The Broken Elbow

This is how the Irish (Cork) Examiner explained her action……. Is there more to this story?

Thanks to MM for this reminder:

At the risk of angering friends on the Left, I feel it necessary to highlight the hypocrisy of the US and the UK in their protests over Russia’s behaviour towards Ukraine. After all the unbridled jingoism that accompanied the US invasion of Iraq and the UK invasion of the Falklands is within the living memories of a lot of my readers. A case of ’when we invade’ it is a crusade for freedom, but when the Ruskies do it, well, it’s a crime……

When this number of people brave these conditions to make a protest about something, it’s a sure sign it is a serious matter…..

Interesting RTE documentary from 1995 on British intelligence dirty tricks south of the Border, from the Dublin-Monaghan bombs onwards. Presented by Brendan O’Brien whose work is always worth following. You can watch it here……

Kincora, the boys’ home in East Belfast where youngsters were sexually abused for years, nearly destroying Ian Paisley’s political and religious career and bringing the two Unionist parties to both physical and political blows, is to be demolished.

It ought to have been preserved and made into a museum dedicated to government indifference, police incompetence and, most probably, MI5 callousness. To remind readers, one of the Kincora staff was William McGrath, head and founder of Tara, the Loyalist paramilitary group into whose ranks the post-Malvern St UVF flocked until it resumed violence with the November 1971 bombing of McGurk’s Bar in North Belfast.

MI5 had at least one well-placed agent in Tara who was close to McGrath, yet, we are told to believe, knew nothing about his abuse of young boys. And I am the King of the Congo. How do you do?

Type ’Kincora’ into thIs site’s search bar and you will find plenty of reading.

This is a guest column written by Joan McKiernan on the occasion of celebrations in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere on the longevity of the UK’s monarch, Queen Elizabeth, whose reign has now earned praise from the strangest of all political quarters, viz the current leader of Sinn Fein, Mary Lou McDonald, whose effusive veneration of the world’s oldest hereditary leader has been greeted variously with a mixture of shock, horror, anger, amazement and delight.

Enjoy:

‘Many people in Britain but only some in Ireland are celebrating the British monarch’s seventy years of a life lived in regal luxury, supported by her taxpaying subjects. While the usual Irish politicians rushed to congratulate the British Queen, amongst those heaping praise on her this time were people who not so long ago reviled her and her government.

‘Prominent  amongst them was Mary Lou McDonald, the current head of Sinn Fein, the formerly republican party, which (peace process or not) still acts as the political wing of the IRA. It was the IRA which killed the Queen’s cousin Lord Mounbatten and which tried to kill her during a previous trip to NI and it was Martin McGuinness as IRA Chief of Staff who ordered the death of Mounbatten. Not long afterwards McGuinness invariably stood at the top of the line to shake the Queen’s hand, or to meet her in secret at Hillsborough Castle.

‘This time, Mary Lou rushed to congratulate the English monarch for sitting on her throne for 70 years, praising Elizabeth II for her “long service”. Long forgotten were all those efforts, and the years spent in jail by those organising the Queen’s untimely death and the reaons they did so, urged on by people for whom meeting royalty had now become a way of life.

‘Back in 1977, during the last time this monarch had a celebration of her ‘service,’ when she was marking her silver jubilee, we saw no subservience from such people in Ireland. You can read about the events in Great Britain in the article below. 

‘Nationalists and socialists in the North of Ireland were quite clear about the Queen’s service. Eight years of British military occupation of nationalist areas, internment without trial, military atrocities, collusion with Loyalists, killing innocent civilians, torture of prisoners, as well as the usual litany of problems such as poverty, unemployment, inadequate services and discrimination marked this Queen’s reign. 

‘In Belfast we got loads of those Socialist Workers Party stickers and went round pasting them on every lamp-post, gate, post box, bus stop or whatever. They were small enough to fit into your hand and no British soldier or RUC man could see what you were doing. The stickers were brilliant, taking off every member of the royals. 

‘There was a protest march, of course, down the nationalist Falls Road, and of course, it was stopped, as always, by the Brits at the Castle Street entrance to Belfast city centre. 

‘And there was an IRA bomb at the New University of Ulster in Coleraine. The Queen appears to have had luck on her side, as the timer was incorrectly set and the bomb went off twelve hours before her arrival.’

Here is the other piece on the Silver Jubilee:

Radical Objects: Stuff the Jubilee Badge
By Danny Birchall on November 25, 2011 in Radical Objects

This anti-monarchy badge was produced and widely distributed in 1977 by the Socialist Workers Party as part of their ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ campaign which focused on the cost of the jubilee and the royal family itself, at a time of public sector cuts. Unlike other anti-Jubilee material produced by the SWP at the time, it doesn’t bear the SWP name or logo. The Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II took place in 1977 against a background of rising unemployment and cuts in the public sector. As well as official public celebrations of the monarch’s 25 years on the throne there were significant protests and opposition on the left. An alternative ‘People’s Jubilee’ was held at Alexandra Palace in North London, with music provided by Shakin’ Stevens and Aswad. The Sex Pistols’ punk anthem God Save the Queen was released to coincide with the Jubilee celebrations but received no airplay from the BBC or commercial radio stations. It is still debated whether the record really reached number 1 in the charts on the week of the Queen’s Jubilee itself, or no.2 as the BBC claimed.

You can read here, the full statement given to a US Congressional committee by Kenova chief Jon Boutcher earlier this week covering the various investigations, from Freddie Scappaticci onwards, that he is leading. Boutcher did not appear in person but his statement was placed into the committee’s record. His report is expected later this year, although few prosecutions are expected.

It has been largely forgotten and written out of accounts of the Parachute Regiment’s lamentable record during the Troubles, that after Bloody Sunday in Derry, the Paras spilled more blood on the Shankill Road. My good friend Peter Sefton revisits the killing of uninvolved civilian Ritchie McKinnie at the hands of the same regiment that tore the heart out of the Bogside. You can read his piece here.

By James Kinchin-White & Ed Moloney

He was controversial in life, and even more so in death. When veteran Troubles and Middle East correspondent Bob Fisk died, it took only days for other journalists to make public what many in the profession knew for years or had been told about him, which was that he sometimes made it up.

The extracts below from files unearthed at the Kew archive in England demonstrate that it was not only his colleagues in the print media who harbored doubts about him but also the British Army, an irony since controversial British Army press officer Colin Wallace was, by some accounts, one of his favoured contacts.

The story at the centre of this row between the military and Fisk has to do with an alleged newly introduced procedure by which suspects arrested by troops in Northern Ireland would first be handed over to the Royal Military Police for processing before being delivered to the RUC, an arrangement that could open the way for evidence tampering.

The British Army’s anger at Fisk’s coverage of the story (see documents below) derives from his failure to include their input which was that this was an old story about a procedure that had actually been introduced about a year beforehand, i.e. in mid-1972 and not August 1973 as alleged by Fisk.

Fisk’s copy as published makes no mention of the Army’s version of what happened or his conversation about the story with two senior officers in the military press unit.

(Ed Moloney adds: ‘I had no personal experience of Bob Fisk and had met him only once when he agreed to be interviewed for our RTE documentary ‘Voices From The Grave’, although his insistence that we fly him First Class from Beirut to Dublin and back (his fans apparently would otherwise pester him) did not exactly endear him to me. When I queried the cost of all that I was told that this was one way we could win RTE over to a film about which they were already terrified, and so I relented. RTE doted over him, it seems.

‘I hadn’t heard the other side of the Bob Fisk story until after our interview when I was told in detail a another disturbing, not to say alarming tale of journalistic deceit that was told to me by a colleague of Fisk’s who had worked alongside him in the Middle East. That source I absolutely trusted and believed‘)