to go by, then the prospect the coming men offer is back to the future.

Irish economic growth very strong and looks likely to be sustained

2007-01-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

Austin Hughes:

Data for the third quarter of 2006 show that the Irish economy is continuing to deliver extremely strong economic growth. The details of CSO figures issued on Dec 21, also suggest that economic prospects may be somewhat brighter than some commentators have suggested.

Growth in the third quarter was boosted by a strengthening in exports with manufacturing output recovering and services exports surging. While household spending and house building remained solid, these numbers suggest strong economic growth is not entirely the product of a debt-fuelled binge on property and consumer goods.

In the third quarter of 2006, real GDP was 7.4 per cent higher than a year earlier while real GNP increased by some 5.4 per cent. These quarterly data can be quite volatile, and it appears that the numbers for the third quarter were flattered by timing issues relating to imports and exports. If today’s figures exaggerate the numerical strength of the Irish economy in the third quarter somewhat, the broad message of exceptionally healthy economic conditions is consistent with that emerging from recent employment and tax revenue data. We now look for GDP to increase by just under 6 per cent in 2006 with GNP set to increase by around 6.5 per cent. Reflecting the carryover of stronger end year conditions, we have raised our forecasts for 2007 by a half percentage point and now expect both GDP and GNP growth of 5.5 per cent next year.

Strong growth in third quarter of 2006

Budget 2007 - More than meets the eye?

Genetic differences between Britain and Ireland

2007-01-02T08:48:00.000-05:00

Robin McKie:

A key example is provided by the People of the British Isles study, led by Sir Walter Bodmer, which has found rich concentrations of genes of the British Isles' first hunter-gatherer settlers in men and women now living in Cornwall, Devon, Scotland and Ireland. One version of the gene MCR1 often confers red hair on its owners and explains those ancient Roman and Greek reports of widespread ginger locks among early Britons. Red hair was common until invasions by non-redheads - like the Anglo-Saxons - pushed these settlers to Britain's outer edges. Hence the red-haired Scots and Irish we see today.

Bodmer has found signs of Anglo-Saxon genes in east England, the remnants of the invaders who established English as the language of the British Isles, while Wilson's research has discovered evidence that Vikings, who colonised Orkney, did so by eradicating nearly ever male member of its Pictish population. This latter discovery was made by analysing the Y-chromosome. Orkney men today tend to have Y-chromosomes like those of modern Scandinavians, the Vikings' direct descendants.

Relax - we're all Anglo-Saxon anyway!

Myths of British Ancestry

Anglo-Saxons Were Apartheid Racists!

'Apartheid' slashed Celtic genes in early England

We're nearly all Celts under the skin

Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration

English and Welsh are races apart

Corruption in the north of Ireland

2006-12-28T09:37:00.000-05:00