Remember Cole and Colley

A Chairde,

On Saturday, 22 September, the lives of Alf Colley and Sean Cole, two members of Na Fianna Éireann who were executed by Free State forces in 1922, will be commemorated. The Mick Murray Sinn Fein cumann, Donnycarney, in conjunction with Ógra Shinn Féin, is organising the event, which has become dormant in recent years.

We in Ógra Shinn Féin hold the same ideals as those two brave teenagers. Just as their passion for freedom and equality was not crushed by the bullets of the Free State, neither will our determination to create a better Ireland be crushed by the Dublin establishment.

We urge all Dublin republicans to honour the sacrifice of these two brave young men at 2pm at the Artane Roundabout this Saturday.

Chris Ó Rálaigh
Ógra Shinn Féin Baile Átha Cliath

Holy Cross tale is not new

A Chairde,

You guys are doing a great job of reporting the hatred around Ardoyne, but you are wrong in thinking this is the worst. As a child, I lived in Alliance Avenue. We were there between 1957 and 1985.

From 1969 to 1974 I went to St Gabriel's school. (Gerry Adams went there for one year) The so-called back exit is out through St Gabriel's all-weather Gaelic pitch.

My little sister had to use that route many times in her years spent at Holly Cross between 1968 and 1975.

The hatred is nothing new. Every morning I had to run the gauntlet of major sectarian harassment past the pupils of Everton and the other bed of hatred at the Protestant boys' school nearby.

I, like many others, got beaten up several times by the crazed mobs, including near misses from gun shots. I have the physical and mental scars to show it.

Living in Alliance Avenue, our wee house was petrol bombed and shot at on 14 occasions.

I remember being ordered back into our house by the RUC (`get back in your house, you fenian bastards') as the Orange bands used to walk up the street to pick up a grand marshal who lived just above the shops on Alliance Avenue.

So stop saying this is new; it's not. All you need to do is go speak to the older original remaining residents, the ones like my mum and dad, who lived in the street from 1950 to 1985

My mum and dad where born in old Ardoyne, Herbert St and Chadam St. My grandparents owned a wee shop their from the 1920s.

The new arrivals won't remember the history of hatred; most new residents are too young or came after 1970.

GD

Attack on the USA

A Chairde,

I confess myself most disappointed in the Irish Times supplement on the attacks on New York and Washington (15 September). The horror of the event was detailed, especially in Conor O'Cleary's harrowing eyewitness account.

Most of the remaining analysis, however, was entirely lacking in insight or evidence of any attempt to bring deeper understanding. The inherently racist catchphrase for Fintan O'Toole's piece, ``the terrorists have used our (?) technology to wage war against modernity'', aptly described the article that followed. Jim Cusack and Cathy Sheridan desperately attempted to implicate Irish republicanism in the atrocity, an effort that resembled distinctly the sound of axes being ground. They are entitled to their obviously strongly held opinions but I for one found it totally and disproportionately inappropriate.

There was not a single article of the type that Robert Fisk has been writing, an attempt to put the hatred and fanaticism of the suicidal bombers in the context of US and Israeli policy in the Middle East. At the Irish Times' Christina Murphy Memorial lecture in Dublin in November 1999, Fisk gave a moving account of the effects of continued US and British bombings in Iraq and the horrific effect of UN sanctions on the ordinary people of that country. Even reprinting that lecture would give some idea why the Bin Ladens of this world have emerged from the cauldron of Middle Eastern violence and politics.

This is the time when the Irish Times should be drawing on the resources of knowledge it has built up in relation to the disastrous effects of western policy in the Middle East. That would be a service to those who died and to those who grieve.

Explaining why is the basis for attempts at resolution. Surely Irish journalism can do better than this.

Anne Speed
Cabra
Dublin 7

Drugs article

A Chairde,

An Phoblacht published a centrespread polemical article on 6 September, advocating the legalistion of all currently illicit drugs. That's fair enough - free speech and all that - though the timing my not have been the most prudent. But this is a debate that is being carried out in society, and republicans should examine the issue from all angles.

Mick Derrig, the article's author, floors us with his knowledge of ancient Sumerian culture. Addictive drugs, he tells us, have been around since the dawn of time. This, he implies, confers a certain respectability on them. Now, murder, robbery, torture, slavery, paedophilia and oppression have also been around for a long time. They, however, have not yet achieved the status Mick Derrig would like to bestow on currently illegal drugs.

By the same token, the fact that large numbers of people use these drugs is no great argument for their legalisation. There are, after all, large numbers of people involved in theft, fraud, murder and the like. We have to judge the issue of decriminalising drugs on its merits, or the lack thereof.

What effect would such a measure have on Irish people? What the law condones, the law promotes. For example, in the US there is a constitutional right to carry firearms and there is easy access to weapons. As a result, the rate of gun-related homicides and crime is many times greater, proportionally, than in European countries.

The legalisation of currently outlawed drugs would lead to the creation of an under-achieving underclass that poses no threat to capitalist society. Small wonder that the main cheerleaders of this campaign are an assorted group of assistant chief constables and the editors of establishment British newspapers like the Guardian, the Independent and even the right-wing Daily Telegraph.

Dopeheads do not make good revolutionaries. Or hadn't you noticed?

The Republican Movement is a freedom-fighting movement and it ill-behoves us to support a measure like the decriminalisation of these drugs, which will result in the enslavement, through drug-dependance, of tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women.

Éamon Ó Domhnaill,
Doire

Lay off Cuba

A Chairde

BJ Ó Droighneáin's comments in An Phoblacht (30 August), which slated Cuba and other Marxist movements, were most unfortunate.

Cuba is, in fact, a remarkable society. It is small and poor. It has been demonised, denigrated, invaded and blockaded, but continues to survive as an inspiration to those involved in liberation struggles all over the world.

In the key areas of education and health, Cuba is light years ahead of every other Latin American society and most advanced western capitalist ones also.

Unlike Ireland, Britain or the US, education is free in Cuba and open to all, right up to university level. Literacy rates stand at 96%. The Cuban health care system is comprehensive and free to most of the population, with only the better off paying a small fee. Surgeons and doctors from all over the world go to Cuba for expert training and in over 50 countries there are around 2,000 Cuban health care professionals providing aid and assistance. Overall, Cuba devotes a greater share of its GDP to these two fields than do Ireland, Britain or the US.

Cuba is not a dictatorship. Universal suffrage for all aged 16 and over exists in Cuba and there are regular elections to the municipal, provincial and national assemblies. Trade unionists, women's groups, small farmers and the popular revolution defence committees all have a powerful voice throughout these bodies, making Cuba's democracy far more particular than that which we have in Ireland

Cuba has shown its nationalism by helping liberation struggles all over the world. For this, its people have paid a heavy, but in their eyes worthwhile, price. The Cuban army's defeat of South American imperialism in Angola in 1988 came after a 13-year conflict, which claimed the lives of hundreds of Cuban soldiers. But it shattered the apartheid state's notions of invincibility, protected the progressive MPLA government, freed Namibia from South African occupation and strengthened the resolve of the anti-apartheid forces within South Africa itself. Cuba has also been a continual supporter of Irish freedom throughout the last 30-plus years of conflict here.

Certainly, Cuba has serious economic problems and various social difficulties. It is not perfect. Much of the blame for this, however, lies with successive US governments who have waged a 40-year campaign of unrelenting aggression against their tiny Caribbean neighbour. The economic blockade, which has cost Cuba over £40 billion is one aspect of this. CIA sponsored terrorism, perpetrated by elements from within the criminal Miami - Cuban community is another. George Bush's recent appointment of the extremist Otto Reich, formerly a promoter of US terrorism in Nicaragua, to the key post of under secretary for Hemispheric affairs is a sharpening of this two-pronged strategy and will serve to intensify Cuba's agonies.

James Connolly, had an ethical imperative to support these struggles. To refuse to do so in order to assuage the appetites of corporate Irish America and the reactionary British press, would be a betrayal of everything that this movement has ever believed in.

Conor Magill
Galway