Léargas

There have been many milestones in the recent history of the northern state. Some have been incredibly difficult and tragic. The foundation of the state; the partition of our small island; the repression of the unionist regime at Stormont and the decades of conflict, have all left a sad and bitter legacy which will take a long time to completely deal with. But more recently there have been different kinds of milestones. Moments of hope. The beginnings of new friendships and the possibility of a new and better future. Four years ago, on Monday March 26th, Ian Paisley and this blog led respective party delegations into the member’s dining room in Parliament Buildings at Stormont. This event followed years of work and some very focussed months, weeks and days of negotiations. Ian Paisley and I sat at the centre of our parties delegations. Beside and behind us set our colleagues. At 12 noon the television feed went live and the first thing viewers saw was Ian Paisley and this blog sitting ...

Last Saturday morning was a cold sharp day in New York. This blog travelled to Calvary Cemetery in Woodside in the Borough of Queens to attend a commemoration in memory of the 1981 hunger strikers. Over the years I have been in many such places. But Calvary is on a different scale to anything this blog has ever experienced before. It is huge. It is so big that it is divided into four parts and together they hold over three million souls. Calvary Cemetery was established in 1847 and opened the following year. It is said that there were 50 burials a day and that half were Irish. Mostly victims of An Gorta Mór – the great hunger. They were some of the hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women and children, who had fled starvation and poverty in Ireland for the new world, only to catch cholera or some other illness. They died in fever camps and ports the length of Canada and the USA. Saturdays’ commemoration was fittingly at the Patriots Plot. A large Celtic Cross marks the spot where ...

Frederick Douglass mural on the Falls Road However far this blog travels there are connections to west Belfast to be found everywhere, usually in the people I meet. Like the man from Lenadoon, who left Belfast when he was five for Canada. He used to come back each year to visit family in Beechmount where he met me at the age of 14 as I was campaigning in an election. Today I met him again in a hotel in New York. He was here for a hockey game. Sometimes the connections are through former political prisoners from west Belfast who are to be found in all parts of the globe or former residents who emigrated but have never forgotten their home and are proud of where they came from. And occasionally the connection is surprising and the coincidence startling. For example. On St. Patrick’s night I attended the traditional St. Patrick’s Day White House event hosted by President Obama. The place was packed. There were a few of us from Ireland, including the Taoiseach. But this was a night for the...

Getting our pic taken in City Hall On Thursday evening this blog called into the Dundalk Institute of Technology where gaeilgeóirí where holding an event to mark Seachtain na Gaeilge – the week of Irish – which this year began on March 5th and concludes, as it does each year, on St. Patrick’s Day next week. The following morning I was in Belfast City Hall where a series of events had been organised to also mark this unique celebration of the Irish language. The choir from Bunscoil Phobal Feirste on the Shaws Road in West Belfast where there and treated us to some beautifully sung songs in Irish and young people from the Meanscoil joined us later. At one point a group of tourists who were being show around the City Hall were invited in to listen to the children. They thoroughly enjoyed it. Seachtain na Gaeilge is a non-profit organization which was set up in 1902 by Conradh na Gaeilge. Its objective is to promote the use of the Irish language in Ireland and overseas. It does this by org...

Yesterday was an important day. The first formal day of the new Dáil. The enhanced Sinn Féin team of 14 TDs arrived to play our part. We gathered under a blue sky at the Mansion House in Dawson Street around 10.30am, the site of the meeting of the historic First Dáil in January 1919. Earlier I had attended a ecumenical service in Saint Anne’s, the church where Wolfe Tone was married. We walked the short distance along Molesworth Street to Leinster House. The Sinn Féin TDs were accompanied by scores of smiling family members and constituency party activists who were there for the occasion. Everyone was in good form. There was a very real sense that Sinn Féin had achieved a remarkable success and that we are now going into the Dáil stronger and more experienced than at any time since partition. The Dáil chamber was packed. It’s smaller than it looks on television or in photos. But it is much bigger than the chamber at Stormont. It was interesting watching Fianna Fáil trying to poke hole...

It’s just over a week since this blog was elected by the people of Louth and East Meath to be their Teachta Dála. As Fine Gael and Labour negotiated their way into government Sinn Féin’s new 14 strong Dáil team met in Leinster House to begin the work of becoming the real opposition. Everyone was in great form. We are very mindful that this is the year which marks the 30th anniversary of the hunger strike and of the sacrifice of the men and women in all of the prisons who contributed enormously to the growth and development of Sinn Féin. So, there was a real sense of change and of progress being made. A recognition that we are part of an all-Ireland team. A determined mood to advance our republican objectives and of confronting the bad policy decisions that will be the inevitable outworking of a Fine Gael led government. Sinn Féin is in Leinster House to do business. We are there to put backbone into the Dáil. The reality is that the problems of unemployment and emigration, of negative ...

The legacy and memories of the H Blocks of Long Kesh were very present this week for this blog. On Monday, in my first official role as a TD for Louth and East Meath I spoke at the removal from Dundalk of my good friend and comrade and H-Block escapee Peter ‘Skeet’ Hamilton. The next day was the 30th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike and along with other ex-prisoners and family members I was present in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast for the opening of an exhibition marking the hunger strike. Martin McGuinness and Mary Lou McDonald formally launched the exhibition. It is a remarkable collection of photos and memorabilia of that time. It sets the prison struggle in the context of the wider freedom struggle, the British criminalisation policy and events inside and outside of the prison. It includes original comms written by Bobby Sands, Ciaran Doherty and Mairead Farrell and others, on tiny pieces of paper which were smuggled out of the H-Blocks and Armagh women’s prison. H-Block a...

Arriving at the Count in Dundalk The election is now finally and positively and definitively over! The last counts in Wicklow and Laois Offaly and Galway West have been completed and the shape of the next Dáil is now known. Acres of newsprint have been used to analyse the results and hours of television and radio, of tweets and blogs have reported on every twist and turn of what was a hugely important election. Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have been punished for the bad decisions they took in government. Fine Gael and Labour benefited from the public anger. They did so despite having said they will implement Fianna Fail’s policy of adding private banking debt to the sovereign debt, and of implementing a succession of punitive austerity budgets over the next three years at least. There are a plethora of independents from the left to the right and many in between. And there are 14 Sinn Fein Teachtaí Dála! The largest number of Sinn Féin TDs in Leinster House since par...