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The Séan MacBride (Principles)
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"I once asked Séan Mac Bride if Hume over the years had ever turned to him for advice and he said he had not. When I asked him why he thought that was the case, Séan replied, emphatically and succinctly: "Because he knows I'm implacably opposed to Partition"
It may not be one of the most unusual book review that I have ever read, but I must admit, it is probably the longest. (Fifteen Pages) For this I suppose we have to thank the wonderful world of the Blogesphere, which allows Mr. Everyman, Everywoman, just to be politically correct, to publish their opinions without the space restrictions of the traditional print media.
The book in question, The Mac Bride Principles: Irish – America Fights Back, is by former Labor MP Kevin McNamara, who stood down in the 2005 election, after 36 years as a MP. After his retirement, McNamara graduated with a PhD from Liverpool University's Institute of Irish Studies in 2007, the thesis for his doctorate being the MacBride Principles.
The tone of the review is pretty much apparent in this initial paragraph of the press release by the reviewer, Fr. Séan McManus.
"CAPITOL HILL. February 2, 2010 - Fr. Séan McManus, the president of the Capitol Hill – based Irish National Caucus – which initiated and launched the Mac Bride Principles – has released his review of the new book by former British Labor MP, Kevin Mc Namara: The Mac Bride Principles: Irish – America Fights Back. (Liverpool University Press. 2009)." Fr. McManus's review is contained in the following letter he wrote to Mr. Mc Namara. While praising aspects of the book, Fr. Mc Manus enumerates factual errors, lack of proper perspective and a surprising persistent pattern of denigration against himself."
Fr. McManus also has some sharp criticisms for Patrick Doherty, whom he labels, 'The Gossip – in - Chief'. Last December, both men were honored in New York City Hall, at an event hosted by the Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, for their work on the MacBride Principles Campaign.
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/12/irish-national-caucus-35-years-and.html

More ...
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/02/fighting-irish.html

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/02/margaret-ritchie-elected-sdlp-party.html

In the first contested election for party leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Margaret Ritchie, Minister for Social Development in the Northern Ireland Assembly, defeated the Deputy leader of the party, MLA, and Member of the Westminster Parliament, Alasdair McDonnell, at the party conference last Sunday.

Previous leaders of the party, Gerry Fitt, John Hume, and Mark Durkan, were elected unopposed. Durkan announced his resignation as party leader last autumn.

The new deputy leader of the party is Mid Ulster MLA, Patsy McGlone.

At a press conference in the Stormont Assembly yesterday, Ritchie hit the ground running with an announcement that she has withdrawn as the party nominee for the position of Justice Minister. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party have been in discussions with Alliance Party leader David Ford to assume the justice ministry, while the SDLP has insisted that the position should automatically be theirs under the De Hondt system, adopted by the Assembly for selecting ministerial positions.

The new SDLP nominee for the post will be North Belfast MLA, Alban Maginness, a barrister by profession, who in In 1997, made history by becoming the first Nationalist Lord Mayor of Belfast.

With the SDLP being eclipsed by Sinn Féin in the last election as the largest nationalist party, the new leader will have her work cut out to reinvigorate the party faithful for the upcoming Westminster elections, and Assembly elections next year. Added to the woes of the SDLP is the organization of Fianna Fáil Forums in the six counties. Three of the six counties, Armagh, Down, and Fermanagh, have established groups, with the three remaining counties expected to follow by mid-summer.

Ritchie has however ruled out any merger with Fianna Fáil. While on the campaign trail for party leader she has stated that she opposed any such moves. Amalgamation she said, would mean Emasculation.

Having lived in the United States for many years, I have perhaps witnessed more trial by media than most people who live in Europe. Two of the most outrageous cases of this that come to mind were the trials in California of O. J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson. Hordes of press from all types of media outlets descended on these trials in a feeding frenzy of T V and print sensationalism. Rather than attempting to use these trials as a means of educating the public on the complexities of the U S judicial process, the media turned these events into a circus of luridness, half-truths, and innuendo. During these trials, the daily exploitation of the American judicial process by media outlets, for the financial gains of newspaper sales and T V ratings, left many Americans dismayed.

With this in mind, and not having the benefit of a legal department on my Blog, I have resisted the temptation to add my two cents worth in the Blogesphere, on the recent disclosures surrounding the propriety of the behavior of local politicians, Iris Robinson, and Gerry Adams.

Barring a diminished responsibility defense, due to mental illness, it seems clear that Iris Robinson will have her day in court to explain her very unusual concepts of fund raising, lobbying, and the bidding process, not to mention certain standards of ethics required of elected representatives.

With my very rudimentary legal knowledge, gained from "Lawyering for Idiots", I would be the first to admit that I would be out of my depth on commenting on the legal issues surrounding the situation that Gerry Adams finds himself in, having admitted that when his niece, Aine Tyrell, accused his brother Liam, her father, of sexually assaulting her as a child, he believed his niece.

What I do know though is this; The actions of Gerry Adams after he was aware that his brother might be a pedophile, raise serious questions as to his judgment, as an elected representative of his community, and his responsibilities to the most defenseless section of that community, children.

The many inconsistencies, in Gerry Adam's many versions of events, detailing the actions he took in response to the accusations against his brother, have been well documented in the excellent reporting of Sunday Tribune Northern Editor, Suzanne Breen. (See Links Below)

Today on the Slugger O'Toole Blog Ms. Cahill, another woman who has claimed that she was repeatedly raped by a prominent Republican and that Gerry Adams was aware of the facts but failed to take action has issued an Open Letter to all Republicans.

Ms. Cahill is a niece of Joe Cahill, a veteran of the organization of which Gerry Adams was never a member.

The open letter is produced below in full.

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/01/open-appeal-to-all-republicans-from-ms.html

Northern Ireland Assembly Collapses

The current political crisis at the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the possibility of a collapse of that institution if the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, are unable to resolve their differences over the transfer of Policing and Justice, again raises the possibility of Direct Rule from Westminster.

The first imposition of Direct Rule occurred on March 1972, and continued for the next 27 years, with the exception of five months in 1974.

The cartoon below, by Dan ÓNéill, was published by the Civil Rights movement while ÓNéill was on a visit to Ireland in 1972, as Stormont was stood down.

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/01/northern-ireland-assembly-collapses.html

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/01/remembering-bloody-sunday.html    more...
Despite the fact that for decades, the international court of public opinion have found the British government of the day, guilty of murder in the killing of 14 Civil Rights marchers in Derry's Bogside in January 1972, relatives of the victims still await a final ruling by the Saville Tribunal on the circumstances of that dreadful day.
LINK: JOHN BARRY LIDDY'S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
http://jfc3.com/liddy.mp3
If this 13 some minute tape does not cause a lump in your throat, or make you want to scream to the heavens for justice for the victims of Bloody Sunday, then I am afraid that you are clinically dead.

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/01/mlk-jr-day-living-dream.html

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2010/01/ill-tell-me-ma-by-brian-keenan.html


Belfast born author Brian Keenan, returned to his native city yesterday to talk about his latest book, 'I'll Tell Me Ma', at the Out To Lunch Arts Festival at the Black Box in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter.

Keenan's first book, 'An Evil Cradling', was an autobiographical account of his four year kidnapping ordeal in Beirut Lebanon, where he was working at the American University.

His latest work is a memoir of his growing up in Belfast in the 1950's. In his talk to a lunch-time audience of over 200 he spoke of the difficulty he had deciding to even start such a work. His early childhood memories were dim, and much of the working-class neighborhood in north Belfast were he grew up has physically changed very drastically due to redevelopment. The work he said, took him to areas where he could never have imagined when he began his odyssey of recollections. At this time his mother was in the final stages of Alzheimer's, and he was making frequent visits from Dublin where he now resides, to be with her. On these trips he would frequently walk the old haunts of his youth seeking inspiration.

Speaking to Soñar Blog afterward, Keenan said that he is already working on another book. He has made two trips recently to Lebanon. While there, he says he was looking for stories of ordinary Lebanese living everyday lives.

I'll Tell Me Ma, is published by Random House.
http://www.rbooks.co.uk/default.aspx

The Out to Lunch Arts Festival runs 6-31January 2010.
For further information on upcoming events;
info@cqaf.com

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/12/irish-national-caucus-35-years-and.html

Fr. Mc Manus is the president of the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus. In November 1984, the Irish National Caucus launched the Principles -- named after Fr. Mc Manus's good friend and supporter -- Seán Mc Bride, Noble Peace Prize laureate.

'Isn't it very striking? The elected officials who led the campaign to end anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland were not Irish- Americans, but Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Hispanic Americans and others! To me, that is the great moral lesson of the Mac Bride Campaign.'

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/12/irish-national-caucus-35-years-and.html

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/12/fianna-fail-new-and-the-not-so-new.html

Source
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/12/sdlp-leadership-what-is-that.html

Guest Blogger Martin Morgan

Editor's Note.

This article was submitted before the the announcement that the current independent, and former Sinn Féin MLA for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Gerry McHugh, announced that he had joined Fianna Fáil. The announcement came after a Fianna Fáil support group in Fermanagh was formally established this past weekend. Fianna Fáil support groups now exist in counties Armagh, Down, and Fermanagh. Membership in the party in the previously unorganised six northern counties is believed to be around 500 with counties Antrim, Derry, and Tyrone, expected to launch by early next year.

"Fianna Fáil offers what both the SDLP and Sinn Féin cannot; it could produce Stormont Ministers and has had Dail Ministers for more than fifty five years of the eighty eight years since partition occurred. Add this together and you could see the creation of the most potent All-Ireland political movement in the island's history."

Martin Morgan is a former SDLP Lord Mayor of Belfast (2003-2004) and former SDLP Councilor for the Oldpark constituency in north Belfast ( Ardoyne, Waterworks, New Lodge, Cliftonville, Ligoniel wards) which he served for 12 years and was a European Parliamentary candidate in 2004.

A double graduate of the Queen's University of Belfast, he is a Social Worker by profession, Martin left the SDLP in 2005 to progress his professional career. Since then Martin has maintained a strong interest in the organisation of Fianna Fáil as a 32-county political entity. He believes that Fianna Fáil is the only political party on the island of Ireland that has the ability to fully promote the well being of all of the people who live on the island.

Maintaining a strong interest in politics across Ireland especially in his home town of Belfast, Martin is of the view that the current political representation afforded to the people of north Belfast is inadequate, outdated and out of touch and requires replacing.

SDLP Leadership – What is that?

Mark Durkan's stepping down as the leader of the soft Nationalist SDLP has come as no surprise to me. Durkan was Hume's left hand man in Derry before becoming the SDLP leader and throughout his stewardship of the Party he was dogged by those who believed that being an able Lieutenant to a former leader was his strongest and most able position in the Party. He is a decent person and was an alright steward, but he was not a leader in its truest sense at a time when the SDLP was losing its direction, requiring a strong and confident hand at the wheel, rather than bowing to the inevitable "I am clever than you" abstract sound bite, which left most of us bewildered.

Since Durkan's announcement Alasdair Mc Donnell and Margaret Ritchie have declared their intentions to replace him. Others in the Party would have aspired to declare openly their ambition to enter the race. Some of these individuals were clearly delusional having overseen their own electoral demise in their respective home constituencies and their failure to strengthen an eroding electoral base. Their vanity by far outweighed their grasp of reality. At least some members of the SDLP had the sense to counsel them against contesting a race that at best had only three serious contenders and at worst two, the third potential candidate being John Dallat from the East Derry area, who would not enter the race even though he narrowly lost out to Mc Donnell for the Deputy Leadership.

Both Mc Donnell and Ritchie are reasonably well-profiled politicians and in the eyes of the electorate Ritchie in particular has handled her Ministerial portfolio well. However, in my opinion, neither Ritchie nor Mc Donnell can turn the tide of fortune back in the direction of the SDLP.

The reasons;

Firstly neither are charismatic characters, commanding the attention of the Party or the electorate.

Secondly we should not be fooled by the "just good enough" election results of the past five years. The results were just good enough for the Party to avoid collapsing, but not anyway nearly good enough to begin to think that the SDLP was returning to former strengths and glories.

Thirdly even though they topped the European poll in the north Sinn Fein has probably peeked at a time when the SDLP's life support system coughs and splutters along the same as before. The soothsayers of the SDLP always held out hope against hope that the demise of the Sinn Féin experiment would see again the rise of the SDLP. That has not happened. The SDLP's old boast of being a "broad church" has ultimately obstructed the Republicanism that lies deep within elements of the Party in favour of a significant number of "latte sipping" come lately representatives ( where were they before the ceasefires?) who want status, status and status. This in turn fed into the Sinn Féin machine that eventually decimated the SDLP.

Fourthly a new powerful, mature and experienced political force in northern politics is rising rapidly in the form of Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil is now organising across the six counties and has recently opened a political surgery in Crossmaglen. Early indicators show a groundswell of goodwill, support and new members for the 32 - county Party, including strong overtures being made by some elected representatives and members of the SDLP to join Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil offers what both the SDLP and Sinn Féin cannot; it could produce Stormont Ministers and has had Dail Ministers for more than fifty five years of the eighty eight years since partition occurred. Add this together and you could see the creation of the most potent All-Ireland political movement in the island's history.

All of this added together is just too much of a challenge for whoever the new leader of the SDLP will be thus sealing the SDLP's fate.

Don't Worry Be Happy.

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-dan-oneill-aka-odd-bodkins_15.html

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/tales-of-ballydrum-etc.html

John Edward Henry (1904-1986) was a native of Ballydrum, Swinford, County Mayo. He emigrated to the USA in his mid- twenties and spent a number of years in Chicago before returning to Mayo in 1931. When he came back, he married his childhood sweetheart, Margaret Salmon and took over the running of his family farm in Ballydrum.
He also worked with Mayo County Council as a supervisor on road and bridge construction for a number of years. The nature of his work meant that he was often absent from home from Monday morning to Friday night for weeks on end. It was during those periods of enforced absence from home and family, that he gathered much of the stories and anecdotes that would later form the basis of his folktale collection.

More info at:
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/tales-of-ballydrum-etc.html

Source and Photo:
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/northern-ireland-executive-condemned-by.html

Despite heavy rainfall, hundreds of trade union members marched from job sites to protest rallies in cities and towns in Northern Ireland yesterday, to protest looming cuts in public sector jobs.

Rallies organised by the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions were held in Belfast, Derry, Omagh, Enniskillen, Coleraine, Craigavon, Armagh, Ballymena, Magherafelt and Newry as thousand also protested in the south of Ireland.

The NICICTU called on the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly to make the defense of public services and protection and creation of jobs in the private and public sectors an urgent priority.

Peter Bunting, ICTU Assistant General Secretary told the Belfast rally: 'We need to cherish our public servants because they are the backbone of the real economy, not small businesses, not multinationals and certainly not the top bankers. In a recession like this, the only source of demand in the economy is coming from the public sector.'

Despite the criticism, several elected representatives attended the rally including; Minister for Health Social Services and Public Safety, Michael McGimpsey, MLAs Alex Maskey, and Sue Ramsey.

The full speech is reproduced below.

Fellow workers, friends and comrades.

We are here today to expose bloat, waste and time-serving at the heart of the public sector.

I am talking about, of course, the people who rule us, who write the laws, frame the budget, those who serve in the Assembly and in Westminster . The people we elect who have fiddled while the economy burns, - just as some may have been fiddling their expenses.

The public is being short changed and it is time for payback.

We have in this region an Executive which is no longer fit for purpose.

They squabble over the devolution of policing and justice.

They prevaricate over education.

They cannot agree on a Bill of Rights.

They have no clear shared method to tackle sectarianism and racism.

At the same time, they act as if the out dated Programme for Government reflects reality. To which we must ask: What colour is the sky over Stormont?

The Programme for Government talked of creating six-and-a-half thousand new jobs, - with some even above the minimum wage. Meanwhile in the place where the skies are Grey and the outlook always overcast, almost 50,000 jobs have gone in the past year.

53,000 people are unemployed and another 300,000 are cast aside in the ranks of the economically inactive.

The construction industry has been demolished, the retail sector is in a permanent closing down sale and manufacturing is covered in rust.

Where are the drastic actions being taken?

Where is the sense of crisis?

What is to be done?

Why is this economic crisis not the number one priority?

Why does it matter so damn much about the names of sports grounds?

Politics is about power. Power is about exercising choices. The choices made by the Executive and the Assembly have been misplaced.

Get with a new programme. One which places at the centre of our politics the daily lives of its citizens. We need more jobs. We need a vibrant private sector. We need more start-ups and we need to create more research and development.

We need to keep our graduates at home. We need to capitalise upon the creativity and humour and intelligence of our young and the experience and training of our older workers.

We need to understand that the best solution to poverty and social exclusion is work. Work in well-paid, humanely rewarding and unionised careers.

We have problems that need to be fixed. Our physical and social infrastructure is not remotely up to scratch.

We need to embrace the creative thinking behind a Green New Deal which sustains and nourishes more than our fragile environment. We need to re-think who our economy is supposed to serve.

We need to re-order our priorities. We need to think bigger than call-centres paying the minimum wage to graduates who can only meet the pressures of a consumer society through credit which is no longer cheap or available.

We need to challenge the consensus that cuts are inevitable in our public services because we just have to keep the bankers in the luxury and bonuses to which they have become accustomed.

We need to cherish our public servants because they are the backbone of the real economy, not small businesses, not multinationals and certainly not the top bankers.

In a recession like this, the only source of demand in the economy is coming from the public sector. We hear much about how well-paid the public sector is, compared to the private sector.

First, tell that to a cleaner, or a classroom assistant or a nurse, or a dole clerk.

Second, the real pay gap is not between the private sector and the public sector in Northern Ireland . The real pay gap is the 20% difference between private sector workers here and private sector workers across the water. That is the real pay gap to contend with.

And yet Northern Ireland is sold to foreign investors by Invest Northern Ireland for its cheap labour. And we are supposed to be grateful for that.

If low wages created jobs we would not have 350,000 of our citizens unemployed or economically inactive. Low wages create poverty.

There is a third important point about the public sector you won't hear about too often from our political classes or read about from the experts in the business press. The public sector spends more money on supporting the private sector than it does on paying public servants.

All the suppliers, who depend on contracts to the schools and public offices,

the service providers to the police and the health service,

the builders of roads and museums,

the profiteers of the Private Finance Initiative,

even the consultants so beloved by Northern Ireland Water,

they take a bigger slice of the public budget than the health workers and the firefighters and the police officers and the social workers and the teachers and the university scientists and all the other public servants put together.

So when you hear the common and cheap mantra from the CBI and the IOD and the usual suspects in the Belfast Telegraph and UTV and the Assembly about making the public sector more lean and mean, what you are hearing is the self-appointed cheerleaders for the private sector cutting off their nose to spite their own face. People operating out of self interest, not in the public interest.

That is what I mean about the public sector as the backbone of our economy. Other speakers here today can make clearer than I, the huge social impact which public service workers make to the daily lives of all of us.

We should be grateful for that, of course, and show that gratitude and respect to every public servant we meet on a daily basis, from the bus driver, to the care assistant, to the traffic attendant to the postal worker.

Especially today, the postal workers of the Communications Workers Union who are making huge sacrifices to keep a universal postal service publicly owned and answerable to the people, not to some Chief Executive Officer who demands a salary of £1 million and yet refuses to meet his workers.

The message I am trying to get across to those who disparage the public sector is its vital role in keeping Northern Ireland afloat now, in this recession, just as they did in the darkest years of our recent past.

Any so-called economist or business expert, or any of their cheerleaders in the press or the Assembly who cannot see that bigger picture is not up to their job. If we must make cuts in employment, maybe we could start with them.

This meeting is as important as when we were here last March, after the murders in Masserene and Craigavon. Then, we were here to defend our democracy.

Now, we are demanding that the democracy we defended does its bit for our economy and our shared society.

Last April, we were here again to defend the workers at Visteon and Nortel and Shorts who were facing job losses in the private sector. We are here today and still sending the same message.

What unites workers is their common humanity, - we do not recognise false distinctions between workers in the public or the private sector.

Support the public sector.

Support decent jobs and pensions for all workers.

Challenge those who make ignorant assumptions about what makes an economy efficient.

Oppose those who try to plant a wedge between private sector workers and public sector workers.

Build an alternative vision for a Northern Ireland which is fit for purpose, for all of its inhabitants.

Thanks for listening.

http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-dan-oneill-aka-odd-bodkins.html

For Event Photos Visit:
http://seosamhsonar.blogspot.com/2009/11/chomsky-scargill-speak-at-belfast.html

If you consider yourself a supporter of the political 'Establishment' you might say it was 'Trick.' If you are of a more non-conformist, or a rebellious nature, you would definitely say 'Treat', to two events hosted in Belfast this Halloween weekend.

On Friday night, Professor Noam Chomsky, and former President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, addressed audiences at separate locations in Belfast.

Chomsky, a longtime critic of American foreign policy, was the speaker at the sold-out Amnesty International Annual Lecture at  Queens University, as part of the Belfast Festival at Queens. The following day, he spoke gratis, at St. Mary's College West Belfast, hosted by Féile an Phobail's, Festival of the People. Overflow seating for over 200 people had to be arranged in an upstairs room with video and audio facilities, as the main auditorium which holds over 300 people quickly filled to capacity.

Scargill, who led the NUM in the 1984-85 strike which ended in defeat for the union, spoke at the Belfast office of the UNITE union. He retired from the NUM Presidency in 2001, and was elected Honorary President in 2002. He is currently Leader of the Socialist Labour Party which he founded in 1996.

Noam Chomsky
Alongside his career as a linguist, Chomsky has been active in left-wing politics. In 1965 he organized a citizen's committee to publicize tax refusal in protest to the war in Vietnam; four years later he published his first book on politics American Power and the New Mandarins. By the 1980's he had become both the most distinguished figure of American linguistics and one of the most influential left-wing critics of American foreign policy. He has been extremely prolific as a writer: his web-site in 2003 listed 33 book publications in linguistics (broadly construed), and although the individuation of his political books is complicated, their number definitely exceeds 40. According to a 1992 tabulation of sources from the previous 12 years in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was the most frequently-cited person alive, and one of the eight most frequently-cited authors of all time.
Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960, Bristol, 2004

"I don't say you're self-censoring – I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
Chomsky Interviewed by Andrew Marr on BBC2, February 14, 1996.

Arthur Scargill
"We need action not words. For the first time we are facing the prospect of seeing legislation introduced which denies the right of trade unionists to come to the assistance of other unionists and denies the right of trade unionists to seek the support of others in their disputes. There is only one response. Faced with this legislation we should say we will defy the law. It is the only action we can take and it is the only response this movement can give. If there is an attempt to use this legislation then you defy it not as an individual union but as a movement."
Speech to the Trades Union Congress at Brighton on the Emplyoment Act 1982
(7 September, 1982).