Léargas

Friday citizens in the south will have an opportunity to remove the eighth amendment. That is citizens will, if they wish to, remove this amendment from the Irish constitution or leave it in. This amendment was originally proposed by Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Charlie Haughey in 1982. The referendum on this was subsequently held under a Fine Gael/Labour coalition government in September 1983.   The Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in 1982 took the decision to oppose this amendment. This was four years before Sinn Féin ended our abstentionist policy to the Oireachtas. So, the Ard Fheis decided not to campaign against the amendment, though individual party members, especially women activists, did. In the decades since then Sinn Féin has constantly revised party policy on the role and rights of women in Irish society. 35 years after the 1983 referendum the people of the south now have the opportunity to vote again on this issue and to right a wrong done at that time. The question we are being asked t

The last few weeks have seen the southern state rocked by the cervical smear scandal and a shameful lack of individual and institutional accountability for this. It’s a story that only emerged as a result of the determination of terminally ill Vicky Phelan to stand up for truth and transparency. In April Vicky refused to collude in the cover up by rejecting a demand that she sign a confidentiality agreement as part of the settlement between her and a US Laboratory, Clinical Pathology Laboratories Inc. The laboratory was responsible for giving her the all clear from a 2011 smear test. Three years after her test and the all clear she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. It was another three years before Vicky Phelan learned that her original smear result had been wrong. Her refusal to acquiesce to the demand that she remain silent was key to lifting the lid on this scandal. In the weeks since almost every day has brought new information and new victims to light. Several hundred

    RG and I arrived in Bilbao in the Basque Country, on the same flight as former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, last Thursday afternoon. While we were in the air a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland had heard a statement from ETA, the Basque resistance group, announcing that it was dissolving. From Bilbao RG and I were driven for more than two hours along fast motorways, and then through narrow country roads that twisted and turned along steep valleys, green and beautiful despite the overcast sky. Despite the poor mobile signals, that was more often down than up, we did our best to keep abreast of developments in the west Tyrone by-election. Towards 6pm arrived at our hotel in the picturesque village of Ainhoa, on the French side of the border between France and Spain. We joined several others, including Bertie, Jonathan Powell, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of Mexico and some Basque colleagues who were due to take part the following day in an international conference to discuss

  Matt Carthy MEP; Gerry Adams TD; Mary Lou McDonald TD; Cllr Ruairi Ó Murchú; and Michelle O'Neill MLA at All-Island Civic Forum on Brexit in Dundalk on Monday April 30 There has been more written and speculated about the likelihood of achieving a United Ireland in recent years than in previous decades. What was once dismissed as fantasy is increasingly being discussed by academics, newspaper columnists and politicians as a real and viable outcome. Perhaps in a few short years, if we who support this objective approach it intelligently and in an inclusive way, and build support for an agreed Ireland and secure a referendum to end the Union.  Two weeks ago a report by one academic, Dr. Paul Nolan, stirred widespread public interest when he claimed that there will be more Catholics than Protestants in the North by 2021 – the centenary of the creation of the northern state. Of course, as we all know the use of statistics to promote one opinion over another is an imperfec