Sinn Fein funded by the IRA

Sinn Fein 'morally unclean' and funded by the IRA says McDowell

JUSTICE MINISTER of the Republic of Ireland Michael McDowell launched a controversial attack on Sinn Féin last night, accusing the IRA of engaging in crime to fund the party's political rise.

In comments likely to have significant implications for the formation of a new Stormont administration, the minister claimed Sinn Féin's political purse was directly funded by IRA criminal activities.

He said Sinn Féin was morally unclean.

He claimed "there is a close connection between Sinn Féin and the IRA and I have no doubt that senior figures in the IRA are engaging in crime to fund the republican movement.

"I don't believe there are strict Chinese walls between Sinn Féin money and IRA money.

"I strongly reject the implicit suggestion that their party is morally clean," he said. When asked if this meant that Sinn Féin's electoral campaigns were funded by money coming from criminal activities by IRA members, he said he believed they were.

Last Word presenter Matt Cooper also asked him if he meant that a growing force in politics was being funded by the proceeds of crime.

"That's exactly the point I'm making. The body politic is at the moment cleansing itself through new laws enacted, through the tribunal process. It ill behoves Sinn Féin to point the finger at anybody when they have close connections to the IRA and organised crime in Ireland," he said.

Mr McDowell alleged that members of the IRA had turned to what he termed "ordinary crime" since their release under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

"One of the things I find most difficult to take is the Sinn Féin party talking about corruption in political life and pointing the finger at others, when they have people very much closer to home whom they hope the media and people like me will stay quiet about. I certainly won't."

I think the figures speak for themselves........................................

Sunday Independent
Lest we forget what the Provos really did

SO IT'S all over for the Provos. Sure, they'll bleat and whinge and threaten, but grudgingly they'll tell us that their war is over. And they'll try to persuade us that it was a just, honourable and successful war, that they were the goodies and that they won.

Before remorseless republican revisionism brainwashes everyone, let's just remind ourselves what the Provisional IRA have done to this country with their guns and bombs and rockets and iron bars and baseball bats since they came into being in December 1969.

The Provos claim they defended the Catholic population from loyalists and security forces, that they were fighting for justice and equality and that by their sacrifice and heroism they have brought a United Ireland closer than anyone could have dreamed.

But it wasn't like that. The Provos made Ireland worse for everyone, Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and unionist, northerners and southerners, civilians and the uniformed. They even made it worse for themselves. They made it worse, not just because of all those they killed and injured and terrified and corrupted, but because everything they did sowed bitterness and mistrust.

More than 3,600 people died during the troubles - almost 50 per cent of them at the hands of the Provos. (Other republican groups bring that tally up to almost 60 per cent.) Loyalists killed just under 30 per cent; security forces 10 per cent.

The Provos weren't defenders of their people. They killed five times as many republicans (162) as they did loyalists (28). Not only did they kill hundreds of Catholics, both accidentally and on purpose, but they provoked loyalist violence.

As Malachi O'Doherty, born and brought up in West Belfast, said in The Trouble with Guns, "the Provisionals articulated not defence but defiance, and the cost of that defiance was increased casualties among the Catholic working

classes".

Of the almost 1,100 killed by loyalists, Catholics bore the brunt. The security forces would not have been killing people had the Provos not been attacking them. The Provos bang on about Bloody Sunday year in, year out and the media exhaustively report that £150m bonanza for lawyers called the Saville Inquiry.

But we don't hear that the Paras wouldn't have run amok on Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, if they hadn't been keyed up by recent Provo murders: that very month, two 18-year-old soldiers, four policemen, one member of the Ulster Defence Regiment and one civilian (to stop him being a witness in an arson case); the previous year, 44 soldiers, 11 policemen and five members of the UDR. When we think of Bloody Sunday, we might put it in perspective and remember how restrained were the security forces, who almost always killed in self-defence.

Here are a few figures Gerry Adams won't give you. Army: 503 soldiers killed; they killed 301. Local defence forces: (UDR/Royal Irish Rifles): 206 killed; they killed 8. The RUC, whom the Provos so thoroughly demonised, lost 303 members and killed 50. The Provos got off lightly, killing 911 soldiers and policemen and losing only 115. But that was typical, for they always got off very, very lightly.

How many of us remember that though during the troubles they killed almost 1,800, they lost fewer than 300? That many of these were killed by their own bombs or shot as informers? That the hunger strikers of 1981 were terrorists? That Bobby Sands was in jail for transporting weapons to kill? That Francis Hughes, the second to die, had murdered between one and three dozen people who were husbands, fathers, brothers and sons that no one ever makes any fuss about? When the republican ballads about cruel English ways are being sung, how many of us remember what the Provos did to people?

There are those who make excuses for atrocities like Claudy or Enniskillen or La Mon - where an IRA fireball burned seven women and five men to death at the dinner-dance of the Irish Collie Club - by saying that mistakes happen in war. (They are usually the same people who make no allowances whatever for mistakes made by soldiers or policemen.)

But even Martin McGuinness can't justify what happened to Patsy Gillespie, a Catholic canteen worker who was chosen in 1990 to be the Provos' first human bomb? Yes, folks, our very own Provos got there ahead of Osama bin Laden. The only difference was that Osama's pilots were volunteers. Poor Patsy was forced to drive a van bomb to a checkpoint because the Provos had kidnapped his family; he died along with five soldiers.

Patsy didn't trouble the Provos' consciences. These so-called defenders are oppressors, and oppressors believe you can't keep people down without violence, intimidation, propaganda, lies and the preaching of hate. The republican leaders who killed and maimed their own people along with the so-called enemy these days preside over beatings and shootings and the suppression of free speech in the sad little ghettos they control. And, of course, over the criminal empire that subsidises Sinn Fein.

The Provos' stated reason for rejecting Sunningdale in 1973 and innumerable other constitutional options was that Northern Ireland could not be reformed so it had to be destroyed. They ruined the lives of thousands of people because they were too thick to grasp their analysis was wrong.

Now that the Provos are giving up their war to put some representative bottoms back on the benches of Stormont, what has become of the United Ireland they claimed they were fighting for? Why, their grimy and heartless war has made it almost impossible.

Sectarianism is worse than 30 years ago; communal memories are incomparably more bitter; unionist mistrust of nationalists is at an all-time high, for they see them voting for murderers and closing ranks with them in negotiations; and the south just wants the troublesome North to go away.

The war is over because the Provos' game is up. It was an unjust, dishonourable and unsuccessful war, they were the baddies and they lost. They do not deserve to have gotten off so lightly. But then, they always did.

http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2003/jan10_IRA_shares_blame__Editorial.php
IRA must take share of blame

(Editorial, Irish News)

Although the latest message from the IRA is particularly truculent in
tone, it is important to remember that previous statements from the same
source have regularly proved to be unreliable in many key respects. In
other words, when attempting to assess the IRA's position, it is wiser
to examine what the organisation does rather than what it says.

The IRA statement said that a crisis had been created through the
activities of both the "British military establishment" and loyalist
paramilitary groups, as well as the failure of unionists to embrace change.

At no stage was there any indication that republicans had ever failed
to live up to their own responsibilities.

It is therefore reasonable to examine the credibility of the IRA's
record since its first ceasefire in 1994.

A matter of weeks after the introduction of what was supposed to be a
complete cessation, IRA gunmen shot dead a Catholic postman, Frank Kerr,
during an armed robbery in Newry, Co Down. Republicans initially denied
any link with the murder but a later statement admitted that IRA members
had carried out the raid without the sanction of the republican leadership.

In 1996 IRA gunmen shot dead Garda Jerry McCabe during another
attempted robbery in Adare, Co Limerick. An immediate IRA statement
denied that the organisation was linked to the murder. A second
statement later the same year accepted that IRA men were involved,
although it was suggested they were acting without authority.
Republicans are now claiming the individuals convicted of the killing as
recognised IRA members who deserve to be released from jail under the
terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

In October 2000 Joseph O'Connor was shot dead in the strongly
republican Ballymurphy district of west Belfast. The IRA again denied
involvement, a claim treated with derision by people in the area.
Despite further denials the IRA is also known to have been behind a
series of killings in Belfast attributed to group calling itself Direct
Action Against Drugs.

Also in 2000, three men who said in court that they were IRA members
were convicted on gun-smuggling charges in Florida. One of the weapons
they sent back to Ireland was later found in the possession of a Sinn
Féin member in Co Cork, who was also jailed earlier this year.

Three suspected IRA members are presently on trial in Columbia,
accused of providing training for Farc guerrillas there. Sinn Féin at
first categorically denied that one of the men was the party's official
representative in Cuba, only to later admit that this was indeed the case.

All these well documented events helped to create the climate in which
allegations of IRA involvement in intelligence-gathering operations in
both Castlereagh and Stormont over the last year would be widely believed.

Political criticism can certainly be levelled at unionists, while in a
very different way loyalist paramilitary groups have undoubtedly set out
to pursue a evil agenda. It is even possible, given the lessons of
history, that British agents have again played a malign role in recent
events.

However, rather than condemning everyone else, the IRA should accept
its share of the blame for the predicament in which we find ourselves
today and start to take the public steps which it must know are
necessary if a solution is to be found.

Despite the statement on Wednesday night, there is still good reason
to believe that progress is possible in the short term.

January 11, 2003

Belfast Telegraph
Trimble urges US to get tough on SF

By Noel McAdam, Political Correspondent

DAVID Trimble today warned he will tell the US Government to reconsider its approach to Sinn Fein if republicans fail the "final test" to restore devolution.

As he prepared to leave for America, the Ulster Unionist leader said he wanted Washington to deliver a blunt, unequivocal message to SF.

And he confirmed his party is involved in on-going discussions with senior republicans, which he made clear he has personally authorised.

On decommissioning, Mr Trimble also said it was important that in the future any amount of weapons put beyond use is clearly quantified.

Mr Trimble said he would be telling key people in the Bush administration they were poised to fight a "just war" against Saddam Hussein which republicans oppose.

"Perhaps republicans see Saddam as not such a bad guy: maybe they see him as someone who is misunderstood? Maybe they believe he didn't murder, torture and terrorise opponents and ethnic minorities in his own country," he told a Press conference at party headquarters.

The former First Minister said republicans' mask had slipped, following the "jungle adventures" of Colombia which he said had sent "alarm bells ringing" in the US.

And he said republicans had also failed to outrightly condemn the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

"Increasingly Americans are seeing through their blarney and their double-speak. They know they are not their friends," Mr Trimble said.

He again spelled out his three requirements and accused SF of attempting to unravel the 'understanding' arrived at during the Hillsborough talks after he left.

They had to decommission "in an open and verifiable way"; make a statement that the so-called 'war' is over and agree to be locked into tough sanctions.

"Absence of any of these three political imperatives and their acts will be ineffectual," he said.

IRA to face new pressure in US
BY CHRISTOPHER WALKER
March 10, 2003

THE IRA will come under renewed pressure to disarm this week when politicians
from Belfast and Dublin fly to the United States to mark St Patrick's Day.
They will be joined by Hugh Orde, Chief Constable of the new Police Service
of Northern Ireland. He is the first police chief to attend.
The centrepiece reception at the White House will take place on Thursday,
four days before the Irish patron saint's day on March 17 - a move,
diplomatic sources said, that reflected the way in which a possible war with
Iraq had overshadowed the issue of Northern Ireland.
In a speech, President Bush is expected to urge the IRA to renounce all forms
of paramilitary activity. Officials in Washington said that he was unlikely
to hold a special meeting with Sinn Fein leaders, including Gerry Adams,
unless the IRA made a prior gesture of conciliation.
The programme of the Sinn Fein delegation will be organised by one of the
30-40 fugitives that Sinn Fein is demanding be allowed to return to Northern
Ireland under a new peace deal. Rita O'Hare, 58, the organisation's publicity
director in the United States, is wanted in Northern Ireland for absconding
while on bail 28 years ago. She faces charges arising from a gun attack on
soldiers alleged to have been lured by her into an ambush.
David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, said yesterday that no progress
had been made on the question of sanctions being taken against political
parties re-entering a power-sharing administration at Stormont. His party is
insisting that parties should face sanctions if groups with which they are
associated flout the terms of the Good Friday agreement.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-605486,00.html

Irish Independent 8th March
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=931770&issue_id=8869
Trouble for Blair as Bush freezes out SF

IN the week just ending, the most important event for the future of these islands did not happen in London, Dublin, or Belfast. It happened in Washington DC.

The event was the decision of President George Bush not to receive Gerry Adams on St Patrick's Day at the White House.

Last year Mr Adams was among a group of five party leaders photographed with Mr Bush in the Oval Office along with Bertie Ahern.

This year there will be no Oval Office photograph of Mr Adams with Mr Bush.

The official version of the reason for the difference between the receptions on the two St Patrick's Days has to do with the present inconclusive state of the peace process.

This is the version propagated by the Irish Embassy in Washington. Pat Kelly, spokesman for the embassy, told the press: "The White House basically envisaged it only if a deal could be done."

That is the hand-out but, like so many political hand-outs, it is not the truth, and the press in Washington know it is not the truth.

As Tony Harnden, the Daily Telegraph's well-informed Washington correspondent wrote on Thursday: "Although the failure of the Northern Ireland parties to reach agreement on restoring devolved government will be publicly cited as the justification, a key reason for freezing out Mr Adams is the IRA's links with the Farc.

The Bush administration now considers combating the Farc to be a part of the war against terrorism, a shift in strategy that by extension makes the IRA and Mr Adams designated enemies of the United States."

Both the London and Dublin governments have to know of that momentous "shift in strategy".

They don't have to comment on it for now, as they can still shelter behind the Bush administration cover-story about the peace process.

Saving the face of Tony Blair, the American government's closest ally over Iraq, is the reason why the cover-story is there, but the cover-story is not likely to outlast the situation which gave rise to it.

War with Iraq, is now probable, but is not likely to last long.

Then there will be the trials of the Colombia Three, probably in no more than a few months time.

If these trials result in convictions and stiff sentences then the IRA will be officially declared enemies of the United States, and the British government will be required by Washington to break off all relations with Sinn Fein, unless Sinn Fein itself repudiate the IRA, which is extremely unlikely.

Tony Blair must be extremely worried about the American shift in strategy in relation to Sinn Fein-IRA, on whose appeasement the British Prime Minister still appears to be bent.

Such a policy on the part of the British can hardly be reconciled with the position of the present US defence administration.

Telegraph
Telegraph website

Terrorist link prompts Bush to snub Adams
By Toby Harnden in Washington
(Filed: 06/03/2003)

Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, will not be permitted to shake hands with President George W Bush or visit the Oval Office during next week's St Patrick's Day celebrations at the White House.

The decision was taken after the Farc, a Colombian narco-terrorist group, used its training from the Provisional IRA to launch a campaign of urban bombing and began to target Americans.

A defence contractor working for the US Army was murdered and three more taken hostage by the Farc last month after their single engine Cessna plane crashed in the jungle 200 miles south of Bogota.

The Bush administration now considers combating the Farc to be a part of the war against terrorism, a shift in strategy that by extension makes the IRA and Mr Adams designated enemies of the United States.

Although the failure of the Northern Ireland parties to reach a deal on restoring devolved government will be publicly cited as the justification, a key reason for freezing out Mr Adams is the IRA's links with the Farc.

Last year, Mr Adams was among a group of five party leaders photographed with Mr Bush in the Oval Office along with Bertie Ahern, the Irish premier, and John Reid, then Northern Ireland Secretary. This year, there will be no photograph and no contact between Mr Adams and Mr Bush.

"That's my understanding of how it's been set up," said Pat Kelly, spokesman for the Irish Embassy in Washington. "The White House basically envisaged it only if a deal could be done."

Three alleged IRA members, including James Monaghan, an explosives expert who was photographed beside Mr Adams at a Sinn Fein conference in 1989, are currently being tried in Bogota on charges of training the Farc's recruits.

A senior US defence official said: "The Farc is using very sophisticated car bombs, mortars and remote controlled devices that have been developed with the help of European terrorist groups such as the IRA and ETA.

"They've activated a plan to shift to urban terrorism. Their attacks are now even more indiscriminate than before. They really don't care who they kill.

"The Farc has also been increasingly targeting Uribe [Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president] - 12 times this year. And it has been deliberately targeting Americans. The whole thing is a package, a completely new approach."

After lobbying from the Pentagon and pressure from Congress, the Bush administration has allowed money from budgets for the war against terrorism to be allocated to Colombia.

"Including Colombia in the global war against terrorism changes priorities and makes it easier to give them [the Colombian government] certain assets," said the senior defence official.

Last month Thomas Janis, 56, a former Delta Force soldier, and Sgt Luis Alcides Cruz, of Colombian military intelligence, were shot dead at close range after the Cessna crash landed.

Mr Janis and the three contractors, also former soldiers, taken hostage were working on electronic surveillance of coca fields, source of 90 per cent of the cocaine smuggled into America. The Farc declared them "gringo CIA agents". So far, a search operation, including the use of around 100 US Special Forces troops, has failed to locate them.

"We don't know much but I'm afraid they are now out of the box where they were captured," said the defence official. "We know how they are but not where they are. One may have been bitten by a snake and this could be very bad news."
# Jeremy McDermott in Medellin writes: A renegade guerrilla, John Alexander Rodriguez Caviedes, 19, claims to have video and photographic evidence to prove that he was taught to build bombs and fire rocket launchers by the three alleged IRA men on trial in Colombia. Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were arrested in August 2001 as they stepped off a plane from a Farc stronghold in the south of the country.

Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-604191,00.html
March 09, 2003

Bush to insist IRA ends paramilitary activities
Liam Clarke



PRESIDENT George W Bush will urge the IRA to renounce all forms of paramilitary activity and to support the police in a speech he will give in Washington on Thursday.

The American president is also expected to support the British and Irish governments’ push to restore Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration and to impose sanctions on any party that breaks its commitment to peace.

Sinn Fein representatives, including Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Pat Doherty, Gerry Kelly and Martin Ferris, will be in the audience for Bush’s speech.

Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief constable, will become the first Northern Ireland police chief to attend the traditional St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washington. Orde will bring two police recruits, one Catholic and one Protestant, to represent reconciliation and equality of opportunity within the force.

When Bill Clinton was in the White House, Adams and McGuinness were allowed to shake hands publicly with the president at the St Patrick’s Day bash, while most of the Irish political class attended a series of receptions in Washington.

This year Bush is unlikely to meet Sinn Fein unless the IRA makes an earlier conciliatory gesture. Instead there are plans to give groups of community representatives, drawn from both traditions in Northern Ireland, pride of place in the Oval Office.

The IRA is preparing a statement which, while it may stop short of saying “the war is over”, may amount to the same thing. It is likely to be issued within the next five weeks.

The statement is expected to be accompanied by a Sinn Fein decision to support the PSNI and to take its places on the police board.

The Sinn Fein representatives, all of whom have current or past associations with the IRA, now find it difficult to get permission to enter America unless they have appointments to meet government officials. They will use the few days before their visa waivers run out to promote the proposed change in policy among American supporters and will raise funds at a series of ticket-only events in 11 cities.

Irish-American support has been vital to changes of IRA strategy and on this occasion the pressure is likely to be for concessions.

Orde has won the support of key Irish-American opinion formers, including Bill Flynn of Mutual of America and Niall O’Dowd of the Irish Voice, and this new law-and-order mood in Irish America will be conveyed to Sinn Fein.

The IRA statement and the deal surrounding it have been the subject of regular contacts between the British, Irish and American governments and the Northern Ireland parties.

David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader who has been in extensive contact with Sinn Fein in the past week, said yesterday that the IRA needs to say that the war is over and it is being wound up.

Trimble has made it clear that he will not return to government with Sinn Fein without a substantial act of IRA decommissioning and the introduction of sanctions to punish Sinn Fein if the IRA breaks its word.

“If they don’t decommission straight away then we will wait until they do,” the Ulster Unionist leader said.

Please spend a few moments making your feelings known to the relevant individual's and newspapers listed below, we must oppose terrorists and those who would support them. Tim Anderson UPMJ.

****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******

Governor Patakis conflict of interests, he must resign now.

****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******

This St. Patrick’s Day, Governor George Pataki is not expected to break Irish soda bread with his pal from Belfast, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Given Adams’ harsh, little-noticed words for the Bush administration in mid-February, Pataki may want to jot a quick note of thanks to Adams for not visiting Albany. Its not the first time Adams put his fingers up at the Americans, President Bush's special envoy, Ambassador Richard Haass, personally asked Adams not to go to Castro's Cuba.

But Adams not only ignored them and went to "honor" Castro, he then refused to criticize Castro's human rights abuses or to even meet with any pro-democracy dissidents in Cuba. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams' decision to visit Fidel Castro's Cuba was an insult to all Americans. Then a defense contractor working for the U.S. Army was murdered and three more taken hostage by the FARC last month after their single engine Cessna plane crashed in the jungle 200 miles south of Bogota. The Bush administration now considers combating the FARC to be a part of the war against terrorism, a shift in strategy that by extension makes the IRA and Adams designated enemies of the United States.

Like many top New York Republicans, Pataki is a loyal ally of the Bush administration and its war on terror, but he is also a longtime admirer of Adams, the ultra Irish terrorist. Adams put Pataki -- and other New York Republicans, such as Long Island Congressman Peter King -- in a tough spot several days ago, when he blasted the Bush administration’s plans for war on Iraq.

But one wonders how well Pataki’s relationship with Adams sits with President Bush. After all, it’s an open secret that Pataki is angling for a job in the Bush administration. But Pataki’s leftward lurch during his second term made him few friends among social and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party. Imagine the fun they’d have passing around photos of Pataki grinning alongside Adams -- a left-wing, antiwar European whose supporters have, unfairly or not, been linked with terrorist acts on several continents.

Particularly bothersome of late to the Bush administration (and hence trouble for Pataki) is a trial unfolding in Bogotá, Colombia, where three Irishmen (including a top Sinn Fein aide) stand accused of training left-wing Colombian terrorists. Adams has said that Sinn Fein had no knowledge of, much less involvement in, the Colombia fiasco. But that didn’t prevent the Pataki-friendly (most of the time, anyway) New York Post from running an editorial which cast Adams as Osama bin Laden’s blood brother.

It is one thing, for Pataki to forgive Adams’ past transgressions, it is quite another to support terrorists who vocally oppose war in Iraq and also to remain associated in any way with terrorist escapades in South America.

As Pataki continues to drop in the polls -- thanks to a tanking state economy and looming service cuts -- a job with the Bush administration will surely look better and better. But as his pal Gerry Adams could certainly attest, the past may yet come back to haunt him. Pataki is a disaster waiting to happen and should resign from office straight away, he has an obvious conflict of interests when it come s to defeating terrorism and is selective to say the least.

Let Pataki and all NY papers and offices know your feeling about his support for terrorism and murder.

Contact Details for relevant people and offices.

Governor George Pataki web sites and email;

http://www.state.ny.us/governor

http://www.georgepataki.com

http://161.11.3.75/

http://www.nysegov.com/search-NY.cfm?displaymode=normal&fontsize=100&contrast=lod&context=askthegov&content=contactus

Address;

Governor George E. Pataki

State Capitol

Albany, NY 12224

USA

--------------------------------------------

City Council Speaker Gifford Miller is hosting a reception for Gerry Adams, the leader of political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Mr. Adams was barred from the Oval Office at this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration, but he is listed as the guest of honor on invitations to the City Council’s “Irish Heritage Celebration” next Thursday. James Oddo of Staten Island is opposed to the visit, saying that you cant understand Adams his "fanatical gibberish needs translated into a parlance that we rational folk can understand,”

Make your feeling known to City Councils Gifford Miller and his support for terrorism and murder.

Gifford Miller 36 East 73rd Street (Suite C), 10021

City Hall: (212) 788-7210

District: (212) 535-5554

Fax: (212) 535-6098

Email: miller@council.nyc.ny.us

Irish Independent 28th August
Family's torment that has endured for decades

THE failure of the intensive searches to locate the bodies of the IRA victims, who became known as "the disappeared", has been a constant thorn in the side of the Provisional political leadership as it seeks respectability on both sides of the Border in the wake of the Good Friday peace agreement.

The IRA agreed to provide information to help pinpoint the whereabouts of the nine bodies after the Irish and British governments introduced legislation preventing any evidence resulting from the discovery of the bodies from being used in attempts to prosecute the killers.

It seemed as if the families of the victims were about to have closure on the agony they had endured over the previous decades as the searches were finally authorised in the summer of 1999. And the terrorist godfathers must also have been reasonably optimistic - despite the confusion they subsequently caused by the paucity of information supplied on where they were buried - that the embarrassing issue could be removed from the spotlight. But, unfortunately for the families, progress has been painfully slow after an encouraging start. The first body was left by the IRA in a newly purchased coffin above ground at Old Faughart cemetery, outside Dundalk, on May 28, 1999, hours before the Gardai began their series of digs for the remains. An alleged informer, Eamon Molloy, from Ardilea Street, Belfast, had been abducted, interrogated and then shot in the back of the head by the Provisionals in 1975.

Gardai were satisfied that Mr Molloy was murdered on the far side of the Border and his body recently moved across to the cemetery for discovery.

The find raised hopes that the other eight bodies would be quickly found.

The following month gardai recovered the bodies of two more victims, Brian McKinney and John McClory in a shallow grave in drained bogland at Colgagh, Culloville, two miles from the Monaghan border with south Armagh after a 30-day search of the area.

The two men had gone missing from their homes in Belfast in 1978 and republican sources claimed they had been abducted by the IRA and interrogated about allegedly stealing weapons belonging to the organisation and subsequently used in robberies. But after those finds the trail ran cold and in May 2000 the gardai decided to call of the concentrated searches, in the absence of any progress.

The biggest search was at Templetown beach, Carlingford, Co Louth, where the IRA had indicated they had buried the body of Belfast mother of ten, Jean McConville.

The searches covered over 5,500 sq metres at Templetown and excavated more than 15,000 tonnes of sand which was later sifted by hand.

Several acres were examined at the other dig sites at Oristown bog, outside Kells, Co Meath; Coghalstown, Navan; Lacken, Co Wicklow; and Carrickroe, Emyvale, Co Monaghan.

But until now there has been no sign of the bodies of Mrs McConville or the five other disappeared, Brendan Megraw, Kevin McGee, Seamus Wright, Danny McIlhone and Columba McVeigh.

Most of the attention has been focused on the plight of the McConville family who have sustained their campaign to put pressure on the IRA to provide more detailed information and encourage the authorities to resume searching.

The McConville case also encapsulated, in the public imagination, the ordeals undergone by the victims before they were eventually killed and the suffering endured since by their relatives and loved ones.

An IRA gang of eight men and four women dragged Jean McConville from the bathroom of her maisonette in Belfast's Divis flats and, ignoring the screams of her children, bundled her into a car.

It was shortly before Christmas 1972 and it was last time that the children saw their mother, dead or alive.

Ten months earlier Jean's husband, Arthur had died from cancer and the orphan children were eventually put into care, coming together again in one room for the first time in 1999, apart from Anne, who died from a stroke seven years earlier.

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=44&si=1036062&issue_id=9706

Belfast Telegraph
Gail Walker: Discovery shows Provo hypocrisy in new light

By Gail Walker
gwalker@belfasttelegraph.co.uk

02 September 2003
LET'S just examine that most recent IRA statement regarding the discovery of the remains of Jean McConville.

The organisation is looking for kudos by saying it had carried out a review of all the information available to it, revisiting each case "in detail."

It then states that it had passed on "specific information" about the location of Mrs McConville's body.

What a parody this is. We are invited to imagine a world of extraordinary bureaucracy.

Such is the volume of files and paperwork kept in good nick by teams of Provo civil servants ("more than my job's worth, guv") that the search for the relevant page of foolscap detailing how Jean McConville was abducted and shot in the back of the head was so painstaking that the pen-pusher who came across the file almost deserves a clap on the back and a round of applause.

Dear, oh dear. Who would be a Provo? "All we want to do is get those touts off the streets - instead we're stuck at the office filling in forms."

Yeah, yeah.

The IRA says it undertook its review to "redress injustices." Well, Vol P O'Neill or whoever you are, how about starting with the person or persons who murdered her?

But, of course, a Provo murder, even when they admit it, is never a real murder. It's a regrettable mistake, a tragic consequence of British oppression, "well, somebody had to be strapped to the bomb to drive it into the army camp and it wasn't going to be one of us", eggs and omelettes, and more of the same oul blether.

The fact is Jean McConville's murder wasn't a Provo mistake.

She was targeted because she was spotted giving comfort to a dying soldier.

The fact she was a Protestant (married to a Catholic) just made it all the more right in the eyes of the psychopaths who killed her and whom the organisation still harbours as good volunteers.

The big gesture from the Provos when the issue of the Disappeared resurfaced some years back was to provide geographical information. This led to the discovery of some bodies but five of 12 are still missing.

Since then, of course, and this year alone, the Stakeknife disclosures, along with rumours of other high-ranking informers in the Provo "nutting squad" have made the organisation's pretence of "redressing injustice" and conscientious assassination look more than a bit stupid.

God knows how many people the Provos killed as touts who were actually set up to protect British agents within their own ranks.

For the first time, the Provos and the Secret Service have a common interest: don't let anybody know who was working for whom.

Meanwhile, people out walking on a beach on a summer's day stumble over what's left of Jean McConville.

And the Provos expect her family - and the rest of us - to be grateful that they have now brought their torment to "closure", as they put it.

This bogus morality might play well in the States. It'll go along with "the IRA always give warnings" and "the IRA always owns up to its mistakes" and "the IRA never kills innocent civilians" and "the IRA has nothing whatsoever in common with organisations calling themselves the IRA - except, that is, members." All that garbage.

The bones of Jean McConville didn't go away, you know.

Over the past few days opinions have been expressed that the McConville murder is being used by cynical elements as a stick to beat the IRA. Why, they ask, is everybody going on and on about this old story when there's a masked and armed puma terrorising the North Coast?

The reason is that her murder sums up the real horror that the IRA, even now, can't face up to about its own activities. They tried to cover it up for so long, slandering her and her family.

With the revelations of high grade informers, is it any wonder that those many, many families whose sons or daughters were executed for alleged touting, and who were forced to keep silent for years because of the terror that might await them, are now beginning to question aloud the huge hypocrisy in their own communities?

It's not only the peace process that is unravelling. It's also the Provo control over hearts and minds.

It's bad enough when your son disappears and turns up in a ditch at the border. But it's worse if you begin to suspect, as many are, that he was murdered to protect the skin of his murderer.

I wonder will we ever see a Provo Ombudsman blowing the dust off all the rest of those fusty files. You know, the ones marked "Nasty Drug Pushers", "Rogue Elements", "Hoods and Other People Who Gave Us Lip", "Protestants (Just Because They Are)" and, oh yes, "RUC/Our Handlers."

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/opinion/story.jsp?story=439519

Walk tall, walk free

Glorying in our murderous past is no way to build the future

Sean O'Callaghan
Sunday September 28, 2003
The Observer

I am writing this in London, not by choice but because I am unable to live in Ireland. If I attempted to do so I would be murdered by the IRA or one of the dissident republican paramilitary groups. I joined the IRA when I was 15 and resigned several weeks before my twenty-first birthday. During that period I served a short jail term, murdered two members of the security forces and was involved in a whole range of terrorist activity.
I rejoined the IRA when I was 24 but this time working as an agent for my government; the government of the Irish Republic. Hence the death sentence that stalks my everyday existence.

My life from the day I started work for the Irish government has been about standing up to political/terrorist violence in Ireland - particularly republican violence. I regard Sinn Fein and the IRA as national socialists in the classical sense. The fact that they want to kill me does not make it easy for me to look at them objectively, but they are an important political force and I take them seriously and assess them as coolly as I can.

The stark and brutal truth is that at the last British general election, Sinn Fein succeeded in becoming, for now at least, Northern Ireland's largest nationalist party. Obviously, therefore, most of Northern Ireland's nationalists disagree with my opinion of the republican movement. If democracy means anything, that collective view, passionately though I believe it to be wrong, has to be respected. The majority of nationalists went to the pooling booth, exercised their democratic right and voted for Sinn Fein.

In this situation to hear unionist MPs such as David Burnside calling for Sinn Fein to be banned is to remind oneself that there are those on the unionist Right who are rather confused about how our democratic process works.

Such a demand is frankly absurd, morally dubious and represents nothing more than a wish to make Northern Ireland a Fenian-free zone. It's a lament for the good old days when the Fenians knew their place. Tenders, please, for a new prison capable of holding 100,000 or so. Only loyal Ulstermen should apply.

Get with the real world, David. It's messy, throws up awkward problems and is often unsatisfactory, but there is no substitute for it.

I have firmly been of the opinion that once the IRA opened its arms dumps for inspection the leadership had decided that the war was over. Imagine Churchill leading international observers around Britain's military defences and armouries knowing that they were going to report back to Hitler. That would hardly have convinced the Nazis that he was serious about war. Disguised, dressed up as it was, that and the two subsequent acts of decommissioning were a surrender, simple as that.

The IRA campaign failed, failed in its bloody and inglorious attempt to bludgeon Northern Ireland's unionists into submission and end the British presence in Ireland.

The IRA's terrorist war is over and Northern Ireland's unionists have simply got to come to terms with that reality. Many of them have done so, but sadly others still cling on to an increasingly threadbare comfort blanket, peeping out at the world and try ing to conjure up the big bad bogeyman to scare the children. The big bad bogeyman is a busted flush. The IRA lost, OK.

Yes, the IRA still beat and mutilate people who displease them. They still exile people and export their technology and training to groups such as FARC in return for money which is used to subvert the democratic process on both sides of the Irish border. All of that activity is disgusting and should cease immediately. I believe the IRA leadership reluctantly knows that it has to stop these activities sooner rather than later so that Northern Ireland can move forward into a sustainable power-and-responsibility-sharing arrangement.

Adams and McGuinness are not great statesmen and peacemakers. Their bodies and souls are soaked in the blood of the innocent. Supreme pragmatists that they are, they recognized that the IRA was on the road to nowhere except a slow but ultimately abject defeat, so they moved early to try and rescue something, anything, from a complete mess which was largely of their own making.

Their able Sinn Fein/IRA public relations machine and the inability of many unionists to grasp what had really happened spun an illusion of victory to their own people and the world at large. They hope, and have reasonable grounds for so doing, that they will continue to make gains in forthcoming elections on both sides of the border. The electorate, however, is a fickle creature, and once the initial hype generated by the new kids on the block has dissipated, questions will be asked about policy on the issues that affect people's daily lives. The juvenilia that masquerades as Sinn Fein economic and social policy is not worth wiping your bottom with.

Unionists and Irish democrats have nothing to fear. Get real, walk tall, walk proud, and don't be frightened of the cookie monster.

· Sean O'Callaghan is the author of The Informer and a director of Terrorwatch
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,1051434,00.html

Sunday Independent
In the media, the truth has Disappeared

ONE of most incisive commentaries last week on the IRA victims known as 'the Disappeared' came in a letter to the Irish Times on Wednesday from one Toby Joyce of Co Meath, who remarked how the commonly-expressed desire for the families of victims to find "closure" is "really a hope that the relatives will now fade away and be quiet".

That has certainly been the case in the North. As the issue built to a head with the discovery of what is probably the body of Jean McConville, the last two issues of the Andersonstown News, the hugely influential West Belfast newspaper covering the area from which the Protestant mother of 10 was abducted, has contained not a single word about the discovery of her body or the fate of the other Disappeared. Instead, the latest front page leads, incredibly, on the poor quality of the water supply in West Belfast.

For the past two weeks, readers have been treated to stories about a Sinn Fein councillor calling for a ban on sunbeds, the letter from Michael McKevitt thanking the paper for running articles highlighting "the injustice of my detention and recent trial" and thanking readers for their support as he was "subjected to an unprecedented campaign of vilification orchestrated by MI5 via the British media", not to mention a protest by republicans against the visit to the North last week of Prince Charles and demanding a public enquiry into collusion. But of the abduction, murder and secret burial of widowed mothers in its own area - not a single word of comment, much less condemnation.

That this should be the response of the republican political underclass in Belfast is hardly surprising. Truth is always the first casualty there when the need to save Sinn Fein from itself arises.

That the media, which prides itself on its independence of mind, should also collude in this reprehensible conspiracy of silence is less understandable. Monday's UTV Live news programme led, not with the IRA statement that it had nothing to do with the disappearance and probable murder of 24-year-old Armagh man Gareth O'Connor, but with news of the conviction of a woman for causing the deaths of two young women in a road accident. A terrible story, but not one which would ordinarily be pushed ahead of a major political scandal-in-the-making like the Disappeared.

BBC Radio Ulster's TalkBack, meanwhile, seemed paralysed by fear as it interviewed Gareth O'Connor's father, Mark, a powerful advocate for his missing son who does not hesitate to criticise Sinn Fein for its role in the organised lying about his fate.

Again, this pussyfooting can possibly be understood from a Northern perspective, but why has there been the same silence in the

Republic's media? The southern Irish are not so hardened to atrocities, nor so inclined to shrug hardheartedly at shocking news such as that the McConville family have been warned by the IRA through intermediaries not to turn their mother's funeral into a public event - as if they had no more right to deciding how their own mother is buried than they had to her body for 30 years.

Yet the response of many media outlets down south was to assume that people's attitudes to the story would be one of wanting to steer well clear lest a controversy upset the delicate peace

process.

Last week, the Sunday Independent argued strongly that what was done to Jean McConville and the rest of the Disappeared, including Gareth O'Connor, was a war crime on a par with anything in Latin America, and made the case for a public enquiry to bring victims' families long overdue justice.

The baton was taken up by former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre in the online republican magazine The Blanket, who, despite a few digs at "the British, unionists and their fellow travellers" for their selective memories, acknowledged plainly that "secret graves have long been the universal calling card of war criminals" and that the cruel tale of the Disappeared "unpicked and ruptured" the republican movement's own preferred narrative of the troubles as a rightful war against foreign occupation.

Everywhere else was silence. RTE's regular 'What It Says In The Papers' slot last Sunday ignored the Sunday Independent coverage. This Week - the radio show whose own website bills it as "RTE's flagship weekly radio news programme, reviewing the significant events of the week and looking forward to future developments", and boasts, comically in this case, that "if there is a major political or social issue on the agenda, This Week will cover it" - ignored the story of the Disappeared completely, preferring instead to deal with the Pat Kenny/Eamon Dunphy showdown and the installation of the new Archbishop of Dublin.

Tommie Gorman, Northern editor of RTE, was particularly exasperating, popping up repeatedly on numerous news programmes to stress how "sensitive" the issue was "in so many communities", what "extremely sensitive territory" it was, what "difficult territory on many fronts", and sounding more like a therapist whose job it is to empathise than a reporter whose job it is to report what is happening.

In fact, at one point Jim Cusack of this parish was moved to remark on Morning Ireland that RTE was treating the self-serving statements of the IRA and Sinn Fein on the Disappeared as though they came from "some sorts of human rights organisations".

News headlines even referred blandly to the Disappeared as "people [the IRA] is suspected of abducting and murdering". Only suspected now, is it?

"Let's not beastly to the Provos" was obviously the collective strategy on this issue.

This is not just a narrow question of journalistic values, of little interest outside the enclosed world of the Dublin media. The issue has serious political implications. As republicans push again for the British government to call elections to the Stormont Assembly - suspended in the wake of the Sinn Fein/IRA spying scandals - the issue of the truth of what happened to the Disappeared, and of Gareth O'Connor in particular, will move up the agenda, with unionists seeking answers as to how these things can be reconciled with republicans' avowed commitment to wholly peaceful and democratic means.

If the Irish media have already concluded that these are minor matters to be dealt with either by silence or else tiptoeing round the "sensitivities" on their part, then they are shaping the way that this debate will pan out in the autumn, and the only winner will be Sinn Fein/IRA, which cruelly buried Jean McConville and the others in a hole and now evidently wants to do the same to the truth.

Eilis O'Hanlon

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=36&si=1043329&issue_id=9773

Sunday Independent
IRA times information on bodies for PR spin

BOTH gardai and Helen McKendry and her husband Seamus, who built the campaign for the recovery of the remains of the people murdered and secretly buried by the IRA, suspected four years ago that her mother Jean McConville's grave was in the Shelling Hill location and not Templeton Beach where the IRA had said it was.

The couple and the gardai asked the IRA through Government intermediaries if it was possible that it had made a mistake and that she was in Shelling Hill. The IRA continued to insist she was in Templeton where gardai dug a hole the size of a football pitch and sieved thousands of tons of sand and soil.

The McKendrys actually went to Shelling Hill which has an approach lane strikingly like that to Templeton Beach. Mr McKendry said he felt it was a far more likely site for a secret grave and actually poked around with a stick close to the site of the grave. And, during the Garda dig at Templeton, gardai also visited Shelling Hill and felt it was a more likely location.

A local man whose house overlooks Templeton also told gardai that he felt Shelling Hill, which is sheltered from view, was a more likely location. Gardai now believe that, for some reason, the IRA chose to gave a wrong location for Jean McConville's grave. The site where she was found is right beside the only distinctive landmark in the area - the gable wall of a derelict house. Gardai cannot work out why the men who murdered Jean McConville would have forgotten that it was beside the only landmark on this otherwise flat and featureless part of the Cooley Peninsula. The information supplied by the IRA stated that a stream ran under the approach to the beach. There is a stream under the approach roads to both beaches. This suspicion about the Shelling Hill location was put to the IRA via the intermediaries and the reply was that the IRA had returned to Templeton Beach and the body was definitely there.

The discovery last Wednesday week by a man from Omeath, who has asked to remain anonymous but who is a friend of a senior Garda in Dundalk, was entirely by accident. His young son was playing at the scene and when the man went to check on the boy he noticed a piece of clothing sticking from the sand and when he pulled on it a bone was exposed.

Examination of the remains found at Shelling Hill have told gardai something about the last moments of Mrs McConville's death. She was shot once in the back of the head, the bullet probably passing through her face. She was not shot in the grave as the remains were face upwards. It is thought likely she was alive when she was brought to the beach and walked to the site of her grave as it is some distance from where a car would park. The grave was only ever about 18 inches deep as it is on the site of an old roadway and there is a line of hard core running across the beach at about this depth beneath the surface.

It appears her killers simply scraped away the layer of sand and placed her body on the stoney road surface. It was impossible to say whether or not Mrs McConville had been buried elsewhere earlier and moved to Shelling Hill. There was disagreement between her children about whether or not the clothes she was wearing were her own. Helen, her eldest daughter, said the clothes were not her mother's and it was felt she might have been given clean clothes by the IRA before taking her to south Armagh because her own clothes were blood-soaked from a beating she had received. The family were shown clothing that had remained in remarkably good condition in the grave and other members of the family felt the blue-striped blouse was their mother's.

The discovery of the bullet hole in the skull has discounted the claims by some IRA figures that she died while under interrogation and the body then taken to Cooley. The evidence of her death will also throw into doubt any claims made by the IRA about her being aninformer.

As Helen McKendry has pointed out, her mother had suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of her husband in early 1972 and could not cope with bringing up 10 children, never mind act as an agent for the British Army.

The family have also pointed out that they had only lived in the Divis complex for two years before her murder and Mrs McConville, as a Protestant and an outsider, had very little knowledge of the goings on in the Lower Falls.

They believe she was murdered because she had shown sympathy to soldiers and because she was a Protestant. As such the murder constitutes a war crime in almost every definition of the term. Gardai were able to contrast the grave at Shelling Hill that that in Co Louth of the two Belfast men who were murdered together in May 1978. John McClory, 18, and Brian McKinney, 22, were both found face down in the grave where they were discovered. One body was lying on top of the other and it appears as though they may have been held down in the grave and shot through the back of the head in situ.

Gardai say there is little prospect, given the information so far from the IRA, that any further bodies will be found. The latest information provided by the IRA - about the death and burial of Columba McVeigh, from Donaghmore, Co Tyrone - is said to be particularly useless. The alleged information about McVeigh is said to have narrowed the location down to an area of forest at least 12 miles square. Some gardai feel that the IRA may well provide more information but will time it for maximum political effect. The last time they gave information and started the Garda digs was in the run-up to the 1999 Assembly elections in Northern Ireland. The digging was actually continuing while electors were going to the polls in the North and the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein received an exceptional amount of positive publicity from the events.

Some gardai feel that any further worthwhile information about the remains of the 10 people still missing will be timed to coincide with either an election or some other important event for the republican leadership.

Jim Cusack

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=36&si=1043217&issue_id=9773

BBC

Murdered man 'was IRA member'

A 24-year-old man shot dead in south Armagh on Wednesday was in the IRA, a senior member of the organisation has told the BBC.
Keith Rogers, 24, from Hackballscross in County Louth was shot dead and two other men injured after a row broke out at Cullaville, which is on the border with the Irish Republic.

The IRA source said the organisation would be issuing a statement saying Rogers was not on "active service".

It is expected to say he was with "other republicans" who were "confronted with a criminal gang".

One man has been arrested in connection with the incident. He walked into Crossmaglen police station with his solicitor on Wednesday night.

Republican sources in the south Armagh area have insisted that Rogers was unarmed.

Shot in the chest

He was among a group of up to 10 men who were involved in a fight at a crossroads in the border village.

A handgun was produced and Rogers was shot once in the chest and once in the arm.

Another man suffered a broken leg while a third escaped with minor injuries.

A man shot in the head was transferred to a Dublin hospital. He is in a critical but stable condition.

It is understood Irish police have still not been able to interview the man, said to be in his late 20s, and that he has so far refused to identify himself.

Despite what the IRA says, some unionists are likely to use this incident of evidence of the IRA's continued existence and are likely to restate their demands for that group to disband.

Earlier, Northern Ireland's Chief Constable, Hugh Orde, said the involvement of paramilitaries in the shooting had not been ruled out.

The police have appealed for the help of the public in the investigation.

Victim to fight May election

(Roddy McGregor, Irish News)

The Derry man shot last year by a suspected IRA gang for challenging a punishment attack on his nephew is to stand as a human rights candidate in the assembly elections.

Coach operator Danny McBrearty (54) was shot in both legs and struck on the head with a hammer in Derry’s Creggan area last September as he drove a group of pensioners home from an outing in Co Donegal.

Mr McBrearty’s nephew, 31-year-old Joseph McCloskey, a nightclub bouncer, was ordered to leave Derry in April 2001 following a row with an alleged IRA man in a pub.

The McCloskey family claimed an armed IRA gang came to Joseph McCloskey’s house following the row and fired a number of shots.

Mr McBrearty, who was in the house at the time, fired back with a legally held shotgun. Within days Joseph McCloskey was ordered to leave Derry with his wife and five children.

His mother Bridie launched a high-profile campaign calling on the IRA to guarantee his safe return.

Joseph McCloskey was allowed to return to the city following a personal meeting with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in London.

Last September’s attack on his uncle was believed to have been in revenge for his intervention in the April 2001 incident.

Mr McBrearty said his decision to stand as an Independent Human Rights candidate for the scheduled May 29 elections was “not about standing against a particular party”.

“I intend to provide a voice for all those, from both sides of the community, who live in fear of those same communities and the hidden intimidation that goes on,” he said.

Mr McBrearty said the “turmoil” of the past two years had changed him from a lifelong republican to a human rights activist.

“They are not the same because if being a republican means terrorising your own people, as it appears to in several areas of the north, then I want no part in it,” he said.

“But human rights should be there for us all, whether republican, loyalist or indifferent.”

Mr McBrearty said he was confident of securing the vote of the “hidden voices” across Derry.

April 15, 2003
http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2003/apr14_punishment_attack_victim_to_stand_for_election.php

BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/2846019.stm
Bomb outside Belfast court

A bomb has been found in a van left outside a court in Belfast.
A man was forced to drive the van from his home in north Belfast by three masked men to the Laganside court complex on Wednesday night.

The alarm was raised shortly after 2300 GMT.

A controlled explosion was carried out by Army bomb disposal experts on the vehicle.

Motorists are facing long delays coming into Belfast city centre.

Detective Chief Inspector Will Kerr said the bomb had the potential to kill or maim.

He said the van "contained a viable device that could easily have gone off at any time without warning, causing serious injury to anyone who was in the area at the time".

He said: "I would condemn this incident and urge anyone who can assist the police in tracing those responsible or can help our inquiry in any way to contact detectives."

It is understood the device was placed in the van at the man's home.

The van is still at the scene.

Police said the adjoining Oxford Street would remain closed to traffic until further notice.

The Queen officially unveiled the Laganside court complex in February.

The £30m complex opened for business in January 2002.

It replaced the Crumlin Road Courthouse, which closed in 1998, and Belfast Magistrates' Courthouse on Chichester Street.

The complex was provided under the Public Private Partnership initiative and was the first court accommodation and facilities project contract of its kind to be signed in the United Kingdom.

Sunday Independent
Media buries Jean McConville yet again

LET me show you a sewer pipe. It was meant to carry away our tribal poisons. But now it leaks like a Buckingham Palace butler and stinks like the All Ireland ticket allocation system. It's called the peace process.

The peace process sewer pipe carries a special infection: it afflicts its victims with moral blindness. They see no evil and hear no evil. So when they look at Sinn Fein they see a normal political party.

The Irish media are particularly vulnerable to becoming victims. Hence the head-in-the-sand reaction to the Jean McConville story over the past three weeks. Because while we have been digging deeper into the story, the rest of the media has been trying to bury Jean McConville for the second time.

Unlike RTE, the Sunday Independent gives a platform to journalists who never forget that Sinn Fein's smile never reaches its eyes. In the past few years we have kept a firm focus on two murders: those of Jean McConville and Garda Jerry McCabe. There are powerful moral and political reasons for doing so.

Let's list these reasons. Sinn Fein-IRA is a deeply delinquent organisation. Like the Nazis, it uses lies and violence in order to pursue its aims. Like the Nazis, its main aim is power. If it achieves that aim we will live in a dictatorship at the mercy of a murderous gang. For more than 30 years, Sinn Fein-IRA has been a source of actual and moral evil. Accordingly, to stand up to the IRA is what Aristotle would call a moral good. And the obligation to keep a potentially fascist force under close observation did not die with the peace process.

The peace process merely meant that the moral good of exposing the evil side of Sinn Fein had to be balanced with the moral good of welcoming any sign of redemption. And of course we did welcome any such signs, notably Alex Maskey's attempts at reconciliation during his time as Lord Mayor of Belfast.

But there is a big difference between a guarded welcome and gullible gushing. Good journalists on this paper are performing a public service by shining a steady torch on Sinn Fein-IRA's nocturnal actions. Idealistic young people need to be shown the Sinn Fein-IRA vampire with blood fresh on its fangs before it has put on a smart suit and adjusted its smile for the cameras.

Apart from moral considerations, there are professional ones. Good journalists are averse to being manipulated by the Sinn Fein spin machine. In an interview with a DCU student, Danny Morrison revealed that the Sinn Fein spinners use the same techniques as drug dealers, first addicting weak journalists to a "source" and then sending them out to peddle the Sinn Fein line:

If journalists wanted access to the IRA they had to come through us and then we get into a relationship and quid pro quos develop.

If people got exclusive stuff from us, then you had a relationship with them where you would say, "Now we have a very important statement coming out tomorrow morning, so don't let us down here," and so our story would maybe run as the top item. Any time the Jean McConville or Jerry McCabe cases come back to public view, the Sinn Fein machine goes into top gear. This time Sinn Fein spinners spread two big lies: that Jean McConville was an informer and that Sinn Fein had been in touch with John Wilson's commission over the summer with new information on the graves. RTE reporters seemed to swallow this stuff.

Jim Cusack dealt with the first lie by pointing out that a Protestant like Mrs McConville would be told nothing in a Roman Catholic nationalist ghetto. Gerry Moriarty in the Irish Times dealt with the second lie in a report which revealed that plain John Wilson's group had got no new information from Sinn Fein.

So why did the RTE reporters supinely swallow what they were told by their Sinn Fein "sources"?

After all, these "sources" are spinning for the psychopaths who murdered Jean McConville and Eamon Collins. Surely statements from such tainted sources should be presented with scepticalprefaces.

Let me suggest two:

I am now going to tell you what a reliable IRA source told me. By reliable, I mean that you can rely on this source to have some hidden agenda, and at the least to attempt to distract the general public from meditating too deeply on the murder of Jean McConville. Or here is an alternative preface.

This is a statement from an IRA source. Accordingly I am not going to dignify it with either a solemn or a breathless RTE voice. Instead I am going to use gritty and sceptical tones and ask you, the Irish people, to stay alert and listen to what may lie behind the lines.

But instead of subjecting every IRA "source" to close scrutiny, RTE reporters surrendered to the Sinn Fein spin machine which was trying to make Jean McConville disappear again. At one stage RTE's Aertel text described the murdered victims as people who had "gone missing". As if they suffered from amnesia.

Why the gullibility ? Possibly RTE reporters are simply bad at being sceptical. But the more benign explanation of their behaviour is that they believe that by going softly on Sinn Fein, they are helping the peace process.

Not so. Going softly on Sinn Fein locks them into their delinquency and prevents the better elements from breaking with the evil side of their activities. Socrates said it all 3,000 years ago:

The worst thing is to do wrong and be praised for it, because that locks us into our wrongdoing. If we do wrong, however, we can restore the good by acknowledging our wrong and by accepting appropriate punishment. He finishes with the four steps to redemption: "truth, repentance, forgiveness and penance". Notice he thinks truth comes first.

So do we.

Eoghan Harris

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=36&si=1045174&issue_id=9782

Sacrifice that Gives us Hope for the Future

Sep 24 2003
http://icnorthernireland.icnetwork.co.uk/pointsofview/comment/content_objectid=13442281_method=full_siteid=91603_headline=-Sacrifice%2Dthat%2DGives%2Dus%2DHope%2Dfor%2Dthe%2DFuture-name_page.html

INNOCENT victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles of the past three decades must not be airbrushed out of history.

The enormous human sacrifice of so many people caused much pain and suffering to grieving relatives left behind and those who died must never be forgotten.

It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that fallen service personnel, all innocent victims of the most ruthless form of terrorism, were remembered yesterday by the Government at a national memorial event in England.

The choice of an obscure English location for a memorial that marks the deaths of soldiers, policemen and prison officers in Northern Ireland may seem odd to some, but obviously considerations had to be made for the families and friends of the 504 murdered soldiers, most of whom came from the British mainland.

The vast majority of the 302 RUC officers and 29 prison officers killed in the Troubles were from Northern Ireland, but, as British citizens, they were gallantly serving their country and, significantly, this has now been officially and permanently recognised on English soil.

Indeed, the Ulster Ash Grove at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire is, as Northern Ireland Secretary of State Paul Murphy points out, a living tribute to the men and women who died while serving their country.

''While they are no longer sadly with us, their legacy remains and the memorials ensure that their achievements will never be forgotten by this or future generations,'' said Mr Murphy.

Interestingly, the Ash Grove memorial at Alrewas is moulded in the Ulster framework; made of the best Mourne granite, and surrounded by six large boulders, representing Northern Ireland's six counties and one quarried from each country.

The RUC, a gallant force which showed a high degree of professionalism and commitment during the Troubles that was widely recognised around the world, is regrettably no longer with us.

It was the RUC which, at the height of the Troubles, prevented this divided society from falling over the abyss into total anarchy and in the process it lost 302 officers.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland has, therefore, inherited a proud legacy that stands it in good stead in policing this Province in the current conditions of relative peace.

The history of the Troubles in this Province cannot ever be forgotten and, as Church of Ireland Primate Archbishop Robin Eames reminded us at the Staffordshire ceremony yesterday, memory is a fragile and personal emotion.

However, a brighter and a safer future for the people of Northern Ireland is what matters most and Archbishop Eames is right to focus on the absolute need for peace to dominate our thinking and our memories.

Nursery's Struggle to Survive After Fire

Sep 24 2003
http://icnorthernireland.icnetwork.co.uk/news/local/content_objectid=13442271_method=full_siteid=91603_headline=-Nursery%2Ds%2DStruggle%2Dto%2DSurvive%2DAfter%2DFire-name_page.html

By Gemma Murray

AN act of ''mindless destruction'' has brought a fledgling Belfast nursery school to its knees.

St Kieran's Irish language school, Belsteel Road, Poleglass, was set alight in the early hours of yesterday.

Police are treating the blaze in one of the two mobile classrooms that make up the school building as malicious.

The second mobile also suffered scorch damage and it is uncertain whether it will be fit for future use.

Committee member Seosamh Jones said he was devastated. This is the second time the 26-pupil school has been targeted by thugs in recent weeks. The previous attack caused damage worth more than £5,000.

Fire officer Gabriel Ferguson said the whole school could have burned down.

"On arrival, it was found that a mobile classroom was well alight, and indeed the building was practically destroyed even before the Fire Brigade got there,'' he said.

"The classroom was pretty much destroyed by the fire, but the prompt arrival of the Fire Brigade stopped the fire spreading to an adjacent mobile classroom.''

Mr Jones said the mobile destroyed had been used as a mother and toddler room. "We have only been up and running for around a year and everyone in the community has put their hearts into this school,'' he said.

"We were broken into just before term started up and the place was absolutely wrecked. There was quite a bit of damage done - broken windows, paint thrown round and that sort of thing.

"I know the community will pull together again and not let this fire deter us.''

Chaplain of the nearby church, the Rev Eugene Lewis, said: ''I am just so saddened to see a school targeted by such mindless destruction.''

SDLP representative Patricia Lewsley condemned the arson attack as ''nothing short of scandalous''.

g.murray@newsletter.co.uk

Schools Forced to Shut by Bomb Alert

Sep 24 2003
http://icnorthernireland.icnetwork.co.uk/news/local/content_objectid=13442284_method=full_siteid=91603_headline=-Schools%2DForced%2Dto%2DShut%2Dby%2DBomb%2DAlert-name_page.html

By Ross Smith


A HEAD teacher yesterday spoke of his frustration after three schools were forced to close by a bomb hoax.

The Catholic Reaction Force said it left the device which was found taped to the gates of Larne High School yesterday morning.

Police told pupils from the school, as well as Moyle Primary School and a nursery which share the same site, to stay away while Army bomb experts carried out a controlled explosion.

The alert was the latest in a series of attacks and hoaxes at schools across the Province in the past two weeks, including one at St Comgall's High School in the town.

Larne High School head teacher Stewart Polley said: ''What sort of message do you give to the sort of person who is responsible for this? All they are doing is disrupting children's education.

"For a number of years, through the worst of the Troubles, schools have been safe havens and haven't been directly affected, which has been wonderful.

"It has allowed us to get on with our job of educating the children, but today children's education has been disrupted and that's rather sad. You've got to ask the question, what's the point in all of that? It's very upsetting for everyone involved.''

Around 1,000 children aged three to 18 from the three schools were kept at home yesterday.

Mayor of Larne Bob McKee said: ''It seems it's a hoax. Nevertheless, it has disrupted children's education and that's appalling and unacceptable.

"Last week it was a Catholic school and this week a Protestant school, but it makes no difference - it's still children's education.

"We've all been working together to try to bring Larne out of the box, but it seems these people want to put it back in again.''

East Antrim MP Roy Beggs - a former deputy headmaster of Larne High School - said: '' Moronic is the only word to describe whoever left this device.

"This spate of security alerts at those softest of targets, schools, right across the country over the past few weeks is shameful.

"All sides of the community must work together to isolate the tiny minority of idiots who are causing this trouble.''

Alliance former MLA Sean Neeson, who used to teach at St Comgall's, expressed concern at the spate of attacks on schools.

"The fact that children's education has been seriously affected by these senseless and malicious acts clearly shows the mentality of those who carried out these attacks,'' he said.

SDLP spokesman Danny O'Connor said: ''Intimidation will not halt progress being made. It is not the way forward and must be stopped immediately.''

r.smith@newsletter.co.uk

Sunday Independent
Terror chiefs say 'sorry' to families of slain informers

JIM CUSACK

THE IRA has begun to issue apologies to families of its own members who were tortured and murdered as informers following revelations that its internal security section - the notorious "nutting squad" - was headed by at least one British Army agent known as Stakeknife.

In both An Phoblacht and the west Belfast weekly newspaper, the Andersonstown News, the IRA has apologised to the families of two IRA men - one of whom was almost certainly innocent of the charges brought against him.

It is the first time the IRA has recanted in such a fashion, and republican sources say it has been coming under intense pressure in Catholic areas from families of IRA men killed for informing.

It is expected that more apologies will be issued, as the nutting squad was responsible for killing at least 47 men accused of being informants.

One of the two agents working inside the IRA internal security unit was also suspected of passing information that led to the British Army's SAS shooting dead IRA men in Belfast and Co Tyrone.

The apologies issued in the past fortnight are on behalf of two IRA men: Michael Kearney from west Belfast, who was kidnapped, tortured and shot dead in July 1979; and Anthony Braniff from Ardoyne, who was killed in September 1981.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that agents within the IRA set up both men for execution to draw attention from themselves.

Kearney was blamed for supplying information to the RUC that led to the disruption of a planned 40-bomb blitz in Belfast in early 1979.

Although he was involved in transporting bombs to the assembly point for the attack, it is now known that Kearney did not supply the information about the bombs.

Kearney was tortured and, the IRA alleged, confessed to passing information. He was found "in breach of general orders" and shot in the head.

It has now emerged that the two men in charge of the squad that tortured and killed Kearney were working for the RUC and British Army.

The other case is that of 27-year-old Anthony Braniff, who is believed to have been responsible for setting up another IRA man, Maurice Gilvarry, for execution as an informer in January 1981.

He blamed Gilvarry for tipping off the RUC about a planned IRA bomb attack in June 1978 which was intercepted by the SAS, who shot dead the three bombers.

Braniff was eventually caught after it was discovered he was receiving a weekly wage from the British Army.

However, last week the IRA issued a statement through An Phoblachtdenying he was an informer and praising him in unctuous terms.

Republican sources say there has been huge resentment among the families of IRA members shot dead as informants after it emerged the internal security squad was headed by two agents. These two men - who might have been collectively, rather than individually, known as Stakeknife - were two of the most important agents ever run inside the IRA.

They were uniquely placed to provide the security forces with information and to cause disruption within the IRA. Both were responsible for multiple killings. One died two years ago.

The same squad was also responsible for killing civilians like the Co Louth farmer, Tom Oliver. Mr Oliver was killed after being accused of telling gardai about an arms dump he had uncovered on his farm.

He was branded an informer and murdered as a lesson to others not to give information to the gardai.

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1057439&issue_id=9878

BBC
Girls injured as buses stoned


Eleven schoolgirls were taken to hospital after two buses were attacked by stonethrowers in north Belfast.

The buses were carrying pupils from the largely Protestant Girls' Model School.

It happened as they came down the Crumlin Road near Twaddell Avenue.

The police said that after the incident two crowds of about 50 people from the loyalist and nationalist communities gathered in the area.

Police officers and community workers moved in to try to calm the situation and a section of Twaddell Avenue was closed for a time.

The north Belfast Democratic Unionist MP Nigel Dodds condemned the attack, which he said was "blatantly sectarian".

Mr Dodds said some pupils had been injured and others badly shaken.

"It's appalling that kids should be facing this sort of journey home from school," he said.

Sinn Fein councillor Margaret McClenaghan also condemned the attack.

"All schoolchildren are entitled to go to their day's education and to come home safely," she said.

"Parents shouldn't have to be sitting anywhere, wondering if their child's going to come home safely."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3143718.stm

SAS man describes ambush of IRA trio
By Bimpe Fatogun

AN SAS soldier has spoken for the first time about how he and his unit "lured" three IRA men to their deaths in a 1988 ambush.
The soldier, believed to be the first of the elite British army unit to speak publicly about an operation in Northern Ireland, recalls the gun battle in Co Tyrone as being like a scene from "one of the old gangster movies".
He describes three IRA members as the "bad boys" who got "the shock of their life".
The interview will be broadcast in a Channel 4 television documentary on Monday.
The SAS man's identity is kept secret in the film and his words are voiced by an actor as he. details how his troop mounted the clandestine operation in August 1988.
IRA members Martin Harte (23), above, his brother Gerard (29) and brother-in-law Brian Mullin (26) were shot dead at Cloughfin in Drumnakilly.
The SAS man says the ambush was planned after an IRA 'active service unit' was spotted tailing a coal man who was also a part-time UDR soldier.
"(The IRA) were going to kill him but we didn't know when and we didn't know where, so we came up with this plan, saying 'right, he's driving round and about when he gets a puncture or something like that and he's got to stop'," the soldier says in the documentary SAS- The Real Story.
" So it's like a lure in a way, to try to get then into the job. So we selected a spot, covered it with an OP (observation post), a reactive OP, which basically means we're there to watch but if it turns bad we can react to it."
One of the unit took the place of the coal man and pretended to work on the vehicle.
"And lo and behold, the bad boys turn up. I mean, they're in a vehicle. You can't touch them. You can't stop them. And they drive past three or four times, past the coal lorry where the guy was sort of fixing his puncture," the soldier says.
"He actually had the wheel off and they didn't do anything.
"Next minute they're driving up the road towards where we are. They're about 200 yards away, the old shots start coming and there's quite a few rounds bouncing round about you now.
"The guy who was firing was actually hanging out the back window of the car like one of the old gangster movies.
"We just opened fire. There was about eight of us there, I suppose. They got the shock of their life, you know.
"So within seconds it was over and done with and the three in the car got killed.

IRA trio were 'lured into ambush'
By Simon Doyle

CHANNEL Four television documentary will next week hear an SAS soldier speak about how his unit "lured" three IRA men to their deaths in a 1988 ambush.
The soldier, believed to be the first of the elite British army unit to speak publicly about an operation in Northern Ireland, describes the gun battle in Co Tyrone as being like a scene from "one of the old gangster movies".
Brothers Gerard and Martin Harte and 26-year-old Brian Mullin were shot dead in a carefully planned SAS ambush on August 30 1988 in Cloughfin, Drumnakilly.
Gerard Harte (29) was a prominent member of St Teresa's GAA club in Lough-macrory and was described by the RUC as the commanding officer of the mid-Tyrone IRA. His 23-year-old brother Martin also belonged to the Loughmacrory club.
The third man killed, Brian Mullin, was a brother-in-law of Martin Harte.
The IRA admitted that the men were members of the organisation and were "on active service" when they were killed.
An inquest into the deaths, held in 1993, heard that security forces became aware of a threat to a former Ulster Defence Regiment soldier.
The shoot-out on August 30 1988 was a result of the action taken.
On that day, a white covered lorry, with a distinctive blue streak painted by the army, had been parked as a decoy at Cloughfin, Drumnakilly.
Fibreglass sheets and bags of coal had been piled up around the cab of the lorry to provide protection for a soldier who was posing as a UDR man.
The soldier was pretending to fix a tyre when the IRA unit, armed with two AK-47 rifles and a revolver, drove up in a hijacked car.
About a dozen soldiers in camouflage were lying in a shallow ditch nearby and more were manning a heavy machine gun at a nearby derelict building.
In the subsequent shooting the lorry was hit five times. A total of 236 shots were fired during the operation.
A helicopter arrived immediately after the shoot out, airlifting a number of soldiers away from the scene.
The subsequent inquest failed to establish who had opened fire first.
The deaths of the three IRA men have been commemorated annually and in last month's remembrance a crowd of people walked from Loughmacrory village to the graveyard where the men are buried.
St Teresa's GAA club in Loughmacrory has held an annual commemoration for the three men and last month marked the fifteenth anniversary of their deaths.

Friday, 26 September 2003

The Irish News

P O'Neill and his foreign cousin

(by Suzanne Breen, the News Letter)

It sounds like a Latin American horror story but it's a distinctly local tale.

The victims weren't glamorous political activists - just ordinary men and women who shared the strengths and weaknesses, qualities and imperfections, of the rest of us.

Their misfortune was to fall foul of a powerful, ruthless organisation. It's not that the Provisional IRA abducted and killed more than a dozen people during the conflict that is most disturbing.

Ugly, brutal incidents happen in war. It's not even that Sinn Fein didn't denounce its armed wing from the roof-tops for the deaths. Loyalty runs deep in the republican community.

The most damning aspect of it all is that the Provos, and their politicians, hid what had happened. They lied through their teeth for decades and now have the audacity to take the moral high ground.

Imagine the fuss if the family of a missing IRA member were handed a heap of decaying rags, without explanation, while DNA tests were carried out on a body to confirm its identity?

Yet Gerry Adams has the audacity to lecture the Dublin government on the need to "act sensitively" because digging for bodies represents a "huge trauma for the families".

That concern wasn't evident when, five weeks after Jean McConville's abduction in front of her screaming kids, the Provos arrived at the door.

A man handed 15-year-old Helen her mother's ring and purse. That was it. He would say nothing. And then it started - the common feature in this disappearance and all the others - the lies designed to absolve the IRA and discredit the missing person.

Jean, according to local rumour, had abandoned her 10 children for 'a Brit'. The family of young Andersonstown man Brian McKinney were told he had scarpered to England.

His mother Margaret gathered the fare and packed her suitcase, ready to go to her son when he phoned. But the call never came. Billy McKinney withdrew his £300 life savings and offered it to the Provos in exchange for Brian's life.

They looked him in the eye and said they knew nothing. As IRA leader in Belfast at the time, Gerry Adams must have known of Jean's disappearance.

If he didn't, maybe he would care to establish the details now. The Provos could share these in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. That would put distance between P O'Neill and his foreign cousin Pablo.

September 4, 2003
http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/arts2003/sep4_P_ONeill_and_foreign_cousin__SBreen.php
----------------------------------------

Sunday independent
Punishment units target children

THE RATE of IRA punishment shootings in Northern Ireland has increased in spite of the establishment of an international monitoring body to examine whether or not the military wing of the republican movement is adhering to the non-violence terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Among cases which have come to light in the past six weeks is one where three teenagers were shot in the ankles in west Belfast. They were alleged to have been involved in an incident in which a priest claimed to have been assaulted. Within days of the incident in a primary school, an IRA unit from Ardoyne in north Belfast arrived in the Turf Lodge area and shot the youths. Local people say one was dragged from a christening in a local club by armed men and shot.

The IRA is also blamed for kneecapping another five youths in west Belfast, all in the last month.

In another attack in the nationalist Short Strand area of east Belfast two weeks ago, a man was shot in both elbows and ankles. The victim, in his forties, may have suffered permanent, crippling injuries. Another 18-year-old man was also kneecapped in the Short Strand days later.

Sinn Fein's position on so-called 'punishment shootings' is that "these sorts of things can happen in the vacuum that exists because of the lack of effective policing". The party also claims not to know who is responsible.

However, other sources say that it is well known that the IRA has been stepping up its punishment attacks and that young men can be shot for relatively minor incidents. One of the series of kneecappings in west Belfast followed an earlier altercation between the victims and a man closely associated with, but not a member of, Sinn Fein.

Since January, the IRA is believed to have carried out 48 punishment shootings and 28 beatings. Loyalist groups have carried out 59 shootings and 59 beatings.

Paramilitary punishment shootings and beatings are now running at what may be an all-time high. Since the Good Friday Agreement, which called for an end to such attacks, was signed in 1998, loyalists have shot more than 425 people and republicans have shot over 240.

Also information drawn up by Dr Liam Kennedy, professor of economic and social history at Queen's University, has shown that the age of punishment shooting and beating victims has fallen, with some victims as young as 13 and 14.

Interviewed in the Belfast Telegraph this summer, Professor Kennedy said: "Writing this report made me more and more angry. How does one write dispassionately about young lives torn apart by terror? We know the awful truth. We know that paramilitary organisations systematically abduct, terrify and mutilate children in this society.

"Yet our response has been pathetically inadequate. London and Dublin have failed us - the local political parties have failed us.

"The hypocrisy, the lying, and the self-delusion that runs through loyalism and republicanism, from street level through to representation in the Assembly, tell us that we inhabit a strange, deformed society."

The four-member International Monitoring Commission is still working out its exact status but it is intended it will have the discretion to recommend that political parties linked to paramilitary activity should be sanctioned.

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1050009&issue_id=9818

Sunday Life
Man who lost leg kneecapped again!
Surgeons fight to save limb after second punishment attack

By Jim Cusack

A YOUNG west Belfast man, who lost a leg after a so-called 'punishment' beating and car accident, has been kneecapped AGAIN by the IRA.

Kevin Whelan, from Ballymurphy, has had a prosthetic leg since a car accident, three years ago.

At the time, he was suffering from severe injuries inflicted in an IRA punishment beating.

Last weekend, he was again abducted by the IRA and shot through his remaining, good leg.

Surgeons at the Royal Victoria Hospital have been fighting to save his remaining limb.

Local people said Whelan, 24, had been targeted because his father, Billy, is a well-known member of the Workers Party.

Mr Whelan confirmed yesterday that his son had been shot in the hand and ankle.

Police records show that IRA and loyalist kneecappings have soared in recent months.

Since January, the IRA has carried out as many as 22 punishment shootings, with victims ranging in age from 17 to 37.

In the past week, the IRA has kneecapped two young men in Belfast, and forced another into exile.

The youth was told, if he returns to his native Short Strand, he will be shot dead.

The total number of punishment shootings could be even higher, as at least two other men are known to have turned up in hospital, refusing to say how they came to have gunshot wounds.

An unknown number of young men have also been subjected to IRA beatings, which can sometimes inflict worse wounds, as their limbs can be shattered by batterings with iron bars or baseball bats.

The IRA punishment shootings have taken place in west and north Belfast, Londonderry, Strabane, Downpatrick, Newry and south Armagh.

At least five of the victims received horrific crippling injuries, when they were shot in both ankles.

One 37-year-old man from south Armagh was shot in both ankles and both elbows, after a dispute with local IRA figures, in February.

The men he was in dispute with are connected to the figure gardai say is the Chief of Staff of the IRA.

The youngest-known punishment victim - a 16-year-old - had his legs broken when he was attacked by four masked IRA men, armed with clubs in Warrenpoint, last month.

http://www.sundaylife.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=396774

Sunday Independent
Republicans the ones rewriting history

'REVISIONIST" has always been Sinn Fein's favourite term of abuse, directed at those who opposed the "armed struggle" and who questioned the simplistic eight-centuries-of-oppression version of Irish history. (In fact, it is the professional obligation of the historian to be revisionist, that is, to continually re-examine received views of the past in the light of new evidence and new insights.) At the 1992 Sinn Fein Ard-Fheis, Martin McGuinness equated "revisionist" with "West Brit" and named me, among others, in that reviled category. Two years ago, An Phoblacht published a photograph of myself, taken unawares at the West Belfast festival, under the caption "revisionist historian John A Murphy". Needless to say, the adjective was not intended to be a compliment.

In Sinn Fein/IRA ideology, the Irish past is a sacred tablet of stone, not to be tampered with. The pattern of historical inevitability is ongoing: tiocfaidh ar la. "History is on our side," as the IRA said after the Warrington bomb in 1993.

What a rich irony it is then, that Sinn Fein/IRA are turning out to be not alone masters of the contemporary craft of spin but arch-revisionists of their own past! The latest instance of this is their reaction to the discovery of what are believed to be the remains of the "disappeared" Jean McConville, abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972. Republican spokesman Mitchel McLaughlin unctuously hoped that sensitivity would be observed towards the McConville family feelings and that "closure" would soon end their trauma. The same nauseating guff was heard from Gerry Adams and in identical phrasing (surprise! surprise!) from the recent IRA statement.

Adams was suave and plausible on Morning Ireland until questioned by Aine Lawlor about his own responsibility as Belfast IRA commander at the time. At that point he went into the usual testy denial, notwithstanding the convincing case made in Ed Moloney's book. "I really think the least said about these matters the better." Indeed. In all this, the impression projected is that the murders of the "disappeared" were somehow an act of God and that the IRA is a benign veterans' association, doing its best to help. Note also that amnesia seems to be okay for Republicans ("long lapse of time, etc.") but unacceptable in the case of British/loyalist atrocities.

Of course, Sinn Fein, having initially tried to dodge the issue, would like to see closure on McConville and similar cases as continuing publicity might impinge adversely on forthcoming electoral prospects. Conversely, investigation of British/loyalist crimes and collusion will be vigorously pursued since the exploitation of anti-British grievances has always been electorally profitable for nationalist politicians. Who cares about these double standards or who questions them?

More generally, the IRA terrorist campaign lasting 25 years has for some time now been re-interpreted and represented by Sinn Fein, for its own political purposes. The sectarian/civil war that was the actuality of the "armed struggle" has been brushed aside in favour of simplistic pictures of the IRA as defender of the nationalist community or as wager of a freedom campaign against British forces of occupation. In fact, of the 1,770 deaths (almost half the total of the Troubles) for which the Provisional IRA were responsible, civilians accounted for the largest category (636), Northern Irish security forces and prison officers totalled about 480 and British army dead added up to some 440. (Lost Lives Ed McKittrick et al.).

At the Sinn Fein Ard-Fheis earlier this year, veteran IRA man Joe Cahill sounded another revisionist note - "We won the war". In reality, the Provos, though never formally defeated, were on their last legs before they began to seriously push their peace strategy. On the same Ard-Fheis occasion, Martin Ferris went off on another revisionist flight of fancy, claiming Sinn Fein had been working at the Peace Process for decades! When Republicans repeatedly emphasise their commitment to the Peace Process, what they would like us to believe is that they voluntarily chose the pursuit of peace out of the goodness of their hearts.

THE most breathtaking Sinn Fein revisionist line is that what was really going on all those years was a struggle for justice and equality, a kind of civil rights movement with teeth, not a terror campaign to coerce unionists (Gerry Adams's "Protestant brothers and sisters") into a united Ireland. In a (sympathetic and uncritical) piece on Bairbre de Brun by journalist Anne Cadwallader in the Irish Examiner a fortnight ago, the former Stormont Health Minister peddles another revisionist variation - "the conflict was not of my community's making" and Sinn Fein "would have chosen another avenue for political change if it had been open to them". So much for the SDLP and non-violent nationalist politics.

Another turn-up for the books is the recent depiction of Martin Ferris as a kind of North Kerry Gandhi. At a Kerry County Council meeting the other day, he was praised by soft-core nationalist Michael Healy Rae (the Healy Rae dynasty is safely ensconced in a different constituency) for the "enormous personal sacrifices" he had made for his political beliefs.

But what brazenly takes the biscuit is Sinn Fein's demand that the criminal records of IRA members should be "cleared". This goes beyond a revisionist's spinning of the past: it is an attempt to alter or expunge the historical record.

The whole Sinn Fein revisionist enterprise is facilitated by a largely uncritical media and by Southern politicians who fail to call the blackmailing bluff that hard questioning of Sinn Fein/IRA would damage the Peace Process. Thus the Provos get away with . . . well, no longer murder, I suppose, but certainly with the spectre of unexamined past murders.

Putting a cosmetic gloss on the past is part of the Republican objective of winning hearts and minds, North and South. That has been Sinn Fein policy ever since Danny Morrison enunciated the armalite-cum-ballot box strategy back in 1981. That is why it has always been important to mobilise Southern public opinion against Provo designs, particularly at critical junctures such as the H-Block hunger strikes. That is why this newspaper makes no apologies for keeping an anti-Sinn Fein watching brief over the years and for being, for example, properly sceptical of the Hume-Adams talks.

Dyed-in-the-wool Sinn Fein voters, North and South, have forgotten about the murky past or perhaps find it glamorous or simply don't care. But if the transfer barrier so evident in last year's election results is to be surmounted; if a breakthrough is to be made to the suspicious middle Ireland vote; if there is to be a significant Sinn Fein jump to political power, then a more palatable Republican past has to be constructed and sold to the electorate at large.

The 19th-century writer Samuel Butler famously observed that "though God cannot alter the past, historians can". Maybe so, but they're only trotting after Sinn Fein.

John A Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University College, Cork

John A Murphy

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=36&si=1043351&issue_id=9773

Attacks follow funeral
RIRA men flee after shooting

(Allison Morris, Irelandclick.com)

A number of Real IRA members from across West Belfast have fled their homes in fear of a ‘Night of the Long Knives’ style blitz in the wake of the murder of Danny McGurk.

The Andersonstown News has learned that five members of the group thought to be connected to the RIRA killing of Danny McGurk last week have fled their homes.

Three of the men were told by the PSNI that they are subject to an IRA death threat. The others left after a number of homes in the Divis area were wrecked in weekend attacks by local people angry at the organisation’s increasingly criminal and anti-social behaviour.

The lower Falls is now bracing itself for an all out war on the RIRA – similar to action taken against the now disbanded IPLO in 1992.

IPLO man Samuel Ward f