SFWP and Fine Gael Unite Against the Prisoners
Socialist Republic1981The Southern state and its partiesLabour, the left and left unityPrisoners and the hunger strikesJohn MeehanThe Southern state and its partiesLabour, the left and left unityPrisoners and the hunger strikes
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One of the most telling points that has been made by Bernadette Devlin/MMcAliskey about the Armagh -h Block political status dispute is that it has split Irish society down the middie, because it forces us all to examine just how seriously we want Irish unity and British withdrawal.
tEverything changes — yet everythings remains the same‘. This sums up the results of attempts by the Northern Ireland Police Authority to gain some credibility recently. After almost universal condemnation and the resignation of several of its members because of its attitude to the torture in Castlereagh the Authority decided to investigate police brutality.
As aresult, on the 22nd of December the first ever public enquiry into police brutality opened. The Gibson tribunal was asked to investigate the torture of Jim Rafferty, a 28 year old trade unionist from Cappagh, Co. Tyrone.
The mechanism for dealing with complaints against the RUC might be described as the 'wait-a-bit! mechanism. The minority has had to wait 12 years for a public enquiry. Jim Rafferty first complained in 1976, We had to wait while his complaint was investigated — by the RUC} Then he had to wait while the Department of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute and wait again while the Police Authority Even Fine Gael county councillors have voted for motions supporting the prisoners. As Frances O! Rourke has revealed in the Sunday Press an attempt by the party leader, the inept Garret Fitzgerald, to get his party to draw up a "black list" of Fianna Failers who supported pro-political pri soner motions But today, when it comes to Armagh and H Block, the position of the party leadership of FG and SF-WwPp are pro-unionist, FG's internal} difficulties on this are relatively well known, But what about SF-WP?
Well, they are in just as much trouble, One example comes from Fermanagh and Tyrone where elected representitives withdrew from the county councils in the support of the hunger strikers, They were members of the SOLP, the Irish Independent Party (IIP) and Frances Donnelly of SF-wWP! Another comes from Killarney where several SFWP members were active in setting up the local Armagh/H Block committee, Northern Ireland,...
"There is a cancer in our society which feeds on a diet of warped religion, an adoration of death, a voyeuristic pleasure in violence and an intellectual justification of slaughter" etc, etc, Only one more point need be made. Many of the people who in the 1920's set up the party now known as Fine Gael would have recoiled in horror from their action had they accurately foreseen their future, SF-WP today has gone through at least as bad a decay in a shorter space of time. If it remains intact it can only go further downhill,