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Showing posts with label Eamonn McCann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eamonn McCann. Show all posts
Eamonn McCann ✒ "The Catholic Church deserves to be burdened with most of the blame. But lay people of secure position sang dumb and averted their eyes."


Jimmy called round to our house one afternoon maybe 15 years ago. We made a cup of tea and sat talking about this and that for around an hour. I had stuff to do and remember wishing he’d head off.

Jimmy had been taken “into care” as a child in Derry and lodged with the nuns. Months later, a social worker arrived, put him in a care and drove to Kircubbin in Co. Down, about 100 miles away. He was handed over to a De La Salle brother at the gate of Rubane House for Boys. The abuse started more or less immediately.

How long after he arrived?

“He took me straight into a room, he had my trousers off in ten minutes, maybe five.”

He had been collected from a Church institution by a representative of the State and delivered into the hands of his abusers in another Church institution.

A few weeks after he’d called, someone phoned and said that Jimmy had been found hanging from a fire escape on the Northern Road.

Continue reading @ Hot Press.

"Misogyny And Child Abuse Have Always Been Cross-Border Phenomena"

Eamonn McCann takes to Hot Press to tell the truth about a liar. 

 
Would Ian Paisley Jnr and his DUP colleagues opt to gag the Gaelgóirí rather than preventing abortion being introduced in Northern Ireland? The question, asked in the News Letter, led to a denunciation of the journalist – followed by an apology from the man with the corkscrew soul ...

Many will have felt strangely let-down by Ian Paisley’s grovelling apology to News Letter journalist Sam McBride – and by Sam’s dignified acceptance of the hateful wee shite’s mea culpa. (The fact that he’s a misshapen lump of mendacity doesn’t mean he’s not a wee shite. Wee shites come in all shapes and disguises.)

The Ballymena bigot had gotten all uptight when Sam drew attention to the Democratic Unionist Party’s improbable gyrations over abortion and an Irish Language Act.

Nowhere else in the known world could these two issues be entwined. But we are, as they say, where we are – viz. Northern Ireland.

The Paisley nose had been put out of joint by the News Letter man pondering in print whether the DUP would put a higher premium on preventing abortion than on denying official status to the Irish language.

Continue reading @ Hot Press.

Ian Paisley Is A Liar And A Hypocrite

Eamonn McCann on why he believes Sinn Fein is spoofing again.


Sinn Féin are telling porkies again—this time over flags. The party voted against a proposal from PBP to remove ‘Soldier F’ banners, arguing instead for a catch all action against ‘all banners’, which PBP did not support. Now the Sinn Féin spin machine claims that it was PBP who opposed the removal of offensive parachute regiment banners. As Eamonn McCann explains, this is not the first time the party has used controversy over a specific incident to enact wider powers of control for the Northern state.

Belfast City Council took an awkward turn on July 1st when discussing the flying of flags supporting Soldier F, the paratrooper facing two counts of murder and two of attempted murder arising from the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry.

The ‘Soldier F’ flags and banners had widely been condemned. The July 1st council motion was a direct result.

But instead of simply demanding the removal of Soldier F flags and banners, or broadening the motion to take in sectarian symbols or threatening messages generally, Sinn Féin took the lead in proposing a wide-ranging ban on all banners which didn’t have the approval of Stormont’s Department for Infrastructure—legal owner of street fixings such as lampposts.

Continue reading @ Rebel.

Flags, Banners & Sinn Féin Spin

Eamonn McCann lays bare the facts about Ian Paisley.

 
When there is mazooma to be made North of the border, it seems that the spectre of Ian Paisley is likely to be hovering close at hand. Why, having railed against the evils of online gambling, the MP for North Antrim is now happily receiving gifts from the betting giant, William Hill...

The pudgy prevaricator Boris Johnson has described French people as turds but, so far, hasn’t been given the heave-ho from public life. So it must be OK for me to call Ian Paisley a shit.

He’s also a sectarian bigot, a conman, a hypocrite, a guttersnipe, a liar and a parasite. But “shit” will do for the time being.

And this shit has form.

Continue Reading @ Hot Press.

Time To Tell The Truth About Ian Paisley

Eamonn McCann writes in the Irish Times that the Conditions that spawned New IRA have not gone away.

The events which were to culminate in the killing of Lyra McKee began with plans for a commemoration of the Easter Rising.

Saoradh, widely taken to be the political wing of the New IRA, had announced a march from the Creggan to the Republican plot in Derry city cemetery on Easter Monday for the traditional reading of the Proclamation, a message from the movement’s “military” leadership, a rendition of the national anthem.

If the march had gone ahead it wouldn’t have attracted a big crowd – a colour party in combat fatigues, a band piping rebel tunes, a straggle of followers, mostly young. A couple of hundred souls at most. In other circumstances, hardly anybody would have noticed.

The march would have been illegal ...

… Everybody knew there was going to be bother.


Continue reading @ Irish Times

Everybody Knew There Was Going To Be Bother In The North

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