http://irspscotland.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/workers-republic-no-1-winter-2010/
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Saturday, 27 November 2010
Christmas drive for Republican Socialist POWs
Christmas drive for Republican Socialist POWs
http://irspscotland.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/christmas-drive-for-republican-socialist-pows/
Below we print a request from Teach na Fáilte requesting support for IRSM prisoners both financially and materially through book donations, or even sending a xmas card. All expressions of support are always welcome.
The IRSP Alba/Scotland Support Group will be playing our part to support the prisoners and would encourage you to do likewise. All donations gratefully received.
**********************************************************************************************
Teach na Fáilte
Republican Socialist Ex-Prisoners Support Group
Costello House
392 Falls Road
BT12 6DH
Belfast
A Chara,
As I’m sure you are aware there are a number of Republican Socialist prisoners incarcerated in prisons throughout Ireland at this point in time. Some are serving lengthly sentences and are incarcarated many miles from their homes so they would be glad of your support especially around the festive season.
As the festive season is approaching I was wondering if you or any of your family, friends or comrades would be interested in sponsoring one of our prisoners or even sending them a Christmas card at this time.
In relation to sponsoring a prisoner you can send your correspondence directly to me at the address below. If you would prefer to send cards etc to me I will see that they get it or you can send cards directly to the prisoners themselves.
Anything that you choose to do would be greatly appreciated by the prisoners themselves as it would let them know that there are people still thinking about them
Fundraising efforts have also begun in many areas and we ask you to continue to support these.
Thank you for your time and effort
Gerard Murray.
—————————————————————
GERARD MURRAY
TEACH NA FAILTE
392 FALLS ROAD
BT12 6D BELFAST
IRELAND
gerardm042000@yahoo.com
E4 Landing
Portlaoise Prison
Portlaoise, Co Laois
Ireland
DENIS DWYER
PAUL KELLY
EUGENE KELLY
EOGHAN CLAIL
GERARD MACKIN
THOMAS KELLY
PADDY WALL
NOEL MOONEY
JONATHAN KEOGH
GERARD KELLEGHER
NEIL MYLES
ANTHONY LEE
GARETH BYRNE
The Grove
Castlerea Prison
Castlerea, Co Roscommon
Ireland
EDDIE MC GARRIGLE
JOHNNY MC CROSSAN
Roe 4
Maghaberry Prison
Old Road
Ballinderry Upper
Lisburn, Co. Antrim BT 28 2PT
North of Ireland
SEAN CARLIN
(Not all of the above named political prisoners are necessarily facing charges relating to RSM activities but for one reason or another they now find themselves on the INLA wing.)
Thursday, 18 November 2010
St Andrews Day Rally 2010
March will assemble on the Esplanade at 4pm, march off 4:30 down the Mile led by the Stockbridge Pipe Band as always. Speakers - outside the Parliament building. Night-time entertainment
Bands are Ted Christopher, Fiery Jack and Albannach
hall is
Lodge Trafalgar
1 St Anthony Street Leith
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
FREE Eddie McGarrigle
FREE Eddie McGarrigle
Posted on IPSC November 2, 2010 at 10:36:16 AM by IPSC (American Branch)
(Note: Eddie's mother has recently died, so any cards or letters would be greatly appreciated)
FREE Eddie Mcgarrigle!
The forgotten victims of the Troubles
(by Suzanne Breen, Sunday Tribune)
(Excerpt)
Eddie McGarrigle, 40, ex-INLA member
It was raining and he was running – big, long strides – to open the back door so his girlfriend wouldn't have to hang outside getting wet. She was a real looker, a former Miss Strabane. They'd been walking home from a date when the heavens opened. He gave her his coat, before darting ahead.
The gunman was waiting in the doorway. Eighteen-year-old Eddie McGarrigle saw a figure in the darkness point what looked like a rifle at him but he couldn't take it in. Thinking a friend was "acting the eejit", he shouted "f**k off!'. When he realised, it was too late. He started to run away but the gunman shot him in the back.
"I crawled along the street, calling him a bastard. My girlfriend arrived and started screaming. I thought I was dying. I told the ambulance driver not to tell my mother." McGarrigle lost consciousness and woke up, three days later, in hospital. "Nobody ever told me I was paralysed from the waist down – I just sort of found out."
Twenty-two years on, it's hard catching up with him. One evening, he's playing basketball "and I'm not stopping when I'm winning!" Next, he's on a hunger-strike march in the Bogside. Then, he's out with his dog, Troy. Never mind the raft of First Communions, odd for a self-proclaimed Marxist.
But McGarrigle confounds stereotypes. When he was an INLA prisoner in Long Kesh, comrades who didn't know him, presumed he'd been shot by the security forces. They didn't realise it was his own organisation, the INLA, which had put him in a wheelchair.
He became an "active republican" during the hunger-strike. In 1983, a woman told him a man had sexually abused her daughter. Another INLA member warned the man McGarrigle was asking questions. The man stole an IRA gun, shot McGarrigle, and the INLA claimed responsibility.
The man was later convicted of sex abuse. The INLA apologised to McGarrigle. "It was hard but I accepted the apology. The INLA had been in disarray at the time. I wasn't about to change my politics because I personally had a rough deal.
"The Brits were my enemy. I wouldn't be distracted from that. I'd loved sport. I was a big lad, 6"1. I was Tyrone boxing champion, I played hand-ball, I ran cross-country. All that stopped but self-pity is a waste of time. Too many people in the Troubles wrapped victimhood around themselves. I was just glad to be alive."
Out of hospital, the security forces "tortured" him. "I was arrested every few weeks. They thought the wheelchair was my weak spot. They'd sing 'You'll never walk alone' at me. They'd stop my car and open the boot and bonnet, knowing I'd struggle to get out and close them, and then they'd walk off.
"One day, the Brits demanded I get out of the car and open the bonnet. I refused. I told them I'd give them five minutes if they genuinely wanted to search the car, otherwise I was off. They stood laughing at me. So when the five minutes were up, I just started the car and drove at them." McGarrigle was convicted of knocking down a soldier.
For legal reasons, the extent of his "republican socialist activities" can't be disclosed: "I'm not saying I was Dan Breen but I played a full and active role. I wasn't restricted to sitting at home planning things. In terms of disability, the INLA was an equal opportunities employer."
Being a paraplegic didn't destroy his personal life: "I pushed my girlfriend away emotionally because I reckoned everybody thought, 'He'll have to marry her. He won't get anybody else now'. But I didn't love her and wouldn't have married her anyway. I'd no trouble getting women. I'd be on the dance floor, wheelchair spinning – though now I'm older, they'd have to forcibly push me out there!"
In 1990, McGarrigle was arrested following the attempted murder of a UDR man. "At night, the cops carried me to the cell bed. But, on the last three nights, one cop abused me, talking about the need to "cook you vegetables". I wouldn't let him touch me. I sat in the wheelchair, three days and nights. I fainted during interrogation.
"The doctor told me to say I was unfit for questioning. I refused. That would have been crying for special treatment. I was convicted of conspiracy to murder. I should have got 10 years but the judge took a year off because I was in a wheelchair. I was raging at the old c**t for making a big deal about that."
Belfast's Victorian Crumlin Road jail was an inhospitable place. "They held me in the cell for infected diseases, the only cell wide enough to take a wheelchair. It was 24-hour lock-up, solitary confinement.
"The toilet and shower room wasn't wide enough either. They said they'd carry me into it. I refused so for two years I'd no washing facilities and a newspaper on top of the bed became my toilet. It was hard. I wrote poetry about drowning and coming up for air. After the Crum, Long Kesh was heaven – a modern building and all on the flat!"
McGarrigle supports the ceasefire but is anti-Belfast Agreement. "The war's over; republicans lost. Adams and McGuinness settled for what could have been achieved in 1974."
He's married with two children, Liam, 9, and six-week old Paiti. "I can't play football with Liam so I take him to see Celtic instead. I don't want to burden him with politics. He thinks I fell off a motorbike. My wife's a special person. She says I'm softer and more compassionate than most men. I'm the best vacuum cleaner in Strabane. Anything like putting up shelves, or cutting the grass, her brother does."
McGarrigle met disabled ex-security force members during treatment in the spinal unit. "On a human level, I feel for them, but we've nothing in common. The reality is I'd have put them in a wheelchair, and they'd have put me in a wheelchair if they'd had the chance. It was a war. We were on different sides."
He never fought his disability, "just tried to get on with life" as best he could. Sometimes, though, things are different: "When I'm dreaming, whatever I'm doing, I'm never in a wheelchair."
Eddie Mcgarrigle: political prisoner !
By iskra1916
An Irish Republican Socialist Party member, Mr Eddie McGarrigle is today beginning a 3 year prison prison term in grim Portlaoise prison based entirely on the "opinion evidence" of a secret policeman!
This was not Burma or Tibet but Ireland in the year 2010 !
Outrageously there exists in Irish law a peice of so-called 'emergency legislation' which allows the 'opinion' of a member of Ireland's political police to effectively convict a person he suspects of being a member of a proscribed organisation. In effect due process does not exist & any semblance of a 'trial' is a mere formality! If this were happening in Tibet or Burma there would be celebrities lining up to support a campaign against this outrage but because this is in a Western country the chattering classes are deafeningly silent!
Mr McGarrigle who hails from Strabane in the North-West of Ireland would have been sentenced earlier with other accused but he had been extremely ill with an infection following a broken leg which coupled with the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair resulted in him being held on strict House-Arrest for 11 months prior to sentencing!
It is worth noting that despite having a disability Mr McGarrigle has been an active campaigner for the rights of Irish political prisoners held in British & Irish gaols and has been a tireless worker on issues effecting the Irish working-class including conflict resolution in the North of Ireland.
Portlaoise prison is a grim antiquated Victorian-era prison with no interior sanitation in the Irish midlands that is ill-equipped for the needs of able-bodied prisoners let alone a wheelchair-bound person! (Who would have thought that a prison which was built conforming to Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design would still be holding prisoners in the 21st Century!)
Ironically, the "proscribed organisation" that it was the secret policeman's "opinion" Mr McGarrigle belonged to, reportedly no longer exists! There is no doubt that there has been an outrage committed today when an activist can be imprisoned entirely on the word of a Special branch spook & it remains to be seen whether this piece of archaic draconian legislation will be rightfully thrown into the dustbin of history as an affront to modernity.
Meanwhile Mr McGarrigle's young family will be struggling to come to terms with the fact that their Daddy has been taken away from them for 3 years & held in the most grim conditions miles from home soley based on the opinion of a secret policeman!
If you are concerned about the plight of Mr McGarrigle or would like to show your solidarity or support it would be advised to contact Teach na Failte which campaigns on behalf of Republican Socialist prisoners.
His Address:
Castlerea Prison,
The Grove, Castlerea town,
Co Roscommon,
Ireland
Posted on IPSC November 2, 2010 at 10:36:16 AM by IPSC (American Branch)
(Note: Eddie's mother has recently died, so any cards or letters would be greatly appreciated)
FREE Eddie Mcgarrigle!
The forgotten victims of the Troubles
(by Suzanne Breen, Sunday Tribune)
(Excerpt)
Eddie McGarrigle, 40, ex-INLA member
It was raining and he was running – big, long strides – to open the back door so his girlfriend wouldn't have to hang outside getting wet. She was a real looker, a former Miss Strabane. They'd been walking home from a date when the heavens opened. He gave her his coat, before darting ahead.
The gunman was waiting in the doorway. Eighteen-year-old Eddie McGarrigle saw a figure in the darkness point what looked like a rifle at him but he couldn't take it in. Thinking a friend was "acting the eejit", he shouted "f**k off!'. When he realised, it was too late. He started to run away but the gunman shot him in the back.
"I crawled along the street, calling him a bastard. My girlfriend arrived and started screaming. I thought I was dying. I told the ambulance driver not to tell my mother." McGarrigle lost consciousness and woke up, three days later, in hospital. "Nobody ever told me I was paralysed from the waist down – I just sort of found out."
Twenty-two years on, it's hard catching up with him. One evening, he's playing basketball "and I'm not stopping when I'm winning!" Next, he's on a hunger-strike march in the Bogside. Then, he's out with his dog, Troy. Never mind the raft of First Communions, odd for a self-proclaimed Marxist.
But McGarrigle confounds stereotypes. When he was an INLA prisoner in Long Kesh, comrades who didn't know him, presumed he'd been shot by the security forces. They didn't realise it was his own organisation, the INLA, which had put him in a wheelchair.
He became an "active republican" during the hunger-strike. In 1983, a woman told him a man had sexually abused her daughter. Another INLA member warned the man McGarrigle was asking questions. The man stole an IRA gun, shot McGarrigle, and the INLA claimed responsibility.
The man was later convicted of sex abuse. The INLA apologised to McGarrigle. "It was hard but I accepted the apology. The INLA had been in disarray at the time. I wasn't about to change my politics because I personally had a rough deal.
"The Brits were my enemy. I wouldn't be distracted from that. I'd loved sport. I was a big lad, 6"1. I was Tyrone boxing champion, I played hand-ball, I ran cross-country. All that stopped but self-pity is a waste of time. Too many people in the Troubles wrapped victimhood around themselves. I was just glad to be alive."
Out of hospital, the security forces "tortured" him. "I was arrested every few weeks. They thought the wheelchair was my weak spot. They'd sing 'You'll never walk alone' at me. They'd stop my car and open the boot and bonnet, knowing I'd struggle to get out and close them, and then they'd walk off.
"One day, the Brits demanded I get out of the car and open the bonnet. I refused. I told them I'd give them five minutes if they genuinely wanted to search the car, otherwise I was off. They stood laughing at me. So when the five minutes were up, I just started the car and drove at them." McGarrigle was convicted of knocking down a soldier.
For legal reasons, the extent of his "republican socialist activities" can't be disclosed: "I'm not saying I was Dan Breen but I played a full and active role. I wasn't restricted to sitting at home planning things. In terms of disability, the INLA was an equal opportunities employer."
Being a paraplegic didn't destroy his personal life: "I pushed my girlfriend away emotionally because I reckoned everybody thought, 'He'll have to marry her. He won't get anybody else now'. But I didn't love her and wouldn't have married her anyway. I'd no trouble getting women. I'd be on the dance floor, wheelchair spinning – though now I'm older, they'd have to forcibly push me out there!"
In 1990, McGarrigle was arrested following the attempted murder of a UDR man. "At night, the cops carried me to the cell bed. But, on the last three nights, one cop abused me, talking about the need to "cook you vegetables". I wouldn't let him touch me. I sat in the wheelchair, three days and nights. I fainted during interrogation.
"The doctor told me to say I was unfit for questioning. I refused. That would have been crying for special treatment. I was convicted of conspiracy to murder. I should have got 10 years but the judge took a year off because I was in a wheelchair. I was raging at the old c**t for making a big deal about that."
Belfast's Victorian Crumlin Road jail was an inhospitable place. "They held me in the cell for infected diseases, the only cell wide enough to take a wheelchair. It was 24-hour lock-up, solitary confinement.
"The toilet and shower room wasn't wide enough either. They said they'd carry me into it. I refused so for two years I'd no washing facilities and a newspaper on top of the bed became my toilet. It was hard. I wrote poetry about drowning and coming up for air. After the Crum, Long Kesh was heaven – a modern building and all on the flat!"
McGarrigle supports the ceasefire but is anti-Belfast Agreement. "The war's over; republicans lost. Adams and McGuinness settled for what could have been achieved in 1974."
He's married with two children, Liam, 9, and six-week old Paiti. "I can't play football with Liam so I take him to see Celtic instead. I don't want to burden him with politics. He thinks I fell off a motorbike. My wife's a special person. She says I'm softer and more compassionate than most men. I'm the best vacuum cleaner in Strabane. Anything like putting up shelves, or cutting the grass, her brother does."
McGarrigle met disabled ex-security force members during treatment in the spinal unit. "On a human level, I feel for them, but we've nothing in common. The reality is I'd have put them in a wheelchair, and they'd have put me in a wheelchair if they'd had the chance. It was a war. We were on different sides."
He never fought his disability, "just tried to get on with life" as best he could. Sometimes, though, things are different: "When I'm dreaming, whatever I'm doing, I'm never in a wheelchair."
Eddie Mcgarrigle: political prisoner !
By iskra1916
An Irish Republican Socialist Party member, Mr Eddie McGarrigle is today beginning a 3 year prison prison term in grim Portlaoise prison based entirely on the "opinion evidence" of a secret policeman!
This was not Burma or Tibet but Ireland in the year 2010 !
Outrageously there exists in Irish law a peice of so-called 'emergency legislation' which allows the 'opinion' of a member of Ireland's political police to effectively convict a person he suspects of being a member of a proscribed organisation. In effect due process does not exist & any semblance of a 'trial' is a mere formality! If this were happening in Tibet or Burma there would be celebrities lining up to support a campaign against this outrage but because this is in a Western country the chattering classes are deafeningly silent!
Mr McGarrigle who hails from Strabane in the North-West of Ireland would have been sentenced earlier with other accused but he had been extremely ill with an infection following a broken leg which coupled with the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair resulted in him being held on strict House-Arrest for 11 months prior to sentencing!
It is worth noting that despite having a disability Mr McGarrigle has been an active campaigner for the rights of Irish political prisoners held in British & Irish gaols and has been a tireless worker on issues effecting the Irish working-class including conflict resolution in the North of Ireland.
Portlaoise prison is a grim antiquated Victorian-era prison with no interior sanitation in the Irish midlands that is ill-equipped for the needs of able-bodied prisoners let alone a wheelchair-bound person! (Who would have thought that a prison which was built conforming to Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design would still be holding prisoners in the 21st Century!)
Ironically, the "proscribed organisation" that it was the secret policeman's "opinion" Mr McGarrigle belonged to, reportedly no longer exists! There is no doubt that there has been an outrage committed today when an activist can be imprisoned entirely on the word of a Special branch spook & it remains to be seen whether this piece of archaic draconian legislation will be rightfully thrown into the dustbin of history as an affront to modernity.
Meanwhile Mr McGarrigle's young family will be struggling to come to terms with the fact that their Daddy has been taken away from them for 3 years & held in the most grim conditions miles from home soley based on the opinion of a secret policeman!
If you are concerned about the plight of Mr McGarrigle or would like to show your solidarity or support it would be advised to contact Teach na Failte which campaigns on behalf of Republican Socialist prisoners.
His Address:
Castlerea Prison,
The Grove, Castlerea town,
Co Roscommon,
Ireland
Monday, 1 November 2010
SRSM set up N.England Branch
The website of the Scottish Socialist Freedom Group welcomes the formation of an N.England Branch of SRSM
Launch of Scottish Republican publication - Spairn
The new Scottish Republican organisation "Saorsa" have launched their publication on the web according to their website.
It will be interesting to see if they can add anything meaningful to the struggle for a Scottish Republic. If so then their existence should be welcomed.
This weblog will however recognise the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM) as the main organisation to struggle for a Workers Republic. The SRSM have recently expanded with a new N.England branch.
Below is taken from the Saorsa website
Launch of Scottish Republican publication - Spairn
31 October 2010
Saorsa is pleased to announce the launch of Spairn, a web-based Scottish republican publication. Whilst the decision to launch the publication has been taken by members of Saorsa it is our objective to provide in Spairn an open-forum whereby all strands of republicanism in Scotland can organise and debate in a fraternal manner.
By our reckoning there are eight Scottish Republican organisations of varying size and activity, plus many other individuals in other organisations or none, most notably the SNP.
We believe that there are around the same number of Irish Republican organisations active in Scotland who likewise support the establishment of an independent Scottish Republic as part of a wider strategy against British Imperialism.
Whilst recognising that in some cases long-standing political and personal differences will continue to exist - we believe that it is in the interests of the wider progressive working-class movement in Scotland that common-ground be found and built upon between these groups, to work together, where possible, in a spirit of mutual co-operation and respect.
We hope that through Spairn we can play a role in this objective and accordingly place Spairn at the disposal of the wider, progressive republican and socialist community in Scotland.
The Future
It is our hope that if Spairn is to be a useful tool for Republican politics that it can, over time, become a means for bringing some form basic unity around a set of common demands such as;
Establishment of an Independent Scottish Republic
Support for a Unified 32-County Irish Republic
Opposition to all manifestations of British Imperialism.
However we also hold to the position of the Edinburgh-born revolutionary James Connolly that the struggles for national and social freedom are inseparable, and paraphrase him that; “The cause of labour is the cause of Scotland, the cause of Scotland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.”
In the face of the Capitalist banking crisis, services being slashed and 100,000 public sector job losses in Scotland republican politics must also, in our opinion, be immersed in community politics, empowering working-class communities and building a campaign of resistance to Imperialism from the bottom-up.
Given that the Socialist Left in Scotland is about to engage in the worst round of sectarian bloodletting for many years this will become an even greater necessity for progressive republican politics.
However such matters are for the times ahead. We hope to show our commitment to these goals through our actions. In the meantime we welcome all submissions to Spairn be they articles, notices or reports of events/ rallies and so on.
Remember it is YOUR paper. Please use it.
Spairn – (A’ Ghaidhlig – Struggle)
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