Category Archives: Northern Ireland

IRA of the Troubles “well beyond recall” report says

A special three-member panel reviewing paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland released its report 20 October 2015.

The report found the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) “remains in existence in a much reduced form” and that an IRA army council is still operating, The Irish Times reports. More coverage from The New York Times.

“PIRA of the Troubles is well beyond recall,” the report says. “It is our firm assessment that PIRA’s leadership remains committed to the peace process and its aim of achieving a united Ireland by political means. … The group is not involved in targeting or conducting terrorist attacks against the state or its representatives.”

Read the report.

Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers commissioned the independent assessment of paramilitary organisations and organized crime in the six-county province in September to avert the collapse of the power-sharing government at Stormont.

International Fund for Ireland launching new strategy

UPDATE:

Support for removing Northern Ireland’s peace walls has dropped to 49 percent, compared to 58 percent in 2012, according to the latest polling commissioned by the Department of Justice and carried out by researchers from Ulster University.

Nearly twice as many Protestants – 44 percent – want the walls to remain in place, compared to only 23 percent of Catholic residents.

More residents want peace walls to stay, from FactCheckNI

ORIGINAL POST:

The International Fund for Ireland is launching a new “Community Consolidation-Peace Consolidation” strategy for 2016-2020. The effort seeks to move beyond creating conditions to remove some of the more than 100 “peace walls” in Northern Ireland to actually start dismantling the physical barriers.

“We have a role to take risks that governments can’t take,” IFI Chairman Dr. Adrian Johnston said during a 28 September briefing at the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C. The new strategy will be officially unveiled in November.

Peace-by-Piece.jpeg (576×386)

While cross-community outreach has continued to expand in the North, “paramilitaries still have a stronghold on the housing estates, with masked men on the streets looking for trouble or in the middle of trouble,” Johnston said.

He was accompanied on his U.S. visit by eight young women and men who are involved in various community programs across the North and the border communities of the Republic of Ireland. They told stories of how dissident republican and loyalist gangs continue to disrupt life through drugs, extortion and other criminal activity.

According to a brochure outlining the new strategy:

  • an average of 3.4 sectarian attacks occur daily in Northern Ireland
  • there are nearly three times as many daily attacks on police
  • threat levels are still considered “severe,” according to British intelligence officials
  • the Independent Monitoring Commission says republican dissidents are recruiting young men with “no previous terrorist experience.”

The new IFI strategy will put “renewed emphasis on addressing the factors that prevent young people from positively influencing their own lives and their communities,” the brochure says.

The first peace walls were constructed by the British Army in 1969 as a temporary, military response to sectarian violence. But many of those walls have now been in place longer than the Berlin Wall, and 30 new walls have been erected since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

“Community appetite for interface barrier removal continues to gather pace,” IFI says, “yet statutory authorities face an increasing challenge to secure the necessary funding for the required economic and social regeneration interventions that make physical change sustainable.”

In other words, if and when the walls come down, there better be jobs and other opportunities in place to fill the gap. “Right now, we are in a state of limbo,”  Johnston said.

Northern Ireland hosts first Famine Commemoration

Today (26 September) the National Famine Commemoration is being held for the first time in Northern Ireland, in Newry, County Down.

In recognition of the fact that the Great Famine affected all parts of the island of Ireland, the location of the annual commemoration has rotated in sequence between the four provinces since 2008. The 2011 event was in Clones, County Monaghan, an Ulster county in the Republic of Ireland.

“The annual Famine Commemoration is a solemn tribute to those who suffered in the most appalling circumstances that prevailed during the Great Famine,” Irish Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Heather Humphreys said in a release earlier this year. “While the scale of suffering was greater in some parts of Ireland than in others, all parts of the island suffered great loss of life and the destruction of families and communities through emigration.”

The BBC has a nice package of stories and info-graphs about the commemoration and the impact of the famine in Ulster/Northern Ireland.

Coinciding with this year’s commemoration is the release of the first paperback edition of “Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and Monument,” by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald. The 2013 book explores more than 100 monuments around the world that recognize the events of 1845-1852.

Here’s a look at three memorials in Northern Ireland. Here’s one in Philadelphia, which I hope to visit next week during a business trip.

Panel will assess paramilitaries and criminal groups in N.I.

Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers has commissioned an independent assessment of paramilitary organisations and organized crime in the six-county province.

The move is aimed at averting the collapse of the power-sharing government at Stormont. The 18 September announcement immediately convinced two unionist parties that had walked away from the government to rejoin negotiations with nationalist parties.

“This assessment will be independently reviewed and checked by three individuals who I will appoint,” Villiers was quoted in the Belfast Telegraph. “This assessment will be published by mid-October and will be available to inform the parties’ discussions and conclusions in the cross party talks.”

The Irish Times offers this “key questions” piece on the political situation.

Grassroots peace efforts continue despite Stormont crisis

Bill Shaw shrugged when asked about the latest crisis at Stormont.

“It doesn’t matter what they are doing at Stormont,” he told Irish Network-DC 10 September. “The peace process was birthed by community workers. It’s community activists that are taking the biggest risks, not the politicians.”

Bill Shaw. Photo by @IrishNewworkDC

Bill Shaw. Photo by @IrishNetworkDC

Shaw works at 174 Trust, a Christian-based social justice organization that has been “building peace and promoting reconciliation” in North Belfast for more than 30 years. He has been the director since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998.

The organization is located inside a remodeled former Presbyterian church on Duncairn Avenue. Groups and activities range from A.A. and Aspergers support to a Boxing Club and an Older Peoples Group. There are after school programs and pregnancy care. There are plenty of art exhibits and performances, even an Irish language class.

“We are finding common issues that will bring people together,” Shaw said. “People don’t stop being Catholic or Protestant, but they go back to segregated communities as changed people.”

Peace and politics on edge in Northern Ireland

The power-sharing government in Northern Ireland is going though yet another crisis. Whether this round, largely driven by police and government statements about the IRA remaining an active organization, is enough to unravel Stormont remains to be seen.

Scotland-based journalist Peter Geoghegan published this 28 August roundup piece in Politico‘s European Edition. The theme is captured by this quote from a unionist political commentator:

“…There is a general sense of despondency with the [power-sharing] assembly. People don’t hate each other, but Sinn Féin and the DUP hate each other.”

In a 30 August editorial, The Guardian says “everything possible must be done to prevent the collapse of a devolved system that, for all its limitations, has helped bring genuine security and has restored growth to Northern Ireland after long decades of conflict which revealed the bankruptcy of both unionist hegemony and republican violence.”

Whatever you say, say nothing

The title and best known line of a Seamus Heaney poem has found its way into The Irish Times‘ political coverage of the east Belfast murder of Kevin McGuigan. Here’s the headline:

Fine Gael adopts ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ approach to NI murder

Police authorities have said some of those involved in the 6 August shooting may have ties to the Provisional IRA, even if the organization didn’t order the murder. Either way could cause problems for affiliated Sinn Féin. But as the Times story notes:

The Fine Gael side of the Coalition has adopted an uncharacteristic “whatever you say, say nothing” approach to the potential political fallout for Sinn Féin …

It is something of a delicate situation for the Government. Facing into a bruising general election campaign with Sinn Féin doing well in opinion polls, the temptation to milk political capital out of the situation must be strong.

On the other hand, as Sinn Féin frequently reminds it, the Government is a co-guarantor of the Belfast Agreement. To allow itself to be portrayed as a player which jeopardised the continuance of the peace process would be damaging for Government TDs in the Border region and beyond.

Heaney, who died in 2013, wrote “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” in 1975, during the worst part of The Troubles. Here’s the relevant stanza:

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the “wee six” I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.

My wife is fond of quoting the very next line: “Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us.”

Here’s the full poem.

Reconsidering Ireland’s centennial remembrances

UPDATE:

More on the tone of centennial commemorations from Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter in the Times: “How do you prefer our long-dead Irish Fenians? Revered or reviled?”

ORIGINAL POST:

The recent 100th anniversary of the Dublin funeral of Fenian O’Donovan Rossa is raising tough questions about how Ireland will recognize other events in the “Decade of Centenaries,” 1912-1922. Some events are more significant, or controversial, than others.

Marie Coleman, a lecturer in Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast, says she was “perplexed and concerned by the nature and extent of the [Irish] State’s official commemoration” at Glasnevin cemetery, which was attended by Taoiseach Enda Kenny and President Michael D. Higgins. She writes in The Irish Times:

It was unclear whether the focus of the event was Rossa himself or the significance of the funeral as signifying the rejuvenation of republicanism as a precursor to the Easter Rising. If the former, the State’s endorsement of an archaic form of irredentist Irish nationalism will sit uncomfortably with many in 21st-century Ireland and with unionist opinion in Northern Ireland. …

I would question if either Rossa or his celebrated obsequies were of sufficient historical significance to warrant a full commemorative ceremony from the State. It would appear that the construct of the “Decade of Centenaries” has created a need to find events to commemorate every year until 2023, even if such events are not of equal significance. …

[Like other anniversaries North and South] [c]ommemorating events that predominantly involved men with guns is highly problematic in a society still going through a fragile process of conflict transformation.

The Slugger O’Toole blog also delves into this issue under the headline, “Can we ever lay 1916 to rest?” The column raises questions about remembering anniversaries associated with the violence of The Troubles in the North.

An 82-year-old clipped copy of Pearse’s graveside oration

A few years ago I inherited some family-related personal items upon the death of one of my mother’s sisters, my aunt. She had saved many of the items for decades, including correspondence from Ireland, and the U.S. citizenship papers of her father (my grandfather Willie Diggin) and mother, and her mother’s brother and sister. All four emigrated from Kerry a few years before the 1916 Easter Rising, each sailing separately to Pittsburgh.

Also among the items was a copy of “History of Ireland,” a text book written in 1903. Stuffed inside the book were several yellowed newspaper clippings, mostly poems cut from The Gaelic American, an Irish nationalist weekly published in New York from 1903 to 1951 (Limited scanned issues available online from Villanova University.) One clipping, dated 13 December 1941 and headlined “America First, Last and All the Time,” says the new war with Germany and Japan “will have the fighting support of every worth-while drop of Irish blood in the United States.”

Willie died four days later, 10 days after the Pearl Harbor attack. It is the inclusion of an Irish Times editorial from 19 June 1974, that makes me believe the book and its collection of clippings belonged to his brother-in-law, John Ware. I knew “Uncle John” to be an avid newspaper reader and follower of Irish politics. I was 15 at the time the editorial was written, which was two and a half years after Bloody Sunday. The piece begins, “Loyalists and Republicans are marching around in the North, like lost legions, in the dark.” We know a lot more darkness followed.

pearseclipAll this is the background to the clipping shown at left, a 19 August 1933 reprint of Pádraic Pearse’s oration at the graveside of Fenian leader O’Donovan Rossa. The clip dates 18 years after the 1 August 1915 funeral and Easter Rising, which soon followed in April 1916. It is 11 years after the creation of the Irish Free State and four years before the 26 counties adopted a Constitution in 1937. In America, the Great Depression was four years old. Roosevelt was just past his first 100 days in office.

In August 1933 John Ware was 47 years old, a veteran of World War I who fought in France. I wonder what Pearse’s stirring speech represented to him? What did he think of the history of Ireland to that point, especially the partitioned North the Times would write about 41 years later?

The oration “has been published more than once in The Gaelic American,” the newspaper’s editors wrote by way of introduction. “At the earnest request of a reader we give it again. Repetition cannot take away from it and it cannot be read too often. A great many people have memorized it.”

John Ware clipped the speech from the newspaper and carefully placed it in the history book that contains not one word about O’Donovan Rossa in a three-page section titled, “The Fenian Movement in America.”

Here’s an online link to the speech that’s easier to read.

Confederate battle flag and NI marching season

It’s marching season in Northern Ireland, and this year there’s some extra attention on appearances of the Confederate battle flag, subject of much controversy in the American South.

Writing in National Catholic Reporter, Mary Ann McGivern notes the similarity of arguments between those who believe celebrating Protestant King William of Orange’s 1690 victory over Catholic King James II is a matter of heritage, and those who say it represents hate. She writes:

As far as I can see, most of the people who wield these symbols of supremacy and privilege don’t have the ugly history in the forefront of their minds. The flags and songs are an excuse for drinking and maybe for finding someone to beat up — in short, for exercising privilege today.

flag

The U.S. has been focusing attention on the June murder of nine African-Americans inside their South Carolina church, and the alleged 21-year-old killer photographed with the battle flag on a website attributed to him and filled with racist rants. South Carolina political leaders are trying to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. But Business Insider reported the “stars and bars” also flies in other nations around the world, for various reasons. In Northern Ireland, the dissident Red Hand Defenders have marched with the flag due to their links with Ulster-Scots who fought for the Confederacy.

Now, with marching season building to its 12 July climax, the Confederate flag has been erected outside the home of a black family in East Belfast. One local politician told the UK Independent: “The flying of this flag is closely intertwined with historical slavery and racist tension, as can be seen by its glorification during recent racially-motivated attacks in the US.”

And in Co. Antrim, the Belfast Telegraph reported Confederate and Nazi flags were flown along with the Union Jack and loyalist paramilitary flags near a Carrickfergus bonfire site. The BBC later reported the Nazi flags were removed.