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GERRY ADAMS: Why would Arlene leave Fermanagh?

THE past and present leaders of the DUP are currently singing off the same hymn sheet when assessing the tensions around the unionist rejection of the Irish Protocol. Peter Robinson’s assertion in a recent News Letter article that “we are perilously close to a line which, when crossed, will lock us all into a pattern all too familiar to my generation” would rightly be pounced on by political opponents and sections of the media if it were uttered by a Sinn Féin representative. DUP Leader and First Minister Arlene Foster told RTE that it is “dangerous when people think they’re being sidelined and not listened to.” Peter Robinson says that unionists “are more alienated than I have seen at any time in my 50 years in politics.” He omits the anti-civil rights campaign in the 1960s; pogroms in 1969; the UWC strike in 1974; DUP-led strike in 1977; reaction to Anglo-Irish Agreement 1985; anger at the Downing Street Declaration and rejection of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. His claim that there is a danger that for some unionists all of this will lead to an “estrangement from the political arrangements” that may then be “vented more robustly”, when taken along with Foster’s warning of danger, must be taken seriously.

GERRY ADAMS: On anniversary of Good Friday Agreement, focus should be on reconciliation

61 YEARS ago this month South African police acting for the apartheid regime shot and killed 69 demonstrators and wounded almost 200 more as they protested against the Pass Laws which were part of the racist apartheid system. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, like Bloody Sunday in Derry just 12 years later, reverberated around the world. It drew huge international criticism of the apartheid South African government, including by the UN Security Council. The British government abstained in the vote. In 1979 the United Nations General Assembly agreed that a week-long series of activities would be held annually in solidarity with people struggling against racism and racist discrimination. March 21 – the date of the Sharpeville Massacre – was set as its starting point. This year the theme of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was ‘Youth Standing Up Against Racism’. The aim of the campaign is to “foster a global culture of tolerance, equality and anti-discrimination and calls on each and every one of us to stand up against racial prejudice and intolerant attitudes”. Despite these efforts, racism, intolerance and misogyny are still very much part of societies around the world. The Black Lives Matters campaign has been very successful in drawing attention to it, especially in recent years. So too has the Me Too movement which has put a focus on violence and discrimination against women. The recent cartoon in the Sunday Independent which depicted Úachtaran Shinn Féin Mary Lou McDonald as a witch is just one deplorable example of misogyny as well as of the anti-Sinn Fein agenda of many in the southern media establishment. Hate crime, intolerance of and discrimination against citizens take many forms. Violence against people because of their race or colour, their sexual orientation or gender, their nationality or religion or their disability is wrong. All of us have a responsibility to make a stand against such injustice and intolerance whatever form it takes. Irish republicans believe that society must reflect and include the entirety of its people, not some of them. People have rights and entitlements. Their human dignity must be acknowledged and upheld. Inclusivity is vital. Equality is vital. The colonisation and partition of Ireland and the periods of intense conflict which resulted from it created significant divisions within Irish society. These remain unresolved. Foremost among these is the right of the people of the island of Ireland to self-government and to have maximum control of that government. A second crucial challenge is posed by political and religious sectarianism. As the debate increases around Irish unity so too must the debate on building an inclusive and reconciled society evolve and grow. Reconciliation and healing must be at the heart of the transition to Irish unity. But they cannot be a precondition to achieving it.

GERRY ADAMS: Micheál has it badly wrong on Irish unity

FOR almost a quarter of a century I used to spend my St Patrick’s Day in the United States talking to Irish America and political leaders in Washington. It’s important to understand that the St Patrick’s celebrations in the USA usually last a week – not a day. Consequently I could be in New York to take part in the celebratory St Patrick’s Day breakfast with hundreds of others before heading off to Philadelphia, followed by a couple of days of meetings in DC. I have some very fond memories of meeting Irish Americans at these events where they joyfully celebrated their Irishness through music and dance, poetry and craic. (YouTube video from New York parade in 1996 below.) On one memorable occasion we arrived in Syracuse in upper New York State for a St Patrick’s Day parade in the midst of a blizzard. We were not dressed for a blizzard. I walked shaking with the cold beside John Aherne, the Grand Marshall, who was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was wearing a top hat as he waved enthusiastically to all the heavily muffled spectators. John’s riposte to the fact that you could barely see twenty yards down the road was, “We parade in March because we are hardy. Anybody can walk in July.” Richard and I only survived thanks to the generosity of DeDe Walsh, the wife of the then Congressional representative for the district, Jim Walsh, who graciously lent us some coats and gloves. Rita O’Hare delighted in telling us off for ignoring her warning that it was going to be a cold walk in the snow. She still delights in telling that story. While no-one was able to travel to the USA this St Patrick’s Day because of the pandemic restrictions it was still nonetheless a good couple of weeks for the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement, the demand for the referendum on unity and for the campaign for a United Ireland.

GERRY ADAMS: 6,000 Days matches epics of prison literature

JAZ McCann writes very well. The reader is quickly drawn into his world. From the opening sentences of his prologue, Jaz paints the sights and sounds, the emotions, shocks, excitement, sadness, smells and the savage brutality and amazing horrors of his 6000 Days of incarceration, mostly in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. He also makes us witness to the incredible courage, vision, commitment, solidarity, idealism, generosity, quirkiness, anger, native contrariness, humour, comradeship and stubbornness of the political prisoners. 6000 Days is an important and significant contribution to the history of the Irish penal experience, in line with Jeremiah O-Donovan Rossa’s classic Prison Life or Irish Rebels in English Prisons and other historical penal narratives. I have long had a view that we republicans need to write our own histories. Others should do likewise. Including from a unionist or even in this case a prison officer’s point of view. By setting all these narratives together the weave of our collective history – as lived in cities or rural Ireland by women, workers, the poor, by combatants, victims and, in this case by our political prisoners – becomes a shared history.

GERRY ADAMS: Kathleen Largey was more than a singer

IT is my great privilege to have met many fine women and men over the years. The Léargas series of books is a record of some of these I came to know or to know of along life’s journey. It is very personal to me. This week I published the latest of these. The seventh book in the series is titled; ‘Kathleen Thompson – Up The Republic, She Raised The Battle Cry’. It is a tribute to my good friend Kathleen Thompson and it includes a limited edition of one of her most popular CDs – Legion of the Rearguard. Kathleen is for many of my generation the voice we most associate with the republican songs of the 1970s. With the intensity of politics and conflict in the North there were many groups and solo artists singing rebel songs.

GERRY ADAMS: No hills like our own hills

I HAVE always enjoyed walking. As a youngster my brother Paddy, Joe Magee and I would tramp the Black Mountain above Ballymurphy and beyond. After we started to have dogs they became part of the adventure. The enjoyment of walking dogs, especially across open fields or hills, has remained with me all my life. Later we graduated from walking to cycling. Joe and I went often to Glenavy and up, down and around all the countryside along that part of Lough Neagh. But we would always spend part of the journey walking. On one occasion we took an especially memorable hitch-hiking holiday. Joe and I persuaded a van driver for Eason’s to pick us up early and take us to Derry. We felt a great sense of adventure as we were dropped off in Derry. It was 7am, there were no trains and everywhere was closed. Walking out the road to Donegal we got a lift on the back of an open lorry and we lay back, gazing at the mountains and the blue sky as we drove into Donegal. After three days and nights camping beside a graveyard in Gweedore, we made our way to Sligo and on to Galway. We stayed for a while in the City of the Tribes, which was buzzing, as ever, with young people, traditional music and its own particular brand of hectic craic.

GERRY ADAMS: Unionist warnings on Protocol beg vital questions

SO what are we to make of the warnings by some unionist leaders over the Irish Protocol? Do we ignore them? I think not. Even though we have heard all this all our lives it is too serious to ignore. Operation Fear needs challenged. Take for example Sammy Wilson’s statement. Mr Wilson said the “real danger is that frustration and anger will be challenged through violence against easily identified targets.”.

GERRY ADAMS: PSNI gradually losing sight of Patten vision

ALL societies need a police service. A police service that works in partnership with the community and with citizens. Community policing is not the same as policing the community. A policing service is different from a police force. The North does not need another state police force. We had that with the RUC. For 80 years that paramilitary organisation, along with the B Specials, functioned as the armed wing of the unionist/British state and employed a plethora of special laws and repressive techniques to maintain unionist domination. The Good Friday Agreement established the Patten Commission as a means of creating a new beginning to policing. Progress was made. But in the Past few weeks a series of events and issues have emerged that have inflicted significant damage to hopes of the Patten vision and the PSNI. The Ormeau Road debacle was one such event. The tactics of PSNI officers dealing with relatives and survivors of a loyalist massacre caused widespread anger. The behaviour of the PSNI toward Mark Sykes and others also drew attention to the withholding of vital evidential information to the Police Ombudsman’s investigation into the Ormeau Road bookies attack. Last week’s anniversary of Pat Finucane’s murder by a unionist death squad, acting in collusion with RUC Special Branch, British military intelligence and the Force Research Unit, also highlighted the ongoing refusal of the PSNI and the British state to open the books on the use of collusion as an instrument of government policy. And then there was the revelation that the tapes of PSNI interviews of two investigative journalists were blank when handed over to them. Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey produced ‘No Stone Unturned’. The documentary examined the 1994 Loughinisland Massacre in which six men watching a World Cup soccer match were killed by a unionist death squad. Two of the weapons used in that attack were part of the South African-sourced arms shipment which arrived in late 1987 for the UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance. It was stored for a time at a farm in South Armagh which was the centre of activities for the infamous Glenanne Gang. This gang is known to have killed upwards of 120 people and involved members of the RUC and UDR.

GERRY ADAMS: Evidence on policing shows we’re not there yet

Last weekend the local news was filled with the images around the deeply unacceptable interference of a PSNI patrol at a commemoration by the families of those who had lost loved ones in the mass murder attack by the UDA on Graham’s bookies in February 1992.

GERRY ADAMS: Spring is sprung and change cannot be held back by Micheál-Arlene double act

MONDAY was St Brigid’s day, the Celtic day Imbolc - the first day of spring. It marks the turn of the seasons when the dark nights begin to turn and the weather starts to get warmer. It is the festival of fertility. It is the end of cold and darkness of winter and the beginning of a new season of light and hope.

GERRY ADAMS: Fra McCann's amazing life of struggle

IF you get a chance, watch this new video below posted on Sunday on YouTube about the life and times of Fra McCann. Just before Christmas 2019 Fra announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. He did several media interviews and spoke out because he believed his words might succeed in persuading other men suffering similar symptoms to speak to their doctors.

GERRY ADAMS: We’re not all complicit in the mother and baby scandal

THE recently released report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission is a shameful record of the brutality, ill-treatment and abuse inflicted on generations of women and their children in these institutions.

OPINION – GERRY ADAMS: A fitting tribute to Fr Des, the People’s Priest

FATHER Joe McVeigh was a close friend and colleague of Des Wilson. It wasn’t just that both were priests. They both shared a passionate belief in justice and were committed to standing up for the rights of citizens against a British state apparatus which was oppressive and violent. Fr Des died on the November 5, 2019, aged 94. He lived a full life. A good life. And in the course of his years of service he helped thousands of people. During the dark years of war and violence he lived and worked in Ballymurphy and Springhill. With Joe McVeigh, Fr Des established the Community for Social Justice. Its role was to highlight the real nature of violence in Ireland and to challenge the leaders of the Church. Fr Des believed that the Church had a moral responsibility to stand against injustice and repression. As a tribute to his friend Fr Joe has just published a thoughtful tribute: Des Wilson – A Voice for the Poor and Oppressed. It tells the story of Des, his early life, his work as a priest in St John’s parish and then in Ballymurphy and Springhill, and then the setting up of Springhill Community House. I am honoured to have written the Foreword. Fr Joe says of Springhill Community House: “Des had a deep love and respect for the people in the Ballymurphy/Springhill community in which he lived. He always had time for a conversation and a cuppa tea. The door was always open. There was always a céad mile failte.

GERRY ADAMS: The Catalonia connection

LIKE many other republicans I have spent several Christmases in prison. It’s not a nice place to be at any time, but especially over Christmas. I was reminded of this a few days before Christmas when I had the opportunity to hold a video conference with two of the imprisoned leaders of 'Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya' (ERC) – the main pro-independence party in Catalan. Oriol Junqueras is President of the ERC and Raul Romeva is the former Foreign Minister of the Catalan government. Both are currently serving prison sentences of 13 years and 12 years respectively in Lledoners prison, Catalonia. Declan Kearney MLA joined me in the conversation and also in attendance was Marta Rovira, the ERC’s General Secretary, who is currently exiled in Switzerland, and Jordi Solé, the ERC's Secretary for International Affairs.

GERRY ADAMS: Singing and climbing are on that 2021 list

DEAR readers, a very happy 2021 to you all. Here are ten personal things I want to do in this bright New Year.

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McGinn wonder goal but Northern Ireland beaten by USA in Belfast

NIFL Premiership: Cliftonville edge out title-chasing Coleraine

World Cup 2022 Qualifiers: Rock bottom for Ireland as Luxembourg claim victory in Dublin

ARTS ROUND-UP: Global lessons in power of art to move mindsets

GERRY ADAMS: Micheál has it badly wrong on Irish unity

REV KAREN: In Holy Week we reflect on the journey to the cross

WE SAY: Anti-Protocol strategy anti-union

Gerry Adams

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