The Republican Blanket web magazine has effectively been closed after the house of its editor was raided last Friday and all computers confiscated. The raid came on the tail of a public demonstration in support of a protest by dissident Republican prisoners, which were attended by two of the magazines key staff – Carrie Twomey and Anthony McIntyre.
The trigger for the raids appears to have an impromptu invasion of the headquarters of the NI Prison Service. In McIntyre’s account of the event (the last story published before its temporary closure), it was a fairly chaotic affair:
It had all the strategic precision we would associate with cows in a field, wandering to whatever opening presented itself. The only reason the protestors got up the stairs was because the building was as open as Royal Avenue. At no point, apart from the incident in the occupied room, was I stopped or asked not to proceed any further.
The incursion stirred deep fears in several Unionist politicians that the protest was a ploy to gain yet more personal details of prison personnel. The suspension of local government institutions in NI began with allegations of information gathering on Prison Officers and various promanent members of the Unionist community – inside and outside politics.
By the next day the two were keenly aware of how seriously the PSNI were taking their presence at the protest. Carrie details the raid on their house, on her blog the Broom of Anger:
On the fourth of July, in a massive security operation involving 33 jeeps and over a hundred officers (5-6 officers per jeep) – 14 jeeps in my small street alone – my home was raided. 4 search teams spent almost 3 hours going through everything, seizing our computer, my digital camera, our mobile phone…
Twomey believes that the incident re-inforces the idea that politics in Northern Ireland is still at an immature stage. Stuck in a transitional between a state of war and prospective peace – political action for dissidents of the current peace process is deeply problematic. It is doubly problematic for anti-violence Republicans like themselves. She told Slugger:
The irony is that with politics bedding down, civil disobedience like Wednesday’s protest is or should be what become the norm. The problem is that neither side – the protesters, who were totally disorganized and still are – or those being protested have any idea how to handle “normal” politics.
They have been assured that the PSNI will return their equipment within a week which means they should be back on line soon afterwards.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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