Adams Family Ansell or Gerry Adams

 international | rights and freedoms | opinion/analysis  Saturday April 27, 2013 07:52 by Brian Clarke - AllVoices 

Responsibilities of Leadership

In his book "Born Free and Equal" : Ansel Adams documented life in internment camps, set up during the second world war for the Japanese. Internment of civilian nationals was also carried out in World War Two in Britain, where all Germans, Austrians over the age of 16 and some Italians, were called before special tribunals and divided into one of three groups:

Saoirse

In his book "Born Free and Equal" : Ansel Adams documented life in internment camps, set up during the second world war for the Japanese. Internment of civilian nationals was also carried out in World War Two in Britain, where all Germans, Austrians over the age of 16 and some Italians, were called before special tribunals and divided into one of three groups:

A - high security risks, numbering just under 600, who were immediately interned.

B - 'doubtful cases', numbering around 6,500, who were supervised and subject to restrictions.

C - 'no security risk', numbering around 64,000, who were left at liberty.

More than 55,000 of category 'C' were recognized as refugees from Nazi oppression. The vast majority of these were Jewish. Thousands of Germans, Austrians and Italians were sent to camps set up at Huyton outside Liverpool while the majority were interned on the Isle of Man, where internment camps had also been set up in World War One.

Many of the 'enemy aliens' were in fact Jewish refugees and hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Nazis but it was something the British didn't bother to consider, fortunately unlike in Germany, they did not get around to not gassing them. They were treated like Germans and Austrians nationals in the Isle of Man concentration camp, where over 80 per cent of the internees were Jewish refugees.

Over 7,000 internees were deported to Canada, some to Australia. The liner Arandora Star carrying German and Italian internees was torpedoed, with the loss of 714 lives, mostly internees. Others were humiliated with terrible treatment on the two-month voyage, with their possessions stolen or thrown overboard by the British military. An outcry in Parliament led to the first releases of internees in 1940, with more than 10,000 freed resulting in the summertime with only 5,000 left in internment camps.

Internment carried out in the US, had some 100,000 Japanese-Americans interned, many in very poor conditions. Winston Churchill, Britain's leader during World War 2, was at first enthusiastic for the use of internment but later came to be highly critical of internment, describing it in in his own words, "in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government." One thing is absolutely clear, that wherever internment without trial and this extreme violation of civil liberties used, it is clearly an act of war and does not belong in any sort of a democracy.

In Ireland, since the foundation of two scum states by the British including British Occupied Ireland, internment without trial has been used in every decade over the last one hundred years. This Act of War used so indiscriminately in Ireland is clearly a symptom of a failed political arrangement and and an indictment of British occupation. It certainly has no place, in a supposed Irish Peace Process after 40 years of war and troubles. Political internment without trial by the British was the spark that started the last troubles that cost 3,000 lives in Ireland.

Since the Tories cam to power after the last election they seem hell bent on starting the conflict again, for war profits for their industrial -war complex election sponsor financiers and the ever expanding bureaucracy of a pseudo war on terror. Their self-serving secret service have been given totalitarian powers of secret service trials in secrecy, dispensing with centuries old human rights provisions like habeus corpus.

They have in the instance of their current internment without trial of two elderly traditional Irish republicans retired decades ago, from active service, after their respective release from sentences handed down over 40 years ago. In fact in the instance of Marian Price, they have destroyed, a royal pardon given to her becuase of extreme bad health, after a 200 day hunger strike. Marian Price and Martin Corey have been interned, held without trial for two and three years respectively.

The British have produced no evidence what so ever, in open court against either Marian or Martin. Judges have on several occasions ordered their release. They have been overuled by the vice royal a minion of what now is the SS Gestapo of the totalitarian British secret services, who still run death squads that murder human rights lawyers and journalists post peace process in Occupied Ireland, despite a supposed peace process.

The British have not produced a shred of evidence in open court, very simply, because there is not a shred of evidence. Marian Price and Martin Corey are too elderly, principled, traditional Irish republicans who believe in the unification of the small island of Ireland without outside British interference. They are entitled to their beliefs and are most definitely not engaged in any violence of any description. They are simply too old, as they themselves have said and they have challenged the British Tories to produce any evidence which they simply cannot. As icons of former active resistance to British occupation in Ireland, they are simply being used by the bigoted British Tories and their sectarian state, as supremacist exhibitionism meant to cow andy restless native unto submission.

“We, as citizens, can agitate for tolerance and fair play, but our agitation must be dynamic and persistent,” Ansel Adams wrote in his in his book Born Free and Equal. “It is easy for a ‘fair-weather lover of the Constitution’ to ‘favour’ tolerance, and mouth principles of democracy, but it is quite another thing to stand up against opposition and fight for principles.” Several of Adams’ photographs in his book feature in A Challenge to Democracy exhibition, that explores the pervasive nature of ethnic profiling such as the British Tories are currently engaged in as an extension of their Thatcherite racism which regards everyone Irish, as a liar not to be trusted.

All of which takes us to an Adams more familiar with British internment in Ireland. Gerry Adams as leader of provisional Sinn Fein and a former internee himself, signed up to a Peace Process meant to engage principles of democracy rather than war. Its not a question of being a little bit pregnant. He is either engaged in that process or not. As something voted on by all of Ireland, he and all those who have mouthed peace for years have serious responsibilities to future generations. Gerry Adams predecessors the SDLP walked out of the British Stormont parliament in Ireland, with the introduction political internment. he and his party either put up or shut up. The injustice of internment, an Act of War on the Irish people does not go hand in hand with the justice foundation necessary for peace. A Peace Process without Due Process is an oxymoron. Gerry Adams and the Tories need to stop cherry picking, it is unsustainable with genuine peace.

If Gerry Adams' Provisional Sinn Fein are remotely true to their founding principles and former comrades, who were given orders by their provisional IRA commanders, to engage in operations 40 years ago, for which according to the British, Marian Price and Martin Corey are still now interned, they clearly have responsibilities of leadership, which has not yet been demonstrated to the ongoing rape of Irish children.

In the same way that her British majesty and the Tories have reneged on their royal pardons and commitments to the Irish Peace Process, they themselves by their actions, as opposed to their peace propaganda, are the enablers of the ongoing lawlessness in Ireland. How can they expect fouth generation, deprived, unemployed Irish youth, to have any respect for their sytemic injustice system of repression, that requires political internment without trial, that is "in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government." Winston Churchill.

It is beyond time for Gerry Adams and his party, stepped up to the plate of being "Born Free and Equal" and demonstrate that like his namesake Ansell Adams, as an elected citizen, he can agitate for tolerance and fair play, be dynamic and persistent, or are they just a‘fair-weather lover of the 'Constitution’(Republic) to ‘favour’ tolerance, and mouth principles of democracy,' or can they stand up against opposition and fight for principles.”

So Gerry, is it Ansell Adams or other Addams family values? We don't have the time to hang around dithering any longer, there are two elderly internees, who have given their life and all for the republic, who are going to die interned, as a result of orders from your commanders. Take responsibility, hold the Tories to account. British political internment without trial, is an a Act of War in an Irish Peace Process.Withdraw from Stormont like the SDLP did. Stop administering Internment !

Related Link: http://irishblog-brianclarkenuj.blogspot.com/2013/04/an....html

IRA 1983 Break Out of the Maze Prison

DANCE ON THATCHER'S GRAVE : Laughter of Our Children

Dance on Thatcher's Grave, but Remember, There Has Been a Coup in Britain
By John Pilger 
April 25, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - In the wake of Thatcher’s departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby’s daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was “affected by a Trade dispute”.

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished.
I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. “I cannot tolerate this,” said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher’s ban held.

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime – the killers of 1.7 million people – retain its “right” to represent their victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia’s liberator, Vietnam. The British representative was instructed to vote with Pol Pot at the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from providing help to where it was needed more than anywhere on earth.

To conceal this outrage, the US, Britain and China, Pol Pot’s main backer, invented a “resistance coalition” dominated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces and supplied by the CIA at bases along the Thai border. There was a hitch. In the wake of the Irangate arms-for-hostages debacle, the US Congress had banned clandestine foreign adventures. “In one of those deals the two of them liked to make,” a senior Whitehall official told the Sunday Telegraph, “President Reagan put it to Thatcher that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show. She readily agreed.”

In 1983, Thatcher sent the SAS to train the “coalition” in its own distinctive brand of terrorism. Seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong, and British soldiers set about training “resistance fighters” in laying minefields in a country devastated by genocide and the world’s highest rate of death and injury as a result of landmines.

I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. “I confirm,” she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, “that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them.” The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the “coalition”. “We liked the British,” a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. “They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims.”

When the journalists and producers of ITV’s landmark documentary, Death on the Rock, exposed how the SAS had run Thatcher’s other death squads in Ireland and Gibraltar, they were hounded by Rupert Murdoch’s “journalists”, then cowering behind the razor wire at Wapping. Although exonerated, Thames TV lost its ITV franchise.

In 1982, the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, was steaming outside the Falklands exclusion zone. The ship offered no threat, yet Thatcher gave orders for it to be sunk. Her victims were 323 sailors, including conscripted teenagers. The crime had a certain logic. Among Thatcher’s closest allies were mass murderers – Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, responsible for “many more than one million deaths” (Amnesty International). Although the British state had long armed the world’s leading tyrannies, it was Thatcher who brought a crusading zeal to the deals, talking up the finer points of fighter aircraft engines, hard-bargaining with bribe-demanding Saudi princes. I filmed her at an arms fair, stroking a gleaming missile. “I’ll have one of those!” she said.

In his arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Lord Richard Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein. These were her “boys”. Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of her boys, mostly cabinet ministers, on the front page sitting with Saddam on his famous white couch. There is Douglas Hurd and there is a grinning David Mellor, also of the Foreign Office, around the time his host was ordering the gassing of 5,000 Kurds. Following this atrocity, the Thatcher government doubled trade credits to Saddam.

Perhaps it is too easy to dance on her grave. Her funeral was a propaganda stunt, fit for a dictator: an absurd show of militarism, as if a coup had taken place. And it has. “Her real triumph”, said another of her boys, Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister, “was to have transformed not just oneparty but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus: the budding war criminal with his mentor. When Ed Milliband, in his unctuous “tribute”, caricatured Thatcher as a “brave” feminist hero whose achievements he personally “honoured”, you knew the old killer had not died at all.

www.johnpilger.com

PROTESTANT COALITION BRITISH OCCUPIED IRELAND

Protestant Coalition

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Protestant Coalition
Leader	Jim Dowson
Founded	24 April 2013
Headquarters	59 The Burn Road Ballygowan BT23 5RZ Northern Ireland
Ideology	Protestantism Unionism Ulster loyalism
Political position	Right-wing
International affiliation	None
European affiliation	None
European Parliament group	None
Colours	Red, White and Blue
Northern Ireland Assembly	0 / 108
Local government in Northern Ireland	0 / 582
Website
http://protestantcoalition.org/
Politics of United Kingdom Political parties Elections

The Protestant Coalition is a loyalist political party in Northern Ireland. It was registered on 23 April 2013,^[1] and launched on 24 April at a hotel in Castlereagh, outside Belfast.^[2]

Contents   [hide]  1 Background 2 Leadership 3 Policies 4 References 5 External links

[edit]Background

The launch of the Protestant Coalition followed a protracted dispute over the decision byBelfast City Council on 3 December 2012 to cease the practice of flying the Union flagthroughout the year over Belfast City Hall, opting instead to fly it only on up to 20 designated days per year. The council decision had been followed by protests throughout Northern Ireland, some of which became violent.^[3] At the time of the launch, both Frazer and Dowson were awaiting trial on charges related to the flag protests.^[4]

[edit]Leadership

The party's founders included prominent anti-republican campaigner Willie Frazer; David Nicholl, a former member of the paramilitary-linked Ulster Democratic Party and Ulster Political Research Group, and Jim Dowson, a former fundraiser for the extreme right-wingBritish National Party (BNP).^[4] Although Dowson was registered with the Electoral Commission as the Protestant Coalition's leader,^[1] he stated at the launch that the Coalition had no one leader.^[4] Paul Golding was registered as the Coalition's treasurer.^[1]

Dowson's links with the BNP had ended acrimoniously in October 2010 and he then campaigned against its leader, Nick Griffin, through the "British Resistance" website.^[5] In May 2011, Dowson, a Scottish Christian fundamentalist, created a new nationalist movement, Britain First, to protect "British and Christian morality" and campaign against Islam, immigration and abortion. Britain First established a short-lived political party in 2011, the National People's Party.^[5]

Golding, who co-founded and chaired Britain First, had been a BNP councillor in Sevenoaks in 2009-11.^[6] Golding had also been the BNP's Communications Officer,^[7] and editor of the BNP's main magazine.^[5] He had flown into Belfast in December 2012 to help co-ordinate the protests over the flags issue.^[8]

[edit]Policies

The policies of the Coalition, which describes itself as "an anti politics, political party", include opposition to "the whole old rotten farce of the DUP/UUP", while it is "happy to cooperate with the likes of the TUV, UKIP and PUP for the greater good of the overall situation". It appealed for those elected for other unionist parties to defect to the Coalition.^[9] The party states that it "exists to protect and secure Ulster's British heritage and identity and to represent the Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist people", and to oppose "the Sinn Féin/IRA cultural and political 'war' against the British majority in Northern Ireland".^[10]

The party claimed at its launch to have over 500 members, and that would remain in existence for three years, during which time it would contest elections to new local government councils. It also said that it would operate a call centre and use other techniques deployed in American political campaigning.^[4] The Coalition aimed to "cascade down to other Loyal parties, groups and organisations the skill-sets and technology to allow the PUL community to professionalise and expand our message".^[10] Dowson

 said that "if anyone thinks this is a Mickey Mouse 

thing... they are going to be in for a very rude awakening."

[edit]References

1. ^ ^a b c Register of political parties at [electoralcommission.org.uk Electoral Commission] website
2. ^ http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/flag-protesters-launch-new-antipolitics-unionist-party-29220215.html
3. ^ "Violence in Belfast after council votes to change Union flag policy" BBC News 3 December 2012 Retrieved 5 December 2012
4. ^ ^{a b c d e} Connla Young, "Union flag protesters launch new party", Irish News, 25 April 2013
5. ^ ^a b c Hope not Hate profile of Britain First
6. ^ Sophie Madden, "Former BNP Councillor Paul Golding heads Britain First nationalist movement", News Shopper, 8 June 2011
7. ^ BNP website
8. ^ Deborah McAleese, [http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/former-bnp-man-and-nick-griffin-excrony-paul-golding-flies-to-belfast-for-loyalist-flag-protest-29005554.html "Former BNP man and Nick Griffin ex-crony Paul Golding flies to Belfast for loyalist flag protest", Belfast Telegraph, 15 December 2012
9. ^ Protestant Unionist Loyalist VOICE magazine, Issue 1, Spring 2013
10. ^ ^a b "Policies", Protestant Coalition website

[edit]External links

MASS HUNGER STRIKES & MARIAN PRICE TYPE FORCE FEEDING

Marian Price is currently interned without trial in a British Gulag in Occupied Ireland Other internees like Martin Corey are also being interned without trial on concocted secret service hearsay, to justify their ever expanding budgets and try provoke another lucrative money making racket of 40 years of making war on ordinary Irish people.

The hunger strike of Marian Price lasted over 200 days,being force-fed by prison authorities for 167 of them. In an interview with Suzanne Breen, Marian Price described being force-fed: "Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can't struggle. You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it open. They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can't move. They throw whatever they like into the food mixer – orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. The force-feeding takes 15 minutes but it feels like forever. You're in control of nothing. You're terrified the food will go down the wrong way and you won't be able to let them know because you can't speak or move. You're frightened you'll choke to death."

Hunger strikes have deep roots in Irish society and in the Irish psyche. Fasting in order to bring attention to an injustice which one felt under his lord, and thus embarrass him into a solution, was a common feature of society in Early Irish society and this tactic was fully incorporated into the Brehon legal system. The tradition is ultimately most likely part of the still older Indo-European tradition of which the Irish were part.[8]

The tactic was used by Irish republicans from 1917 and, subsequently, during the Anglo-Irish War, in the 1920s. Early use of hunger strikes by republicans had been countered by the British with force-feeding, which culminated in 1917 in the death of Thomas Ashe in Mountjoy Prison.

In October 1920, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton prison. Two other Cork IRA men, Joe Murphy and Michael Fitzgerald, also died on hunger strike in this protest along with Monaghan native,Conor McElvaney who lasted 79 days before death. TheGuinness Book of Records lists the world record in hunger strike (without forced feeding) as 94 days, which was set from August 11 to November 12, 1920 by John and Peter Crowley, Thomas Donovan, Michael Burke, Michael O’Reilly, Christopher Upton, John Power, Joseph Kenny and Seán Hennessy at the prison of Cork. Arthur Griffith called off the strikes after the deaths of MacSwiney, Murphy and Fitzgerald.

After the end of the Irish Civil War in October 1923, up to 8000 IRA prisoners went on hunger strike to protest their continued detention by the Irish Free State (a total of over 12,000 republicans had been interned by May 1923). Two men, Denny Barry and Andrew O’Sullivan, died on the strike. The strike, however, was called off before any more deaths occurred. The Free State subsequently released the women republican prisoners. Most of the male Republicans were not released until the following year.

Under the de Valera Fianna Fáil government three hunger strikers died in the Republic of Ireland in the 1940s. They wereSean McCaughey, Tony d’Arcy and Sean (Jack) McNeela. Hundreds of others carried out shorter hunger strikes during the deValera years with no sympathy from the Government.

The tactic was revived by the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s, when several republicans such as Sean MacStiofainsuccessfully used hunger strikes to get themselves released from custody without charge in the Republic of Ireland. Michael Gaughan died after being force-fed in a British prison in 1974.Frank Stagg, an IRA member being held in a British jail, died after a 62-day hunger strike in 1976 which he began as a campaign to be repatriated to Ireland.

Irish hunger strike of 1981

Main article: 1981 Irish hunger strike

In 1980, seven Republican prisoners in the Maze Prisonlaunched a hunger strike as a protest against the revocation by the British government of a prisoner-of-war-like Special Category Status for paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland. The strike, led by Brendan Hughes, was called off before any deaths, when Britain seemed to offer to concede their demands; however, the British then reneged on the details of the agreement. The prisoners then called another hunger strike the following year. This time, instead of many prisoners striking at the same time, the hunger strikers started fasting one after the other in order to maximise publicity over the fate of each one.

Bobby Sands was the first of ten Irish republican paramilitaryprisoners to die during a hunger strike in 1981. There was widespread support for the hunger strikers from Irish republicans and the broader nationalist community on both sides of the Irish border. Some of the hunger strikers were elected to both the Irish and British parliaments by an electorate who wished to register their support for the hunger strikers. The ten men survived without food for 46 to 73 days,[9] taking only water and salt. After the deaths of the men and severe public disorder, the British government granted partial concessions to the prisoners, and the strike was called off. 

This article appeared in Campaign for a United Ireland

One Island – One Nation

POXYMORON PEACE PROCESS WITHOUT DUE PROCESS

The British Tories who have reneged on most details of the Irish Peace Process have also ignored calls by the partly Unionist, Alliance party in their own Parliament, on British Tory policies of internment without trial in British occupied Ireland.

Sinn Fein leaders have consistently stated that the Tories since their election have detached from the Peace Process a diplomatic description of the Tories, reneging on British commitments made in the Belfast Agreement, to end the latest episode of forty years of war by the British in Ireland. They still however, as part of the one party regime in Stormont administer internment without trial, post peace process.

Commitments were signed by the previous Labour Government in Britain, to try to bring peace in Ireland, have been reneged on.. The Tory government since their election have destroyed practically all of the Agreement and tried to provoke another war with re-introducing internment without trial which was the spark, that created the previous forty years of war on the Irish people. 

Because of commitments made to their their financial election sponsors, of the British industrial  arms complex, to promote arms sales, their return to war in British Occupied Ireland, is the perfect shop window to the world, particularly on their BBC world service news reports, of British evolving armaments of repression and British state terrorism, being used in their counter insurgency test laboratory of  British Occupied Ireland.

The political internment without trial, of the iconic 59 year old, FORMER Irish resistance fighterS Marian Price and veterans like Martin Corey an old age pensioner, long retired from politics, is the most perfect way possible according to aTory Think Tank, to re-start the British war on ireland.

" INTERNMENT – Indefinte detention without charge or trial – is not confined to Ireland. Virtually all countries, from the most overtly totalitarian to the most 'liberal' social democracies have on their statute books repressive laws to be used in any 'emergency' – that is when the ruling regime is threatened from below. In Ireland, however, that 'emergency' has been going on for almost 100 years.

This book is only concerned with internment in Ireland, North and south, from 1916 to the present day. The author shows how internment has been used as a political weapon, how it has succeeded in the past and how in the long run it has been a majot factor in the downfall of Stormont, the parliament of Northern Ireland.

But most of all this is the story of the internees, working-class men and women who have suffered and, in some cases, died for their beliefs. They are neither heroes nor villains, although many have shown great bravery and heroism and some have been guilty of cowardice. In this book they tell for the first time what it is reallly like to be interned. They are not well-known public figures, politicians or publicists. They are ordinary men and women who have suffered for their ideals an dwho remind the readers that the 'knock on the door' could be heard by them too. For those peace-loving citizens who unreservedly support the forces of 'law and order' this book reminds them of the old caveat: Quis custodes custodiet? Who will guard the guards?

Parts of this book, particulary those dealing with torture and brutality, do not make pleasant reading. But then we do not live in pleasant times.

LINK:

‘Internment’ by John McGuffin (1973)

The Knock on the Door

In many a time, in many a land,
With many a gun in many a hand,
They came by the night, they came by the day,
They came with their guns to take us away,
With their knock on the door, knock on the door,
Here they come to take one more.

Look over the oceans, look over the lands,
Look over the leaders with blood on their hands,
And open your eyes and see what they do,
When they knock over there friend, they're knocking for you,
With their knock on the door, knock on the door,
Here they come to take one more.

'They can jail the revolutionary
but not the revolution'
— CHE GUEVARA.

The Persecution of Martin Corey

   

Three years of internment

By Jim McIlmurray

On Tuesday, April 16th, 2013, Lurgan man Martin Corey will have spent three years in Maghaberry Prison without any charges ever being placed against him. During that time, police have never questioned or interviewed Martin regarding any incident, occurrence or event relating to his imprisonment.

So who is Martin Corey?

Martin Corey is a 62 year old man who served 19 years of his life in Long Kesh as a republican prisoner. He was released by the prison authorities in 1992 and began to rebuild his life. He is a popular figure from a well respected, hard-working family in the town.

It was a proud day for Martin when he was granted a loan to purchase his own mechanical digger. After a time, he gained the contract as the parish grave digger, covering several cemeteries in the greater Lurgan area. Many people, myself included, will recall his compassionate approach and professionalism during the time of families’ bereavement.
In all the time I have known Martin, I have only known his interests to be his family, his friends and his love of coarse fishing.

On Friday, April 16th, 2010, the police arrived at his O’Neill’s Terrace home and told him they had a warrant for his arrest. Martin was brought to Lurgan PSNI station and later that day transferred to Maghaberry Prison. It was stated he broke the terms of his Life Licence release. When his solicitor requested to know what Martin was alleged to have done, he was told it a matter of National Security and the subject of closed file information.

For the past three years, his solicitor and barristers have challenged his unlawful detention on numerous occasions in the High Court. On Monday, the 9th of July, 2012, a High Court judge, Justice Seamus Tracy, who has a background in the European Human Rights Courts, ordered Martin’s immediate release, stating that his Human Rights had been breached under sections 4 and 5 of the European Human Rights act and that there were no charges for which he should answer. I waited for 4 hours outside Maghaberry with Martin’s family that day, only to be told at 4:15pm that the then current Secretary of State, Owen Patterson, had overruled the High Court judge and blocked Martin’s release. I was 25 yards away from Martin when I received that call. I watched him step out of the prison van at the reception centre and watched him walk back to the van to be returned to his cell. As he got into the van, he paused and stared at me and that will always be one of the hardest and cruelest moments I have ever witnessed in my life.

\

Martin has a legal entitlement to an annual Parole Board review every twelve calendar months to reevaluate the reasons for his continued detention. I have been accepted to speak on Martin’s behalf; however, every date set for a hearing for Martin last year was followed by a cancellation by the Parole Board, citing numerous excuses.
Martin hasn’t received a parole review in 18 months, an action deemed illegal by the Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. We are currently awaiting a date to take this case to the High Court for a judicial review.

Martin has been subjected to a number of incidents during his time in Maghaberry Prison. These incidents include waiting over three weeks for an emergency dental appointment; of note, a veterinarian would have a legal obligation to report a pet owner for cruelty if he found an animal to be suffering for that period. Also, Martin’s request for compassionate leave to attend the funeral of his brother was denied by both the Prison Service and the Courts without any reasons given. He was only granted leave to attend 1 hour before the service started after a request was made to the Justice Minister on humanitarian grounds. I had to make three requests to the Prison Ombudsman to intervene in cases concerning material submitted by myself for Martin for use in his cell crafts. The prison staff either confiscated the printed image materials or refused to provide them to Martin. The Prison Ombudsman upheld all three decisions in Martin’s favour, ruling against the Northern Ireland Prison Service and determining that the material must be provided to Martin.

Martin’s case has been in the High Court in Belfast several times over the past three years, without any finding of criminal offence with which to charge him. Had Martin been charged with possession of an illegal firearm during his arrest three years previously, he would have been released six months ago. There is no other name for his illegal detention other than internment without trial.

As a close friend of Martin’s, I am in a better position than most to know if he was ever involved in any activity that could be deemed illegal or “a threat to National Security”, a phrase often utilized by faceless, nameless individuals in the courts. I can say without fear of contradiction that Martin is an innocent man. Everyone should make their voice be heard and call upon the Secretary of State to either bring charges against him or release him immediately.

I speak to Martin by telephone on a daily basis and visit him regularly in Maghaberry Prison, and can assure everyone that his spirits remain high despite his total lack of confidence in the judicial system in the North of Ireland. He thanks everyone for their continued messages of support .

We are currently awaiting a date to attend the Court of Appeal in London to challenge his illegal detention. If unsuccessful there, we will take his case to the European Courts of Justice. We will continue our presence at the Belfast High Court to request the Parole Board to give an explanation as to why Martin has been denied his legal right to an annual Parole Review.