Léargas

  Alice Toner I was deeply saddened by the death of Alice Toner. I knew Alice and her husband Fra all of my adult life. Like my own family they moved into Ballymurphy shortly after it was built. She and Fra were long standing republicans. Alice was born Alice Scullion in 1929 from Varna Street in the Falls area. Varna Street is now gone – a victim of redevelopment but it was situated around where Osman Street is now. Alice was born eight years after partition was imposed. Her family suffered under the apartheid system imposed by the unionist regime at Stormont. Unemployment and poverty were widespread along with the denial of the vote in local elections and the gerrymandering of electoral boundaries. It was almost impossible to get a house if you were a Catholic. In the late 1940s Alice met and fell in love with Francie Toner. Through the first years of their marriage they and their three children lived in one room in Alice’s family home in Varna Street. In the early 1950s th...

  H Block LP –Resistance Music The first time Christy Moore sang  ‘Ninety Miles from Dublin’  in west Belfast - his song about the obscenity of the H-Blocks - was in the old Ballymurphy Tenants Association building on the Whiterock Road in the summer of 1980. Tom Cahill had asked Christy to come to the city and play a set. Still not sure of the words, Christy had a piece of paper on which the words were written taped to the microphone. The H Block LP which had been recorded over the previous two years was also released that summer a few months before the first hunger strike commenced and at the height of the public campaign in support of political status. It has ten tracks and the wealth of talent on display is formidable. Christy Moore, Francie Brolly, Dan Dowd, Mick Hanly, Noel Hill, Tone Linnane, Donal Lunny, Matt Molloy, and Declan Sinnott. Actor Stephen Rea reads three poems, two of them written by prisoners in the H Blocks and smuggled out from the prison. Thr...

  The Future of Moore Street Last Thursday the relatives of the Signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic and the Moore Street Preservation Trust launched their detailed plan for the protection of the 1916 Moore Street Battlefield site and for its development as a historic cultural quarter. They were joined at the launched by many of those, including … and Mary Lou McDonald TD and others who have campaigned against the developer led proposal for the area that has been produced by British company Hammerson. Hammerson’s plan which would see much of the iconic 1916 architecture of the area demolished, has the support of An Taoiseach Micheál Martin and his government. Mr. Martin, who met Hammerson and endorsed its plan before the developer published its proposal, has refused, thus far, to meet the relatives. To their shame successive Irish governments have supported the private development of Moore Street and allowed the national monument at 14-17 Moore Street, the las...

  Gerry Adams launched his latest book in his Léargas series on Michael Davitt at the Davitt’s GAC grounds at Beechmount in west Belfast on Saturday morning 16 October. The training grounds were full of young people, some as young as 5 and 6 practicing their hurling moves.  Davitt’s were playing St. Paul’s and the skill and determination of the youngsters as they blocked and tackled and sent the sliothar from one end of the pitch to the other was a joy to behold. Tommy Shaw and Terry Park from the Davitts were on hand to help launch the book which is drawn from two lecture on Michael Davitt that Adams gave in the Club in October 2006 and again in August 2021. Speaking at the launch Gerry Adams said: “ Much has been written of Davitt.  But what is indisputable is that he was an idealist, a nationalist, a fenian, a republican,  a revolutionary, a labour activist, a writer and journalist, a historian and an internationalist. James Connolly who lived on the Falls Road an...

  Jeffrey at the Crossroads Is the Union the only reason why some working class unionist voters persist in voting for parties like the DUP when that party clearly doesn’t represent them on social and economic issues? In fact the DUP often acts against the class interests of working class Protestants, Unionists and Loyalists especially those from deprived communities, suffering from the effects of Tory policies.  The failure, thus far, of parties like the PUP and other smaller parties to organize and to win more significant electoral support compounds this anomaly. So does Sectarianism. I don’t buy into the current popular notion, based on recent opinion polls that the DUP vote is in terminal decline. Unionism has lost its electoral majority but that could be turned around if its leaders got their act together. The scandals involving some of the DUP’s Assembly Ministers had  a negative influence in the last election but  the DUP still emerged as the larg...