Monthly Archives: August 2019
Around the blogs
On the Treason Felony blog:
By 13th August, in anticipation of protests over events in Derry, the Unionists had 400 B Specials on duty in Belfast. The RUC were briefing that events in Derry and the solidarity protests elsewhere were being organised by the IRA and Sinn Féin. This included claims to have intelligence that the IRA was mobilising units in South Armagh to make a move on Newry and IRA units assembling within Newry itself.
That night violence flared after demonstrations outside Springfield Road and Hastings Street RUC stations. There was also trouble in Short Strand and in Hooker Street off the Crumlin Road. According to Billy McMillan, the Belfast O/C in August 1969, the Battalion consisted of around eighty volunteers and an auxiliary of. . .
On the Eirigi blog:
Fine Gael is handing about €2,400,000 (€2.4m) of public money per day to private landlords. The bill for renting ‘social housing’ from the private sector for all of 2019 will be about €900m.
This money is dispensed through a number of schemes including the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), Rent Accommodation Scheme (RAS), Social Housing Current Expenditure Programme (SHCEP), Rent Supplement and the Emergency Accommodation Budget.
Despite their different names, the core function of each scheme is the same. All of them use public money to rent accommodation from the private sector. That accommodation, which includes everything from entire apartment blocks to a single bed in a B&B, is then used by the state to. . .
full at: http://eirigi.org/latestnews/2019/8/7/government-housing-policy-explained-part-three-
Eireann Ascendant:
“It is awfully funny being ‘on the run’!” wrote Countess Markievicz to her sister Eva, in January 1920. “I don’t know what I resemble most: the timid hare, the wily fox, or a fierce wild animal of the jungle.” For three months, she had been a free woman, since leaving Cork Jail, on the 18th October 1919, in time for a police constable to be shot dead in Dublin later that evening.
The British authorities claimed a connection between that and her. . .
Review of Lindie Naughton’s edited Markievicz’s Prison Letters and Rebel Writings. For full, see here: https://erinascendantwordpress.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/book-review-markievicz-prison-letters-rebel-writings-by-constance-markievicz-edited-by-lindie-naughton-2018/
Socialist Democracy:
An irony of the recently opened James Connolly Visitor Centre on Belfast’s Falls Road is that it confirms one of his big ideas. A larger irony is that it doesn’t even refer to it. Instead it offers a very limited version of the Connolly familiar from the murals and essentially sets out to claim him for Sinn Féin.
The exhibits start with the Easter Rising, an event that occurred at the end of his life. More appropriately it closes with the Easter Rising. In between we learn that he was born in Edinburgh, served in and deserted from the British Army, worked as a union organiser in Ireland and the United States and was executed for his role in leading the Easter Rising. The percentage of visitors to the centre who are unlikely to know these broad facts will not be high.
Virtually absent from the modest range of reproductions of posters, newspapers and ephemera from the period is any indication that Connolly was a. . .
full at: http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentATripToTheJamesConnollyVisitorCentre.html
In Review: Marisa McGlinchey’s ‘Unfinished Business’
Marisa McGlinchey, Unfinished Business: the politics of ‘dissident’ Irish republicanism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019, 231pp; reviewed by Philip Ferguson
Marisa McGlinchey’s book should be read by all radical republicans, Marxists and anyone else genuinely interested in national liberation and socialism in Ireland.
Don’t be put off by the fact that the back cover features praise for the book from the likes of Lord Bew of the Stickies and Richard English, both of whom have carved out well-rewarded academic niches writing attacks on republicanism and producing material that can only aid British imperialism. Their reasons for praising the book are entirely different from those of anti-imperialists.
There are two key strengths to this book.
One is that it is based on on a substantial set of interviews (90 in all) the author conducted with republicans opposed to the Good Friday Agreement and the Provo leadership’s move into the service of the British state and the statelets which are the result of partition in Ireland and the Provos’ move from sort sort of vision of socialism to embracing the market and capitalist austerity.
The other strength is that she largely lets the interviewees speak for themselves, rather than trying to stitch them up. Thus, for instance, she refrains from referring to them in the book as “dissident” republicans – the book’s sub-title was chosen, presumably, by the publisher. Instead, she refers to them by the much more accurate term of “radical republicans” and treats them as rational political activists rather than some kind of pathology.
The interviewees, some of whom are now dead and some of whom have left the organisation they were in at the time they were interviewed, cover the gamut of radical republican groups, some of which are linked to armed organisations and some of which are not. Thus the interviewees include independents and members of Eirigi, RNU, Saoradh, the IRSP, RSF and the 32CSM. They range from younger activists such as Louise Minihan to veterans who go back to the 1956-62 border campaign and even earlier, such as Peig King and Billy McKee. Some of the activists support Read the rest of this entry
Support August 10 anti-internment protest, Belfast
Anti-Internment League statement:
This year’s National Anti-Internment march will take place next Saturday 10th August, assembling at Writers’ Square in Donegall Street, Belfast at 1pm. We will march to Belfast City Hall for speeches, before marching to the International Wall in Divis Street.
This year’s march seeks to highlight internment via remand, miscarriage of justice and by revocation of licence. In addition, themes this year will also include the continued use of the Diplock/Special non-jury courts against Republicans, and draconian bail/licence conditions imposed.
All Republican, human rights, socialist, community, youth and sporting organisations are hereby publicly invited to what is the only annual march that takes place in Belfast City Centre to highlight injustices inflicted on Republican Prisoners.
Political Prisoner related placards, banners, flags, posters, etc only are welcome in order to maintain the focus on the intended issue.
Let’s put feet on the street in order to demonstrate our support for Republican Prisoners and all those affected globally by internment and draconian conditions inflicted on political prisoners, while proving that Belfast is our city too!
Text of oration at Dungiven commemoration for INLA Volunteer Kevin Lynch, Sunday, July 28
Below is the oration delivered at the commemoration for hunger-striker INLA Volunteer Kevin Lynch in Dungiven on Sunday (July 28).
Kevin was born on May 25, 1956 and died on August 1, 1981 in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, after an extraordinary 71 days on hunger strike. The Dungiven oration was given by Dan Ó Murchú of the IRSP.
A chairde ‘s a comradaithe ba mhaith liom fáilte a chuir raibh uillig, go raibh maith agaibh as a bheith anseo.
Friends and comrades I’d like to welcome you all here today as we remember the life and legacy of INLA Vol. Kevin Lynch.
On the 1st of August 1981 Kevin passed away after 71 gruelling days on hunger strike at the young age of 25, a year older than I am today.
Coming from a staunch republican community the stories from the dark days of the H-Blocks, of the Blanket protest and the hunger strikes were often told.
Dan Ó Murchú delivering the oration in Dungiven; pic by Micheál Ó Ceallaigh
Young republicans, such as myself, who did not live through the dark days of the conflict, often struggle to truly comprehend the conditions that could give rise to such an undaunted determination as was shown by Kevin and his nine comrades.
As a result, I believe, the younger generation has a tendency to almost mythologise Kevin and his comrades.
Over these last few days, speaking with friends and comrades of Kevin and reading about his days as a young lad growing up here in Dungiven, to his days as a revolutionary republican socialist I found the story of a man that trumps all the stories of the Irish mythological heroes. It’s the story of an ordinary lad growing up in Read the rest of this entry
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