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1 April 1999 Edition

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Back issue: Stalwarts of freedom

Ardoyne is a small community in Belfast which has borne more than its share of suffering in the past twenty years of conflict. This week its people came together to remember their dead and to rededicate themselves to the struggle for lasting peace in their community and their country.

If the privileged few who rule Ireland North and South were to be believed, the people who celebrated Easter in Ardoyne are terrorists and terrorist sympathisers who have brought violence on themselves and who want more violence. That is how the privileged have always described those who demand their rights and who are prepared if necessary to lay down their lives to achieve them. Twenty years after the nationalists of the north rose from their knees, the establishment in Ireland is telling them to go back down.

The condemnations of ``men of violence'' and the deliberate censorship of the will of nationalist communities is but the other side of the coin to the terror of loyalist gangs which in Ardoyne and North Belfast generally have murdered hundreds of civilians because they were Catholics. That terror is part and parcel of the British government's strategy of intimidating and silencing an entire community.

An Phoblacht, 30 March 1989.


An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland