Americans will remember that the usual St Patrick’s Day invitations were withdrawn from Sinn Fein by all parties this year in favor of the family of a murder victim. The McCartney family are strong supporters of the Republican cause but are being denied justice in the murder of their fiance and brother. Robert McCartney was killed in a fight which is believed to involve members and elected represntatives of Sinn Fein.
Now with the general election upcoming, their campaign is obviously becoming embarrassing for Sinn Fein and the McCartney family are starting to get threats and intimidation. The piece below the fold is a quote of the entire article from the Guardian as it tends to move archive pieces behind a pay wall.
Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondent
Friday April 15, 2005
The GuardianPolice were last night investigating a claim by the sister of the Belfast murder victim Robert McCartney that she was intimidated by republicans and told to leave her home.
Paula McCartney, 40, a mature student with five children, said she was visited at around midnight on Wednesday at her terrace house in the small Catholic enclave of Short Strand in east Belfast.
Ms McCartney said a relative of a Sinn Fein member suspended over her brother’s killing threatened that she would be “put out” of the area. She was warned not to distribute leaflets publicising a vigil for her brother, who was allegedly murdered by IRA members after an argument in a bar.
Mr McCartney’s fiancee, Bridgeen Hagans, said she was also threatened and told to leave the area with her two sons, aged two and four.
One month after the family took their campaign for justice to Washington, no one has been charged with McCartney’s murder and his sisters say witnesses have been intimidated.
On Wednesday, Ms Hagans and four of the McCartney sisters pushed slips of paper through letterboxes in Short Strand, announcing a vigil on Sunday outside Magennis’s bar where Mr McCartney was attacked. Paula McCartney said that on one street a crowd of 12 men and women gathered shouting abuse about Mr McCartney and shouting sexual obscenities at the sisters. They told Ms Hagans to move out of the area.
Ms McCartney said the crowd was “a minority, a dangerous minority. They are intent on oppressing and intimidating people…
“We believe their aim was to engage us in a physical confrontation in an effort to damage the campaign. But we didn’t rise to the challenge.”
She said the crowd included relatives and associates of people believed to be involved in Mr McCartney’s killing and the subsequent cover-up. A senior republican who the family allege was involved in the murder was standing nearby but not taking part.
Ms McCartney had contacted police. She said the majority of Short Strand residents had been supportive and Sunday’s vigil would go ahead.
Sinn Fein councillor Joe O’Donnell said: “I seem to be coming to the conclusion that it was a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other with regards to the abuse and threats which passed back and forwards between some residents and some members of the McCartney family. I am trying to reconcile and mediate in the situation. I have to keep an open mind.”
The McCartneys denied being threatening or abusive.
The SDLP deputy leader, Alasdair McDonnell, said: “There are no two sides to this story…This was a naked attempt to silence them [the McCartneys] and drive them out.
“Sinn Fein may claim to support the family, but the reality is that on the ground, Sinn Fein and the IRA are clouding the issue, covering up the truth and trying to silence the voices of those who demand justice.”
What an ugly situation. Thanks for keeping us informed… hope you’ll continue to do so.
give us Americans a little primer on the issues?
How do the English feel about ‘the Republican cause’ these days? How about Scots and the Welsh?
And how do feelings break down by party?
Politics in Northern Ireland has little formal links to the mainland political parties and a complete analysis would require a book rather than a blog entry to cover the 400 years plus of background.
There are three interlinked strands to the NI parties. The left/right spectrum is overlaid by both Catholic/Protestant and Irish Nationalist/Crown loyalist (“Unionist”) spectra. Both extremes have used violence or the implied threat of violence against the other community. The current political background goes back to the division of the island between the then Irish Free State and Ulster, primarily brought about by the threat of inter-community war by Protestants in the North/East where they were the majority.
Northern Ireland is a separate entity within the UK and had its own administration which was used by the Protestant majority to entrench their advantages. The initial suspension of the NI government, direct rule and the introduction of troops on the streets during the late 1960s was a response to increasing violence against Catholics whose increase in numbers and demands for equal rights had become a threat to the Protestants whose majority was being reduced by the different birth rates and whose relative economic advantage was being threatened. After a series of basically incompetent responses to Catholic demonstrations, the Army’s popularity amongst that community disappeared and it became yet another institution used to supress their aspitations. The effect of this was to revitalise the paramilitary wings with a re-established “Provisional” Irish Republican Army on the Catholic side and a variety of paramilitary loyalist groups on the other. The Protestant groups tended to be more disparate, less disciplined and more prone to internal fighting than the IRA.
The greater divisions in the protestant extremists allowed a somewhat less violent group to form a party around Ian Paisley, with a variety of smaller even more extreme parties linked to the paramiitary groups. The links between Sinn Fein and the IRA are more direct to the extent that the two leading members of Sinn Fein. Jerry Adams and Martin McGuiness are widely believed to be on the IRA Army Council. Whereas Ian Paisley has much of the bombast and unpleasantness of the US regligious right, from who he purchased his “Reverend”, the IRA have much more sophisticated political presentation.
A lot of the social infrastructure on both sides was used to collect funds to finance men of violence. On the Catholic side this was more unified and had a greater history. With the Good Friday agreement, much of the criminal infrastructure on both sides remains. They had also maintained a quasi policing role within their communities. These employed such tactics as punishment beatings, “kneecapping” (shooting the joint so disabling the victim) or enforced expulsion from the area or the entire province under a death threat. The McCarthy death is in the context of the mafia-like control that the IRA has on some parts of the catholic community in which they or their political wing see themselves as immune from ordinary law.
At the last elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly (under the Good Friday process), the two largest parties were Sinn Fein and Paisley’s Unionists. The more centrist parties (left to right) of the mostly catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party, the non-sectarian Alliance Party and the mostly protestant Ulster Unionists lost out. These are loosely alligned respectively to the British Labour, Social Democratic and Conservative Parties. Up to the period of direct rule, the Unionist Party was formally part of the UK “Conservative and Unionist Party”.
Under the Good Friday process, the two largest parites in the Assembly have to agree a power sharing arrangement. Paisley had been seen as obstrucing this by closely associating the IRA and Sinn Fein and insisting on verified completion of the decommissioning process. A very large ($50 million) NI bank raid was blamed on the IRA by police on both sides of the border. The cover-up of the McCarthy murder and the IRA’s offer to shoot the offenders compounded the bad publicity. The net effect is to gain sympathy for Paisley’s view of a Sinn Fein/IRA direct connection.
This piece inevitably has a London bias but I have tried to be as neutral as possible. Neither side of the divide is innocent as far as provocation and violence towards the other side and their own community is concerned. In taking a view of this from the other side of the pond, you should also bear in mind the histroy of the ultra-nationalist side of presenting the situation as an anti-British, anti-colonial struggle, with resonances of the American Independence, rather than the inter-community conflict it is seen as in Britain and (to a lesser extent) in the Republic.
for the excellent synopsis.
How has terrorism in England effected sympathies and hardened attitudes toward the IRA?