Léargas

Ballina Commemoration will remember the Hunger Strikers This Sunday the national hunger strike commemoration will commence at 2.30pm in Ballina, County Mayo. The starting point is at Bunree Road Industrial Estate F26V243. The event will mark 45 years since the 1981 hunger strike in which ten men died. It will also remember all of those Irish republicans who died on hunger strike and especially the resolve and courage of three Mayo hunger strikers Michael Gaughan (1974), Frank Stagg (1976), and Jack McNeela (1940). Looking back five decades after the commencement of the blanket protest in September 1976 and the two hunger strikes that took place in 1980 and 1981, I remain awed by the tenacity and determination of those who endured five years of brutality, violence, deprivation and abuse in the H-Blocks and Armagh Women’s prison before embarking on that most challenging of all personal undertakings – the hunger strike. I remember the lengthy discussions, via smuggled comms, about the pro...

  Anger Is Not A Strategy!  Monday’s Irish Times has an editorial dealing with the possibility of the collapse of the Northern Assembly at Stormont. This is the latest media driven piece of speculation in recent weeks – based on nothing other than the view of the authors - that Sinn Féin plans to bring down the Executive and Assembly. No evidence is presented to support this opinion.   It is true that many republican voters are annoyed at the endless shenanigans of the DUP within the institutions.  Obstructionist attitudes to the Irish language allied with the slowness, for example thus far to build the new Casement stadium, the delays in the development of the A5 and other important matters have angered, with justification, many including this columnist. But anger is not a strategy.  Increasing numbers of nationalists, particularly the new generation, have moved beyond the northern statelet and are now focussed on the Unity referendums. They have little co...

  WHO iS BUGGING WHO?  The efforts by the PSNI and MI5 to monitor the calls of journalists has been in the news lately. MI5 was ordered to pay compensation to BBC journalist Vincent Kearney and former BBC reporter Brian Rowan revealed that his calls were part of a surveillance operation by the PSNI. Both cases have drawn attention again to the use and abuse of surveillance by British state agencies in the North. Republicans were often the target of this kind of behaviour. For example, a s the Sinn Féin delegation walked into crucial talks at Leeds Castle in England in September 2004, several of us carried a five-foot-long listening device that had been uncovered in Connolly House, in west Belfast. A week earlier another device had been found in the flat belonging to a member of my constituency staff. Irish republicans have long been targeted by the British state as part of their counter-insurgency strategies. Homes have been bugged, phones tapped, and movements monitored and n...