Saturday, November 29, 2008

32 YEARS UNDER WATER........

....or 'A SWIM FOR EVERY COUNTY!'

It began - properly structured and organised - in 1976 ,as a ‘fundraiser with a difference’ combined with the need to gain extra publicity for a situation which was then - as now - making world headlines . Those that sat down together in early September 1976 to tighten-up the then ‘hit-and-miss’ affair were a dedicated team who fully understood that to fail in their business would not only bring derision on them and the issue they sought to highlight , but would give their enemy a publicity coup which they would exploit to the fullest extent . With that in mind , the team persevered - favours were called-in , guarantees were secured , provisions obtained and word dispatched to like-minded individuals in the near-locale . At the appointed time on the agreed day - 12 Noon , Christmas Day 1976 - a soon-to-be 32-years-young event was ‘born’…….



The CABHAIR Christmas Day Swim is , thankfully , still going strong and will be , as mentioned , 32-years-young on December 25th next!
Photographs of last years event can be viewed here and , if you can’t make it to the actual swim itself , you might consider posting a donation to the following address
(please note that all monies raised goes to the republican prisoners themselves and to their families - no expenses or admin fees etc are removed) :
CABHAIR
Irish Republican Prisoners Dependants Fund
223 Parnell Street,
Dublin 1,
Ireland.

Thank You,
Go Raibh Maith Agat.

Sharon.






Wednesday, November 26, 2008


THE IRA : the new IRA is younger , more radical and has seen little of life other than violence.......
By Ed Moloney.
From 'Magill' magazine, September 1980.

" The most successful radicalisation of the Republican Movement since the Republican Congress, and it didn't cause a split..." - that's how Sinn Fein Vice President Gerry Adams, the man most identified with that radicalisation , now describes the recent political changes in Sinn Fein .

The move to the political left hasn't , it's true, caused a split in the Provisionals but it has come very close to it : there is undoubtedly a division within the Provo ranks , and that organisation can be said now to be roughly divided between North of Ireland and South of Ireland , old and young , traditional and revolutionary , but essentially between political 'right' and 'left' .

The impetus for the move leftwards has come from a small group of Northern and especially Belfast radicals whose influence far outweights their strength . One Belfast leftist puts their numbers at no more than 30 or 40 , but it is almost entirely because the present 7-person IRA Army Council is like-minded , and are responsible for the military re-vitalisation of the IRA , that the leftists have exerted as much influence as they have . Realistically , the Provisionals have yet to move much further to the left before the radicals can say that they have successfully turned it into a socialist organisation . More so than most political organisations , the Provisionals consist of a delicate balance of differing interest groups - move them one way and the balance is upset . Most political organisations can withstand those sort of stresses and strains but less so an organisation that is also fighting a war of national liberation . The leftists have been able to tip the balance so far and even then only a little at a time.......

(MORE LATER).



BLACK PROPAGANDA AND BLOODY MURDER.......
British Army Captain John Colin Wallace.

First it was the Maguire family - claiming they had been wrongly convicted of bombings in London on faulty forensic tests and circumstantial evidence . Then the Birmingham Six were shown to have been the victims of another miscarriage of British 'justice' . Now , in the most bizarre case of all , a former British Intelligence officer , who served in the North of Ireland , has claimed that he was framed for a killing he didn't commit .
British Captain John Wallace , now serving ten years for manslaughter , claims that his conviction was part of a plan to destroy his credibility because he knew too much about covert operations in Ireland - on both sides of the border . Frank Doherty talked to Wallace and to another former British Intelligence officer , Captain Fred Holroyd , who is lobbying politicians to re-open a case which is as potentially embarrassing for the British Secret Service as the Wright case in Australia has proved to be.
From 'MAGILL' magazine , December 1986 .

British Army Captain John Colin Wallace claims that he was shifted from the North of Ireland to England because he was one of a team of black propaganda experts organised by the Secret Service chief in the North , Craig Smellie. According to Wallace , his title of 'Head of Production Services' was a meaningless cover for his real job as senior officer in the secretive 'Information Policy Unit' , a propaganda group run jointly by MI6 and the British Army.

" Most of the propaganda was directed against the IRA . Some of it was used on targets like Ian Paisley, Bill Craig and some Southern politicians, " says Wallace . He claims that he leaked information to 'The Times' newspaper after being instructed to do so by a 'a senior officer in [British] intelligence' . Files and papers concerning a special unit set up at Stormont Castle to discredit politicians were dropped through the letterbox of a Queen's University professor's home in 1975 - " It was me who delivered those papers, " Wallace says , " but I was acting on instructions from higher authority . Later , the reporter was visited at a Dublin hotel by a British Embassy official and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if he used the information in the documents I had left with him."

The whole affair was part of the feud which had blown up between rival British spy agencies in Ireland . " I ended up with a civilian job in Arundel, Sussex, as Information Officer with the local council . Other members of the MI6 team in Lisburn were sent elsewhere when MI5 took over responsibility for intelligence on both sides of the Irish border . The head of the Secret Service team , Craig Smellie , was sent to Athens . He died there....... "

(MORE LATER).



THE UNDAUNTED WOMEN IN ARMAGH.......

The full story of the republican prisoners in Armagh Jail has yet to be told. It has yet to be sung , and properly described , other than as an after-thought in public speeches - "...and of course the women in Armagh.." Republicans have a right to be proud of those women who, from the Divis Flats grandmother doing six months for what an Orange judge called "riotous behaviour" to the young IRA Volunteer inside for the second time and not yet 25-years-old , have managed, whether they numbered 12 or 120 , to maintain their resistance to the most vicious prison system in Europe. The words that follow , says writer Patricia Collins , were written to encourage more of those women to come forward and tell their story , and are based on conversations with several
ex-prisoners , and on visits and letters from those women presently imprisoned. They were written in the hope of jogging the memory of all those women who wrongly think their contribution to Ireland's future peace is not worth mentioning.

From 'IRIS' magazine , August 1984.

Young women from Nationalist ghettos would be thrown into Armagh Jail , just like Brenda Murray was : Rita Bateson , from the Bone area of Belfast , arrested in November 1976 , then aged 16 : Peggy McCormack , sentenced to two years in 1978 , then aged 14 . In contrast to those teenagers , there were also women like Rose McAllister , from Ardoyne , who had done six months in prison for wearing a combat jacket in 1971 . Later , in 1976 , she spent a few months on remand which ended with her charges being dropped and , finally , in 1978 , she was sentenced to two years , which she did on the protest . She was then aged 40 and had four children . With these women a whole community was being criminalised .

Brenda Murray was on her own in the sentenced part of 'A' Wing for three or four weeks . Eileen Morgan , from Newry , then joined her and the two engaged in a 'no work' protest and , as a result , were put on 21-hour lock-up , with only one visit a month , loss of all privileges and loss of remission .

Other women were soon to follow : Roisin Rouse from Craigavon , then Mairead Farrell . By February 1977 , there were five protesting prisoners and two are still inside - Eileen Morgan and Mairead Farrell . By March 1979 , the numbers of protesting Irish republican female prisoners stood at 38.......
(MORE LATER).







Tuesday, November 25, 2008

HAVE SOME OF US LOST THE SENSE OF 'RIGHT AND WRONG' ?
HAVE SOME LOST THEIR MORALS ?



(Photo from here.)

On Wednesday, November 12, 2008 , an Irishman was killed in Afghanistan : Robert McKibben (32), from Westport in County Mayo , died wearing the uniform of the British Army . He joined the Royal Marines at 27 and trained as a commando before joining J Company 42 Commando based in Plymouth. Marine McKibben, known to most on his unit as 'Frank', was serving on Operation HERRICK 9 with the Brigade Reconnaissance Force (BRF), 'United Kingdom Landing Force Command Support Group', as a reconnaissance operator. He was buried yesterday (Monday 24 November 2008) in Aughavale Cemetary in Westport and six uniformed British Army Marines carried his coffin – draped in a Royal Marines flag . That particular group of savage bandits has a bloody track record on this isle , which they attempt to pass-off as 'a jolly-good caper' on behalf of the 'empire'. It is nothing of the sort , as we Irish , amongst other peoples, are all too aware : that British Army Unit , and its members , represent the same 'tradition' as Cromwell did and should be seen as representing that 'Thug Tradition' .

The British political leadership themselves are , as expected , being extremely hypocritical regarding the deaths of 'their boys' :
'Two weeks ago, it was revealed that a British commander with the elite Special Air Service (SAS) had resigned, blaming the failure to provide his troops with heavy armoured vehicles for the deaths of some of his soldiers. Major Sebastian Morley, commander of SAS (Special Air Service) troops in Afghanistan, had "resigned in disgust"....'
(From here.)
They'll tell you it's 'your duty' , that you owe it to those that have gone before you , that it's for 'justice and world peace' ....or even that it's "for the freedom of small nations" : and some Irish people apparently still consider that to be the case. In doing so , they ignore not only their own history but that of 'The Great British Empire' as well . More fool they.

This.....

....is NOT our flag . Let's not make it so.


Robert McKibben died representing a foreign army of occupation . He is not the first Irishman to have that wrote about him and probably won't be the last : voices like ours on this blog are in the minority in highlighting that fact and , while we understand the grief his family are going through , we can only hope - sincerly - that his death may at least give others a reason to think twice before they go off , fully armed and kitted-out in an occupiers uniform , to foreign climes to 'keep the peace between the natives' .
Sharon.






Sunday, November 23, 2008

NO WELCOME HERE FOR BRITISH 'ROYALTY'!

In the last few weeks there has been increased speculation by the establishment media that the present English 'queen' is planning to visit her loyal subjects in Stormont and Leinster House : the Irish Republican position on any such visit is clear -

'When the english robbed our language
and gave us theirs instead,
they gave us leave to cheat them
in the things we left unsaid,
when they robbed us of our claymores
and thought our pikes absurd,
we fashioned brand new weapons,
with each new fangled word.'


Anne Windsor was the Colonel-in-Chief of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment of the British Crown Forces (29th/45th Foot) until it became the 2nd Battalion of the Mercian Regiment (Worcesters and Foresters) last August. In 1916, the 178 (Forester) Brigade was sent to Dublin in an attempt to suppress the Easter Rising. The same women is presently associated with British political and military imperialism by virtue of the following positions which she holds :
* Colonel-in-Chief, The King’s Royal Hussars
* Colonel-in-Chief, The Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment (29/45 Foot)
* Colonel-in-Chief, The Royal Corps of Signals
* Colonel-in-Chief, The Royal Logistic Corps
* Colonel-in-Chief, The Royal Army Veterinary Corps
* Commandant-in-Chief, The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps)
* Colonel, The Blues and Royals
* Royal Colonel, The Royal Scots Borderers, 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland
* Royal Colonel, The 52nd Lowland Regiment, 6th Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland
* Rear Admiral and Chief Commandant for women, Royal Navy
* Honorary Air Commodore, RAF Lyneham
* Honorary Air Commodore, University of London Air Squadron
* Royal Honorary Colonel, University of London OTC
* Commodore-in-Chief, Portsmouth.

Irish Republicans will be opposing the presence on this island of Anne Windsor : details of the intended protest will be announced nearer the date concerned .
Sharon.