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Pre-2015 articles and interviews

by Admin

Dublin Lockout: The Risen People

Bloody Sunday baton charge

Bloody Sunday baton charge

Published in the CFMEU WA Branch Journal in September 2013

Irish trade unionists are marking the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, the most significant labour dispute in Irish history. Led by ‘Big Jim’ Larkin, the people of Dublin’s slums fought a five-month battle with the city’s major employers over the right to union recognition. It was a fight that affected 20,000 workers and their 80,000 family members, and included deadly street battles with police.

The Lockout, which began in August 1913, was no spontaneous dispute. It was a conscious attempt by businessman and media magnate William Martin Murphy to nip the growing power of the newly formed ITGWU in the bud. The Irish Transport and General Workers Union was formed by Larkin in 1909 and by 1913 it had won several improvements for members across Ireland.

Ireland in the first two decades of the 20th century was experiencing major political upheaval, with suffragettes, radical nationalists and republicans organising powerful movements for change. With brutal working and living conditions, the radicalisation among working people that took place in Dublin during this period – led by Larkin and fellow socialist and trade unionist James Connolly – was little wonder.

Slum city

Dublin in 1913 was a city of slums – of impoverished people living in squalor in over-crowded tenement housing. Shortly after the Lockout began in August 1913, two overcrowded four-storey tenements on Church Street collapsed, killing seven people.

An inquiry into the disaster reported on housing conditions in the city the following year, stating that of the 400,000 residents of Dublin, almost 90,000 lived in tenements in the city centre, with 80% of these families living in a single room. The Church St disaster inquiry reported that: “We have visited one house that we found to be occupied by 98 persons, another by 74 and a third by 73.”

Overcrowding, malnutrition and poor sanitation meant disease thrived, with the most dreaded being the deadly tuberculosis. A Census in 1911 found that Dublin had a mortality rate as high as Calcutta’s, and that one in five deaths that year was of a child under the age of one.

Larkin forms ‘One Big Union’

Dublin lacked an industrial base and its workers were mainly unskilled and employed on a casual basis. Around 50,000 people depended on work on the docks, in transport, the building trade and a limited number of factories and workshops.

Labourers could be replaced at a moment’s notice from a pool of thousands, many from the countryside, who carried with them the recent memory of the Famine. There was a readiness to work for any wage and in any conditions. Unemployment was 20%, and workers were often paid their wages in pubs.

This was the city into which Larkin arrived in 1909. Born in Liverpool, Larkin joined the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) in England. He led the successful dockers’ and carters’ strike in Belfast in 1907 – during which the display of Protestant and Catholic working-class unity shook the Belfast establishment. Larkin fell out with the NUDL leadership in 1908 and set up the ITGWU in 1909. By 1913, the ITGWU operated out of Liberty Hall in Dublin with a membership of around 10,000, and The Irish Worker, launched in 1911, had a circulation of 90,000.

Larkin was a charismatic and powerful orator who was fiercely loved by Dublin’s working people. A syndicalist, Larkin was especially adept at using the ‘sympathetic strike’ to win better conditions for workers. The sympathetic strike was when workers acted in solidarity with striking workers by refusing to deal with companies whose employees were on strike, and the tactic was effectively used by the ITGWU between 1909 and 1913 in Cork, Derry and Wexford.

One major employer who was paying close attention to the ITGWU’s success was businessman William Martin Murphy. Murphy owned the Irish Independent newspaper, Clery’s Department Store, the Imperial Hotel and the Dublin United Tramways Company, among other interests. In 1911, Murphy formed the Dublin Employers’ Federation which drew together more than 400 bosses into a powerful organisation intent on smashing the ITGWU.

‘Your union or your job’

Murphy fired the first shot in the dispute in 1913 by sacking around 40 workers in the Irish Independent after literally offering them the choice: “Your union or your job”. In July he forbade transport workers in the Tramways Company from being ITGWU members. He warned his staff a strike would fail, saying company leaders would have three meals a day regardless of the outcome, but “I don’t know if the men who go out can count on this”.

In a planned challenge to the ITGWU, on 21 August more than 100 workers at the Tramways Company received a dismissal notice. As large numbers travelled to the Dublin Horse Show on 26 August, drivers and conductors stopped the city’s trams and walked off. Larkin called on workers in other companies owned by Murphy or dealing with him to join the strike in solidarity. James Connolly, then ITGWU secretary in Belfast, was brought to Dublin to help run the strike.

On 31 August, Larkin addressed a banned demonstration on Sackville St – now O’Connell St – from the balcony of Murphy’s Imperial Hotel. Connolly and other leaders had already been arrested, and Larkin too was immediately. The Dublin Metropolitan Police baton-charged the crowd so violently that the day became known as Bloody Sunday – the first of three ‘Bloody Sundays’ in Ireland in the 20th century.

Two men – James Nolan and John Byrne – had their skulls fractured by police batons and later died. An ITGWU representative from Dun Laoghaire, James Byrne, died in November following a hunger strike in Mountjoy jail. Another striker, 16-year-old Alice Brady, was shot dead by a scab as she returned to her home with a donated food box.

Tension between the police and workers rose, with police smashing up the tenements by night. Rioting and street battles with police took place across the city throughout the Lockout, leading Connolly to found the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) as a workers’ self-defence organisation. At a time when women in Ireland were still fighting for the vote, the ICA accepted women as full and equal members.

As thousands of workers were attending the funeral of James Nolan on September 3, the Dublin Employers Federation met and issued the “pledge” document – which employees would be forced to sign or face immediate dismissal – and the strike became a lockout.

The pledge read:

I hereby undertake to carry out all instructions given to me by or on behalf of my employers, and further, I agree to immediately resign my membership of the ITGWU (if a member) and I further undertake that I will not join or in any way support this union.

Thousands of workers refused to sign – including many who were not ITGWU members. Rosie Hackett, a co-founder of the Irish Women Workers Union in 1911 with Delia Larkin, Constance Markievicz and others, organised women in Jacobs’ factory in support of the strike. Other major bosses joined the Lockout and by the end of September, 20,000 workers were locked out for refusing to sign the pledge.

Hunger sets in

The ITGWU paid strike wages but it wasn’t enough and hunger and desperation set in. Soup kitchens were run from Liberty Hall, union headquarters. The British Trade Union Congress voted in September to provide food and material assistance, with more than £150,000 donated from unions in Britain, the US and Australia. On 28 September a ship arrived from Britain with 60,000 ‘family boxes’ of food for the striking workers, which provided a vital morale boost.

James Larkin

James Larkin

Larkin spent several brief periods in jail for sedition and incitement, and between these periods he spent time in England in September and November trying to organise support. Connolly continued the organisation of the strike at home. While sympathetic strikes took place in several English cities, the British trade union leadership failed to call a general strike as advocated by Larkin and Connolly.

Conferences took place between workers, bosses and a union delegation to try to resolve the dispute, but failed as a result of the employers’ refusal to recognise the ITGWU. The workers faced the full force of the police, backed up by the military, as well as a fierce campaign of vilification of “Larkinism” by the clergy and media.

A hollow victory

Hunger spread as winter deepened, and there was simply not enough resources to sustain so many workers and their families, who were beginning to starve. By January the striking workers had lost all hope and began to file back to work, with the ITGWU deciding on 18 January to end the strike. The union advised workers to return to work without signing the document if possible, but in most cases it wasn’t.

But Murphy’s victory was hollow. He believed he had smashed the ITGWU but within a short period workers who had signed the pledge never to join the ITGWU did just that. The union did not have official recognition but employers were not willing to risk another lockout of union members and by 1920 the ITGWU had 100,000 members, 10 times more than in 1913. The attempt to destroy trade unionism in Ireland had clearly failed.

The Lockout was a defining point in Irish history and is rightly commemorated as such 100 years later. Poet Austin Clarke wrote that Larkin’s name endures, “scrawled in rage by Dublin’s poor”. This roar of the city’s impoverished workers meant the brutal conditions they endured could no longer be ignored and began to change.

Crucially, the fight put up by these workers meant that at this turbulent point in Irish history, the working class had a political voice – a voice that influenced middle-class nationalists such as Pádraig Pearse, who together with Connolly led the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland in 1916. Both were executed within weeks of the Rising.

Unfinished business

In O’Connell St today stands a monument to Larkin with his famous phrase from the Lockout period engraved in the stone: “The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”

The question of union recognition remains unresolved in Ireland today, which is one of only three EU states that lacks a legislated right to collective bargaining. Poverty, unemployment and emigration have soared after five years of austerity, and the injustice of the massive public debt undertaken by the government’s bailout of corrupt banks is bitterly felt. Austerity is not working for workers and their families right across Europe, and the Murphys of today should take note.

The centenary commemorations of the Lockout during the current crisis are helping a new generation understand the meaning of the central slogan used by the striking workers in 1913 – that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ – as they organise to defend hard-won working and social conditions.

by Admin

Cuban Five begin 13th year in US jails

cuban5-main

Published in An Phoblacht on October 1, 2010

AS THE Cuban Five enter their 13th year behind bars in US jails, the international campaign for their release marked the anniversary of their imprisonment in September 1998 with demonstrations and vigils around the world, including in Ireland.

René González, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labanino and Fernando González were arrested by the FBI 12 years ago on September 12th, after they infiltrated Miami-based right-wing Cuban paramilitary groups engaged in a campaign of violence and sabotage against Cuba.

Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, more than 3,500 Cubans have been killed in attacks by right-wing groups based in southern Florida, often acting with the active support of the US government.

During the mid-1990s, as a bombing campaign aimed at undermining Cuba’s tourism sector was being carried out by these organisations, the Cuban government deployed intelligence agents to the US to monitor these groups and gather evidence of their involvement in anti-Cuban violence to prevent future attacks.

The Cuban Government supplied this evidence to the US Government in 1998 – but instead of arresting those involved in violent criminal acts against Cuba, the FBI arrested the five men and handed them over to the Miami courts, which charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage against the US.

At a trial held in Miami – the stronghold of virulently anti-Castro organisations, politicians and media – the five men were convicted in 2001 and received sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life sentence.

The five were each held in solitary confinement for the first 17 months of their imprisonment. A UN committee and Amnesty International have condemned the conditions of their imprisonment as contravening human rights.

In a further act of cruelty, the US Government has for the past 12 years cited “national security” grounds to refuse Adriana Perez and Olga Salanueva, the wives of Gerardo Hernández and René González respectively, visas to enter the US to visit their husbands in jail.

The Cuban Government and people have led an extraordinary international campaign for the release of the Cuban Five (also known as ‘The Miami Five’).

More than 300 solidarity organisations have been established around the world to campaign for their release. The trial is the only judicial proceeding in US history to have been singled out for condemnation by the UN Human Rights Commission.

‘Perfect storm’ of bias

After being unjustly imprisoned for seven years, the five won the right to an appeal in 2005. In August that year, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta described the atmosphere in Miami during their trial in 2000-2001 as “a perfect storm” of bias. The court overturned the convictions of the Cuban Five and ordered a new trial outside of Miami.

But the Bush administration intervened. A full 12-judge session of 11th Circuit Court of Appeals court was convened to overturn the ruling and the original convictions were upheld.

The Cuban Five then tried to appeal to the US Supreme Court. Their lawyers filed 12 global ‘friends of the court’ briefs to the Supreme Court, including a brief from Ireland signed by former President Mary Robinson and 47 TDs and senators. Among other signatories of the briefs were 10 Nobel laureates, hundreds of parliamentarians, and several US and international jurist organisations.

Despite optimism that President Barack Obama would respond to the massive international pressure over the case, the Supreme Court last June refused to hear the case – without offering any explanation.

However, in a victory for the campaign, three of the five had their sentences reduced in 2008 and 2009. Ramón Labanino had his life sentence reduced to 30 years; Fernando González had his 19-year sentence reduced to 17 years and 9 months; and Antonio Guerrero had his life sentence plus 10 years reduced to 21 years and nine months.

In a joint statement after their sentences were reduced, the three noted that “the prosecutor publicly recognised the existence of a strong international movement in support of our immediate freedom that affects the image of the US judicial system”.

“The absolute political character of this process is confirmed,” they said.

Legal farce

The sentence of René González (15 years) was not reviewed, nor was that of Gerardo Hernández – who was sentenced to double life sentences. Hernández’s sentence, the harshest of the five, is based on unfounded allegations linking him to the shooting down of two ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ illegal flights over Cuban airspace in 2006 (while Hernández was in Miami). Brothers to the Rescue is one of the most active right-wing Cuban groups based in southern Florida.

Hernández’s lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, pointed out: “Hernández is the first person in US history to be charged for the shoot-down of an aircraft by the armed forces of another country acting in defence of their airspace.”

In June, Hernández’s lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court for a collateral appeal – a limited form of appeal based on constitutional issues – citing new evidence that emerged in 2006 that the US government was paying journalists in Miami before and during the original trial and sentencing of the Cuban Five to produce stories hostile to Cuba and the Cuban Five.

Solidarity organisations in the US are currently engaged in a legal struggle to have the journalists’ – who were supposedly independent but were on the payroll of the federal government associated with Radio and TV Marti – contracts released to the public.

Yet despite the serious implications of this information – evidence of the US Government illegally propagandising against its own population – there continues to be a virtual media blackout in the US of the case.

As the political nature of the case becomes ever more pronounced, and as the legal avenues for redressing this injustice dwindle, the need for the international campaign to pressure the Obama administration to intervene is vital.

by Admin

Tory economics are fantasy and fiction

George Osborne

George Osborne

Published in An Phoblacht on August 27, 2010 

“I can best describe our approach as like the methodical turnaround of a failing business. When a company is failing – when spending is rising, sales are falling and debt is mounting – you need someone to come in with energy, ideas and vision and take a series of logical steps.” That’s what British Tory Prime Minister David Cameron told the press in mid-August.

One of Cameron’s ‘visionary’ steps to regenerate the economy is to attack the Winter Fuel Payment for older people. Reports suggesting the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition intends to raise the age of entitlement from 60 to 66, and to cut it by up to £100. The National Pensioners’ Convention says almost 37,000 older people died from cold-related illness last winter across Britain and the Six Counties – 13 pensioners every hour.

The ferocity, speed and scale of the Coalition’s public spending cuts goes well beyond their pre-election promises and post-election warnings. The Coalition leaders don’t bother to make apologies for their actions. They are relying on the debt hysteria fostered by politicians, economists and the media – the mantra that says the state’s deficit must be reduced at all costs to ensure Britain can borrow with a good credit rating.

This explanation is backed up with Chancellor George Osborne’s claims the cuts will be “fair and progressive” and arguments that the cuts to the public sector will stimulate growth in the private sector. Everyone living in the 26-County state has heard this story before and knows how it ends.

So are the Tories stupid or just lying through their teeth?

All of these claims are dishonest and economically unsound.

The key factor in Britain’s tentative emergence from recession in the last quarter of 2009 was the Labour Government’s 2009 stimulus budget. The Coalition government’s cuts have already had a negative impact on ‘market confidence’ in the British economy, with the Bank of England’s August report cutting its 2011 GDP forecast to 2.8% from 3.4% in May as a direct result of the Emergency Austerity Budget in June.

Comparisons with Greece in relation to the deficit are totally inaccurate. The British state has longer to make the repayments and fewer international lenders to repay. The only people making the comparison to Greece are Tory politicians.

Most significant of all the false Tory claims is the assertion that the swingeing cuts to the public sector will stimulate growth and employment in the private sector.

An internal Treasury assessment leaked to the Guardian newspaper in June showed the Coalition is predicting between 500,000 and 600,000 job losses in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 in the private sector over the next five years as a direct result of spending cuts.

Yet, despite their own estimate predicting the private sector will be hit even harder than the public sector, the Coalition claims that 2.5 million jobs will be created in the private sector over the same period. The British Trades Union Congress released a study of previous recessions and recoveries in June, labelling this claim “absurd”.

In the boom years of 2000-2008, 1.6 million jobs were created in the private sector – when public spending was aiding that growth.

The Coalition is claiming that when public spending is reduced, the private sector will automatically grow. But this is the opposite of the general dynamic between the two sectors. Cutting public sector jobs means less spending with a consequent loss of jobs in the private sector. And when such a profound crisis is still ongoing, the private sector is saving, not investing.

Rejecting this claim is especially important when it comes to the Coalition’s proposals to swiftly ‘rebalance’ the North’s economy through spending cuts.

The Coalition is surely aware that its predictions of private-sector growth are wildly optimistic and completely detached from reality. It is pedalling this claim to convince the public that they are on the road to economic recovery when in fact the road leads only to mass unemployment.

It is a concerted, conscious campaign, led by the Tories, to transfer more wealth from the poor to the rich.

Only a sustained campaign of resistance – led by progressive parties, the trade union movement, and the community and voluntary sector – can halt this attack. Its starting point must be rejecting the economic falsehoods pedalled by the Coalition Government and its media mouthpieces. There is an alternative and it’s public investment – targeted stimulus measures.

In the North, the campaign against this attack, which for a myriad of reasons will cut much deeper here, must be directed at securing a sufficient block grant for the Executive that acknowledges the economic conditions of the Six Counties and meets objective needs. It must also demand the democratic control of economic decision-making – that revenue raising and spending powers be devolved to locally-elected, directly accountable institutions.

Regardless of who’s in power in Downing Street, these powers should be devolved. The farcical situation where the Tories – who failed to win a single seat in the North in the May election, and who refuse to acknowledge the reality of the North’s economic circumstances – can impose these outrageous cuts highlights the urgency of this demand.

by Admin

Climate emergency demands emergency response

Flooding in Pakistan in 2010

Flooding in Pakistan in 2010

Published in An Phoblacht on August 27, 2010

THE deadly extreme weather and natural disasters that have hit Pakistan, China and Russia in the past two months sound an undeniable warning – we’re rapidly losing a safe climate.

In Pakistan, the worst flooding in the state’s history has killed more than 1,200 people, left 20 million homeless and submerged more than one-fifth of the country. The monsoon rains caused flooding and landslides that killed more than 1,400 people in the Chinese province of Gansu on August 8th.

The Russian Meteorological Centre said Russia had not gone through a comparable heatwave as that experienced in July/August in 1,000 years. The wildfires and drought will cut Russia’s wheat harvest by one-third this year, which has caused a sharp rise in world grain prices.

Global temperature records have been smashed repeatedly this year. Seventeen countries – which combined make up one-fifth of the Earth’s land surface – have reported record-high temperatures so far in 2010. The first half of 2010 was the hottest six-month period on record in the hottest year on record in the hottest decade on record.

The human cost of climate change is mounting, with 10million people now affected by hunger as a result of a severe drought in western Africa. The Global Humanitarian Fund estimated in May 2009 that climate change was already causing the deaths of 300,000 people in the global south each year.

These unprecedented extreme weather events are happening when the Earth has warmed on average by 0.75°C on pre-industrial levels.

In September last year, the British Met Office warned that the planet would warm by a catastrophic 4°C by mid-century if carbon emissions were not immediately cut by at least 3% per year – which would cause millions of people to become climate refugees due to rising sea levels, among other effects.

But despite the Kyoto Protocol aiming to achieve an average 5% reduction in global emissions on baseline 1990 levels by 2012, carbon emissions have continued to rise during the 2000s and are now at an all-time high.

The Copenhagen climate summit held in December was supposed to agree a legally binding international climate treaty on carbon emission reductions that would replace Kyoto, due to expire in 2012. It fell dismally short of achieving this due to the appalling role played by the United States at the negotiations.

The most up-to-date climate science tells us that a 40% cut in emissions in industrialised countries is required by 2020, and an 80-95% cut by 2050. But at Copenhagen, the US pledged only a 4% reduction in its emissions by 2020 – just one-tenth of what climate scientists believe is required! The EU pledged a 20% cut by 2020 – half that required by the science.

The US has continued to play the role of climate renegade at the negotiations in Bonn this year in the lead-up to the Cop16 summit in Cancún, Mexico, in November – refusing to up its 4% pledge.

In the recriminations that followed Copenhagen, western politicians denounced China for throwing a spanner in the works. But what actually happened was that the rich countries, led by the US, tried to force the poor into agreeing to abandon the Kyoto Protocol’s key principles – that targets must be legally binding, that rich countries have a greater responsibility to cut emissions, and that developing countries must be provided with adequate finance for adaptation and mitigation.

The outcome of the Copenhagen summit was that 130 countries “took note of” a non-binding accord which contained no actual emission reduction targets.

Analysis commissioned by Bolivia and released through the UN at the Bonn climate talks in June showed that countries’ current pledges amounted to just 12% to 18% reductions below 1990 levels by 2020. When all the loopholes and ‘carbon market mechanisms’ in the text were taken into account, global emissions could actually be allowed to rise by 9%!

Bolivia’s Ambassador Pablo Solón said: “The new data shows a frightening chasm between what the science says, what the people have asked for and Earth needs, and what rich countries are saying they are willing to do.”

At the June talks in Bonn, more than 100 poor countries demanded that the ‘safe climate target’ of 2°C warming be reduced to 1.5°C or lower. A large body of climate science, including reports from the world’s leading climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, supports the 1.5°C figure as a safe climate target.

The 2°C target is set out in the Copenhagen Accord and arises from the UN’s 2007 IPCC report. The developing countries called for a review of the science, saying the 2007 report has been superseded – but this won’t happen until 2014.

The bloc also stated that the Copenhagen Accord’s goal of providing US$100 billion in climate aid annually by 2020 was insufficient.

The mainstream media pushes the line that any deal is better than none – that the bloc of poor countries should ‘get real’ and accept the terms being pushed on them.

But the laws of physics and chemistry cannot be bargained with, stalled or tricked. The developing alliance between the poor countries, progressive forces in the industrialised states, and the growing global climate justice movement is up against hugely powerful governments and business interests who are determined to prioritise short-term profit over the survival of the planet. Public pressure and mobilisation is clearly the key to changing this balance of forces and ensuring action is taken at Cancún.

by Admin

Bloody Sunday: the ‘defining story’ of the British army in Ireland

Families celebrate as the Saville Report is published at Derry's Guildhall

Families celebrate as the Saville Report is published at Derry’s Guildhall

Published in the West Belfast News in June 2010

The publication of the Saville Report, the inquiry into the British army massacre of 14 civil rights protestors in Derry in 1972, confirmed what the victims’ families had always known — that those shot had been unarmed and posed no threat to the British Parachute Regiment.

The victims’ families welcomed the report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, handed down on June 15. The inquiry was chaired by British law lord Mark Saville and launched in 1998. They were joined by thousands of supporters in a march to Derry’s Guildhall — symbolically completing the march route begun by thousands of civil rights activists on January 30, 1972.

The official British line for the past 38 years, repeated by the media and “confirmed” by the inquiry chaired by John Widgery in 1972, was that those shot down — half of them teenagers — had been armed with guns and nail-bombs, and had opened fire on the paratroopers.

The Widgery cover-up said that the paratroopers’ behaviour had “bordered on the reckless”.

In contrast, Saville said there was no justification for opening fire and that all the soldiers who testified, bar one, had lied to the inquiry.

Saville referred to one person who was shot while “crawling away from the soldiers”; another shot “when he was lying mortally wounded on the ground”.

Bloody Sunday was a defining moment in the recent history of Ireland. The civil rights movement that had emerged in 1968 in the sectarian northern Irish statelet and demanded equal rights for the Irish nationalist and Catholic minority communities was literally shot off the streets.

The British military had been deployed in 1969 to support the discredited Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) after the explosion of the civil rights movement and the sectarian pogroms against Catholics that followed.

The British government claimed that its forces were being deployed to “keep the peace” between two warring communities — the mainly Catholic nationalists, supporters of Irish unity, and the mainly Protestant unionists, supporters of British colonial rule. But in reality, troops were sent in to prop up the crumbling statelet and maintain its union with Britain, something that quickly became clear to the nationalist community.

Civil rights activists in Derry on January 30, 1972 were protesting against the army’s introduction of internment without trial in August 1971. By the time of the Bloody Sunday march, more than 2000 people, almost all of them nationalists or republicans, were interned without trial in prison camps. Following the massacre, the British government introduced direct rule from London.

Bloody Sunday is largely regarded as the decisive factor that convinced a generation of young people that the only means to resist the oppressive Unionist state was to fight an armed struggle against the British army and RUC.

The tenacity and determination of the Bloody Sunday victims’ families was applauded as “inspirational” by speakers in Derry as the report, that was supposed to be published in 2006, was finally released. Thousands of supporters from across Ireland and around the world have joined the families each year to march in Derry on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, demanding justice for those killed.

Palestinian flags flew among the crowd outside the Guildhall in Derry. Tony Doherty, who was nine years old when his father was shot dead, said the victory of the Bloody Sunday families should be shared by those who had died struggling for justice everywhere: “Sharpeville. Grozny. Tiananmen Square. Darfur. Fallujah. Gaza. Let our truth stand as their truth too.”

Unionist politicians and British military spokespeople have reacted angrily to calls for the prosecution of the individual soldiers responsible for the Bloody Sunday killings.

But prosecuting the soldiers would not deal with the fundamental issue — that the killings were part of official state policy.

In response to fresh calls by British military officials for the prosecution of Irish Republican Army members and leaders for historic actions, Junior Minister in the Stormont Executive and former IRA prisoner Gerry Kelly pointed out that the British state has until now acted with total impunity.

“The difference is that 15,000 IRA prisoners served more than 100,000 years in jail,” he said.

Speaking from Westminster following the report’s publication, British Tory prime minister David Cameron said the shootings were “indefensible”. His apology on behalf of the British government was welcomed in Derry.

However, he then went on to say: “Bloody Sunday is not the defining story of the service the British Army gave in Northern Ireland from 1969-2007.”

West Belfast MP and president of Irish republican party Sinn Fein Gerry Adams rejected this claim, saying: “The British Army’s actions at that time were part of a deliberate tactical decision designed to intimidate the wider nationalist community by killing citizens.”

One British soldier present on Bloody Sunday, identified as Soldier 027, who has been in a witness protection program for the past decade, testified to the Saville inquiry that his unit was encouraged to “get some kills”.

The significance of the Saville Report is that it challenges the official view of the role of the British military in Ireland and elsewhere. It exposes its real role as a colonial force willing to use brutal force to enforce its will. It adds weight to the campaigns for justice by other victims of British state killings, and to calls for a withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the 36 hours after the introduction of internment in August 1971, 11 people — 10 men, including a mother of eight children and a local priest — were shot dead in Ballymurphy, west Belfast, by the same British Parachute Regiment later to be unleashed in Derry.

British military forces in Ireland and the RUC killed at least 363 people since 1969, most of them civilians. Loyalist death squads killed more than 1000 people — mostly Catholic civilians — often acting with the sanction or aid of British military intelligence and RUC’s Special Branch.

From the open military repression and martial law tactics of the early 1970s to the running of loyalist murder gangs throughout the following decades, the British government’s actions had the same aim throughout the conflict: to terrorise and demoralise the nationalist population and crush their aspirations for democratic rights and a united, independent Ireland.

Speaking at a press conference in west Belfast on June 17 with the Ballymurphy massacre families, Adams said: “All of these families deserve the full support and encouragement of the community, and of the Irish government, in their efforts to secure an independent, international investigation into these deaths.”

by Admin

European debt crisis sparks new attacks on public sector

Anti-austerity protesters in Pairs

Anti-austerity protesters in Pairs

Published in An Phoblacht on May 20, 2010

THE British Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition has announced that it will immediately make £6 billion in public spending cuts this year in order to begin reducing the state’s £163bn deficit. The coalition will reveal an emergency budget on June 22nd, with further cuts to be implemented this autumn.

The announcement comes as no great surprise – it was a Tory election pledge, while the Lib Dems and Labour both campaigned against such immediate cuts, saying the move would threaten Britain’s fragile economic recovery and threaten to push it back into recession.

While the North’s Executive will not be affected by this round of cuts this year, it will be expected to “pay back its share” of these spending cuts as well as make further spending cuts next year. Sinn Féin has called for a united front of all parties to formulate a plan of action in the Executive to effectively resist major cuts to the block grant or the North’s public services.

Among the initial measures in Britain will be a freeze on recruitment to certain vacant public sector jobs and the sacking of agency and temporary workers. With unemployment in the state now at 2.5 million people, trade unions are preparing for a campaign of industrial action to halt the new government’s plans to cut jobs and pensions and further privatise public services.

Sovereign debt crisis

‘Reducing the state deficit’ has become the mantra of governments across Europe as the global financial crisis, which hit world markets in 2008, has entered its second phase – the ‘sovereign debt crisis’.

The United States, Britain and the Eurozone countries have collectively given the banks more than $14 trillion since September 2008. But the massive state intervention into markets has been aimed at nursing the banks and financial institutions back to the condition where they could carry on as they had before the collapse, rather than taking them into permanent public ownership.

Now, the political sponsors of the financial elite argue, begins the age of austerity – when the public deficit caused by the bail-out is to be reduced by cuts to public spending.

In response to several downgrades in Greece’s credit rating since December last year, European Union members and the International Monetary Fund initiated plans for a ‘financial safety net’ in March aimed at guaranteeing loans for member states under threat of defaulting.

On May 10th, the EU agreed the terms of the ‘safety net’, its biggest bail-out package since 2008, which consists of about €750 billion. There is €440 billion in guarantees from Eurozone states, €60 billion in a European debt instrument, and €250 billion from the IMF. Of course, any vulnerable state that needs to avail of this assistance will have to agree to harsh spending cuts and other conditions.

Austerity measures

The Dublin Government has been voluntarily implementing brutal ‘austerity’ cuts in public spending since 2008 to reduce the state deficit. Other states with high levels of public deficit (5-10% of GDP) – Portugal, Spain and Italy – have begun implementing similar cuts this year.

After Standard & Poor downgraded Portugal’s credit rating last week, the Portuguese Government said it would rush through spending cuts planned for next year. Spain’s rating was also downgraded last week by S&P and the government announced further spending cuts of €15 billion in 2010-11.

On May 9th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition lost an important state election in North-Rhine Westphalia, and its majority in the upper house, after committing to making the largest national contribution to the Eurozone ‘safety net’ package.

Greece – which has a fiscal deficit of about 10% of its GDP, similar to the US’s and less than Britain’s – was forced to accept a “rescue package” of €110 billion this month after its credit rating was downgraded to junk status by the same agencies that played a major role in causing the global financial meltdown in 2008.

The package of loans and guarantees came with conditions of major public spending cuts, including cuts to public service jobs and pensions, raising the retirement age, privatisations and more – provoking outrage among the Greek population and a general strike that shut down the country on May 5th.

Economist Michael Burke pointed out in ‘An Phoblacht’ last week that the bail-out is not aimed at reviving the Greek economy. “The targeted beneficiaries of the bail-out are the holders of Greek Government debt. These are mainly German, French, British and US banks,” he wrote.

Lessons

Several things are clear from the latest crisis in Europe, which has arisen as a result of the response to the 2008 crisis.

The states with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio are those that have implemented cuts rather than stimulus measures to deal with the recession.

The Greek/Eurozone crisis, like the global financial crisis, is largely the result of shady financial speculative practices that were not reined in and regulated after the 2008 collapse.

EU leaders charge Greece with masking its true debt level since entering the Eurozone in 2001. Goldman Sachs helped the Greek Government do so by turning its public debt into tradable ‘derivatives’. Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions were then able to gamble on Greece defaulting. This speculation fuelled the “loss of market confidence” that saw the state’s credit rating downgraded to being a risk for investors.

France, Germany and Italy have also turned their public debt in tradable derivatives.

The financial crisis has not passed but has entered a new phase of public debt and the nationalised debt is being repaid by states’ cuts to public spending. Political, economic and social policy decisions have been totally subordinated to the market.

It is also clear that Eurozone leaders are trying to ensure that the weaker states in the zone are forced the bear the brunt of the most severe public spending cuts. The strongest members are embarking on a drive to reduce member states’ independence in fiscal policy matters.

If the austerity measures are successfully implemented in Greece, workers in Ireland, Portugal, Spain – and then the rest of the Eurozone states – will be next.

by Admin

Sharpeville: Brutal massacre that galvanised anti-apartheid movement

Sharpeville, 1960

Sharpeville, 1960

Published in An Phoblacht on 25 March 2010

South Africans have marked the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre by joining a commemorative rally in the town’s stadium that was addressed by the country’s Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe.

On 21 March 1960 in the township, the apartheid regime’s police officers opened fire on an unarmed demonstration of thousands of black South Africans protesting against discriminatory laws, in particular the pass system that controlled travel and employment. Sixty-nine people were shot dead, most of them in the back as they were fleeing the gunfire; at least 180 more were wounded.

The commemoration also marked the killings of 29 people in 1985 marching in the town of Langa to mark the 25th anniversary of Sharpeville.

“The Sharpeville and Langa massacres were a tipping point in that they triggered revulsion and disgust locally and internationally,” Motlanthe said at the ceremony.

Catalyst

The pass, referred to by non-white South Africans as the ‘dompass’ – the ‘stupid pass’ – had been introduced by British colonialists in the 19th century and its use tightened in the 1950s, including being forced onto women. The pass laws controlled travel and employment of holders and black people faced arbitrary arrest if they were not carrying it.

Thousands of black South Africans rallied peacefully against the pass system that day 50 years ago. They turned up outside the Sharpeville police station without their passes and demanded the police arrest them. The police responded by massacring the protesters and in the following weeks and months, under a ‘state of emergency’, thousands of black South Africans were rounded up and detained without trial. The African National Congress and other political parties were banned.

Sharpeville was a pivotal moment in the history of the South African state and the resistance movement that ultimately brought one of the 20th century’s most tyrannical political systems to its knees. The massacre radicalised a generation of South Africans and prompted the ANC to launch an armed campaign against the state as people became convinced that peaceful resistance was no longer an option.

The Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) or ‘Spear of the Nation’ became the military wing of the ANC and had the honour of later being classified as a ‘terrorist’ organisation by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the United States.

Sharpeville drew the world’s attention to the abhorrent reality of the apartheid state and its violations of human rights, and was the spark for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign that developed over the following decades until it became powerful enough to have a meaningful political and economic impact on the regime – helping to force it to the negotiating table with the ANC.

In 1966 the UN General Assembly declared 21 March the International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Today, 21 March is celebrated as Human Rights Day in South Africa. In 1996, the ANC chose Sharpeville as the site to usher in the era when then-President Nelson Mandela signed the progressive new South African constitution into law.

“To adequately commemorate the victims and survivors of the Sharpeville massacre and other bloodbaths, we must ensure the progressive realisation of the socio-economic rights as envisaged in the Bill of Rights,” Motlanthe said.

“This means as government working with our social partners, we must strive to improve the quality of life of all our people by providing shelter, basic amenities, education, and security.”

Racist tyranny

While racial segregation and oppression of the black majority had been entrenched by European colonial settlers, both Boers and the British, for hundreds of years, apartheid was made official policy in 1948. Legislation was passed that classified people – and the rights they were entitled to – on the basis of their skin colour or ethnicity – ’black’, ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’.

The regime began consolidating the process of segregating different racial groups geographically and eventually tried to corral the black population into ten ‘bantustans’ or ‘homelands’. Formalised in 1958, these were designed not only to drive black people from their land to be replaced by white settlers, but also to deprive them of their South African citizenship and (already limited) franchise under the guise of having ‘autonomy’ in the impoverished bantustans.

The bantustans, which allowed the regime to rid itself of social responsibility for the majority of the state’s citizens, were only recognised as ‘sovereign states’ by South Africa – and Israel.

Addressing the UN four years after the Sharpeville massacre, Argentinean-born Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara said: “We speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?”

The fierce state repression of the 1960s failed to prevent an upsurge of youthful struggles for civil rights in the 1970s, with a mass student demonstration in Soweto in June 1976 being met once again with ruthless violence. This time several hundred school students were shot dead.

‘Stop Israeli apartheid’

Throughout the 20th century the oppressed people of South Africa fought back with courage and determination in the face of brutal repression – using strikes, protests, armed struggle, civil disobedience and more. The Sharpeville and Soweto massacres were defining moments in this struggle in terms of galvanising the resistance and shocking the international community into taking action against the regime.

Today, as a democratic South Africa struggles to overcome the legacy of the poverty and racial inequality caused by 400 years of colonialism, it also demands that the new apartheid state, Israel, be similarly isolated through boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Nelson Mandela has said that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said.

by Admin

‘International community must act to keep Palestinian statehood alive’

PLO Executive Member Professor As'ad Abdul Rahman

PLO Executive Member Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman

Published in An Phoblacht on 8 March 2010

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman, an independent member of the PLO’s Executive Committee and a founding member of the PFLP, was a keynote international speaker at the recent Sinn Féin Ard Fheis. He spoke to An Phoblacht’s Emma Clancy about the need for the international community to act urgently to stop the colonisation of further swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem if a two-state solution is to have any prospect of being achieved.

The criminal siege of Gaza is continuing to cause the deaths of Palestinians each day, and the world must take action immediately to lift the blockade, Abdul Rahman told An Phoblacht.

“Not only has there been no rebuilding of Gaza permitted since the bombardment reduced much of the territory to rubble, but more than a year later, Palestinians are still waiting desperately on an uncertain trickle of basic vital food and medical supplies to be allowed in,” he said.

“Resolving the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip by lifting the blockade is the most urgent priority. At the same time we need to bring to the world’s attention what is going on in the West Bank, because each day the colonial actions of the Israeli government are moving the prospect of Palestinian statehood further and further away.”

Rogue state

Abdul Rahman spoke about the refusal by Israel to abide by existing agreements and of the role of the U.S. in tolerating Israeli aggression.

“Palestinians have had a very bitter experience of agreements entered into which have not been implemented,” he said.

“We thought 20 years ago that the discussions and process we began would deliver peace with justice in the Middle East. But this so-called peace process began an era of a new apartheid in Palestine, as Israel chose to go down the path of a rogue state.

“The consistent failure of world leaders to respond effectively to Israel’s violations have given the state the confidence to proceed on this course. The situation is worsening as the behaviour of Israel, now led by an extreme right-wing government, has become increasingly brutal and, frankly, crazy.

“This reckless brutality has manifested itself in many ways – the slaughter in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008/09, the ongoing siege of the territory, and the Israeli response to the United Nations’ Goldstone Report into the Gaza attack.

“The official response to the Goldstone report which asserted that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza was to call Justice Richard Goldstone a ‘self-hating Jew’ who was irrationally ‘biased against Israel’.”

Abdul Rahman pointed out that although the Goldstone report was adopted by the UN General Assembly, there will be no ‘independent inquiry’ set up by Israel to investigate violations of the laws of war, as the report recommended.

Goldstone’s report says that if Israel failed to do this, justice for the Gaza victims should be pursued through other mechanisms, in particular the International Criminal Court and the use of universal jurisdiction by other countries against states that breach the Geneva Conventions.

Abdul Rahman continued: “Of course, the most recent demonstration that Israel operates as a rogue state can be seen in the transnational killing of a Hamas leader (Mahmoud al Mamdouh) in a hotel room in Dubai by a large team of Israeli intelligence operatives who moved around using forged passports from several countries, including Ireland.

“Everybody, even Israel’s staunchest allies, recognises that Mossad was behind this transnational murder, just as Mossad was behind the assassination of (Hezbollah member) Imad Mughniyeh in Syria in 2008.

“How long can the U.S., and the rest of the world, stand back silently and watch as Israel violates not only the rights of the Palestinian people, but the basic laws and standards of interacting with other countries, including its western allies?” Abdul Rahman asked.

U.S. role

“Israel’s confidence in its impunity has been reinforced by the failure of the U.S. and the international community to take action as it violates agreements and continues its relentless colonial expansion,” the PLO representative said.

“When Barack Obama was elected U.S. president, he initially made strong statements and moves in favour of creating conditions conducive to negotiations resuming between us and the Israelis. But he has since then backed down and is now trying to insist that the Palestinians resume ‘negotiations without preconditions’.

“What this means is that Israel is allowed by the U.S. to continue its colonial settlement expansion and annexation across the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, in a flagrant breach of its commitments under the 2003 Road Map. In recent years Israel has dramatically intensified its colonisation of Jerusalem, evicting Palestinian families from their homes.

“Under the Road Map agreement Israel is obliged to cease all expansion of its colonies, including that of so-called natural growth. But this extreme-right Israeli government insists that Jerusalem is exempt from the settlement freeze and continues to seize Palestinian land, destroying the potential for East Jerusalem to be a viable capital of a future Palestinian state.

“It is impossible for any Palestinian leadership to negotiate directly with Israel under such conditions.”

Abdul Rahman said that U.S. envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, was working towards facilitating ‘proximity talks’ where direct negotiations would not take place but whereby he would travel between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Successive U.S. governments have also tried to sideline the UN from the Palestinian question – the Middle East Quartet (the U.S., UN, EU and Russia) has the UN only as one partner when by international law it should be the key body dealing with the issue,” he said.

“While the U.S. has repeatedly publicly stated that it views the ongoing colonial expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as being against international law, it has failed to exert the necessary pressure on Israel to cease this expansionism.

“Palestinian representatives, the Palestinian people, the Arab masses, and supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide are fed up with nice talk and no deeds.”

Unexpected rift

Since carrying out this interview a major diplomatic rift between the U.S. and Israel has developed, with the Israeli announcement during a visit to the state by U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden last week that the government was to build 1,600 new homes in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.

Palestinian negotiators said there would be no talks, direct or indirect, unless Israel shelved the plans; Biden reportedly said the plans “would set the Middle East on fire”. Obama has demanded that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu act to halt the planned construction and commit to re-entering negotiations on core issues with Palestinians.

Netanyahu apologised for the “unfortunate timing” of the announcement and, under intense pressure, said that the construction would not begin for at least a year, but he has stated that Israel’s ongoing colonisation of East Jerusalem is “not negotiable”.

It remains to be seen if the Obama administration will back up its unprecedented harsh words to Israel with actions.

Demand for unity

Abdul Rahman also discussed the division between the different factions of the Palestinian national movement, saying the longer the siege of Gaza and the restriction of movement between the two territories continued, the harder it will be to break down the barriers between Fatah and Hamas.

“There is a lot of work going on to pressure the different forces into working for unity, for a quick rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas, despite the ideological and political schisms that have riven the national movement,” he told An Phoblacht.

“The strongest pressure, of course, comes from Israeli brutality and oppression, which fosters the demand for unity from the ordinary Palestinian people.

“If they fail to resolve these differences and work together in the interest of the Palestinian people, they are both becoming increasingly aware that they are moving toward their own destruction as political forces, because the Palestinian people view the factional fight as basically committing suicide – suicide of the nation. It is my deep hope that the two sides will come together soon to try to resolve their differences.”

by Admin

PSNI must suspend use of stop and search powers

PSNI

Published in An Phoblacht on 10 February 2010

THE PSNI is under mounting pressure to suspend its use of stop and search powers granted under Section 44 of the British government’s Terrorism Act 2000. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on 12 January that the power to stop and search people arbitrarily  – without any grounds for suspicion – was a violation of the human right “to respect for private life”.

The British government has refused to repeal or suspend the legislation and has said it plans to appeal against the ruling.

Sinn Féin MLA and member of the Policing Board Daithí McKay said the most recent figures available from the PSNI on the powers backed up the ECHR’s ruling’s finding that the so-called anti-terror legislation was being abused by police, and used in an arbitrary and discriminatory way.

Targeting nationalists

While in Britain the powers have been used disproportionately against black and Asian people – who are four times more likely to be stopped under S44 – McKay said the nationalist population in the Six Counties was overwhelmingly bearing the brunt of this violation of civil rights.

“Sinn Féin has campaigned against this abuse of power by the police since the introduction of this draconian legislation by the British government. We believe that, in light of the European Court of Human Rights ruling that the Section 44 powers are illegal, the PSNI must now suspend its use of these powers,” McKay said.

The latest quarterly figures publicly available, from July to September last year, on the PSNI’s use of S44 stop and search powers show three key findings:

•There was a dramatic jump in their usage, with figures more than doubling from the previous quarter. From July to September last year, 10,265 people were stopped and searched under S44 in the Six Counties.

•Stop and search powers continue to be invoked a vastly disproportionate number of times in nationalist areas. The constituency with the highest number of people stopped and searched during the July-September quarter was Foyle, with 2,203. While S44 stop and search powers were used 1,305 times in Strabane during the quarter, they were used only once in Larne, a town of around equal population.

•The use of stop and search continues to be demonstrably ineffective by the PSNI’s own criteria. Of the more than 10,000 people stopped and searched during the quarter, only 39 were subsequently arrested.

Abuse of power

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act allows areas to be “designated” for the use of stop and search without suspicion by a police constable. The designation is made by an assistant chief constable and subsequently endorsed by the Secretary of State – and it can be made without going through any judicial or parliamentary process.

Under the legislation, the designation lasts 28 days, but can be renewed on a rolling basis. Civil rights groups in England responded with outrage last year when it emerged that the whole of Greater London had secretly been an authorised stop and search area since 2001.

The powers allow police to stop an individual or a vehicle within a designated area and search the person, anything they are carrying, and their vehicle. The legislation means that police officers no longer have to have “reasonable grounds of suspicion” to do so.

In 2008/09 police forces in the North, and in England and Wales, stopped and searched around 250,000 people under S44. In 2008, the London Metropolitan police stopped and searched more than 2,000 children under 15 years old  – including 58 under the age of nine.

In July last year the London Metropolitan Police force announced it was refining and limiting its use of S44 powers following a review. The police force in Hampshire, England, said it was suspending its use of the powers the same month, citing the fact that no arrests were made despite more than 3,000 searches being carried out.

‘Illegal’

The European Court of Human Rights case was brought against the British government by two people who were stopped, interrogated and searched under the legislation in London in 2003 as they made their way to an anti-war demonstration against an arms fair. English civil rights group Liberty strongly supported the case.

The landmark ruling by the Strasbourg court on 12 January (Gillan and Quinton V the United Kingdom) found that:

•The power to search a person’s clothing and belongings in public could cause humiliation and embarrassment and was a violation of Article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the right to respect for private life.

•The fact that the decision to stop and search somebody was “based exclusively on the ‘hunch’ or ‘professional intuition’ of the police officer” meant there was a “clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion” to a police officer.

•The judges were concerned by the way the powers are authorised. There is no requirement that the powers be considered “necessary” –  only “expedient”.

•The absence of any obligation on police officer to show a reasonable suspicion “made it almost impossible to prove that the power had been improperly exercised”.

The court found that the use of stop and search, and the way the powers are authorised, are “not sufficiently circumscribed nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse”.

“They are not, therefore, in accordance with the law.”

Challenge

McKay said that the problems in the use of such police powers were compounded in the Six Counties, with a long history of such powers being abused for political repression against republicans and nationalists.

“Many of those who have been stopped and harassed by the PSNI were stopped because of their political opinion or background. This abuse of power amounts to political policing and damages the credibility of police forces that use them as well as community relations,” he said.

“People in the North want a police service that will deal robustly with serious issues affecting their daily lives such as drugs and criminality in our communities. They want to see effective, civic and accountable policing, and the use of Section 44 powers by the PSNI seriously undermines this.”

McKay said that Sinn Féin was calling on the PSNI to suspend its use of S44 powers and was challenging the PSNI on the issue on the Policing Board and in the District Policing Partnerships.

Sinn Féin spokesperson on Policing and Justice and Policing Board member Alex Maskey has written to the British government and the PSNI chief constable asking for their response to the ECHR ruling.

Fellow Policing Board member and Sinn Féin MLA Martina Anderson will be part of the Policing Board’s Human Rights and Professional Standards Committee’s review of stop and search powers which was announced following the ruling.

“The PSNI should now suspend its use of Section 44 in light of these facts and the ruling from the European Court of Human Rights that it is incompatible with Convention rights. The continued use of this legislation is a flagrant abuse of human rights,” McKay said.

by Admin

World’s poor battle for climate justice at Copenhagen

Climate activists at the Copenhagen summit. Photo by Lauren Carroll Harris

Climate activists at the Copenhagen summit. Photo by Lauren Carroll Harris

Published in An Phoblacht on 10 December 2009

THE enormous rift between rich and poor countries on solutions to climate change has, unsurprisingly, immediately come to the fore at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen which began on 7 December and is to conclude on 18 December, reports An Phoblacht’s Emma Clancy from Copenhagen.

A secret draft agreement believed to have been worked on by the US and Denmark among other states, which was leaked to the British ‘Guardian’ newspaper on Tuesday 8 December, outlined rich countries’ plans to sideline the UN in all future climate change negotiations.

It also sets grossly unequal per capita emissions limits for 2050 that would mean people in rich countries could emit almost twice as much as those in the developing world, and plans to hand climate finance control over from the UN to the unaccountable World Bank.

The leaked draft proposals fall dismally short of the action required to tackle climate change and it follows several months of efforts by leading politicians, who represent powerful industrialised states, trying to lower expectations as to what can be achieved at the Copenhagen summit.

The industrialised countries are responsible for three quarters of emissions historically while they represent only 15% of the world’s population.

The text – a draft of the final agreement – clearly abandons the Kyoto Protocol’s principle that rich and poor countries have differing obligations based on their historical contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their differing capabilities in terms of making the transition to clean energy.

Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said the draft text also “does not suggest anything like the 40% [by 2020] cuts that science is saying is needed”.

Binding treaty

Sinn Féin MEP Bairbre de Brún, who is participating in the summit as part of the European Parliament’s 15-person official delegation, has reiterated her call for a legally binding treaty to be reached at Copenhagen that sets emissions targets that can limit global warming to no more than 2C.

Emissions must peak by 2015 and then be quickly reduced if a safe climate is to be maintained.

“Industrialised countries must commit to at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and an 80 to 95% reduction by 2050 compared to 1990 levels in order to prevent warming reaching more than 2C,” the MEP said.

However, at this stage the EU says it will reduce emissions by just 20% by 2020 (which it will raise to 30% if other states make similar commitments) and by 50% to 80% by 2050. The US pledges to cut emission by only 17% to 20% by 2020.

Bairbre de Brún said that in addition to ambitious, science-based targets by industrialised countries, a key element of a just agreement must be the provision of financial and technical aid to developing countries to enable them to put their industries and economies on a sustainable path and to adapt to the impact of climate change.

“It has been estimated that the developing world will need €120 billion per year by 2020 to cope with these problems and the EU must commit to at least €30 billion per year in climate funding to developing countries by 2020 in addition to overseas development aid,” de Brún said.

The consequence of failure to make the urgent and necessary changes to our societies – to break our fossil fuel addiction and make the transition to sustainable economies powered by renewable energy – is catastrophic climate change.

The devastating human cost of climate change that has occurred as a result of the 0.75C warming since pre-industrial temperatures is already being felt in developing countries through drought, floods and other disruptive weather patterns. The Global Humanitarian Fund estimates that 300,000 deaths in the global South are being caused each year by climate change.

If warming continues based on current emission rates, the UN estimates that nine out of ten farmers in Africa will be unable to grow food. More than 1.3 billion people in Asia are dependent on water from the rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers to survive; current levels of warming mean the glaciers may have melted entirely by the end of the century.

A shadow of doubt?

An alliance between the developing countries, progressive forces in the industrialised states and the growing global climate justice movement is facing hugely powerful governments and business interests at the Copenhagen summit that are determined to prioritise short-term profit over the survival of the planet. Public opinion, pressure and mobilisation is the key to changing this balance of forces and ensuring action is taken.

The release of hacked email correspondence between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in mid-November was timed to coincide with the Copenhagen summit and aims to sow seeds of doubt among the public about climate science which proves global warming is occurring and is a result of human activity.

The emails are damaging to the climate movement in that they damage the credibility of three or four scientists and show that the highest standards of scientific integrity were not being adhered to in the UAE’s Climate Research Unit.

But, as a spokesperson for the British Met office said: “If you look at the emails, there isn’t any evidence that the data was falsified and there’s no evidence that climate change is a hoax”.

South African-based author and activist Patrick Bond believes “the real danger comes from fossil fuel firms – especially BP, Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil – that, like big tobacco corporations decades ago, know full well the lethal potential of their products. Their objective is to place a grain of doubt in our minds, and for that climate denialists are useful,” he said.

This denialist campaign is having a disturbing impact, and in the US a poll by Pew Research Center poll in October found that only 35% of respondents believed that human activities lay behind global warming – down from 47% in 2006.

The release of the emails has also overshadowed the findings of several highly significant reports that have been released in the past month.

Market failure

In addition to several scientific reports that reaffirm the existing climate science and show that climate change, and specifically the melting of the arctic sea ice, is occurring much faster than believed only two years ago, Friends of the Earth has also released a report outlining the major flaws in the carbon trading system championed by big business and rich governments as a mechanism to reduce emissions.

The FoE report – ‘A Dangerous Obsession: The Evidence Against Carbon Trading’ – found that carbon trading is “not delivering the urgent cuts in emissions needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, is failing to realise promised incentives for investment in new low-carbon technology, and is a dangerously unstrategic approach to making the transition to a low-carbon economy”.

The report said carbon trading schemes rely on so-called offsetting – “a controversial, ineffective and increasingly discredited mechanism”.

The speculative carbon market bubble “risked a repetition of the subprime mortgage crisis, and provide a smokescreen for rich developed countries’ failure to provide developing countries with adequate support to tackle climate change” it said.

“A completely different, faster and more strategic approach is needed – one that relies on simple, direct and proven policy tools such as taxation, regulation and public investment,” the report concluded.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are expected to participate in demonstrations for climate action during the climate change summit, with a global day of action scheduled for 12 December, when a major protest will take place outside the summit in Copenhagen.

Last weekend, tens of thousands joined protests in Dublin, Belfast, London, Glasgow, Brussels and Paris to demand an effective treaty that can guarantee a safe climate.