Sinn Féin author sees its future as part of radical left

REPUBLICANS SHOULD discuss and debate their own political history as well as their place in Irish history in general, Sinn Féin MEP Mary Lou McDonald has said.

Speaking in Dublin at the launch last night of Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism by Eoin Ó Broin, former director of the party’s European department, she said: “It is important that we participate in the broader conversation with historians and political commentators beyond the republican family.”

Mr Ó Broin, a Sinn Féin candidate in the local elections for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown council, said: “Sinn Féin has been one of the central architects of the peace process and is increasingly setting the terms of political debate in Ireland north and south. Despite this, the party remains much misunderstood and often misrepresented.

“It is the left republican tradition started by Connolly and continued by Mellows, Gilmore, O’Donnell, the Republican Congress, Clann na Poblachta and even the Workers’ Party to which we belong.

“While our history has seen many successes, it has also seen many failures. Honestly understanding our past is vital if we are to understand the limitations of our present and to achieve our objectives in the future.

“Sinn Féin’s future must be a left republican future, taking our place in the globally resurgent radical democratic left of Europe, Latin America and the wider world.”

Prawo Jazdy: mystery motorist who bamboozled Irish traffic police

The identity of one of Europe’s most notorious drivers, who racked up dozens of speeding and parking offences in a crime spree across Ireland while continuing to elude the courts, has been uncovered by police – with the help of a dictionary.

Prawo Jazdy, presumed to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Poles lured to Ireland during its economic boom, was the Scarlet Pimpernel of motoring, leaving a trail of multiple identities and vehicles across the data base of the Republic’s Garda Siochana.

With not a single conviction by 2007 and more than fifty offences recorded, the police decided to take a closer look at Mr Jazdy.

The result was unexpected and embarrassing: in a letter that is now doing the rounds of Garda e-mail inboxes, a traffic division official wrote that it had come to his attention that officers inspecting Polish driving licences were recording Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name. “Prawo Jazdy is actually Polish for ‘driving licence’ and not the first and surname on the licence,” he wrote.

“Having noticed this I decided to check on Pulse (the criminal data base) and see how many members have made this mistake. It is quite embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.

“He can also be found on the Fixed Charge Processing System as well. This mistake needs to be rectified immediately and a memo sent to the members concerned. I also think that Garda Information Service Centre [in] Castlebar should be notified and some kind of alert put on these two words.”

Rise in NI AIDS cases linked to foreign travel

The volume of HIV and Aids cases is expected to increase significantly and sexual health consultant Dr Raymond Maw said official figures under-estimated fresh diagnoses by about a third. Most heterosexual people have been exposed to the virus outside the UK but homosexuality has also been blamed.

A total of 65 new cases were diagnosed in 2007. The tally has been increasing since 2001.

Dr Naresh Chada, senior medical officer at the Department of Health, told a conference at Stormont sexually transmitted diseases posed a major challenge. “Some of the preliminary figures for 2008 suggest that there would be quite a considerable increase on the previous years but those won’t be official until the end of the year,” he said.

“It is difficult for us to say why those figures are going up. There seems to be a mixture of issues, one of the continuing infection of men who have sex with men but there is also an increase in heterosexual HIV.”

Approximately 250 people are receiving anti-retroviral therapy which can cost over £1 million from the drugs budget. Dr Chada added: “Compared to other parts of the world and in the rest of the UK our rates of HIV are somewhat low but it is very much on the increase. “HIV/Aids is a huge burden in terms of actual resources that are used.”

The Department’s funding for genito-urinary treatment was branded a “sticking plaster” by Dr Maw.

He said: “We just have not had the investment in sexual health services and this is known by everybody from the Department of Health down. “We have had some recent investment which is welcome but it is certainly not adequate to meet the needs of our population and it is considerably less than has been given in the rest of the UK.”

Marlene Kinghan from the Children’s Commissioners’ office said a number of services were not fit for purpose or covering the level of need. We currently have four (genito-urinary) clinics however combined they are open for less than 40 hours per week, some which operate on an appointment system others on a drop in basis,“ she said.

“How are young people, some of whom who are still in full time education, expected to access a clinic that is only open three hours per week during the day?

“The approach to delivering relationship and sexual education is neither comprehensive nor consistent in schools across Northern Ireland. Research on this issue shows the quality of sexual education depends on the school the young person attends and indeed the approach taken by individual teachers.”

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0216/breaking64.htm

British gassed POWs in Long Kesh

A former republican prisoner has vowed to fight for justice for his dead comrades after a new freedom of information act – which came into effect on January 1- revealed that the chemical CR Gas was employed by the British Army against republican prisoners in Long Kesh 30 years ago.

The dramatic breakthrough proves the British did inflict poison gas on both sentenced and interned prisoners after they burned the notorious Cages in protest at conditions in October 1974. 50 former prisoners have either died prematurely through cancer or have been diagnosed with the disease possibly as a result of the choking poison that the British Army rained down on over 800 men.

As revealed by the Andersonstown News in several articles over the past five years, prisoners including internees, both republican and loyalists, as well as the British armed forces deploying the weapons, were exposed to their deadly toxins. It will vindicate former POWs who have been fighting for several years for the British government to admit that they used CR Gas and it will severely embarrass the British government who denied the sinister attack ever took place.

Former POW Kevin Carson said it showed how the British engaged in chemical warfare against “defenceless” prisoners in Long Kesh and said it was particularly poignant that the news should break on the week of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz where tens of thousands of men, women and children were gassed by the Nazis.

In 1998 John Spellar, minister for the British armed forces, in a written answer to Labour MP Ken Livingstone denied that CR Gas had ever been used ‘operationally’. Some time later former shadow Secretary of State for the North Kevin McNamara asked the same minister what quantity of CR gas was used on October 16 1974. Again Spellar denied it was used by significantly saying that “some 200 hand held spray devices containing 0.05 per cent CR were held at HM Prison Maze at the time”.

But now the secret go-ahead to use the chemical weapons has been revealed in papers from 1976 that show that the use of CR or Dibenzoxazepine “10 times more powerful than tear gas” was allowed from 1973 to be released onto Long Kesh. Documents show that the authorisation was so sensitive that officials involved in organisation training with the chemical were told: “All concerned should be told of the consequences of idle talk”.

Kevin Carson described how the CR Gas fell on the prisoners, describing the attack as “hell on earth”.

“These prisoners compared to any random group suffered a high percentage of premature deaths as a result of internal cancers,” he said. “The gas affected your sinuses and throat. That continued down the nose and throat with mucus. It was like you were drowning in your own mucus and your eyes filled up with water. The gas filled the whole football pitch in the jail in a dense fog. The bombs fragmented into smaller bomblets of gas leaving the dense effect on the ground. The result has been agonising diseases suffered by Irishmen at the behest of the British,” he said.

More information on Dibenzoxazepine here
http://www.zarc.com/english/tear_gases/crdibenzoxazepine.html

 A new campaign GROUP is demanding answers of the British Government over the use of CR gas against Irish Republican prisoners in Long Kesh in 1974. Ceartas (the Irish name for Justice) is the brainchild of former Long Kesh POW Jim McCann who for years has campaigned to get to the truth behind the British Army attack on prisoners during the burning of Long Kesh in October 1974. Along with Charlie Mawhinney, Joe Doherty and Mairtín Óg Meehan, McCann aims to “lift the curtain of secrecy that the British Government has thrown over its use of chemical weapons against unsuspecting prisoners”.

One of the motivating factors for the former prisoners is the high incidence of cancers among former POWs who were targeted in the gas attacks.McCann explains: “In 1974, republican POWs were being constantly harassed by the prison authorities so in October we took action.”This action saw hundreds of POWs burning the Long Kesh Cages and taking over the camp. In response, the British Army was deployed and, in the course of two days of fighting, hundreds of prisoners were seriously wounded when British soldiers fired rubber bullets at point-blank range and beat them with batons.However, it was the use of gas what campaigners believe was the highly toxic CR gas that has caused more concern in the long term.As the fighting between the British Army and the POWs intensified, the prisoners were driven into the playing fields at the centre of the camp. Once there, helicopters flew overhead and dropped clusters of gas.

The operation to use CR gas was authorised under guidelines codenamed Snowdrop. British Government documents obtained by Ceartas quote an AW Stephens, Head of the British Ministry of Defence’s DS 10, describing Snowdrop as “the contingency plan developed to deal with hi-jacking and other serious armed terrorist incidents” with members of the SAS – transported in helicopters – trained to carry out the operation.

Many of those gassed, who had suffered the effects of CS gas during rioting on the streets of the Six Counties, described completely different sensations when engulfed by the Long Kesh gas.“We were left completely incapacitated,” says McCann. “I remember having this sensation that I was drowning.”According to McCann, “approximately 12 per cent to 15 per cent of the prisoners affected in the camp at that time have since contracted various forms of cancer, including leukemia and other lung diseases.”

Ceartas maintains that there is further evidence of a cover up in relation to the use of CR gas.In the days and weeks after the fighting was quelled, prisoners had their blood tested with samples being taken by British Ministry of Defence (MoD) technicians without explaining why they were doing these tests. “My medical records for 1974 have mysteriously gone missing,” says Jim McCann. “Through my solicitor I have been able to get my medical records for the whole time I was in prison except for the year 1974. Nor has anyone admitted to taking blood samples from the prisoners”.CR gas was developed as a riot control weapon through the late 1950s and into the early 1960s by the British Government.When it tried to market this gas to the United States military it was refused on the grounds that “not enough was known about its carcinogenic and mutanogenic effects”.

In other developments, in response to a parliamentary question from Labour Party MP Ken Livingstone, then Armed Forces Minister John Spellar, also of the Labour Party, admitted that “some 200 hand-held spray devices containing CR were held at HM Maze [Long Kesh] at that time”.The Guardian newspaper reported in March 1974 that “the chemical has already been issued to Long Kesh military guards and will be used in the event of serious rioting”.And writing in The Observer in 2005, journalists Craig Morrison and Martin Bright disclosed:“The British Government had secretly authorised the use of a chemical riot control agent to be used in prisons at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles.”

Jim McCann explains:“We want the floodgates to open as we slowly attempt to put the jigsaw together piece by piece because we have been fobbed off and lied to for far too long.“The curtain of secrecy in which the British Government is attempting to shroud the truth in is full of holes and although it is already too late for some of us we are refusing to let the injustices continue.”

The above article was written by Peadar Whelan and printed in An Phoblacht on July 1, 2008.