Oppose Plastic Bullets and Twenty-Eight Day Detention
21/07/09

On August 9 1971, internment without trial was introduced in the occupied Six Counties. Within hours hundreds of republicans were being rounded up in dawn raids. For some of those detainees it would be years before they would be released from British custody. That introduction of internment marked a dramatic escalation in the conflict that was then raging across the Six Counties. Within less then five years, in December 1975, internment ended – in complete failure.

In 2009, Britain has reintroduced internment without trial to Ireland, in the form of twenty-eight day detention periods. Irish citizens can now be held by the occupation forces for up to four weeks without being charged or convicted. Earlier this year republicans were detained for the first time using this draconian legislation.

If further evidence was needed of the true nature of Britain’s role in Ireland the behaviour of the paramilitary PSNI on July 13, 2009 provides it. As residents of the Ardoyne district of North Belfast gathered on that date to peacefully protest against an unwanted sectarian march, they were met by hundreds of PSNI members in full riot gear. Within hours the PSNI were indiscriminately firing plastic bullets, injuring ten people.

Plastic and rubber bullets have already killed seventeen people in Ireland. The use of such lethal weapons for ‘crowd control’ purposes has long been condemned by all right-thinking people across Ireland and beyond.

On August 8, éirígí will be holding demonstrations at the British Embassy in Dublin and at Enniskillen PSNI Barracks to mark the introduction of internment in 1971 and to oppose both 28-day detention and the use of plastic bullets.

On the following day, there will be a public meeting on Belfast’s Falls Road, focusing on the introduction of internment in August 1971 and the contemporary use of repressive legislation by the British government. Speakers will include former Guantanamo Bay detainee Ruhal Ahmed, former Long Kesh internee and H-Block escaper Gerry McDonnell and human rights lawyer Pádraigín Drinan, who represented the hooded men. The meeting will start at 3pm on Sunday, August 9 in the Conway Education Centre, Conway Mill, Falls Road, Belfast.

Speaking in advance of the Dublin protest éirígí chairperson Brian Leeson said, “Over the course of the last twelve months there has been a dramatic escalation in British operations in Ireland. We have seen the British Army redeployed in the form of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, twenty-eight day detention introduced, peaceful protests forcibly suppressed, and most recently we have seen plastic bullets being fired once again. In addition there has been a noticeable upsurge in harassment and attempts to recruit informers.

“Our protest on August 8 will give people in Dublin an opportunity to show their opposition to the ongoing occupation in general and twenty-eight day detention and plastic bullet use in particular. I would encourage everyone who supports Irish freedom to come along to the protest and make their voice heard.”


-Protest: PSNI Barracks, Enniskillen, Saturday August 8, 12pm

-Protest: British Embassy, Dublin, Saturday August 8, 2pm

-Public meeting: Conway Mill, Belfast, Sunday August 9, 3pm

Elderly Must Not be Made to Pay
13/07/09
Donegal éirígí spokesperson Micheál Cholm Mac Giolla Easbuig has slammed cutbacks by the Twenty-Six County Health Service Executive (HSE) in the home help support service and has called for them to be reversed immediately.

Mac Giolla Easbuig was speaking as a well-attended protest march against the cutbacks took place in Ballybofey on Saturday [July 11].

Between 25-30,000 home help hours are due to be cut in Donegal alone, with similar cutbacks proposed throughout the Twenty-Six Counties. The draconian move follows a previous reduction in home help hours in 2008 and cuts which were introduced by the HSE earlier this year.

Micheál said: "The provision of home help is an essential service and a vital life-line for many elderly and sick people throughout the country, but particularly in rural areas like Donegal.
“That these services are now being cut back in such a sweeping manner is disgraceful. The people dependent on these services are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They need more assistance, not less. The reality is that we have an aging population in Ireland, which increases the necessity for these services.

“Home help services actually save the state considerable expense – by taking care of those in need within the community it prevents them from being needlessly forced into nursing homes. It prevents the deterioration of their health and their hospitalisation for acute treatment at a far greater financial cost. Proper care within the community improves their quality of life, as they deserve, but also reduces the cost to the tax-payer.

“These cutbacks will hurt the sick and elderly, are unjust and must be reversed immediately. The HSE and their political masters need to invest increased funding and resources into home help support and other similar community services, to expand and improve the service further.”
Micheál concluded: “Our elderly deserve first class public care and must not be made to pay for the greed and corruption of the business people and politicians that led to the current economic crisis.”

Lisbon 2 – Democracy EU-Style
30/06/09
The vision of a unified Europe first articulated in the Schuman Declaration of May 9th 1950, to the effect that “the pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe”, is the vision that has guided the European project since its inception. We must be under no illusion that it is the consolidation of political power in a centralized, ‘free market’ based, neo-liberal Europe that the Eurocrat establishment has as its primary objective. All European treaties throughout the last 60 years have been directed at progressing towards the achievement of this objective. Essentially this is what Lisbon 1 was about. It is what Nice 1 and 2 were about. The particulars of the ‘assurances’ or ‘guarantees’ agreed at the EU summit of June 19th notwithstanding, this is what the coming Lisbon 2 is about also.

We will be made to vote again and again if needs be until we vote ‘right’, both literally and figuratively – until we vote to accept that the economic and political future of the millions of people who inhabit the EU area is best determined by an unelected Commission and a burgeoning and ever-more powerful EU bureaucracy. Such is ‘democracy’ EU-style. It is the epitome of bourgeois democracy – replete with the illusion of substance, yet in practice inherently anti-democratic in any real sense, and directed fundamentally at securing the interests of capital and its political servants.

Most of the ‘assurances’ agreed by EU heads of State at the summit relate to issues (such as conscription, abortion and taxation etc.) that never formed part of the left opposition’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. Nowhere in all of the campaigning against Lisbon that éirígí was involved in were these types of issues seriously articulated by the man and woman on the street. They do not reflect the grounds upon which working class people came out comprehensively against the Treaty. The CAEUC, of which éirígí is a member, based its opposition to Lisbon primarily upon the fact that the Treaty would undermine sovereignty, was fundamentally anti-worker, promoted greed over need and increased the militarization of Europe. Many of the 862,415 Irish citizens (over 53 per cent of the 26-county electorate) who voted against the Lisbon Treaty agreed with this analysis and opted to vote against the vision of Europe that was being proposed by those who deigned to tell them what was in their best interests, having already discarded the democratic determination of the peoples of both France and the Netherlands and denied all other European peoples the right to vote one way or the other. This is democracy EU-style.

As to what will be different this time? There is absolutely nothing about the assurances ‘secured’ by Cowen et al. on June 19th that will in any way, shape or form alter the substance of the Lisbon Treaty. Not one full stop, nor comma, of the Treaty will be altered. The fundamentals of Lisbon remain the same: it codifies neo-liberalism, further deepens the democratic deficit and progresses the Eurocrat plan for an EU super-state. The ‘assurances’ given with regard to the fear of creeping EU militarism are instructive in this regard. That the assurances can state that the 26-County government may “determine the nature and volume of its defence and security expenditure and the nature of its defence capabilities” at the same time as the text of the Lisbon Treaty obliges all signatories to commit to “progressively' improving (military) capabilities” highlights the contradiction between what is being said and what must be done. The EU bureaucracy is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. What the ‘assurances’ amount to is subterfuge and scaremongering. Subterfuge in that the ‘assurances’ are intended to give the impression of a changed Treaty while doing nothing of the sort in reality. When Brian Cowen states that: “We came here (to Brussels) with two aims. Ireland (sic) wanted firm legal guarantees. We got them. We wanted a commitment to a protocol. We got that. I am confident we now have a solid basis to go to the (sic) Irish people and to ask them again for their approval for Ireland (sic) to ratify the Treaty so that Europe can move on”, he is engaging in a display of shocking cynicism. He implies that the ‘assurances’ are something other than mere legal re-statements of aspects of the existing Treaty, which they are not.

The scaremongering is to be found in the subtext to all of this, which is as follows: “if we don’t vote yes, what is an already economically disastrous situation, will be compounded and exponentially made worse”. The implication is that accepting Lisbon will help rescue Ireland from the depths of the economic recession it finds itself in. Given the fact that neo-liberal ‘free’ market economics is what caused the global meltdown in the first place and the fact that the same neo-liberal agenda is codified in Lisbon, the proponents of a Yes vote are like quack doctors whose proposed cure for a disease is more disease.

We must resist the renewed attempt to have the Lisbon Treaty forced upon us as we did when we first defeated Lisbon against all odds in June 2008. On that occasion, the people of the Twenty-Six Counties defended the democratic rights of all of the peoples of Europe. Once again we must organise to reject the anti-democratic, anti-worker, anti-citizen paradigm that the Lisbon Treaty represents. We must organise to reject the notion that a neo-liberal EU super-state can deliver the people of Europe anything than a continuation of denial of democracy, capitalist crisis and periodic economic meltdown. Our position with regard to Lisbon 1 was quite simply that saying NO to Lisbon was to say yes to the possibility of a democratic Europe, to the possible realisation of an “internationalism based upon the ideal of a free federation of free peoples”. It remains our position, no matter what ‘assurances’ emanate from Brussels or any other EU bourgeois institution.

SAY NO TO A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE – SAY NO TO LISBON 2

Right to Protest Suppressed by Riot Squad in Belfast
28/06/09
As dozens of masked paramilitary police decamped from armoured jeeps onto a Belfast street it could have been a scene from 1969, 1979 or 1989. But it wasn’t. Instead it was June 27th 2009 – the day of Britain’s inaugural ‘Armed Forces Day’.

If proof was ever needed of the unchanged nature of both British policing in Ireland and the wider occupation, it was provided in Belfast today. As one arm of Britain’s occupation forces were ‘celebrated’ with the flying of the ‘Armed Forces Day’ flag above City Hall, another arm of those same occupation forces were busy suppressing the right to peaceful protest.
While republicans are all too used to the PSNI blocking the routes of ‘illegal’ marches, today the PSNI went a step further and prevented éirígí activists and supporters from even reaching the assembly point for a static picket. Those walking on the footpath found their path blocked by baton-yielding paramilitaries clad from head to foot in body armour. Such pre-emptive policing would sit comfortably in the police state of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The picket which was called in opposition to the flying of the ‘Armed Forces Day’ flag over Belfast City Hall was unable to take place as upwards of 120 people were prevented from entering the centre of Ireland’s second city.

As it became apparent that the PSNI were intent on using violence to prevent access to the city centre an impromptu protest was held on Castle Street.

As part of this protest the names of those killed as a result of British state violence was read to the listening crowd. The task of reading this lengthy list of names was shared between Marie Drumm, whose mother Máire was murdered by unionist death squads, and éirígí’s Seán Mac Brádaigh. This dignified memorial to the victims of British state violence stood in contrast to the menacing backdrop of the masked militia. Speaking after the protest éirígí General Secretary Breandán Mac Cionnaith said, “All the talk of change in recent years has today been exposed as just that – talk and nothing more than empty, hollow talk. Belfast city centre remains a no-go zone for republicans – unless, of course, those republicans are wiling to ask the British state for permission to enter their own city.

“In light of the potential threat to the safety of those attending the picket we decided that it would be best for people from the west of the city to walk together to City Hall. And this is what we did only to find the footpath blocked by the PSNI riot squad. When we moved to the footpath on the other side of the road the PSNI moved ahead of us to block it also. Despite the spin of the PSNI there was no attempt made by éirígí to march to City Hall. What we witnessed today was the actions of a police state where protest and dissent are met with brute force.”
In closing Breandán committed éirígí to opposing ‘Armed Forces Day’ in the future.

“Today was the first so-called armed forces day. By our protest here today éirígí has ensured that it did not pass unopposed. In the years to come we will build on today’s protest and ensure that June 27th becomes a date of protest – not a date of celebration.”

Basque Anti-Extradition Campaign Launched
15/06/09
The official launch of the Don’t Extradite the Basques Campaign took place last Wednesday [June 10] in Cultúrlann MacAdam–Ó Fiaich in Belfast.

The campaign was started in response to attempts by the Spanish state to extradite two Basque political activists living in Belfast, Iñaki de Juana and Arturo ‘Beñat’ Villanueva.

Iñaki moved to Ireland in 2008 following his release from a Spanish prison. He could not return home because of the harassment he faced. Despite this, a rally celebrating his release was held in Donostia.

The organisers read a letter thanking everyone who attended and it was reported that they finished with the popular Basque expression “Aurrera bolie” [Forward with the ball]. Spanish police then claimed that Iñaki had written the letter and that the statement called for the continuation of armed struggle.

Arturo ‘Beñat’ Villanueva has lived in Belfast since 2004. Like Iñaki, he moved to Ireland to escape Spanish political persecution. Arturo was arrested by the PSNI in April 2009 on an extradition warrant, charged with “membership of a terrorist organisation”.

The organisation in question is the Basque political youth organisation Jarrai, which was declared a terrorist organisation by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2007. Arturo has not been a member of Jarrai since 2000.

The anti-extradition campaign was launched by veteran civil rights activist Fergus Ó hÍr. Speaking at the launch, Ó hÍr said: “In its effort to prevent the Basque people from exercising their democratic right to self-determination, Spain is breaching several fundamental rights as outlined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to freedom of opinion and expression, of peaceful assembly and association, the right to take part in the government of their state and the right not to be subjected to torture or abuse.”

The campaign has five key objectives:

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  Demanding that the Spanish government respects the fundamental human, civil and political rights of the Basque people as laid out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
  


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  Demanding that the Spanish government ends its campaign of criminalisation and political persecution against organisations and individuals that are in favour of Basque independence.
  


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  Supporting the right of Iñaki de Juana and Arturo ‘Beñat’ Villanueva not to be persecuted by the Spanish government for their political ideas.
  


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  Calling on the British government to immediately reject the extradition requests and to refuse to collaborate with the Spanish government’s political persecution of Iñaki de Juana and Arturo ‘Beñat’ Villanueva.
  


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  Supporting the right of Iñaki de Juana and Arturo ‘Beñat’ Villanueva to live freely in Ireland.
  

The campaign was launched as new details have emerged showing the flimsy nature of Spanish attempts to extradite the two. In Iñaki’s case, the arrest warrant is merely to question him about the phrase, and he has not been charged with any offence.

Last Friday [June 12], Arturo and his legal team challenged the retrospective nature of the charges against him in court. In response, the judge stated that the arrest warrant could be thrown out on that basis alone and that he would contact the Spanish authorities about the situation. All parties are due in court again on Friday [June 19] to discuss these developments.

éirígí condemn daubing of election poster with racist slogan

28/05/09

Tir Chonaill éirígí activist Micheál Cholm MacGiolla Easbuig has described as “deplorable” the daubing of an election poster at Crolly with a racist slogan and has called on politicians and political parties in the region to unreservedly condemn the incident and those who carried it out.

The slogan was daubed on the election poster of Donegal local election candidate Stella Oladapo. Ms Oladapo is a Nigerian native who has lived in the county for many years. MacGiolla Easbuig said: “This is an appalling incident. Those who defaced this candidates poster with their racist comments are to be condemned. For our part, éirígí believe that racism is never justifiable and must always be challenged wherever it rears its ugly head. As socialists and republicans we believe there is no place in Irish society for this type of race hatred.”He added: “The entire community throughout Donegal, especially out here in the west of the county, must unite in our opposition to such incidents. As Irish people, and particularly as Donegal people who have seen such high levels of emigration to foreign shores over the years, we have ourselves often been on the receiving end of racism in Britain and elsewhere throughout the world. That racism was unjustified and unacceptable then just as this racism against this election candidate is unjustified and unacceptable now.” MacGiolla Easbuig concluded: “There is no place for people within our society who espouse racism and try to spread race hate. I am calling on the entire community to unite in our condemnation of this incident and those who carried it out. In particular it is vitally important that all politicians and political parties in the region publicly condemn this incident in an unequivocal manner. Those responsible for this incident must be left in no doubt that their views do not represent the views of the people of Donegal and that their actions wont be tolerated.”