Ireland is a small Island with a total population of 5.5 million people. 1.5 million people live in northern Ireland which remains part of the United Kingdom and is Governed by the Northern Ireland Assembly which is made up of both Catholic and Protestant politicians who represent both religious communities in northern Ireland. In 1916 there was a political up rising by Irish republicans (nationalist/Catholic) and the British withdrew from 26 of the 32 Counties of Ireland, the 26 counties (The Irish Republic) has since been governed by The Irish Government.
While Ireland may be small in scale when compared to other European nations its scandals are just as big, complex and news worthy. The big news stories in Ireland in recent weeks relate to politicians in Northern Ireland (the north) and these stories have been based around two senior politicians in Belfast City, Gerry Adams (President of Sinn Fein, the largest Catholic/Nationalist Party in the north) and Iris Robinson (Wife of Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson. The DUP is the largest Protestant/Unionist party in the north). Iris Robinson is an elected MP (Member of the British Parliament as is Gerry Adams). The revelations in recent weeks about these two politicians could not be invented by even the most imaginative tabloid journalist. Several weeks ago Ulster Television (UTV) (one of the main TV stations in the north) produced a documentary (Insight) in which it was claimed that the President of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, had known for over a decade that his brother Liam Dominic Adams had raped his daughter Aine from the age of 4. Aine appeared on the programme and explained how she and her mother had went to meet Gerry Adams MP several years ago to tell him what his brother Liam had done. Gerry Adams appeared on the programme and accepted that he had indeed known for over a decade that Aine had been raped by his brother Liam. Gerry admitted that Liam had told him that he had indeed raped Aine over many years since she was 4 years old. The Adams story brought shock waves to the Irish people both at home and abroad, not because this (child abuse) is a new development in Irish society, but the fact that the man (Gerry Adams) welcomed into the White House, Westminster and other democratic institutions around the world had actually concealed the rape of his little nice Aine.
However, the Adams story did not end there. A few days after the Insight programme Gerry Adams was forced to admit that his own father Gerry Adams Snr was also a child rapist and that Gerry had also concealed this information from the police and social services. However, since these revelations Gerry Adams MP has tried to spin and lie his way out of the political corner that he finds himself in, he has said that once his brother Liam had told him that he was a child rapist he had no more contact with his brother Liam. However, the Sunday Tribune in Ireland and other good media have clearly established that not only were Gerry Adams and his brother in contact, but that Gerry Adams helped his brother Liam establish a new live with a new family (including children) in the Irish Republic. Liam Adams is to be arrested within days when a European Arrest Warrant is issued by the Courts in Northern Ireland. It now appears that Liam Adams knew he had 24 charges of rape out-standing against him in the north and that he used his position in Sinn Fein to hide in a safe house in the Irish Republic so that the Police could not arrest him. The reason I have shared this story is not simply to demonise a man who has done terrible wrong, but because while Gerry Adams was protecting his brother from the Courts of Justice, Gerry Adams was the President of Sinn Fein, an organisation that was forcing known sex offenders out of the community.
However Sinn Fein's woes while very much an issue at the moment were quickly joined by the woes of their partners in Government the DUP. Iris Robinson MP has been a fearsome politician for many years, she and her husband Peter Robinson MP have been married for 40 years and have three grown up children. Iris has been out spoken against homosexual relationships and has taken high moral ground on a number of other social and personal issues. However when one is high on moral ground there is only one way to go when you lose your footing, and thats down. Yes indeed, last week the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation NI) produced a documentary by its Spotlight team, in this documentary it was shown that Iris Robinson had been having a sexual relationship with a teenage boy and that she had used her political position to secure money for this young boy so that he could start a business. It would appear that Mr Peter Robinson had discovered this affair in March 2009 after Iris had attempted suicide. It would appear that Peter ordered that any monies secured by Iris for her young lover should be returned immediately. Since the Spotlight documentary more revelations have been brought forward about Iris, and it may well be that her decision to retire from politics with immediate effect was the right one.
However, having said all of the above I am very consious of the fact that in the next few days Northern Ireland may reach yet another mile stone in its turbulent political history. The DUP and Sinn Fein are trying to make a deal that would see the British Westminster Government devolve responsibility for Policing and Justice to the Northern Ireland Assembly. This would be a very big move forward in a very fragile peace process. However while Ireland may be small in scale its political scandals can be just as interesting, complex and intriguing as those in America or France.
Bloody Sunday by Eamon Mc Cann
On Tuesday 15th June,2010, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry will publish its 5,000-page report into the mass killing of protesters in 1972, an event that was unique among Troubles atrocities and that changed Northern Ireland profoundly
THE SMOKE HADN’T cleared from the Bogside when Capt Mike Jackson, second-in-command of the first battalion of the Parachute Regiment, standing in the lee of the Rossville Street flats, began making the notes which were to become the basis of the official British version of the Bloody Sunday killings.
In the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, more than 30 years later, in October 2003, Gen Sir Michael Jackson, as he now was, chief of the general staff, Britain’s number one soldier, told barrister Michael Mansfield that he could remember next to nothing about compiling the Bloody Sunday “shot list”, nor explain why none of the shots it described appeared to conform to any of the shots which the evidence indicated had actually been fired.
In the House of Commons two days after the event, on February 1st 1972, prime minister Edward Heath announced the appointment of Lord Chief Justice Widgery to conduct the original Bloody Sunday inquiry. On the same day, British Information Services distributed to wire services and broadcasting outlets across the world a document headed “Northern Ireland: Londonderry”, detailing 14 shooting incidents which it suggested had made up the “fighting”. These were the incidents recorded by Jackson. The account was to be endorsed 11 weeks later in Widgery’s report.
Next week victims’ families hope to see the Jackson/Widgery version of events repudiated and the truth they have held to through the intervening years installed in its place. Their campaign, which culminated with the appointment in January 1998 of the second tribunal under Lord Saville, aroused the admiration of many and sparked resentment in quite a few.
Why Bloody Sunday? There were bigger death tolls in single incidents in the Troubles. Fifteen Catholics died in the loyalist bombing of McGurk’s Bar in the New Lodge in Belfast a month earlier. Eighteen paratroopers died in an IRA ambush at Warrenpoint in 1979. And, numbers apart, was not the Provisionals’ slaughter of 11 Protestants as they stood in reverent silence around the Enniskillen war memorial on Remembrance Sunday in November 1989 as wicked and unjustifiable as the Bogside massacre?
A number of things made the events in Derry different. This wasn’t an atrocity perpetrated on one community by people purporting to represent the other. It could not be fitted into the preferred narrative of official British thinking. The killers had been uniformed to represent the state. The affront was compounded by the fact that the state at the highest level had then proclaimed that the killings were neither wrong nor illegal.
In every other comparable atrocity, the victims were acknowledged as having been wrongly done to death and the perpetrators damned as wrongdoers. But the Bloody Sunday families were told, in effect, that while they might personally, reasonably, lament the loss of a loved one, they had no wider ground for grievance or legitimate expectation of the killers being brought to account.
All the dead were thus diminished. Liam Wray, brother of Jim Wray, 22, shot in the back at point-blank range as he lay wounded in Glenfada Park, commented: “It said that my brother was less than fully human.”
Bloody Sunday was different, too, in that it was to prove a significant plot point in the narrative of the Northern Troubles. Communal heartache in the wake of mass killings has tended generally to dissipate over time, the happiness of those left behind likely shattered forever but public life not discernibly changed.
In contrast, Bloody Sunday catapulted working-class Catholic communities across the North outside all notions of constitutionality, removing from the Stormont parliament whatever legitimacy it had retained among Catholics. The parliament, which had governed the North since partition, was abolished eight weeks after Bloody Sunday, three weeks before publication of Widgery’s findings. No other major change has stemmed so directly from a single incident.
Bloody Sunday was unique among atrocities, too, in that it was perpetrated in full public view. Most killings in the North have happened with thunderclap suddenness, on lonely roads or in the dead of night, by stealthy ambush or furtive bomb. Bloody Sunday unfolded over a period of perhaps eight minutes in a built-up area on a bright afternoon and in circumstances in which thousands of the victims’ friends and neighbours were crowded into the immediate vicinity.
Within hours, even as Jackson was transmitting to Whitehall the account which was to be disseminated by the British government to deceive the world, people in Derry were piecing their memories of the day together and assembling their unshakeable truth. Few local people didn’t know some of the dead or the families of the dead.
It has regularly been argued Saville’s inquiry was likely to prove futile as “people have already made their minds up”. And, true, campaigners didn’t demand a new inquiry because they wanted to be told the truth but because they wanted the truth to be told.
In the two years after the killings, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association held commemoration marches; from 1975 to 1989, they were organised by Sinn Féin. Some families, disapproving of the political colouration, withdrew from participation. The demand for a new inquiry wasn’t prominent on the agenda. Militant nationalist politics, on the face of it, sought an end of British jurisdiction, not justice from within the British legal system.
In 1987, a group of relatives, along with a number of Sinn Féiners and other political activists, reflecting the drift towards constitutional politics, formed the Bloody Sunday Initiative, later the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC), specifically to push for a second inquiry. In 1992, the new group took over organisation of the annual commemorative march, advancing three demands: repudiation of Widgery and the institution of a new inquiry; formal acknowledgement of the innocence of the victims; and the prosecution of the soldiers responsible.
The BSJC was to encounter considerable initial hostility, but attitudes began to shift as the move towards a settlement gathered pace. The nascent peace process involved the Dublin government taking on issues which might otherwise have remained the prerogative of still only slightly constitutional republicans. In 1995, taoiseach John Bruton designated a civil servant specifically to liaise with the Bloody Sunday families.
Meanwhile, separately from activity in Derry, the director of British Irish Rights Watch, Jane Winter, and Belfast solicitor Patricia Coyle unearthed a series of documents at the Public Records Office in Kew, including the transcript of a now notorious conversation between prime minister Heath and Lord Widgery prior to the announcement that Widgery was to chair the first inquiry. The documents were to form basis of a report by Prof Dermot Walsh in 1997, The Bloody Sunday Tribunal of Inquiry: A Resounding Defeat for Truth, Justice and the Rule of Law .
In June 1997, the new administration of Bertie Ahern presented the newly elected government of Tony Blair with a 178-page assessment of the new material, drawing heavily on Walsh’s analysis. A preface placed the issue in the context of the developing peace process and, for the first time, asserted the demand for a new inquiry as an Irish government position.
When prime minister Blair announced the new inquiry in the House of Commons on January 29th 1998, the Bloody Sunday families celebrated what they saw, accurately, as a victory for their campaign. But they were also aware broader political developments had facilitated their success. Lord Saville delivered his opening statement in the Guildhall on April 3rd, seven days before the Belfast Agreement.
The Bloody Sunday Inquiry was to sit for 434 days. Oral hearings began in Derry’s Guildhall on March 27th 2000 and moved to London from September 2002 to October 2003 to take military and other evidence. In all, 921 witnesses took the stand: 505 civilians, 245 soldiers, 33 police officers, nine forensic experts, 34 IRA members, 39 politicians, civil servants and intelligence officers, 49 journalists and seven priests. Counsel to the inquiry Christopher Clarke made his closing speech on November 22nd and 23rd 2004.
Saville had to deliver a judgment on Bloody Sunday as a single event, and also on each killing and wounding. In effect, there will be 28 mini-reports within the 5,000-plus pages to be published on Tuesday.
For the families, living through the inquiry has been an intensely emotional, frequently fraught, sometimes fascinating and often tedious experience. For some during the hearings, it was virtually a full-time occupation. They face publication of the report with high hopes balanced against fear of a let-down.
On Tuesday they will march together from the killing ground around Rossville Street to the Guildhall, where, at around 10am, five and a half hours before David Cameron stands up in the Commons to introduce the findings, they will learn what Saville has to say about how and why their loved ones were gunned down on their own streets by members of an elite regiment of the British army.
It has been a long trek to reach the place where the march for civil rights had been scheduled to end, but never made it, 38 years ago. In London at the same time, Gen Jackson will learn just what the inquiry has to say about his shot list.
UP DATE: 7th July 2010:
Lawyers representing Liam Adam sought "more time" before the High Court today to prepare their defence to an attempt by the North to extradite him.
Mr Adams, a brother of Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, is wanted in the North to face multiple charges of rape, indecent assault and gross indecency against his daughter, Aine Tyrell, who has waived her right to anonymity.
Mr Adams (aged 54) with an address at Bernagh Avenue in Belfast, denies all the charges and is contesting his extradition.
Today the High Court was told Mr Adams' legal team was seeking a further adjournment of the matter to allow for a sworn affidavit from a solicitor in the North to be filed in the case.
The court, of Mr Justice Michael Peart presiding, adjourned the matter until July 21 next when he was told "everything would be ready to proceed in the usual way".
An order of discovery, being made in relation to a single document, will also be heard on that day.
Judge Peart said he was "most anxious" to fix a date for the hearing of the matter "at that stage".
It is claimed the offences occurred at various addresses in Belfast between March 1977 and March 1983 when the alleged victim was aged between four and 10 years.
It is alleged some of the offences occurred when Ms Tyrell's mother was out of the family's house.
Mr Adams turned himself into gardaí in Dublin early this year after a European Arrest Warrant was issued by the PSNI.
He has already denied he fled the North a year ago to escape prosecution but claims he feared he and his children were in danger after media reports of the allegations.
Mr Adams also maintains he will not get a fair trial.
Up Date 21st July 2010:
Lawyers for Liam Adams have been refused access to correspondence which they claim could be relevant to the fight against his extradition to the North for alleged sex abuse charges, it has emerged.
Today the High Court ruled it would not grant an order of discovery sought by Mr Adams (aged 54) for a letter sent by authorities here seeking “further clarification” of certain issues from the Crown Solicitor’s office in Belfast.
Mr Adams, a brother of Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, with an address at Bernagh Avenue in Belfast, is wanted in the North to face multiple charges of rape, indecent assault and gross indecency against his daughter, Aine Tyrell, who has waived her right to anonymity.
He denies all the charges and is contesting the request for his surrender.
Today, Mr Michael O’Higgins SC, for Adams, argued the letter was “reasonably necessary” to the case, as it could “give rise to a suggestion” that the warrant issued for his client “wouldn’t pass mustard” in its present form.
Other correspondence of the same kind has already been made available to Liam Adams’ legal team, and the court heard it was “wholly inconsistent” that a “differing stance” would be taken in respect of a specific letter.
The court was told that when the hearing of the matter goes ahead, counsel for Adams will “attempt to highlight fragilities” in the warrant and this could be “aided” by “concerns voiced” about it by authorities here.
Mr O’Higgins SC also said that the letter potentially “tied into” some of the grounds being raised in the case, including an argument of “lack of specificity”.
Liam Adams was as in court for yesterday’s brief application which was heard at Court 21 at the Criminal Courts of Justice, Dublin’s Parkgate Street.
It is claimed the sexual offences occurred at various addresses in Belfast between March 1977 and March 1983 when the alleged victim was aged between four and 10 years. It is alleged some of the offences occurred when Ms Tyrell's mother was out of the family's house.
Mr Adams turned himself into gardaí in Dublin early this year after a European Arrest Warrant was issued by the PSNI.
He has already denied he fled the North a year ago to escape prosecution but claims he feared he and his children were in danger after media reports of the allegations.
Mr Adams also maintains he will not get a fair trial.
Yesterday’s motion for discovery was opposed by the State who claimed the application was “not well founded” and that letter requested was neither “relevant” not “necessary”.
Judge Peart refused the discovery sought, holding that it was not a suitable incidence for the granting of such an order.
The case was adjourned until Wednesday next, when lawyers for Mr Adams will indicate to the court whether their client wishes to appeal the High Court’s refusal.
The court also heard yesterday that an issue would be raised in the case concerning “transcripts of broadcasts” relating to “the controversy”.
