Top Issue 1-2024

19 August 1999 Edition

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Dúirt siad...

If this happened in Tiananmen Square there would be an international outcry, but the RUC can do what they like on the Lower Ormeau and get away with it.

- Lower Ormeau residents' spokesperson, Gerard Rice, after last Saturday's brutal attack by the RUC on peaceful demonstrators in Belfast

 


The peace process is a joke. Nothing has changed. The loyalists still get marching down the roads and we are beaten off our own streets.

- A Lower Ormeau Road woman

 


The RUC had their batons out for no reason. People were just sitting there, holding hands and singing songs.

- Another Lower Ormeau woman.

 


I went up to Alistair Graham [Parades Commission chairperson] and told him I hoped he was satisfied at what had happened here this morning. I said to him I hoped he was ashamed of himself because I believe their decision has set back a peace process that we have been engaged in for years.

- Lower Ormeau Parish Priest, Fr Anthony Curran

 


We are very, very concerned about the [British] government's willingness to actually get to those responsible for the Finucane murder. Going after a journalist who has information that the government already has appears to be a diversionary tactic.

- Julia Hall of the US-based Human Rights Watch on attempts to force journalist Ed Moloney to hand over his interview notes to the RUC

 


The founding father of the Irish state, Pádraig Pearse, still revered as a latter-day political saint, was a blood-thirsty fanatic who espoused violence, death and destruction, no matter how futile, in the pursuit of a united Ireland.

- Kevin Toolis waxes in vehemently revisionist vein (The Guardian, 14 August)

 


It defies logic that the [Dublin] government would give the co-ordinating role for measures to reduce the demand for drugs to the Department of Tourism, Sport, and Recreation. Illicit drug use is not a tourism, sport or recreational issue. It is a health issue.

- Irish Medical Organisation public health specialist and medical adviser to the National Drugs Strategy Team, Dr Joe Barry (Sunday Business Post, 15 August)

 


This is just another blurring of the line between politics and celebrity... another example of how celebrity is driving politics and the media.

- Political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe on news that actor Warren Beatty is considering contesting the Democratic nomination for the 2000 US presidential elections (Sunday Tribune, 15 August)

 


In recent years, the overlap between the sectarian and the racist have blurred, effectively constituting the same phenomenon in Northern Ireland. Chinese families that moved into Belfast's hard-line loyalist Donegall Pass were intimidated and driven out.

- Ina Kilroy (Sunday Tribune, 15 August) on the treatment of Chinese people, the largest non-white ethnic community in the Six Counties

 


We make bold claims about the New Scotland, but to be a pluralist democracy you have to value the experiences of many different components of society, and I don't think that's ever really happened in Scotland. It certainly has never happened to the Catholics.

- Scottish composer James MacMillan, who says that anti-Catholic bigotry still poisons Scotland (The Observer, 15 August)

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