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14 October 2004 Edition

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The Fifth Column

Davy Adams, a co-founder of the now defunct and UDA-backed Ulster Democratic Party

Davy Adams, a co-founder of the now defunct and UDA-backed Ulster Democratic Party

THE DUP is keen to have people believe that their links with unionist death squads (the Ulster Workers' Council putsch, Third Force, Ulster Resistance, etc) is all in the past but a leading loyalist has highlighted ongoing DUP dalliances with the UDA/UFF.

Davy Adams, a co-founder of the now defunct and UDA-backed Ulster Democratic Party, wrote a two-page exposé of the campaign of intimidation his family has suffered at the hands of his former comrades in the Lisburn UDA because he supports the Peace Process. A pig's head, dripping with blood, has been left on the front passenger seat of the family car in their driveway. Visitors have had their cars vandalised. But the Lisburn loyalist says that at least one senior DUP activist has been helping the UDA.

Davy Adams applied to join the local District Policing Partnership. "After the initial interview was held at the council offices in Lisburn," Adams says, "a local DUP member relayed the news of my application directly to the leader of the UDA in Lisburn." He was immediately threatened. And when he was officially accepted onto the Policing Partnership, the UDA knew before Davy Adams did — probably through a unionist mole at the Policing Board itself. "The DUP member had learned, presumably through contacts at the Policing Board, of my successful application and, once again, immediately relayed the information to the Lisburn UDA."

Serving Trimble right

DAVID TRIMBLE would have been glad of a few more guests at the first-ever Ulster Unionist Party fund-raising dinner just held in New York under the cover name of 'The Friends of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'.

The mouth-watering menu included the undreamt of delights of hearing Trimble as the main course and Sir Reg Empey as the starter. (Ex-UDR gunman Lord Ken 'Beefy' Maginnis was also there.)

The Big House unionists felt right at home in the swanky Cipriani's, with what one food critic described as its "thrusting marble columns, 65-foot ceiling, inlaid floors and overflowing chandeliers [that] create an atmosphere of glorious empire that American businessmen like to use as a nice ego massage while discussing third quarter profits".

The UUP (flushed by the warm welcome given to Trimble's sucking up to the Zionist lobby after trips to Israel and his attacks on the Palestinians) offered a hoped-for 200 guests trifle with Trimble at $1,000 a dinner plate.

Barely half the invited audience showed up.

Even Trimble's prime backer in the US, Estee Lauder's son, Ronald, the billionaire heir to the cosmetics empire and one of the biggest benefactors to Jewish organisations around the world, backed out at the last minute after Irish-American groups lobbied the media about Trimble's actual role in frustrating the Peace Process, his links with the Orange Order and his antics at Drumcree.

The prospect of a consumer boycott of Lauder's perfumed products also put manners on potential guests and dozens dropped out like peas from a pod.

The final verdict on the UUP fare came from one seasoned observer, who rather tastelessly remarked:

"What should have been a historic moment for the UUP turned into a social event that would be dwarfed by any Albanian Transsexual Association meeting in a city that caters for every possible political and social taste."

And that's from the Belfast Telegraph!

Large helping of tripe

INVITATIONS to the UUP bean-feast claimed that they represented a significant section of the "Ulster community'' and enjoyed the support of "a large section of the Protestant and Catholic populations'' in the North.

When Irish-American groups challenged this, a UUP mouthpiece dismissed it as "sectarian".

The UUP has some 120 members of the Protestant supremacist Orange Order on its ruling body.

Sinn Féin in vote stealing scandal

SINN FÉIN is at the centre of a voting rigging scandal. But before the SDLP's hopeless election wonks start desperately calling for recounts of the umpteen polls they've lost to republicans, we should point out that the culprit caught trying to rob someone else's vote is the 26-County Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, and in less a hallowed place than Leinster House itself.

TDs get to vote electronically in Dáil debates. Each of them has an allocated seat from which to vote and the vote is recorded as being made by the person the seat is designated for.

But the eagle-eyed Sinn Féin TD for Cavan/Monaghan, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, caught the Progressive Democrats' president with his finger on someone else's button during a Dáil vote on whether the government should be allowed to rush through a Bill last Thursday.

Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin quite properly brought the PD Pres's dodgy voting to the attention of the Ceann Comhairle as a matter of procedure and record. In turn, Fianna Fáil TDs (particularly the smug Conor Lenihan) rallied to defend their PD buddy. The errant Justice Minister, however, was more magnanimous and put his hands up: "Well spotted by the deputy."

If you can't trust electronic voting in the Dáil, how can you trust it outside?

Educating Mary

NEWLY PROMOTED MINISTER Mary Hanafin showed her mettle on Today FM's Sunday talk show with Sam Smyth and Sinn Féin TD Arthur Morgan after her appointment.

PD types rang in to complain about the sale of T-shirts with IRA images on the Sinn Féin website. Our Arthur wasn't flustered and explained (yet again) that they had to be seen in the context of the conflict and that they are still particularly popular among young people as a gesture of rebellion against the Establishment. Indeed, added Arthur, they are in the genre of Ché Guevara T-shirts, beloved by radicals and pop stars alike.

Ex-schoolteacher Hanafin adopted her sternest school ma'am pose and chastised Arthur. There is a "whole lot of difference" between Guevara and the IRA "who shot people".

This may be news to Mary Hanafin, but Guevara was a gunman, what the Establishment would call a terrorist. He was an Argentine-born revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla, a member of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, which violently seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government, Guevara left Cuba in 1966 with the hope of fomenting revolutions in other countries, first in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and later in Bolivia, where he was killed.

Like the IRA, Ché Guevara shot people too. Mary Hanafin doesn't seem to know that singularly basic fact about the most famous revolutionary in history.

Mary Hanafin is Dublin's new Minister for Education.

Do they teach Ministers anything nowadays


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