Thursday 13 January 2011

‘You lying BBC; you’re photographing things that aren’t happening.’
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Belfast woman to a BBC cameraman
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‘More than 50% of persons with schizophrenia are not receiving appropriate care.’
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World Health Organisation

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Scap would later tell his FRU (Force Research Unit – specialist military intelligence) handlers how he had watched senior Provos in the Republican clubs and pubs playing their roles, throwing their weight around, throwing IRA money around, buying drinks, acting the hard men and expecting to be treated like privileged leaders.  And Scap knew that all the money came from collections made in bars and clubs from the hard-pressed, deprived Catholic community… Scap noted that these same men hardly ever put themselves at risk.’
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‘I’ve had it, Johnty.  I’ve seen enough.  I have seen them with big boxes of money from their drugs and their racketeering, sharing it out among them,’ he said, ‘There are no soldiers in it, Johnty.  It’s all a waste of time,’ he added.
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Barrett was the man who murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane
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Nicholas Davies, Dead Men Talking
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According to Davies, Freddie Scappaticci was the British government’s top spy in their war against the IRA, rising from street hooligan to chief torturer in the infamous ‘Nutting Squad’, tasked with interrogating suspected informers – informers like himself.
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‘Although it is not known who shot (campaigning journalist Martin) O'Hagan, he had recently expressed concern after being told that he was possibly under surveillance by members of the splinter loyalist group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). The LVF had harboured a grudge against him for years because he had exposed how they combined a campaign of nakedly sectarian assassinations against Catholics with a large illegal drugs distribution network.’
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Obituary, guardian.co.uk, October 1, 2001
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‘In other words, a crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: you have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage. Notwithstanding the leadership's rhetoric about the family nature of the business, the gang's wages are about as skewed as wages in corporate America. A foot soldier had plenty
 in common with a McDonald's burger flipper ora Wal-Mart shelf stocker...
‘You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?’ he said.
‘So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain't no leader.
  If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit.’’
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The leader of a Chicago  crack gang explains to ethnographer  Sudhir Venkatesh why his foot soldiers receive paltry wages
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Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
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‘For howbeit the Irish might do very good Service, being a People removed from the Scottish, as well in Affectations as Religion; yet it is not safe to train them up more than needs must in the military Way.’
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Thomas Wentworth,
letter to King Charles 1, 1638
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‘The fools, the fools, the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’
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Easter-rising leader Patrick Pearse giving a eulogy at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa.  Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, August 1, 1915.
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‘Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster...If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster... I would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ good Protestant lads and lassies.’
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The then Minister for Agriculture Basil Brooke MP and later Prime Minister of Northern Ireland for 20 years, speaking at an Orange Institution rally, July 12, 1933.
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(Above:) The Republican Memorial in Milltown Cemetery, Andersonstown district of West Belfast, scene of the Michael Stone shooting which killed three and left four others seriously injured in 1988.  Released as part of the Good Friday deal, he was again convicted for violence: attempted murder during a November 2006 attack at the Stormont parliament buildings.
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‘‘You’re welcome here today.  It’s not often that we see you protecting us.’
  Her casual remark lingered in my mind, and I was to ponder on it long afterwards.’
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RUC chief constable Sir John Hermon recalls the comment of a young Catholic waitress in 1953, after the police thwarting of a Protestant flute band’s attempt to march through the village of
Dungiven in County Londonderry,
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‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.’  
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George Orwell, Nineteen-Eightyfour
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‘What was this alleged bigger picture?  I really would like to have known.
  No matter.  The decisions were made and no-one dared to question them.  Such was the absolute power of the Special Branch.  They had taken this self-confessed killer, a man hated and feared by his own community, had dressed him up in some intelligence ‘glad rags’ and had convinced our most senior police that he was something holy, something good, something vital to their operational strategy.  Was he?  Even if he was, did this really warrant maintaining his credibility?  They had argued vehemently that it did.  The force within a force had moved to protect him and God knows how many of his co-conspirators.’
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Johnston Brown, Into the Dark
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Falls Road area, West Belfast, Autumn 1999.  People live in these terraced houses, and the building overlooking their homes is a police station. For decades, Belfast CID Detective Sergeant Johnston Brown faced continual obstruction by sinister elements within RUC Special Branch and almost no support from his CID superiors whenever they were alerted to potentially fatal malpractice.
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‘(From thread) ChrisyBhoy
Apr 4 2004, 11:30 AM
Can anyone help me with the lyrics to this song? I dunno which is the proper name for it as I've seen it called both, but the chorus goes....
Give me the Irish Republican Army
Give me the Green, White and Gold every time.
Give me the Three-Leafed Shamrock of Ireland.
A land that I love so divine.
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Send the English back where they came from
(TO HELL!)
Make our land ours once again.
Give me the Irish Republican Army.
To make our land a nation once again.
Southsider’
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celtic-lyrics.com
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‘My mind wandered on through the years to the Fenians and one man stuck out in my mind, not a Fenian, but a man called Francis Meagher who brought the flag that we all love, our Tricolour.  He said, ‘I have brought this flag from the barricades of France and I am presenting it to the Irish nation.  Green represents the Catholic, the Orange the Protestant and the white the truce between them.’  I hope that one day the hand of Protestant and Catholic will be united and respect that flag.’
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Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, An Irish Eye  
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‘You have sold Ulster to buy off the fiendish republican scum.  You will learn in a bitter school that all appeasement of these monsters is self-destructive.’
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Reverend Ian Paisley, ordained in 1946, quoted in The Independent, December 16, 1993
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‘If anyone says, “I love God”, yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.’
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Bible, 1 John, 4:20
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‘If there was any time at which the rising threat of Paisleyism might have been halted, it was, I believe, following that evening of 6 June 1966.  By 1968, the divisions within the traditional Unionist Government, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and the capacity of the
IRA to infiltrate it, made conflict inevitable.
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Sir John Hermon,
Holding the Line
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On that June day, Paisley’s Ulster Protestant Volunteers paraded through the Catholic Cromac Square area of Belfast, initiating violent protest from the Catholic community.
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Right: Shankill Road
area, West Belfast, 1993.  These children are standing on concrete blocks, used to hinder vehicle-borne gunmenused to hinder vehicle-borne gunmenused to hinder vehicle-borne gunmen
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‘Education is a treasure, and culture never dies.’
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The Roman writer Petronius (1st Century),
Satyricon, sec 47
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‘Martin McGuinness, Mid Ulster
Born 23 May, 1950; Educated Christian Brothers’
Technical College
Special Interests; South Africa
Recreations; cooking, walking, reading, fly-fishing.’
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DOD’s Parliamentary Companion 2001
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… and writing poetry: ‘Purple-heathered hillsides clothe the peaty bogs, leaching streams of water, swimming pools for frogs.’
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‘Martin McGuinness also came down for the night with a few of his cronies, and they just about wrecked the hotel we were staying in.  They sprayed water all over every bedroom and smashed the floorboards on the landing and stairs.  There was about £5,000 worth of damage altogether, which was quietly paid out of IRA funds.
  The boys also nicked thousands of pounds of gear from a fishing tackle shop.  We all piled in there, and while I and a few of the others were buying hooks and bait, Stud McGinty, Sean McArdle and Paddy Lawler sneaked out of the door with four or five fishing rods each.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  If any kid had tried it, he’d have been knee-capped, but here were the top Derry IRA men claiming to be upholders of  the law, hooding with impunity.  The owner sensed something was going on, but was probably too scared to say anything.’
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RUC agent Raymond Gilmour, who now lives in hiding outside Northern Ireland, in Dead Ground
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Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness MP was Education Minister on the Northern Ireland Assembly from 1998 until 2007
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‘UN Human Rights Committee recommendation, July 2008:
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9. The Committee remains concerned that, a considerable time after murders (including of human rights defenders) in Northern Ireland have occurred, several inquiries into these murders have still not been established or concluded, and that those responsible for these deaths have not yet been prosecuted. Even where inquiries have been established, the Committee is concerned that instead of being under the control of an independent judge, several of these inquiries are conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005 which allows the Government minister who is responsible for establishing an inquiry to control important aspects of that inquiry. (art.6)’
  Lawyer Pat Finucane’s name was selected for his 1989 murder by Brian Nelson who was handled by the British Army’s Force Research Unit, a shadowy group of Intelligence Corps agent handlers.  Loyalist paramilitaries The Red Hand Defenders claimed to have carried out the 1999 murder of fellow solicitor Rosemary Nelson. How far up this collusion went is not open to debate – the British government are refusing to allow an independent public inquiry, choosing instead to keep any inquiry ‘in-house’.  Whether the FRU were inept with their record-keeping, as they claimed to the Stephens Inquiry – or whether they ordered the murders – is the million-dollar question. 
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The UK Government is quite clear that an inquiry under the Inquiries Act would provide a full, effective and independent examination of the circumstances of Mr Finucane’s death, whilst taking into account the legitimate need to protect national security and the safety of individuals.  It is the UK Government’s view that inquiries under the Inquiries Act are perfectly capable of meeting all international human rights obligations.’
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UK government submission to the UN Committee on Human Rights, July 2008.  Others disagree…
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‘I conclude there was collusion in both murders (of Pat Finucane and mistakenly targeted protestant student Brian Lambert) and the circumstances surrounding them.  Collusion is evidenced in many ways.  This ranges from the wilful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder.’
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Sir John Stevens, Stevens Enquiry Three, Chapter 4, section 4.7
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‘None of us are entirely innocent. But thanks to our strong sense of civil society, thanks to our religious recognition that none of us are perfect, thanks to the thousands of people from both sides who made countless acts of good authority, thanks to a tradition of parliamentary democracy which meant that paramilitarism never displaced politics, thanks to all these specific, concrete circumstances we, thank god, stopped short of that abyss that engulfed Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and Rwanda.’
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David Trimble, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1998
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As well as the Army’s Force Research Unit undercover agent handlers, commanded by Brigadier (then Colonel) Gordon Kerr, the Stevens Inquiries found evidence of collusion by rogue elements within RUC Special Branch, discrediting an otherwise excellent, mostly impartial police force.  The RUC had borne the brunt of political violence and murders for three decades, yet they were disbanded, brought down because they had shut their eyes to the truth.  By taking a side, the bigots undermined the entire police force.
  In its place, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, deemed more acceptable to both sides of the fractured population. 
  The cancer of sectarianism, fed by poverty and indoctrination, seems subdued.  For now.  The schoolchildren of Ulster are still mostly segregated, and the gable ends still glorify the paramilitaries.  
  Many of who’s heroes are now making a nice living as drug-pushers.  Because, for the most-part, that is all the gunmen ever were.
 Green, white and gold?
  Follow the money… and you’ll not be far wrong.

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Forward to Scotland


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