Top Issue 1-2024

10 April 1997 Edition

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Editor's desk

Next Wednesday 16 April the first ever public march and rally by gardai takes place. Following the traditional route used by generations of Irish revolutionaries the gardai will assemble in Parnell Square and march through the centre of Dublin to demand better pay. It should be an historic and impressive gathering. But won't something be missing? What about the men and women in the cars on strategic corners and in huddled groups on the edges of the crowd? Who will note, photograph and video those exercising their right to demonstrate in public? Surely not the Special Branch themselves who like good comrades will join their colleagues in the serried ranks of labour.

Only one group could possibly fill the gap and that's you my fellow republicans. Check the time of the start in next week's papers, turn up in your cars or on foot, don't forget your caps (well pulled down over your eyes), your notebooks and cameras and see what it's like to be them watching us. Uncle Joe Cahill might even pay you a bit of overtime for your trouble.

 
The hysterical fuss over the postponement of the Grand National certainly does put into perspective the long years of conflict in which thousands of people have lost their lives. It's hard to remember such a torrent of manufactured outrage. It's a good job the IRA didn't decide to kill one of the horses. The fury would have been Sefton-like multiplied by ten.

Still, I did like the Daily Mirror's headline, ``We'll Fight Them on the Becher's''.

 
Our friend, Sean O'Callaghan, the self-styled Informer Poet, seems to have struck up a very peculiar relationship with his most loyal defender and apologist, Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Ruth wrote last week in the Examiner about their recent trip to the USA during which they tried - and failed - to get a hearing from the mainstream media. Quite sensibly, she steered well clear of recording any tangible achievements from the trip. Instead, she wrote about how she looked after his culinary needs - an important job with the famously thin O'Callaghan.

Sad to report, the bumbling pair often missed out on meals. ``The food problem provoked a mood of dull despair,'' wrote Ruth. In particular, breakfast was an absolute disaster. ``Seán, who never once complained about the quality of food provided in prison, enquired dolefully: `Is there anything they can't ruin?'''

Sad isn't it? (By the way, what a guy Seán is, the only prisoner in the history of captivity not to complain about prison food.)

So there you have it, Ruth Dudley Edwards, the famous historian, reduced to looking after a hungry tout. And the headline on the article? `Playing Mum to America's most wanted fugitive'.

 
Evidence that British soldiers are in Ireland to shoot Irish people was provided in a letter to The Times on Monday. It was written by Scots Guards generals Murray Naylor and David Scott-Barrett, the organisers of the campaign to free Scots Guards James Fisher and Mark Wright, who are serving a sentence for murdering unarmed New Lodge teenager Peter McBride.

Fisher and Wright ``both acted in good faith, in pursuit of an operational policy laid down by the government'' said the generals. ``To be condemned to to an interminable period for carrying out orders seems to be grossly unfair.''

Peter McBride was shot in the back.

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