BBC Spotlight on Political Internment Martin Corey

Statement from Release Martin Corey Campaign

The Spotlight Programme screened on Tuesday, November 12 was, in part, concerned with the case of political internee Martin Corey. Ciaran Tracey, Journalist for the BBC, visited Martin in Maghaberry prison, Co Antrim and conducted an interview with him. During the course of this interview Martin stated that he believed that he was in jail because he refused to become an informer, he stated he had been approached prior to his incarceration and told that he should co-operate with the security forces or else he would find himself in jail.

And that is where Martin Corey found himself, in Maghaberry Jail, he has been there for over three-and-half-years. He faces no charge and no trial, he has no release date, his release had previously been directed by the courts but then overturned by the British secretary of state. Three British secretaries of state have allowed Martin's internment to continue with secret evidence quoted as justification for this.

This blatant disregard for the judicial system exposes the true nature of British rule in Ireland and how it serves to persecute political dissenters. It is now time that Martin Corey is released once and for all with no interference from un-elected British officials who seek to protect those who recruit informers and put Irish citizen’s lives in danger on a daily basis. 

On Monday, November 11 and Tuesday, November 12, the Release Marin Corey Campaign loosely organised an attempt to highlight Martins case on social networking site Twitter. The result was overwhelming and exceeded expectations throughout the course of those two days. Republicans and human rights defenders continuously tweeted #releasemartincorey and due to their hard work this trended at number two on Monday (November 11) and number 1 on Tuesday (November 12) in Ireland. The committee would like to thank all those who took part and congratulate you on your success.

We are weeks away from knowing the outcome of Martin's case but we must not now sit back think that here is no more to done, we must keep the pressure on. In September Human rights organisation, Justice Watch Ireland released a report on their findings into the incarceration of Martin Corey. A full copy of this report has now been published onwww.releasemartincorey.com

The Release Martin Corey Campaign once again reiterates its demand for the release of Martin Corey, who is in jail solely for his political views. The British Government and their security must not be allowed to continue down this path of political persecution unchallenged.

Posted in: Internment,Martin Corey

THE FOLLY OF EMPIRE Chris Hedges

Who dares to speak for an innocent man whose voice has been silenced behind the wall of 21st Century British repression in Ireland?

Martin Corey has been locked away in Maghaberry Prison since 2010 without charge or trial on the basis of closed evidence. Visit the website to learn more: www.releasemartincorey.com 
Nobody knows the reason why Martin was arrested, nor has a reason been given. This is very worrying, indeed all free minded people, all who believe in free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of movement should be worried, all who believe in a democratic society where everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion should revolt to this 63 year old mans defense. As an Irish Republican Martin Corey believes in the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland, he believes Ireland and her people have a right to practice unheeded their own independence. Is this why Martin was interned? When did it become a crime? Was it with the signing of the Belfast Agreement (GFA), is this the new start, the new beginning we were all promised?

The reality on the ground is that not much has changed and so it becomes obvious that Martin Corey is being held Hostage by the British Government because of his Political Beliefs, all those who believe in justice and equality must support this campaign.

If you would like any further information please contact: 
releasemartincorey@gmail.com

by Celtic Chieftan

The Folly of Empire

By Chris Hedges October 14, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Truthdig" - The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.

The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.

The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off. His severed head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.

Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding obsessions. The Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri and turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence. “Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions,” Suetonius wrote in “The Twelve Caesars.” Tiberius trained small boys, whom he called his minnows, to frolic with him in the water and perform oral sex. And after watching prolonged torture, he would have captives thrown into the sea from a cliff near his palace. Tiberius would be followed by Caligula and Nero.

“At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve, although serving that system means disemboweling the nation and the planet. Our elites and bureaucrats exhaust the earth to hold up a system that worked in the past, failing to see that it no longer works. Elites, rather than contemplate reform, which would jeopardize their privilege and power, retreat in the twilight of empire into walled compounds like the Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality. Those on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior. They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the end increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. And then it all collapses.

Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.

It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.

Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.

Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

© 2013 Truthdig, LLC.

MI5 MASSACRE AGENTS RELEASED ON INTERNED BIRTHDAY OF MARTIN COREY 63

The proof that Britain's Secret Services MI5 in British Occupied ireland, are hell bent on undermining the Irish Peace Process, can be found in the contrasting treatment of Orange Order Loyalist Stephen Irwin, perpetrator of the Greysteel Massacre and the internment without charge or trial of traditional irish Republican, Martin Corey. If the Irish Peace Process works, MI5 will be out of their multi-million pound, State of the Art Palace Barracks in Holywood, County Down, minus their multi million pound budget, the prize of their turf wars with competing Secret Service MI6.

Releasing a loyalist mass murderer early, to do so some more of their British State Terrorism, dirty work, coupled with provoking republicans, with the injustice of their internment without charge, trial and prejudiced secret evidence against Martin Corey, is precisely the same injustice, that fuelled the conflict for more than the last 40 years. As every interdenominational mongrel on an Irish street knows, enduring peace with such provocative injustice, is simply impossible

Orange Order mass murderer Stephen Irwin has been freed again from prison, for the second time, just before the 20th anniversary of his Greysteel massacre. Irwin 40 was released previously under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement but was imprisoned again 8 years ago, for visciously slashing a fellow football fan at a soccer match with a knife. He was told at that time, he would have to serve out his full sentence, for the eight murders at the Rising Sun Bar massacre. He was granted early release last week by the parole board and walked out of prison after commissioners ruled his release immediately. East Derry's John Dallat one of the very few Members of Stormont Parlaiment {SDLP MLA} who is not compromised to the British Secret Services, described it as “unbelievably insensitive” coming so soon, before the anniversary of the Greysteel massacre.


John said: “This will only fuel the widely-held belief that Irwin and his fellow killer Torrens Knight were and most likely still are on the payroll of British Secret Servic MI5 and that that affords them the kid glove treatment.I have it on excellent authority from a well placed source that both Irwin and Knight were agents and met their MI5 handlers at Ebrington and Shackleton Barracks when they were in operation.


People are not stupid and they know there are many unanswered questions about the Greysteel slaughter and the killing of four men in Castlerock earlier the same year that Torrens Knight also committed using the same weapon.Those questions will only be answered if an independent inquiry is held and access is given to files on Irwin and Knight.I am sure the relatives of those murdered and maimed in Greysteel 20 years ago will be sickened as I am that someone who was clearly unbelievably insensitive thought it was a good time to put this killer back on the streets.”


Sentence Review Commissioners contacted declined to comment. This purports to be Due Process in Peace Process Ireland, when on October 30, 1993, Stephen Irwin, Torrens Knight, Geoffrey Deeney and Brian McNeill, all fellow Orange Order members, went into the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel armed.They massacred eight people, six Catholics and two Protestants. The victims were: John Burns, Moira Duddy, Joe McDermott, Victor Montgomery, James Moore, John Moyne, Stephen Mullan and Karen Thompson. One of the gang after release stated, his only regret, was that he didn't kill more. Irwin was given eight life sentences but was released after just a few years under the Good Friday Agreement.


Martiin Corey was born in the "Murder Triangle" of British Occupied Ireland and saw first hand the sectarian work of the"Glenanne gang." From being a teenage vigilante protecting his community, he volunteered for the IRA, the only defence his community had at 19. The name "Glenanne gang" is derived from a farm at Glenanne near Markethill, County Armagh, used as the Orange Order gang's arms dump and bomb-factory.Most of the Glenanne gang's attacks took place in parts of County Armagh and mid-Ulster, which later became known as the "murder triangle." The Orange Order loyalist extremists carried out sectarian attacks, from the beginning of the 1970s on a sectarian basis, against Irish Catholics, in a violent campaign, that eventually provoked a tit for tat reaction. Commanded by British Military Intelligence and RUC Special Branch, they also carried out attacks all over Ireland.


This gang of British State terrorists, included soldiers in the British Army, its Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), British Police in the form of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) some Ulster Defence Association (UDA) members. Former members alleged they were commanded from London and the one common bond, everyone belonged in the Orange order. The Pat Finucane Centre has listed 87 murders, as the crimes of the Glenanne gang, which includes the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Miami murders and the Reavey and O'Dowd murders. A sworn affidavit in the 2003 Barron Report by Glenanne gang member and RUC Special Patrol Group officer John Weir confirms this. The RUC Special Patrol Group, a specialised police unit tasked with counter-terrorism was instead engaged in sectarian murders


It is important to understand this background, in the context of Martin Corey volunteering to join the IRA and be the only protector of his totally defenceless community in Lurgan, being systematically murdered by British State terrorism and the later disbanded paramilitary police of the RUC. Martin was found guilty of shooting two of them in an IRA ambush almost 40 years ago. He served almost 20 years and was released unconditionally at that time. This then is the background to a heavily censored discussion on why Martin is interned almost 4 years again without charge and without trial.The censored debate in the pensive quill, followed an opening piece from Jim McIlMurray afriend of Martin's, on the the continued internment of Martin Corey' on hi s63rd birthday which went as follows:


" September 2, 2013, is the 63rd birthday of Martin Corey.


Today is also the date the Parole Commissioners were to commence Martin’s annual Parole hearing. We received communication on Friday, the 30th of August, informing us that this open hearing to review Martin’s ongoing detention would not commence on this date, with no alternative date being suggested or discussed with us.

Martin is entitled by law to an annual Parole hearing, and yet he has not received one in over two years.
A variety of reasons have been given for the delay, including blaming Martin himself for his "legal challenges" against his detention under Article 5 (4) (the right to have a court decide the lawfulness of his detention under the European convention of Human Rights).

Recent violations of Human Rights in the Middle East have received worldwide condemnation, including by the British government who stated that they 'will continue to play an active and forthright role in international institutions that promote and protect human rights.' They also emphasised the UK’s own commitment to strengthen human rights, both domestically and internationally.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that it was unacceptable to deny an annual parole hearing to anyone held in custody. This ruling ollowed a case of a man who waited 14 months for a parole hearing. Martin Corey has now waited 25 months.

The Secretary of State in a recent communication stated, 'an individual who served a life sentence
can be returned to prison if they pose a risk to the public or commits further offences.' Since Martin’s arrest in April 2010, he has never been charged with a crime, questioned by police regarding a crime, or given any explanation as to the risk he poses to the public.

Martin served 19 years in prison prior to his release in 1992. He has now served the equivalent of a
seven year sentence since his arrest in 2010.

Martin has not committed any crime. He poses no risk to the public and I am calling for his immediate release today.

I spoke with Martin this morning and he wishes to express his gratitude to those who sent messages and cards and also for their continued support in highlighting the ongoing injustice perpetrated upon him by
the British government.



Posted in: Martin Corey






   











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10 comments:



Pauline says:


10:06 AM, September 02, 2013Reply



Martin Corey is a name that pops into my head almost daily. I can't understand why there isn't more of an outcry outside of the campaign for him. The man is held at the whim of a politician with no mandate in north on alleged advice from the parole commission that she employs and if she so chooses can dismiss. Held on the strength of evidence that neither he nor his legal team are give access to, which begs the fundamental question, how do you challenge what you can't see?

In England MPs have spoken out against the use of 'closed material' branding it the product of Tyrants and repressive regimes. This puts a question mark over the attitude of the Stormont Executive's position on the use of closed material evidence, and I believe that the parties and MLAs in Stormont whether holding ministerial positions or not should clarify their individual and party position on the use of such draconian measures. I would urge all interested parties to write to their MLA's and ask them do they support the use of closed material evidence and if not what they are doing about it?

A very dangerous precedent has been set here!







AM says:


10:45 AM, September 02, 2013Reply



The PSNI probably have it in for him given the conviction he has for killing two of their colleagues. They are getting their revenge because they can.

Now, that might be understandable in terms of sheer human emotions. But if human emotions hold a veto over what goes on in society, there would never be any progress, the jails would be packed and we would probably have the death penalty for offences considered trivial by modern era standards.

Martin Corey is being held for what a court said he did in the 1970s - for which he has served his time - not for anything a court said he has done in recent years. He is being held at the whim of a politician - political policing par excellence.



itsjustmacker says:


3:13 PM, September 02, 2013Reply



Firstly , Birthday Greetings to Martin , I have intentionally omitted "Happy".

Martin is being held on secret evidence , It stems from the HET/ex RUC Special Branch and MI5 ,That's the Brits way of getting their own way. Every Ex pow should be out onto the street enforce demanding his release , lest they forget , He is still a comrade. As Anthony stated, Martin served his time , How many ex RUC murderers are going to be arrested under the secret evidence scam, Dare I say it , "NONE" , nor , any Murdering British Soldier. Its heart rendering to say the least, so called ex comrades allowing a 63 year old pensioner still interned and they do nothing about it, I hope some of them, especially in the Fellons club are reading this and I hope they die in shame.



Fionnuala Perry says:


1:42 PM, September 03, 2013Reply



What happened to putting manners on the Brits?
Last night we went as a family to watch a play written by Rosaleen Watson about the short life and tragic death of Tom Williams.
Throughout the short and very moving drama there was an atmosphere of shock and disbelief that something as horrendous as Tom's eventual murder took place.
There was an atmosphere of past- tense, an atmosphere of having moved away from these awful times.There was almost a feeling of detachment an invisible line drawn to distinguish past from present.
I wondered as I left the prison was I the only person there who felt, all these years later nothing has changed they would hang us all over again if they could? Who knows?



itsjustmacker says:


4:16 PM, September 03, 2013Reply



Fionnuala:

"as I left the prison was I the only person there who felt, all these years later nothing has changed they would hang us all over again if they could?"

They wouldn't take a millisecond to hesitate.



Pauline says:


7:22 PM, September 03, 2013Reply



My husband's grandfather was interned in Crumlin Road Gaol with Tom Williams at the time he was executed. My husband would often remark that his grandfather never spoke of it, such was the impact it had on him. Any time the name of Tom Williams comes up you can be sure my husband will be muttering the following passage from Tom Williams' letter to Hugh McAteer. As he was reading this thread earlier he went into it!

''But shall we make the mistake of '21? no, no, tis men like you and your staff will see to it. That no farcical so called Treaty shall in no way be signed by a bunch of weak-kneed and willed Irishmen. Better that the waves of the mighty oceans sweep over Erin than take and divide our nation, murder her true sons again. Better would be that heavens would open and send fire to destroy Erin, than to
accept another Treaty like it''

Another point of interest is that Paddy McGrory the father of the current DPP was actually taking a case to Europe over the internment of my husbands grandfather and others around 1958, I think, how times have changed you definitely couldn't say like father like son.



Maitiu Connel says:


9:11 PM, September 03, 2013Reply



I simply find this a crime against human rights. At the weekend I was researching through a few articles / writings about loyalism and part of my results included recent UTV and BBC articles in which they stated openly, the names of well known UDA men and that they were leaders. The same man who openly speaks from time to time on the news with the title " UDA leader " under his name. How can these people be publicly named as leaders of an illegal terrorist group and never face arrest. Today we have 5 supposed PIRA men being charged with membership from 1997 - 2000. We watched Marian Price spend years in prison there for holding a piece of paper. It seems MI5 love to turn a blind eye to it's operators whilst still the Irish suffer.



frankie says:


10:56 PM, September 03, 2013Reply



I think you hit the nail on the head Anthony...Pure and simple bitterness.

Judges can't find a reason to hold him, cops aren't interested.

Unless, as several posters have mentioned before they (powers that be) are simply testing the water to see how far they can push the boundaries..



itsjustmacker says:


12:20 AM, September 04, 2013Reply



Maitiu Connel:

Those five are out on £250 bail , They are SF, That's unheard off in Nationalists terms, not that I would want to see them being remanded , I am just making a point , Its the same on both sides of the divide, Its not what you know , its who you know , but , there is more to this case than just being accused of being a member of PIRA.

Frankie:

I have always stated that. They are pushing as far as they want now because they won't bang up any Pro treaties. I was well pleased on the Anti Internment March , all the banners of those still Interned , Also those of Michael Campbell, and of course those of Martin Corey.



Snowtorch says:


9:05 AM, September 04, 2013Reply



If Shinners such as Padraig Wilson support the British rule of law then I'm sure he would have no problem facing due process and taking a spell on remand, after all Sinn Fein are fond of due process. However I think what's keeping them off remand is that Padraig Wilson had requested to go on the republican wing when it was looking like he was going to be locked up a few months ago. Now that wouldn't look to well for the shinners one of their leading members requesting to be housed with those they have condemned as criminals and traitors."





#ReleaseMartinCorey

THE POLITICS OF INTERNMENT 1971 #ReleaseMartinCorey

‘Internment’ by John McGuffin (1973)

---

Chapter 7
THE POLITICS OF INTERNMENT 1971

IN the mid-1960's people might have been forgiven for thinking that internment was a thing of the past. (True, the obnoxious Special Powers Acts were still on the Statute Book, but they were in abeyance). Such thinking was not to be right, however. The monolithic structure of Unionism proved incapable of reforming itself under the onslaught of the civil rights campaign. Terence O'Neill might have been able to save the Unionists with his pragmatic approach and his appreciation of the need for change, but their diehard 'not an inch' backwoodsmen would have none of it. And so the week of 12 – 16 August 1969 saw the old familiar pattern: a police force unable, and, in many cases unwilling,^[1] to prevent the sectarian attack upon the Falls Road periphery, led in some cases by the B specials. That month was to see house burning, intimidation and murder – ten civilians dead, including a 9-year-old boy asleep in his bed, shot by a high-velocity Browning machine-gun used with murderous recklessness by the police in their Shorland armoured cars; 145 injured, hundreds of families burnt out of their homes, 90% of them Catholic. Free Derry was born that week. The barricades went up in Belfast. The first steps towards the irrevocable demise of Stormont were taken. And, predictably, men were detained, without charge or trial.
     At 6.45 a.m. on 14 August, 28 Republicans were arrested and taken from their homes. As usual, no 'Loyalist' extremists or gunmen were arrested.
     When the English Special Branch men arrived next month to sort out the RUC they asked for the files on all the 'terrorists'. They were handed the records, mostly out-of-date, on the IRA. "What about the UVF," they asked. "It doesn't exist," was the reply. "We have no records on Loyalists."
     But this time it was not to be internment. The British army had had to be called in. Callaghan and Wilson had summoned Chichester Clark to Downing Street. The B men were 'phased out'. The Scarman Tribunal was set up. The Labour Government was tired of the old-fashioned traditional Unionist methods. Moreover, from behind the barricades a campaign was being mounted. Illegal radios proliferated. Street newspapers were born. The detainees were released after 17 to 20 days. The message should have been clear; internment should have no place in the 1970's.
But the Unionist hierarchy learn nothing from history. The gangling figure of Chichester Clark, the stand-in PM, shambled off into obscurity as 1970 and 1971 saw an escalation of the violence by the Provisional IRA, themselves a reaction to the attempted 'Loyalist' pogrom of 1969.
     On 23 March 1971 Brian Arthur Deane Faulkner achieved his lifelong ambition and became PM. The English press warned that he was the 'last man in'. If he couldn't control the situation, direct rule was a certainty. But despite the obvious immensity of the task, Faulkner was confident.
     This was the moment for which he had schemed, intrigued and betrayed, for so long. With a staggering record of disloyalty to previous PMs, he could hardly expect to be trusted or liked, but surely all could agree on his shrewdness and ability.
     In fact, Faulkner's intelligence was always greatly over-rated by the media. And his biggest mistake was soon to come. The Sunday Times 'Insight' team claim^[2]that "when he took over the issue was not whether internment was to come, but when and on what scale. By then Faulkner had been an advocate of internment inside Chichester Clark's Joint Security Committee, for six months." Whether this is true or not, and on balance it seems a reasonable statement, it is certain that Faulkner had completely failed to learn the lesson of how and when internment 'worked'. He had been Minister for Home Affairs in 1959 under Brookeborough, and, with the help of his trusty aide, the civil servant William Stout, he bad been responsible for the implementation of internment, which he apparently felt to be responsible for the defeat of the IRA border campaign. As is made clear already, this just was not so. The campaign failed, for lack of popular support, and, most important, the internees could languish in Crumlin because there was no campaign to get them released.
     Nevertheless, one of Faulkner's first actions upon becoming Northern Ireland's last PM was to order the RUC Special Branch to work with the Director of Military Intelligence at Lisburn in drawing up a list of those Catholics who should be interned. The army were unhappy. General Tuzo, the GOC in Northern Ireland since February 1971, consistently opposed internment, believing, rightly, as it turned out, that they could not get the right people. But as the violence escalated, Faulkner became more and more insistent. On 9 July he telephoned Heath. "I must be able to intern now" he demanded. Accordingly, with some reluctance, a 'dry run' was agreed upon. At dawn on 23 July, 1,800 troops and RUC raided Republican houses throughout the province, searching for documents. They got enough to encourage them. The decision to intern was only a matter of time then, despite army objections.
     The position was complicated by the mistrust and, in some cases, downright hostility between the army and the RUC. As the Sunday Times team put it: "The army believed the police list was politically motivated, and the police believed that the army's list showed inadequate local knowledge." Both were correct. Some sections of the army had favoured a small internment in the spring of 1971, with only 50 or 60 men being lifted. They had been overruled. Now the task was to be much greater.
     The list had more than 500 names on it. Of these only 120 or 130 were gunmen or officers in the IRA. The vast majority were regarded either as 'Fellow-travelling sympathisers' or troublesome political activists – like PD socialists. The police contribution was the names and addresses of former internees. But Faulkner was determined. At the Joint Security Committee meeting at Stormont, Shillington, the Chief Constable, agreed with Tuzo that internment would not work. That made no difference. Faulkner secretly flew to London that afternoon. There he convinced the Cabinet. Tuzo could offer no alternative. Maudling was his usual indolent self. Whitelaw said nothing. Internment without trial was acquiesced to. The date was set for 10 Augnst. On Sunday 7 August, however, Harry Thornton, an innocent building worker, was driving his car past Springfield Road barracks when it backfired. Soldiers opened up and killed him. His friend Murphy was dragged from the car, covered with Thornton's blood, and savagely beaten by police and army. Within minutes the people of Clonard went wild. The fighting went on all night but had died down the next day. But the army were taking no chances. At midnight on Sunday the order went out: operation internment was brought forward 24 hours. Brian Faulkner had unwittingly signed himself his own political death warrant – and that of Stormont, too.