Internment

Today is the 50th anniversary of Internment…

Brian O'Neill on August 9, 2021, 8:24 am | Readers 5798

On this day 50 years ago the old Stormont government launched Operation Demetrius. An attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Catholic community by randomly locking them up. To the surprise of no one, the policy backfired spectacularly and many consider it the best recruiting tool the IRA ever had. The main failure of the policy (apart from the obvious: locking people up without trial) was they were using old intelligence that was sometimes decades out of date. …

71: A story of remembering and interpreting the past

David McCann on October 9, 2014, 8:36 am | Readers 763

Film buff, Dan McGinn has an interesting review over on his great blog ‘They’ll love it in Pomona” A new picture by Yann Demange called 71 tells the story of one of the brutal years of the Troubles. It was the year in which Internment was introduced, Ballymurphy massacre took place, the Tripartite summit between Ted Heath, Brian Faulkner & Jack Lynch attempted to find a solution to what the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs called “a tragic and most tractable problem.” …

Book Review: The McGurk’s Bar Bombing

John Ó Néill on October 11, 2012, 3:23 pm | Readers 126

The McGurk’s Bar Bombing: Collusion, Cover-Up and a Campaign for Truth with a foreword by Colin Wallace, just published by Frontline Noir, is the first book by Ciarán MacAirt, grandson of one of those killed in the bombing and the most visible campaigner on behalf of the victims and their families. The book pulls together the results of Ciarán’s searches in various archives, responses to FOI requests and dealings with the Chief Constable of the PSNI and the Policing Ombudsman on behalf of …

Happy travels! Guantánamo Bay: a decade of failure

Patrick Corrigan on January 11, 2012, 10:42 am | Readers 45

Ten years ago today, the first detainees were transferred to the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Since then 779 people have been held, yet only one has been given a trial in an ordinary US federal court. Yesterday I met with the impressive acting US Consul General, Kevin Roland, at the Consulate in Belfast to record our demand that the Guantánamo Bay detention camp be closed down, and our call that the 171 remaining prisoners be charged with …

Attorney General re-opens #Ballymurphy inquests

John Ó Néill on November 16, 2011, 12:16 am | Readers 40

Eleven people were shot dead by British soldiers in Ballymurphy in the three days following the introduction of internment without trial on 9th August 1971. Today, more than forty years later, John Larkin, the Northern Ireland Attorney General, has ordered fresh inquests into the deaths. The original inquests returned an open verdict in 1972 but there was no serious investigation into the behaviour of the paratroopers who carried out the killings. In 1998, some of the families of those that were killed began …

Britain’s “Abu Ghraib.” Lessons of internment ignored

Brian Walker on November 5, 2010, 7:04 pm | Readers 6

I’m not usually in favour of projecting the past onto the present but in this case the usual mantra,” lessons have been learned” has been totally ignored. First came the relatively mild strictures of the Compton Report We consider that the following actions constitute physical ill-treatment; posture on the wall, hooding, noise, deprivation of sleep, diet of bread and water. On 8 February 1977, in proceedings before the ECHR, and in line with the findings of the Parker …