Irish Foreign Affairs Minister to Accept Parliamentary Report on Marian Price
international | rights and freedoms | news report 
Thursday October 18, 2012 12:21
by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices 
Marian Price Irish Parliamentary Visit
Irish Foreign Affairs Minister to Accept Parliamentary Report of Group Visit to Marian Price
According to the Irish Times of 18/10/12
Irish Foreign Affairs Minister to accept Parliamentary report of Group Visiting Marian Price
According to the Irish Times of 18/10/12
"The Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore said he would accept a report from an Oireachtas group planning to visit jailed republican Marian Price in two weeks.
Ms Price was detained in May 2011, after the licence on which she had been released in 1980 for IRA bombings in London was revoked.
Mr Gilmore said he had raised the case with former secretary of state for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson on several occasions and, more recently, with the current holder of the office, Theresa Villiers.
“The Taoiseach also took the opportunity to raise the matter with secretary of state Villiers when he met her on October 2nd,” Mr Gilmore added.
“I will continue to raise this case with the British government and to convey my concerns, which are shared by all sides of this House, to them and to relevant Northern Ireland authorities.”
Mr Gilmore was replying to ULA TD Clare Daly, who said the treatment of Ms Price had been deemed to be tantamount to torture by the UN.
“Her medical treatment is not the best and does not adhere to various standards,” she added.
Ms. Daly said she was “an extremely ill woman who represents no danger to the public whatsoever and the longer she is incarcerated in solitary confinement and denied the support she needs, the worse her condition will get”.
Ms Daly suggested that Mr Gilmore join a number of TDs who are planning to visit Ms Price in two weeks.
Mr Gilmore said he was aware a parliamentary group intended to visit her and he would be happy to hear a report when it returned."
According to the Irish Times of 18/10/12
"The Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore said he would accept a report from an Oireachtas group planning to visit jailed republican Marian Price in two weeks.
Ms Price was detained in May 2011, after the licence on which she had been released in 1980 for IRA bombings in London was revoked.
Mr Gilmore said he had raised the case with former secretary of state for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson on several occasions and, more recently, with the current holder of the office, Theresa Villiers.
“The Taoiseach also took the opportunity to raise the matter with secretary of state Villiers when he met her on October 2nd,” Mr Gilmore added.
“I will continue to raise this case with the British government and to convey my concerns, which are shared by all sides of this House, to them and to relevant Northern Ireland authorities.”
Mr Gilmore was replying to ULA TD Clare Daly, who said the treatment of Ms Price had been deemed to be tantamount to torture by the UN.
“Her medical treatment is not the best and does not adhere to various standards,” she added.
Ms. Daly said she was “an extremely ill woman who represents no danger to the public whatsoever and the longer she is incarcerated in solitary confinement and denied the support she needs, the worse her condition will get”.
Ms Daly suggested that Mr Gilmore join a number of TDs who are planning to visit Ms Price in two weeks.
Mr Gilmore said he was aware a parliamentary group intended to visit her and he would be happy to hear a report when it returned."
SONG FOR MARIAN PRICE
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3On the same day the Parker report was published on 2 March 1972, the United Kingdom Prime Minister stated in Parliament, that its torture techniques in British Occupied Ireland would not be used ever again in future. The Prime Minister's statement, directives expressly prohibiting the use of the techniques, whether singly or in combination, were then issued to their forces by the Government.
At a hearing before British Courts on 8 February 1977, the British Attorney-General declared that the 'five techniques' would not in any circumstances be reintroduced either collectively or individually.
The Irish Government referred to the Commission of International Human Rights in Strasbourg, cases of persons submitted to the five techniques during interrogation, at the unidentified centre or centres between 11 and 17 August 1971.
In a recent article SPOOKY BIZARRE BRITISH SECRET EXPERIMENTS the details of the torture of Marian Price were covered, which clearly demonstrates the British have broken their promises and undertakings to the international community with regard to their torture. They have also re-introduced internment without trial in various disguise.
The Republic of Ireland v. The United Kingdom
Before the European Court of Human Rights
18 January 1978
The British Government introduced special powers of arrest and detention without trial, which were widely known as internment without trial.The Government of the Republic of Ireland brought an application before the Commission of International Human Rights in Strasbourg (ii) that various interrogation practices--in particular the so-called 'five techniques', which included wall- standing, hooding and deprivation of sleep and food--and other practices to which suspects were subjected amounted to torture and inhuman or degrading treatment contrary to Article 3...The Commission unanimously found that the five techniques did constitute a practice of torture and that other practices amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment
Both were attacked by reactionary fascist forces, culminating in the assassination of King, with the Irish peaceful demonstration attacked by the British Army, resulting in the murder of 13 of Marian's peaceful fellow demonstrators. This action coupled with interment without trial of all peaceful dissident voices, resulted in further reactionary violence from the Provisional IRA.
Now its very easy for us in the comfort of hindsight or removed from the first hand experience of watching human blood flow on the streets, to condemn activity at this time. Most people do however, totally overlooking the injustice that breeds all of this violence. There are many people who call for peace, without working for the justice that underpins, any realistic long term peace. This is as shallow and insincere as your average modern self-centered, selfish in the extreme, consumer.
Bearing in mind that opinions are like arseholes and everyone has got, It is my humble opinion, that those participating in militant action, have a moral duty to explore all alternatives, before resorting to violence. It is very difficult for me to encourage younger acivists to explore the concept, that the pen is mightier than the sword, with the extent of British sponsored censorship currently in Ireland. It is also very difficult for the likes of me, to encourage the possibilities of traditions of community consciousness, rather than organized, exclusive based rules, to get where freedom loving people like Marian want to go, who are interned without trial in British secret courts by British secret services, under the cloak of Her Majesty's Official Secret's Act, in British Occupied Ireland.
Marian has said it herself. If the British are have something to charge her with, let them do it in open court, before her peers, she will accept their verdict. So far judges have thrown out the British charges against her twice and she was pardoned for her 'violence' of almost 40 years ago as witnessed by the leader of Ireland's largest spiritual community. It is vindictive to torture, intern and censor her. Any reasonable minded person would agree, in the context of contemporary Ireland, that Marian's internment for activity 40 year ago, does not serve the interests of either justice or peace in Ireland.
Many people like myself, who do not agree with the tactics of even IRPWA, never the less understand, where internment without trial is leading. It has been tried in very decade since the formation of the two current scum states of schizophrenic ireland. I believe there are non violent alternatives to freedom and justice in Ireland but not many young, impatient, abused, people are going to listen to me, with the current political reality of social and neo-colonial state violence, exerted on the Irish community, whether it's internment or political policing in both parts of Ireland. This ultimately is a class struggle against contemporary, creeping, fascism.
Old Bailey bomber ashamed of Sinn Fein
Suzanne Breen
A well-dressed, articulate, middle-aged woman, Marian Price wouldn't look out of place on a Sinn Féin negotiating team meeting Tony Blair or Bertie Ahern.
But she'd face jail and hunger-strike all over again rather than take part:"I would be ashamed to be on any delegation to Downing Street given what’s on the table. The only reason for going there should be to negotiate the freedom of our country.
"If I went to agree to British rule, restoring Stormont, or signing up to a partitionist police force, I'd hope at least to have the decency to hang my head in shame."
The last time Price visited London was to blow it up. With her sister Dolours and Gerry Kelly, now a Sinn Féin negotiator, she was part of an 11-strong IRA unit which in March 1973 planted bombs at the Old Bailey, New Scotland Yard, Whitehall, and the British Forces Broadcasting Office.
They were arrested attempting to fly home from Heathrow Airport. A 200-day hunger-strike and force-feeding regime made the sisters household names. "I did what I believed in," Price says. "Nothing Provisional IRA or Sinn Féin leaders do can denigrate that.
"But I'm very angry when I see so much has been sacrificed for so little. All these lives have been lost - IRA volunteers, civilians, policemen, British soldiers - and for what? If this is what they’re settling for, we all could have joined the SDLP back then."
Price (50) came from a staunch republican family in west Belfast. She believes IRA membership is too often explained away as an emotional response to events: "I made an ideological choice to join. It wasn't a reaction to Bloody Sunday, internment or anything else."
Her childhood ambition was to be a nurse. She left school with a string of 'O' and 'A' levels and secured one of only five places on a course at the Royal Victoria Hospital. She denies there was a huge contradiction between IRA membership and nursing.
"One day, a wounded British soldier was brought into casualty. He was wearing a dirty vest. He looked frightened. I felt very sorry for him. That night, I told my comrades and one joked that I should have finished him off.
"I asked why on earth I'd do that. He was no longer a soldier, he'd been taken out of the battlefield. He was a patient now, I'd have no difficulty looking after him."
The bombing mission was the Provisional IRA's first to England. The idea and planning came from the sisters. Price travelled on the Dublin-Liverpool ferry with one of the four car bombs which was then driven to London.
Did she never consider the morality of planting bombs in densely populated areas?: "The warnings given were twice as long as in Belfast. That was a conscious decision because we knew the English lacked experience of evacuation. We didn't want civilian casualties, from a moral or pragmatic viewpoint."
Yet there were casualties. Two bombs were defused but those at the Old Bailey and Whitehall exploded, injuring 200 people, mainly with flying glass. Price expresses regret but says the injuries "weren’t intentional".
"I've never had a sleepless night over anything I've done as an IRA volunteer. Bombs are weapons of war. Western states have used them far more brutally than we ever did.
"George Bush and Tony Blair send other people's sons out to die without ever venturing onto the battlefield themselves. They drop far bigger bombs from B52s on women and children and they don't give any warnings at all." Price is an atheist: "When I look around the world, I think if there’s a God, he's a bad God."
After her arrest at Heathrow, she was interrogated for five days. "I was stripped in the police station and given a grey blanket to wear. I was embarrassed because there were a lot of policemen about and I was sexually innocent.
"They used no physical violence but I wasn't let sleep once. The lights were kept on in my cell and the police were there at all times. If I started to doze off, they clapped their hands."
She remained remarkably unfazed: "I remember a detective saying to me, ‘I bet your mother will be proud of you' and I thought 'yes, she will be very proud of me'. My father was on a bombing mission to England in the forties, so it was a family tradition."
The sisters were charged and moved to Brixton prison. They were strip-searched daily and locked 23-hours a day in cells where again the lights were permanently on.
As a 19-year-old facing potential life imprisonment in England, wasn’t she depressed?:"It never entered my head. I'd known what I believed in and the risks involved.
"My mother, her sisters, and my granny had been in Cumann na mBan. My Aunt Bridie was badly injured lifting an IRA arms dump in the 30s. It exploded and she lost her hands and sight. She was 26.
"When we were growing up, it was never a case of 'poor Bridie'. We were just proud of her sacrifice. She came home from hospital to a wee house with an outside toilet, no social worker, no disability allowance, and no counselling. She just got on with it."
Price claims that during their 1973 trial, the bombers learned they had been compromised by a high-placed informer in Belfast who knew all the details but didn't take part in the operation.
"It emerged in court that customs at Liverpool realised one of the cars had false number plates. They phoned Scotland Yard but were told to wave it through.
"The authorities allowed the bombs to happen. They had details of the operation in advance that could only have come from a senior figure in Belfast. We learned that photos of Dolours and I had been circulated at airports and ports across Britain nine hours before the bombs exploded,”
says Price.
She claims that during the trial they agreed it would be less damaging for the IRA if they appeared "young, stupid and incompetent", rather than publicly exposing an informer. She claims to know the identity of the alleged informer whom, she says, remains in a leadership position.
The Price sisters, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney went on hunger-strike in Brixton prison in November 1973 as part of a campaign to be repatriated to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland.
"Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can't struggle," says Price. "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."
Price was force-fed 400 times over six months. "I knew nothing about force-feeding beforehand," says Price. "I thought it was like when you hold a baby's nose and put a spoon in its mouth. Ignorance was bliss."
After the sisters went on hunger-strike, the British Home Office dispatched eminent psychiatrist Peter Scott to examine them. "He said he’d been sent to certify us so we could be force-fed. He left saying we knew exactly what we were doing and the problem was we were too sane,”
Price says.
They built a good rapport with Dr Ian Blythe, the prison doctor: "He called us 'my girls'. As the hunger-strike went on, he arm-wrestled with us, pretending it was a game but really testing us to see how much we were weakening."
Dolours was first to be force fed, three weeks into the hunger-strike. "I met her in the exercise yard afterwards. She was in a terrible state. She said it she couldn't go through that again. I told her she didn't have to, she could come off the hunger-strike immediately, but I'd stay on.
"She said we'd come off together or not at all. She was much braver than me because she was so much more afraid of force-feeding yet she didn't give in." Two days later, Marian was force-fed.
While Dolours endured the procedure once a day, Marian suffered it twice daily because she vomited so often afterwards. "I always threw up when they pulled the tube out of my stomach. It was vile. I would be exhausted afterwards but you couldn't even lie in bed in your cell in privacy because the screws came in with you.
"Sometimes when they arrived to force feed me, I would struggle; other times I didn't have the energy to fight. The low point was having no control over your weight. But not for one minute did I think of giving up. They were never, ever going to break me."
One day, a doctor put the tube into Price's lung, not her stomach, and water flooded in. "I felt like I was drowning. I passed out. They carried me back to my cell. The doctors were standing over me when I came round. If had been food, not water in the tube, it would have killed me. The medical and prison staff told the authorities they wouldn't force feed me again."
A fortnight after that incident in May 1974, the hunger-strike ended and a deal was reached. The sisters were moved to Armagh prison the following March.
The British Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was loathed by republicans for his treatment of the hunger-strikers. Price says she doesn't hate him: "He was caught up in the politics of the situation. He followed orders. I once asked the psychiatrist Peter Scott who knew him to invite him to Brixton to visit us. He said he wouldn't come because if he met us, he’d want to send us home."
Price was freed after five years in Armagh jail, suffering from anorexia and tuberculosis. Ten-and-a-half stone when she was arrested, she left prison half that weight.
On release from jail, she says she was in no physical or mental state to rejoin the IRA and had no interest in a Sinn Féin career: "I like politics but not politicians. To be a politician, you must be a liar and a hypocrite."
Still, she was initially positive about Sinn Féin's rise, believing it would strengthen the IRA campaign: "I remember watching TV as Sinn Féin swept down the stairs in Belfast City Hall with Tricolour ribbons and champagne after an election victory.
"My father was disgusted. He pointed to Gerry Adams and said, 'I've been around longer than you, that boy will sell you out'. I told him to give Sinn Féin a chance. I was wrong."
From 1994, Price had "serious concerns" about the leadership's political direction but "loyalty to the movement" kept her quiet. Eventually, she spoke at one 'republican family' meeting in west Belfast, expressing doubts. A senior IRA member visited her home: "He told me what I was saying wasn't appreciated and he'd shot people for less."
She claims the republican movement underwent a transformation: "People began to make financial gain from the movement. Those who had never worked a day in their lives, now had better homes, cars, and holidays than their neighbours.
"It used to be what you could do for the movement, now it's what the movement can do for you. In the past, to be a republican brought financial hardship. But that was okay because to be a republican was to be something special. You knew you were right."
Price says that while the peace process has secured "a measure of equality" for Catholics, a British withdrawal and the ending of partition is further away than ever.
Five years ago, she joined the 32 County Sovereignty Movement which security sources say is the Real IRA's political wing, a claim the group denies. She says her military days are over but she won't condemn others "for doing what I did myself".
She claims 'armed struggle' is morally justified "while the British occupy part of this country". The Real IRA has proved itself incapable of waging a sustained campaign against the state and lacks popular support. Physical force republicanism has never been weaker in recent decades.
Price refuses to recognise 'armed struggle' is now pointless: "Sometimes it’s necessary to do something just to let it be known there are people out there who don't accept the status quo.
"Being a minority of a minority is nothing new for republicans. You don’t join for an easy life or to be popular. As a child, I remember 50 people at an Easter parade on the Falls Road."
Despite everything, she has no regrets: "Disappointments maybe. I’m disappointed in Gerry Kelly. I expected more of him but I'd never detract from the physical bravery he showed. Gerry Adams and I were once friends. We certainly aren't now. He may have difficulty admitting his IRA past but I'm very, very proud of mine."
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