Saturday 7 March 2015

THE SINN FEIN NEO-LIBERAL DECEPTION






Much of Sinn Fein's money, comes from foreign corporate donations. Such money to political parties, is outlawed, in other democratic countries, as it should always be outlawed in Ireland. The old Irish saying, "He who pays the piper calls the tune" has already been clearly demonstrated, in Blueshirt policies, in the south. Proper oversight or limits on these donations, does not exist in Ireland. These massive donations, will dictate Sinn Fein's neo-liberal policies, as a juniot partner with Fine Gael, after the nest election and will refect itself, in even further austerity for ordinary Irish people, to facilitate the corporations, with a cheap hungry workforce. British Sinn Fein have already signed, as junior partners in the Stormont Junta, to a Tory scorched earth policy, in the north, after the next British election. Today British Sinn fein delegates in Derry, voted not to join either a Fine Gael or Fianna Fail coalition, which has as much credibilty, as the neo-liberal deception, described in the article below.


The Neo-Liberal Deception and the New World Order

By Lionel Reynolds

Global Research,

Beginning in earnest in the late Seventies, a sustained and pervasive ideological attack was mounted against the role of the State in managing economic affairs. The terms of the attack ranged from ethical and philosophical arguments about individual liberty and property rights to more pragmatic arguments about the supposed economic advantages of private ownership, deregulation of capital and flattened fiscal regimes. Alternative visions of the role of the State were marginalised and discounted as either economically misguided or politically totalitarian.

The emerging consensus became known as Neo-Liberalism, or Economic Rationalism. It had its intellectual progenitors – Adam Smith, the Austrian and Chicago Schools, Ayn Rand; its political trail-blazers – Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, and its demons – Socialists, Marxists and Keynesians. When the Berlin Wall came down, and the ‘evil empire’ collapsed, it seemed that the ideological battle had been won – the deprived masses of the Socialist bloc had overthrown their Orwellian masters and would readily embrace the new credo. Ahead lay a brave, new, unipolar world in which largely unregulated markets would constitute the bedrock of a free, dynamic and innovative global economic order in which social wealth would be maximised.

In due course, after some initial resistance, the centre-left caved in to the Neo-Liberal gospel, especially in the Anglosphere, always the geopolitical fulcrum of the Neo-Liberal order. By the mid 90′s the centre-left in the UK, USA and Australia were committed to an economic program that was virtually indistinguishable from the Reagan/Thatcher platform of the previous decade, all be it dressed up in a more progressive social liberalism.
The reason that so many ‘social-democrats’ and ‘socialists’ embraced the Neo-Liberal revolution is that they came to accept its core claim that not only is capitalism the most effective way of generating wealth but that, contrary to now supposedly outmoded Keynesian and socialist views, it is also the best way of actually spreading the benefits of that wealth as widely as possible.

There are no losers – everyone’s a winner. The view is that governments don’t create wealth – they just spend it on coercing people and distorting market mechanisms that would otherwise produce greater social utility. By extracting the State from economic activity and allowing a more lightly regulated capitalism to structure production, distribution, exchange and finance, everyone is actually better off. The market mechanism can even play a positive role in improving social services like health and education, and providing essential infrastructure like transport, communications and energy – all with minimal regulatory regimes.

Under cover of this ideological offensive, the entire post-war Bretton-Woods economic order was dismantled. Capital controls were removed, public assets and infrastructure privatised and markets deregulated. Manufacturing and back-office functions were offshored. Organised labour was suppressed by legislation and by exporting traditional unionised industries to low-cost non-unionised labour markets. In addition to the huge profits to be made from deploying capital to low-wage economies, this also made it possible for capital to significantly increase the rate of surplus value extraction in the developed economies. The monetary value of what labour was making began to grow much more quickly than the monetary wage cost of the labour itself. Now that most consumer goods – for example clothing, electronic goods and household items – were produced cheaply in low-cost markets, the living costs of the developed economy worker were kept low, alleviating pressure on wages. It was a win/win for capital.

Consequently, for 40 years real wages in the developed world have been virtually stagnant – especially in the USA. In fact, income as a share of GDP has been in steady decline in many developed economies. Labour was producing more commodities than it had the monetary means to purchase, because an increasing share of the monetised value of commodities was being realised as capital, not wages. Inequality between capital and labour was further exacerbated by huge cuts in marginal tax rates and corporate taxes.

This is where the financial system stepped in to eliminate potential under-consumption. By leveraging capital sourced from expanding corporate profits and the personal wealth of the super-rich, the banks began to sell huge quantities of lucrative debt to the working class, enabling the latter to buy back the product of its own labour and keep capital accumulation ticking over.

Credit controls were relaxed leading to massive asset bubbles in property and consumer spending, which in turn spawned a parasitic, multi-trillion dollar shadow banking economy of ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDO’s) – tranched securities built from bundles of debt. These in turn spawned another equally large market in ‘credit default swaps’ (CDS’s) in which entities offered to ‘insure’ securities, even though the ‘insurance-buyer’ was often not even the owner of the reference assets, and the ‘insurance provider’ was not able to underwrite the debt ‘insured’. It wasn’t actually called ‘insurance’, so it didn’t fall under any insurance regulatory regime. In fact, most of the trade in CDO’s and CDS’s was wholly unregulated, taking place ‘over the counter’ rather than in organised exchanges.

As if the bankers were not getting rich enough from buying and selling consumer and property debt, they also branched out into buying and selling student debt – a new concept for most of Europe, which had previously operated under the assumption that tertiary education should be publically funded.

The property asset bubble, limitless personal credit lines, and the market in low cost consumer goods kept the developed world working class largely integated into the capitalist order. Real wages were stagnant and labour was being deprived of an increasing share of the value it created, but as long as property values were rising and credit card limits expanding there was always a source of liquidity to make up the difference. If you didn’t own a property, the answer was to work harder and longer and borrow the money to buy one – to ‘get on the property ladder’.

In 2007/8, the massive Ponzi scheme collapsed. Trillions of dollars were wiped off the market. The immediate cause of the collapse was over-leveraged household debt. Working class homebuyers in the USA began to foreclose. They had been sold mortgages on ‘teaser’ interest rates by brokers making a living flipping mortgages to CDO funds. The homeowners on teaser rates couldn’t actually afford the mortgage repayments at the market rate – they were relying on property values increasing so they could refinance once the teaser rate expired. As foreclosures spread, property values actually dropped, leading to more foreclosures, leading to further drops.

Suddenly, trillions of dollars of CDO’s began to lose value across the board as debts went toxic, debt repayment flows dried up and asset values collapsed. When large numbers of CDO holders tried to cash in their CDS’s the underwritten cash sums simply didn’t exist – the money wasn’t there. Exit AIG, the largest insurance company in the world. Banks stopped lending to each other because they all knew how heavily leveraged they were, and they all knew that the leveraged debt was going toxic. The financial system was deadlocked.

It then became clear that when the Neo-Liberals said that government interference in the economy is a bad thing, what they really meant to say is that it is a bad thing when it is for the benefit of labour. It turns out that it is in fact a very good thing when it is done in order to save the capitalist system from falling on its own sword. That would appear to be the only explanation for what followed – the biggest government bail out in modern economic history. All the money that hadn’t been available for manufacturing, for healthcare, for education, for infrastructure – suddenly became available to save the banking system.

The Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank have, in the last 6 years, created trillions of dollars and handed them straight to the bankers. The process is called quantitative easing. The central banks create money via a digital book entry, and then use the money to purchase commercial paper from the banking sector – typically government and corporate bonds, but also CDO’s. This does two things. Firstly, it means that governments and corporations can raise credit cheaply, because the buyer of the debt knows they can flip it to the central bank and earn a return. This keeps interest rates low. Secondly, it injects liquidity into the banking system and keeps the business cycle going.

In the meantime, it’s austerity for the rest of us, as costs are driven down to encourage business investment and governments cut back on social programs in order to finance their ever growing debts.

It will be recalled that the ‘useful idiots’ of Neo-Liberalism – the centre-left that abandoned not just socialism but any semblance of Keynesianism – bought into the idea that privatisation, deregulation and flattened fiscal regimes were all consistent with traditional centre-left values of economic justice and equity. As it happens, there is overwhelming evidence that they were completely wrong.

In January of this year, Oxfam published a briefing paper called ‘Working for the Few’ (http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-en.pdf ). The paper was released to coincide with the 2014 World Economic Forum at Davos, the premier public social event for self-respecting members of the global elite. The paper is based on the tactical idea that the World Economic Forum is part of the solution, which rather flies in the face of the commonplace historical observation that, with some notable individual exceptions, the rich and powerful are not given to fundamentally questioning the structures that support their wealth and power.

Having said that, the report is a stunning indictment of the Neo-Liberal deception.

In the opening executive summary the reader is informed that:
Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.
Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

In the ‘People’s Republic’ of China, now firmly established as an integral component of the world capitalist order, supplying cheap consumer goods to the US/EU economies and using its massive US dollar foreign exchange reserves to help bankroll the US/NATO war machine, the report states that the richest 1% have more than doubled their share of national income since 1980.

The report reveals the stunning fact that 18.5 trillion dollars – a sum greater than total US GDP, is held unrecorded and offshore in tax havens – the lion’s share held in a network of current and former British possessions – Hong Kong, The Cayman Islands, Singapore, Jersey, Bermuda and Guernsey.

As for the distribution of wealth, 10% of the global population control 86% of total global assets, whilst the bottom 70% control just 3%.

Regarding the increased rate of surplus value extraction from developed economy labour, and its relationship to the offshoring of manufacturing and anti-union leglislation, the report explains that:


A report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) shows that between 1989 and 2005, union density (a measure of the membership of trade unions which represents union membership in relation to the total labor force) mostly declined in countries for which data are available, and that union density is negatively correlated with income inequality. Power relations between owners of capital and workers have changed dramatically in the past three decades in many countries, mostly as economies have moved from manufacturing to services, and as globalization has allowed for outsourcing of jobs. This is reflected in the decreasing share of income going to labor: over the past three decades, wages, salaries and benefits represent a smaller share of national income in nearly all ILO member countries.

There is, however, one region that is bucking the trend and that just happens to be the region of the world in which significant elements have bucked the trend to Neo-Liberalism and are turning to the Left – Latin America. The report explains that:


growth of tax revenues in Latin America has been the fastest in the world, and this growth has translated to higher spending to reduce inequality. For instance, between 2002 and 2011, income inequality dropped in 14 of the 17 countries where there is comparable data.During this period, approximately 50 million people moved into the middle class, meaning that for the first time ever, more people in the region belong to the middle class than are living in poverty.

The report continues:


By some estimates, social spending as a percentage of GDP across Latin American countries increased by 66 percent over the past twenty years. The impact is noticeable, given that not long ago the region had among the lowest public spending levels in the world. Increased spending on health and education has had the greatest impact on inequality reduction.

The report concludes with a set of recommendations, including:


• Stronger regulation of markets;
• Curbing the power of the rich to influence political processes and policies that best suit their interests.
• Cracking down on financial secrecy and tax dodging;
• Redistributive transfers; and strengthening of social protection schemes;
• Investment in universal access to free healthcare and education;
• Progressive taxation;
• Strengthening wage floors and worker rights;

This is, of course, the complete opposite of the Neo-Liberal prescriptions that have seduced significant elements of the so-called ‘left’ for the last 20 years.

The fact is that ‘we’ allowed the global super-rich to screw us, and then we bailed them out when the system that made them rich was in danger of collapsing. They got richer and richer, while we were bought off with the illusion of increasing wealth, when the reality is that we have been getting a declining share of the wealth we actually produce.

For years we have been told there was no money for social programs, and that our children had to pay to go to university, while trillions were spent on USA/NATO imperial wars and capitalist banker bailouts, and further trillions were hidden away in largely British-connected tax havens.

We should all be very angry with the Neo-Liberals

Tariq Ali: The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution

By Chris Hedges

March 06, 2015 "ICH" - "Truthdig" - Tariq Ali is part of the royalty of the left. His more than 20 books on politics and history, his seven novels, his screenplays and plays and his journalism in the Black Dwarf newspaper, the New Left Review and other publications have made him one of the most trenchant critics of corporate capitalism. He hurls rhetorical thunderbolts and searing critiques at the oily speculators and corporate oligarchs who manipulate global finance and the useful idiots in the press, the political system and the academy who support them. The history of the late part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century has proved Ali, an Oxford-educated intellectual and longtime gadfly who once stood as a Trotskyist candidate for Parliament in Britain, to be stunningly prophetic.
The Pakistani-born Ali, who holds Pakistani and British citizenships, was already an icon of the left during the convulsions of the 1960s. Mick Jagger is said to have written “Street Fighting Man” after he attended an anti-war rally in Grosvenor Square on March 17, 1968, led by Ali, Vanessa Redgrave and others outside the U.S. Embassy in London. Some 8,000 protesters hurled mud, stones and smoke bombs at riot police. Mounted police charged the crowd. Over 200 people were arrested.

Ali, when we met last week shortly before he delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, praised the street clashes and open, sustained protests against the state that erupted during the Vietnam War. He lamented the loss of the radicalism that was nurtured by the 1960s counterculture, saying it was “unprecedented in imperial history” and produced the “most hopeful period” in the United States, “intellectually, culturally and politically.”

“I cannot think of an example of any other imperial war in history, and not just in the history of the American empire but in the history of the British and French empires, where you had tens of thousands of former GIs and sometimes serving GIs marching outside the Pentagon and saying they wanted the Vietnamese to win,” he said. “That is a unique event in the annals of empire. That is what frightened and scared the living daylights out of them [those in power]. If the heart of our apparatus is becoming infected, [they asked] what the hell are we going to do?”

This defiance found expression even within the halls of the Establishment. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings about the Vietnam War openly challenged and defied those who were orchestrating the bloodshed. “The way that questioning was conducted educated a large segment of the population,” Ali said of the hearings, led by liberals such as J. William Fulbright. Ali then added sadly that “such hearings could never happen again.”

“That [spirit is what the ruling elite] had to roll back, and that they did quite successfully,” he said. “That rollback was completed by the implosion of the Soviet Union. They sat down and said, ‘Great, now we can do whatever we want. There is nothing abroad, and what we have at home—kids protesting about South America and Nicaragua and the contras—is peanuts. Gradually the dissent decreased.” By the start of the Iraq War, demonstrations, although large, were usually “one-day affairs.”

“It was an attempt to stop a war. Once they couldn’t stop it, that was the end,” he said about the marches opposing the Iraq War. “It was a spasm. They [authorities] made people feel there was nothing they could do; that whatever people did, those in power would do what they wanted. It was the first realization that democracy itself had been weakened and was under threat.”

The devolution of the political system through the infusion of corporate money, the rewriting of laws and regulations to remove checks on corporate power, the seizure of the press, especially the electronic press, by a handful of corporations to silence dissent, and the rise of the wholesale security and surveillance state have led to “the death of the party system” and the emergence of what Ali called “an extreme center.” Working people are being ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit—a scenario dramatically on display in Greece. And there is no mechanism or institution left within the structures of the capitalist system to halt or mitigate the reconfiguration of the global economy into merciless neofeudalism, a world of masters and serfs.

“This extreme center, it does not matter which party it is, effectively acts in collusion with the giant corporations, sorts out their interests and makes wars all over the world,” Ali said. “This extreme center extends throughout the Western world. This is why more and more young people are washing their hands of the democratic system as it exists. All this is a direct result of saying to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘There is no alternative.’ ”

The battle between popular will and the demands of corporate oligarchs, as they plunge greater and greater numbers of people around the globe into poverty and despair, is becoming increasingly volatile. Ali noted that even those leaders with an understanding of the destructive force of unfettered capitalism—such as the new, left-wing prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras—remain intimidated by the economic and military power at the disposal of the corporate elites. This is largely why Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, bowed to the demands of European banks for a four-month extension of the current $272 billion bailout for Greece. The Greek leaders were forced to promise to commit to more punishing economic reforms and to walk back from the pre-election promise of Tsipras’ ruling Syriza party to write off a large part of Greece’s sovereign debt. Greece’s debt is 175 percent of its GDP. This four-month deal, as Ali pointed out, is a delaying tactic, one that threatens to weaken widespread Greek support for Syriza. Greece cannot sustain its debt obligations. Greece and European authorities will have to collide. And this collision could trigger a financial meltdown in Greece, see it break free from the eurozone, and spawn popular upheavals in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The cost of open defiance, which, Ali pointed out, is our only escape route from corporate tyranny, will at least at first be painful. Our corporate masters do not intend to release their death grip without a brutal fight.

Ali recalled that even his late friend Hugo Chavez, the firebrand socialist president of Venezuela, was not untouched by intimidation from Establishment forces. “I remember talking to Chavez many times and saying, ‘Comandante, why do you stop there?’ ” Ali said. “He said it is not realistic to do it at the present time. We can regulate them, make life difficult for capitalism, use oil money for the poor, but we can’t topple the system.”

Ali added, “The Greeks and the Spanish are saying the same.”

“I don’t know what Syriza thought,” he said. “If it thought we can divide the European elite, we can make a big propaganda campaign in Europe and they will be forced to make concessions, that was foolish. This European elite, led by the Germans, doesn’t crack easily. They have walked all over the Greeks. The Greek leaders should have said to their own people, ‘We are going to try and get the best possible conditions—if not we will report to you what has happened and what we need to do.’ Instead, they fell into the European trap. The Europeans made virtually no concessions that mattered.”

The clash between the Greeks and the corporate elites that dominate Europe, Ali said, is “not economic.”

The European Union is “prepared to pour billions into fighting Russians in the Ukraine,” he said. “It’s not a question of the money. They can throw away the bloody money, as they are preparing to do and are doing in the Ukraine. With the Greeks they pretend it is economic, but it’s political. They are fearful that if the Greeks pull it off, the disease will spread. There are elections in December in Spain. If Podemos [Spain’s left-wing party] wins with Greece already having won and proceeding, however modestly, on a different path, the Spanish will say the Greeks have done it. And then there is the Irish waiting patiently with their progressive parties, saying, ‘Why can’t we do what Syriza has done? Why can’t we unite and take on our extreme center?’ ”

Ali said he was “shocked and angry about all the hopes that were invested in Obama by the left.” He lambasted what he called the American “obsession with identity.” Barack Obama, he said, “is an imperial president and behaves like one, regardless of the color of his skin.” Ali despaired of the gender politics that are fueling a possible run for the White House by Hillary Clinton, who would be the first woman president.

“My reply is, ‘So bloody what?’ ” he said. “If she is going to bomb countries and put drones over whole continents, what difference does her gender make if her politics are the same? That is the key. The political has been devalued and debased under neoliberalism. People retreat into religion or identity. It’s disastrous. I wonder if it is even possible to create something on a national scale in the United States. I wonder if it would be better to concentrate on big cities and states to develop some movements where they can have an influence in Los Angeles, New York or in states such as Vermont. It may be wiser to concentrate on three or four things to show that it can be done. I can’t see the old way of reproducing a political party of the left, modeled on the Republican and Democratic structures, as working. These people only work with money. They do not even speak with very many ordinary people. It is credit-card democracy. The left cannot and should not emulate this. America is the hardest nut to crack, but unless it is cracked we are doomed.”

Ali said he fears that should Americans become politically conscious and resist, the corporate state will impose naked forms of militarized repression. Government’s reaction to the 2013 bombings at the Boston Marathon stunned him. Authorities “closed down an entire city with the support of the population.” He said that the virtual declaration of martial law in Boston was “a dress rehearsal.”

“If they can do it in Boston they can do it in other cities,” he said. “They needed to try it on in Boston to see if it would work. That frightened me.”

“The manufacturing of threats manufactures fear,” he said. “It creates sleepwalking citizens. They [officials] never tried to do this on this scale when they were fighting the Soviet Union and the communist enemy, which was supposed to be the worst, most dangerous threat ever. Now they do it over a handful of bloody terrorists.”

Groups such as Black Lives Matter, he said, offer some hope.

“Just as the traditional left parties have been wiped out all over the world, so has the radical segment of the African-American population and their organizations,” he said. “They were physically wiped out. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, some of the most gifted leaders, were assassinated. The Black Panthers were destroyed. Areas where blacks lived on the West Coast were flooded with drugs. It was a well-planned assault. But the young people who came out in Black Lives Matter have this older spirit. When Jesse Jackson went to Ferguson and engaged in demagogy he was heckled. They did the same on the East Coast with [Al] Sharpton. These black leaders, bought off, are being seen for what they are.”

Ali’s deep concern is that organizations such as Black Lives Matter too often react to events and “don’t totally grasp that dealing with this problem of continuous state violence against the citizenry requires political movements.” He worries that Americans lack an understanding of their own history and that very few are literate in basic revolutionary theory, from Karl Marx to Rosa Luxemburg. This illiteracy, he said, means that opposition movements are often unable to effectively analyze the structures and mechanisms of capitalist power and cannot formulate a sophisticated political response.

“Why didn’t the American working class produce a Labour Party or a proper Communist Party?” he asked. “Repression. If you look at … what happened in America in the early decades of the 20th century and the last decade of the 19th century you see that private mercenaries were hired to stop it [political organizing]. This is a history that is not emphasized. This wretched neoliberalism has downgraded the teaching of history. It is the one subject they really hate. Politics they can take up because they use anti-communism. But history is a huge problem. You can’t understand the emergence of Syriza without understanding the Second World War, the role of the partisans, the role of the Communist Party that organized the partisans and how at one point 75 percent of the country was controlled by these partisans. Then the West came and fought a new war, Churchill did it with Truman’s backing, to defeat these people.”

“I was sympathetic to the Occupy movement, but not to the business of not having any demands,” he said. “They should have had a charter demanding a free health service, an end to the pharmaceuticals and insurance companies’ control of the health service, a free education at every level for all Americans. The notion, promoted by anarchists such as John Holloway, that you can change the world without taking power is useless. I have a lot of respect for the anarchists that mobilize and fight for immigrant rights. But I am critical of those who theorize a politics that is not political. You have to have a political program. The anarchists of yore, in Spain, for example, had a real political program. This new type of anarchism achieves nothing. And probably half of these groups are infiltrated. We have the figures of how many FBI people were in the Communist Party and their Trotskyist offspring. There were huge numbers. FBI people were making key decisions.”

Ali said that the failure on the part of citizens to build mass movements to dismantle wholesale surveillance in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden was an example of our collective self-delusion and our complicity in our own oppression. The cult of the self, a product of neoliberal corporate propaganda, infects every aspect of society and culture and leads to paralysis.

“Hollywood gave an Oscar to “Citizenfour” and that is as far as it goes,” he said. “As if that matters. That is what is frightening. No civil rights movement has sprung up uniting the citizens against mass surveillance. Neoliberalism has effectively destroyed solidarity and empathy, helped by new technology. It is a culture of narcissism.”

Ali predicted that the current global speculation would result in another catastrophic financial crash. This new crash will give birth to “movements and people who will say, ‘Enough.’ ” If these movements build radical political programs with an alternative socialist vision for society, our “authoritarian capitalism” can be battled, but if this vision is absent, if revolt is simply reactive, things will get worse. The epicenter of this struggle, he said, will be in the United States.

“If nothing happens in the United States, if nothing new is created to challenge systemic excesses and empire, it will be a bad situation for all of us,” he said. “One is doomed if nothing happens in the U.S.”

For information about Tariq Ali’s new book, “The Extreme Centre: A Warning,” click here.

© 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.

Friday 6 March 2015

CROSSMAGLEN POLE DANCING



The main purpose of free speech, is to fight an authoritarian state peacefully. Currently, there is rampant censorship in Ireland, justified on the basis "that it's only purpose, is to offend." The Orange Order State has the veto on all freedom, so do battle against authoritarianism peacefully often requires the unorthodox. 
Now metaphorically speaking, the fiefdom of Conor Murphy, MP/Warlord of South Armagh is a good example of this. Everyone knows free speech is not allowed in South Armagh, after the execution of Paul Quinn, who tried to exercise that right, in opposition to the Murphys. 


So an Irish Blog reporter, took a trip over to a secret shebeen in Mullaghbawn, to investigate for himself, what the reality was, in the wake of all of the pole-dancing controversies there. Now as an Irishman from a Lily white background, the moment, he walked in the door, Jesus, Mary and Joseph he was mortified. There was a woman on stage called Orange Lily, pole dancing almost nude in her oily skin. The place was full and it was clear that everyone was from all over Ulster. He was going to to ask them, how many pence on the price of a litre of petrol, people were prepared to pay, in order see Orange Lily but thought better of it.

When she finished her gig, he made an appointment with her for an interview, for which she demanded a hundred pounds sterling, for her services for two hours. Now the place was full of the fumes of the people's duty-free whiskey, as opposed to the British Governments, pricey tainted stuff, which Murphy is currently protecting. It was unavoidable to inhale the ether of the wacky baccy, that engulfed the place. When he mentioned this to a fellow guest, he was reminded, that he did not have the right to demand, that South Armagh, throw away the principles of enlightenment, to kowtow to the outrageous, arrogant and risible demands of British Occupation and was politely asked, if I didn't like freedom of speech and it's practice, why he had I gone there in the first place? Fortunately at that point, Orange Lily arrived for her appointment and they retired to her chambers.



Her boudoir was well perfumed, with a very large bed. She ordered him to strip, shower and basically told him to roll onto his back and expose his genitals. While she worked on his resurrection, h interviewed her. She told him that Orange Lily, was not in fact her real name. It was in fact Lily Frazer, as baptized by the Pentecostal Church and that she had learned her pole-dancing in London's West End. She had been invited to return to South Armagh by Provo politicians, who used her services in London, when they came over to claim expenses, as MPs of the House of Commoners, and she was promised protection. She worked as a professional lobbyist by day and as a part-time pole dancer by night, in both London and South Armagh. She said most of the Provo politicians used her services in their extensive free time as a result of a point of principle, while not attending the House of Commoners, officially. She confided, that after the Queen's banquet for compliant Irish politicians, she had developed many new professional relationships in Ireland.


Asked if Gerry engaged her services, she replied, that he preferred his dog and tree show. When asked, if Marty engaged her services, she replied, that he was inspired by certain fetishes with royalty. So as he continued to ask her specific questions, the picture emerged, that most of theIrish establishment, used her services, which was perfectly legal, in her capacity as a lobbyist. Asked, if the British Secret Services employed her, she refused to comment, other than to say that she had a stick and carrot approach, with regard to the Irish establishment and that they were all feeding from the same trough in London. Lily said most of them were gobshites, who generally paid her for permission to lick her. 



Now at this point, our reporter being a paradigm of virtue, was forthright and asked her, if she had an assistant, explaining he preferred a sandwich. She told him, that unfortunately, she hadn't but she would be travelling up the Sinn Fein Party conference in Derry and would bring her assistant, if he cared to avail of their services, there. At this point, they were rudely interrupted by two heavies, wearing balaclavas, who apparently were listening, with some bugs in the bed. He was told, to pack his bags and fuck off. To which he replied, grow a pair and take off the balaclavas, or words to that effect. Now at this point, I must add, that our friend did not intend offence, to the fascist feminists, for the phrase 'grow a pair,' who regard it as misogynistic,  but our colleague was under stress.


The current situation in South Armagh, for most people, is horrendous and miserable, thanks to a bunch, of vile fascists political administrators, mentored by British Military intelligence, to extend Her Majesty's writ over South Armagh and collect taxes, from the Irish on the artificial, British border, they created. South Armagh today is much the same as it was 50 years ago. The people of South Armagh are regularly beaten, jailed and murdered for daring to express, differing opinions, in what is clearly a pseudo, peace process, environment. 



The majority of decisions in Ireland, whether in Stormont ot Leinster House, are made by a small group of people, who censor the views of large parts of the population. This is how the repressive Stormont Junta administers corrupt law and state-sponsored violence for the British. What protects people’s rights to say things objectionable, are precisely what protects the right to object. The “assassin’s veto, is the ultimate threat of murder, to silence any of those with whom we disagree. The attack and murder of Paul Quinn in South Armagh, was the ultimate censorship, by fascist hands, not republican ones. Censoring all debate, free expression, for one or the other, based on the absence of offence, results, not in less offensive speech, but no speech at all. It is the same intolerant Blueshirt fascism, that murdered more than 80 brave Irish republicans, overtly in the south of Ireland and approximately 50 covertly, in the north, during this phase of Struggle. British heavy weaponry, used by Blueshirts, bombarded the four courts in Dublin, starting the Irish Civil War in the south. Incidents like Loughgall, were used, in what the British term, "to sanitize" the republican movement, which in reality, was eliminating any opposition, to a neoliberal agenda, that facilitates Corporate Fascism.


What The BRICS Plus Germany Are Really Up To?


By Pepe Escobar

March 05, 2015 "ICH" - "RT" - Winston Churchill once said, “I feel lonely without a war.” He also badly missed the loss of empire. Churchill’s successor – the ‘Empire of Chaos’ – now faces the same quandary. Some wars – as in Ukraine, by proxy – are not going so well.

And the loss of empire increasingly manifests itself in myriad moves by selected players aiming towards a multipolar world.

So no wonder US ‘Think Tankland’ is going bonkers, releasing wacky CIA-tinted“forecasts” where Russia is bound to disintegrate, and China is turning into a communist dictatorship. So much (imperial) wishful thinking, so little time to prolong hegemony.

The acronym that all these “forecasts” dare not reveal is BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). BRICS is worse than the plague as far as the ‘Masters of the Universe’ that really control the current - rigged - world system are concerned. True, the BRICS are facing multiple problems. Brazil at the moment is totally paralyzed; a long, complex, self-defeating process, now coupled with intimations of regime change by local ‘Empire of Chaos’ minions. It will take time, but Brazil will rebound.

That leaves the “RIC” – Russia, India and China - in BRICS as the key drivers of change. For all their interlocking discrepancies, they all agree they don’t need to challenge the hegemon directly while aiming for a new multipolar order.

The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) – a key alternative to the IMF enabling developing nations to get rid of the US dollar as a reserve currency – will be operative by the end of this year. The NDB will finance infrastructure and sustainable development projects not only in the BRICS nations but other developing nations. Forget about the Western-controlled World Bank, whose capital and lending capacity are never increased by the so-called Western “powers.” The NDB will be an open institution. BRICS nations will keep 55 percent of the voting power, and outside their domain no country will be allowed more than 7 percent of votes. But crucially, developing nations may also become partners and receive loans.

Damn those communists

A tripartite entente cordiale is also in the making. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in China next May – and ‘Chindia’ will certainly engage in a breakthrough concerning their bitter territorial disputes. As much as Delhi has a lot to benefit from China’s massive capital investment and exports, Beijing wants to profit from India’s vast market and technology savvy. In parallel, Beijing has already volunteered economic help to Russia – if Moscow asks for it – on top of their evolving strategic partnership.

The US “pivoting to Asia” – launched at the Pentagon – is all dressed up with no place to go. Bullying Southeast Asia, South Asia and, for that matter, East Asia as a whole into becoming mere ‘Empire of Chaos’ vassals – and on top of it confronting China - was always a non-starter. Not to mention believing in the fairy tale of a remilitarized Japan able to “contain” China.

Isolating the “communist dictatorship” won’t fly. Just watch, for instance, the imminent high-speed rail link between Kunming, in Yunnan province, and Singapore, traversing a key chunk of a Southeast Asia which for Washington would never qualify to be more than a bunch of client states. The emerging 21st century Asia is all about interconnection; and the inexorable sun in this galaxy is China.

As China has embarked in an extremely complex tweaking of its economic development model, as I outlined here, China’s monopoly of low-end manufacturing – its previous industrial base – is migrating across the developing world, especially around the Indian Ocean basin. Good news for the Global South – and that includes everyone from African nations such as Kenya and Tanzania to parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Of course the ‘Empire of Chaos’, business-wise, won’t be thrown out of Asia. But its days as an Asian hegemon, or a geopolitical Mob offering “protection”, are over.

The Chinese remix of Go West, Young Man – in fact go everywhere – started as early as 1999. Of the top 10 biggest container ports in the world, no less than 7 are in China (the others are Singapore, Rotterdam, and Pusan in South Korea). As far as the 12th Chinese 5-year plan – whose last year is 2015 – is concerned, most of the goals of the seven technology areas China wanted to be in the leading positions have been achieved, and in some cases even superseded.

The Bank of China will increasingly let the yuan move more freely against the US dollar. It will be dumping a lot of US dollars every once in a while. The 20-year old US dollar peg will gradually fade. The biggest trading nation on the planet, and the second largest economy simply cannot be anchored to a single currency. And Beijing knows very well how a dollar peg magnifies any external shocks to the Chinese economy.

Sykes-Picot is us

A parallel process in Southwest Asia will also be developing; the dismantling of the nation-state in the Middle East – as in remixing the Sykes-Picot agreement of a hundred years ago. What a stark contrast to the return of the nation-state in Europe.

There have been rumblings that the remixed Sykes is Obama and the remixed Picot is Putin. Not really. It’s the ‘Empire of Chaos’ that is actually acting as the new Sykes-Picot, directly and indirectly reconfiguring the “Greater Middle East.” Former NATO capo Gen. Wesley Clark has recently “revealed” what everyone already knew; the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh fake Caliphate is financed by “close allies of the United States,” as in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel. Compare that with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon admitting that ISIS “does not represent a threat to Israeli interests.” Daesh does the unraveling of Sykes-Picot for the US.

The ‘Empire of Chaos’ actively sought the disintegration of Iraq, Syria and especially Libya. And now, leading the House of Saud, “our” bastard in charge King Salman is none other than the former, choice jihad recruiter for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan Salafist who was the brains behind both Osama bin Laden and alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.

This is classic ‘Empire of Chaos’ in motion (exceptionalists don’t do nation building, just nation splintering). And there will be plenty of nasty, nation-shattering sequels, from the Central Asian stans to Xinjiang in China, not to mention festering, Ukraine, a.k.a Nulandistan.

Parts of Af-Pak could well turn into a branch of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh right on the borders of Russia, India, China, and Iran. From an ‘Empire of Chaos’ perspective, this potential bloodbath in the “Eurasian Balkans” – to quote eminent Russophobe Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski – is the famous “offer you can’t refuse.”

Russia and China, meanwhile, will keep betting on Eurasian integration; strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and their own internal coordination inside the BRICS; and using plenty of intel resources to go after The Caliph’s goons.

And as much as the Obama administration may be desperate for a final nuclear deal with Iran, Russia and China got to Tehran first. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in Tehran two weeks ago; stressing Iran is one of China’s “foreign policy priorities” and of great “strategic importance.” Sooner rather than later Iran will be a member of the SCO. China already does plenty of roaring trade with Iran, and so does Russia, selling weapons and building nuclear plants.

Berlin-Moscow-Beijing?

And then there’s the German question.

Germany now exports 50 percent of its GDP. It used to be only 24 percent in 1990. For the past 10 years, half of German growth depended on exports. Translation: this is a giant economy that badly needs global markets to keep expanding. An ailing EU, by definition, does not fit the bill.

German exports are changing their recipient address. Only 40 percent - and going down – now goes to the EU; the real growth is in Asia. So Germany, in practice, is moving away from the eurozone. That does not entail Germany breaking up the euro; that would be interpreted as a nasty betrayal of the much-lauded “European project.”

What the trade picture unveils is the reason for Germany’s hardball with Greece: either you surrender, completely, or you leave the euro. What Germany wants is to keep a partnership with France and dominate Eastern Europe as an economic satellite, relying on Poland. So expect Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy to face a German wall of intransigence. So much for European “integration,” it works as long as Germany dictates all the rules.

The spanner in the works is that the double fiasco Greece + Ukraine has been exposing. Berlin as an extremely flawed European hegemon – and that’s quite an understatement. Berlin suddenly woke up to the real, nightmarish possibility of a full blown, American-instigated war in Europe’s eastern borderlands against Russia. No wonder Angela Merkel had to fly to Moscow in a hurry.

Moscow – diplomatically – was the winner. And Russia won again when Turkey – fed up with trying to join the EU and being constantly blocked by, who else, Germany and France – decided to pivot to Eurasia for good, ignoring NATO and amplifying relations with both Russia and China.

That happened in the framework of a major ‘Pipelineistan’ game-changer. After Moscow cleverly negotiated the realignment of South Stream towards Turk Stream, right up to the Greek border, Putin and Greek Prime Minister Tsipras also agreed to a pipeline extension from the Turkish border across Greece to southern Europe. So Gazprom will be firmly implanted not only in Turkey but also Greece, which in itself will become mightily strategic in European ‘Pipelineistan’.

So Germany, sooner or later, must answer a categorical imperative - how to keep running massive trade surpluses while dumping their euro trade partners. The only possible answer is more trade with Russia, China and East Asia. It will take quite a while, and there will be many bumps on the road, but a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing trade/commercial axis – or the “RC” in BRICS meet Germany - is all but inevitable.

And no, you won’t read that in any wacky US ‘Think Tankland’ “forecast.”Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.



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Thursday 5 March 2015

PADDY'S DAY LIBERATION



The leader of the Irish,
 who fought against the fascist General Franco in the Spanish Civil War was Frank Ryan,
P.16 LEAD Irish - FrankDocuments just released by the Moscow based organisation, Comintern, give a summary of the 230 Irish who fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, almost a third of whom died.

Researcher Emmet O’Connor, from the University of Ulster, says
Frank Ryan played a vital role within the International Brigades, after travelling to Spain in 1936, despite his crippling deafness.

“He had two important tasks: first, to help rebuild the battalions decimated after the Battle of Brunete in July 1937, and second, on his own initiative, to get as many Irishmen as possible repatriated if he felt that they had done enough.”

The Comintern library contains about 60 million pages of documents, the global scope of which creates a unique opportunity to study previously undiscovered details of the war.

They were very brave men and not a few women who served in nursing roles in the I/Bs. I remember hitching a lift one day in the late 60s’ from an ex I/B man... amazing tales told by a front line soldier. These I/B men knew how important it was to defeat the fascists, especially as it was not well known at the time that the elites in France and Britain were doing everything they could to ensure the Republic was destroyed and when this happened WW11 was the outcome....anon

One of the best books I’ve read on the subject is “Unlikely Warriors” by Richard Baxell. The Republic lacked arms because of the actions of the governments of France and the UK....anon


C(o)ill Cais

This is one of my favourite Irish songs and I feel it gives a good insight into the sense of loss, that many Irish people feel in their hearts, for the land that they love. The British knocked down all of the woods in ireland, to build ships for their piracy around the world. Ireland is beautiful but is barren in many respects and I often try to visualize it, covered in its native woodlands, rather than the coniferous plantings imported. The sense of loss is accentuated by the loss of its population in it's holocaust and endemic emigration, thereafter. It will take time to recover but I believe with patience, we will do it eventually.

brionOcleirigh


Wednesday 4 March 2015

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST IN SOUTH ARMAGH


They say life is stranger than fiction but some of the stuff that's happening in South Armagh, is straght out of the Murphy's Law, textbook. A year ago today, one of Willie's Frazer's cult followers, was minding his own business, when one of Murphy's Sin Fein councillors brought his attention to two Irish tricolour flags, that were also minding their own business, in trees at the edge of lake in Bessbrook. Murphy's councillor brought Oswald Bradley's attention to the flags and said the Irish tricolours should come down. Sin Fein made the following statement at the time, calling for their removal, saying they were "overtly sectarian, intimidating and threatening," Well Willie Frazer's cult follower became enraged and emboldened by Sin Fein rhetoric, he started to have some very strong feelings about the presence of the Irish flags on the island on Mill Pond. So being a Willie Frazer man, he put a Union Jack flag in his pocket and started to swim out to replace the flags with the Union Jack, as Sin Fein had advised, when the poor man, got into trouble while swimming across to the flags.

The tricolours erected in Bessbrook

Oswald Bradley, a stout Orangeman in his 70s, entered the water at Bessbrook Mill Pond at 5pm and after getting into fierce difficulties, was pulled by the Orange Order and Sin Fein from the water. Despite all sorts of mouth to mouth resusitation to revive him, poor Oswald could not be saved and kicked the bucket. After the tragedy Sin Fein representatives arranged for a canoeist to go out in the lake and retrieve the Union Jack flag which was floating on the pond. Sin Fein also removed the two tricolours, which were doing nobody any harm at all, from trees on the pond island.

Pastor Barrie Halliday, a member of the Pentecostal Church and also a member of Willie Frazer's outfit, said Mr Bradley was also a member of Willie's organisation, and as a result of the Sin Fein controversy, that Oswald was upset about the presence of the Irish flags in the mixed village. He said Mr Bradley considered the recent erection in the village, an insult. Murphy's people in the area had attempted to swim out to remove the Irish flags, in days previous to the tragedy but found it too tough and turned back, leaving poor 70 year old Willie to die in the lake. He also said: "Ossie was a very down-to-earth man and he saw these flags as an act of cruelty."

Now you would think by the law of averages, that would be that for a while, but this is South Armagh Occupied Ireland and last week, Murphy sent another crew to remove something, that was offending them, up a pole that promptly exploded and blew Murphy's man back down again, giving him a pair of black eyes and a very bloody nose. There was fierce weeping and gnashing of teeth about it altogether and Murphy took off to London to get away from it all, all expenses paid by Her Majesty the Queen of England of course. 

So a couple of nights ago, some republican stalwarts in Bessbrook, who hadn't forgotten about the Sin Fein removal of their tricolour a year previously, decided to erect a new tricolour and keep watch with camera on what would happen. Well last night a pickup came down the road crawling.  It's not clear if it was one of Willie Frazers or Murphy's mob, with the intention to remove the tricolour. As they watched from an upstairs window, camer in hand, they could see one of their young fellows climb up the pole to remove it, when all of a sudden, there was an almighty blast and a bang, that blew him back down the pole again. 

His brethern came to his rescue, gave him mouth to mouth resusitation and put him in the back of the pick-up and drove off again. Now none of the media are covering the matter, so there appears to be a cover-up about the incident, because of embarrassment following events just a week earlier. The republicans being the gentlemen that they are, decided to remove the tricolour for dry cleaning, to prevent further cruelty to the eyes of South Armagh, at least for the time being.

Now all of this takes me back to when Provisional Sinn Fein first participated in Assembly elections in South Armagh in 1982, and we were intending to drive through the mixed village of Bessbrook, in a motorcade through the village. Taxi Hughes from Newry and myself were to head the motorcade, with a tricolour, in a pickup not too different from the one last night. We weren't the owners, the Murphys would know who owned it. Of course the Newry lads had to do the dirty work and lead the motorcade, with the tricolour. The Murphys were way back, being soldiers of the rearguard. 

Well the sectarian RUC stopped us and apparently they regarded the Irish Flag, as cruelty to both their eyes and to some residents of Bessbrook. So Taxi and myself, bought as much time as we could, delaying the issue as best we could, until we got some support from the Murphy's behind. Well into the proceeding, I looked behind for the support but Lo and Behold! there wasn't a sign of the Murphy's. Well the two of us were well outnumbered by numerous angry RUC men, we held our ground as best we could but we couldn't breach their ranks, as our backs weren't covered. The lesson I learned that day, was always remember to have your back covered, by people you can definitely trust. Now of course the Murphy's will deny this but if you don't believe me, you can go into Newry and ask Taxi Hughes, a dacent man who did time for his country, who stood by the Irish Triolour. 

WHISKEY IN ME TAY

Come all ye bold teetotallers and list' to me a while,
And if you close attention pay I'll cause you to smile;
No story of Grecian queen, nor tale of Trojan say
But a tale of woe that happened so with whiskey in me tay.


I was a bold teetotaller for three long years and more,
The neighbours all respected me and decent clothes I wore,
My family were fond of me till one unlucky day
Just like a child I was beguiled with whiskey in me tay.


I only took the smallest sup when up the ructions rose,
I saw that I was put upon and slaughtered friends and foes,
A Polisman surrounded me and hauled me up next day,
The charge was read and duly pled, 'twas whiskey in me tay.


From Carrickmacross to Crossmaglen the polisman(?) did vow
There are more rogues than honest men as any will allow,
It isn't rogues or honest men the Justice then did say,
We deal with now, but a drunken row from whiskey in his tay.


This man he was a sober man for three long years or more
The neighbours all respected him and decent clothes he wore,
The story is an ancient one the justice did say,
He'll pay up bail or go to gaol for whiskey in his tay.


So all bold teetotalers if sober you would be
Be careful of your company and mind what happened to me,
It wasn't the lads from Shercock or the boys from Ballybay,
But the dealing men from Crossmaglen put whiskey in me tay.




Letter from the Craigavon Two




An open letter written by miscarriage of justice victims Brendan McConville and John-Paul Wootton, followed by a recent synopsis of the case.


We acknowledge with interest the decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Barra McGrory, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of Michael Tighe by the RUC in 1982.This was clearly a case of injustice in which vital evidence (a recording device) was destroyed to cover the realities of an RUC shoot-to-kill policy.

It would be difficult to ignore the glaring parallels that exist between this case and our own with regard to the destruction of key evidence. This is especially so given the conclusion reached by a director of the company responsible for manufacturing the device which contributed to our wrongful convictions. At the trial he stated that the wiping of data “would not have been something that could have happened purely accidentally”.

The question must now be asked: how can Mr McGrory attach such significance to the wiping of evidence in the Tighe case while at the same time ignoring similar misconduct in our case?

Mr McGrory’s expressed concern that the case of Michael Tighe could potentially undermine the credibility of the Public Prosecution Service could equally apply to our case.

In denying the truth Mr McGrory’s predecessors withheld justice from the family of Michael Tighe for more than 30 years. Does he intent to mimick what he now condemns and wait for his successor to address his current wrongs or is he now prepared to accept that justice was similarly perverted in a case in which he continues to be instrumental?


Injustice and the Craigavon 2 (by Thomas G Maher)

In 2012, John Paul Wooten and Brendan McConville were convicted of the 2009 killing of PSNI Constable Steven Carroll in Craigavon, County Armagh. Both men have maintained their innocence since the day of their arrest and interrogation by the PSNI.

John Paul Wooten was 17 at the time of his arrest and imprisoned at Maghaberry Prison, which is the adult committal prison for male prisoners in Northern Ireland. Brendan McConville at the time of his arrest was 38 years old and had previously served his community by being elected to Craigavon Borough Council.

The trial was placed under the jurisdiction of the juryless court system in Northern Ireland, formerly known as “Diplock Courts”. A jury-less court in NI is established under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Act of British Parliament) and can try a case with a single judge presiding and hearing evidence.

The evidence which the prosecution brought before the court was, as many legal experts have described, insufficient to be admissible as evidence, evidence was insufficient to carry a conviction and that the security services doctored the evidence. The evidence given by “Witness M” was only presented to the PSNI 11 months after the date of the murder. This witness placed Brenden McConville at the scene, however has admitted he (Witness M) was “intoxicated at the time”. However since then a family member of witness M, has come forward and given a statement questioning the statement of witness M and his ability to identify Brenden on the night of the murder. Since coming forward witness M has benefitted financially and has been placed into the witness protection programme. Witness M gave his testimony over tv link to the court.

At the time of the murder John Paul Wooten had been under surveillance by the British Army and a tracking device had been affixed to John Paul’s car. After the arrest of both men on the same night, the tracking device was then removed from the car and brought back to an army base and the data on the device was retrieved and then the device was wiped clean of all data. This happened six days after the date of arrest which has been questioned by the defence as unacceptable to be admissible as evidence to court. Questions have also been raised as to the device’s ability to give accurate readings in GPS format and that it has been proven data has gone missing from the device which the defence argues should never of been allowed to be presented to court.

These two pieces of evidence were the basis of the prosecutions case. It placed both suspects at the scene; made use of the corroborated evidence rule (requiring 2 pieces of evidence to be presented before any evidence is deemed to be admissible); both Brenden and John Paul were involved in republicanism (also covered by the “Hearsay rule” in English Law).

The use of the juryless court system has been called into question by Amnesty International, the Irish Human Rights Council and by previously and current serving members of the Dail, Stormont and Westminster.

To be tried under a juryless court is to be denied the very basic right under criminal law, to be tried by a jury of your peers. This right is the right of any person charged with a criminal offence and designed to give a fair balance of justice regarding the power of the state and allows for the person charged to be judge by the tested standards of the public and not that of the legal profession or the security services.

In our society a miscarriage of justice is deemed to be the failing of the law to protect the rights of the individual under the legal system and therefore any conviction or sentence can be defined in law as “invalid”. This case has many parallels in The Republic of Ireland, most notably Ian Bailey, where the State’s agents and by definition the State, allegedly doctored evidence, perverted the course of justice and committed perjury in court by corroborating the evidence which is presented in court.

At the very heart of this case is the juryless court system and its ability to give a fair and balanced trial. The Craigavon 2 have had their basic human rights under criminal law denied to them by the state, have been given life sentences based on questionable evidence and have had the appeal by the Court of Appeal in Belfast reserved with the convictions and sentences upheld.

The next step for Brenden and John Paul is the Supreme Court in London.

For more information on the Craigavon 2 go to https://www.facebook.com/JFTC2