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ic NorthernIreland – Adams Is Accused Of Abusing Human Rights
Adams Is Accused Of Abusing Human Rights
Jan 30 2004
Belfast
SINN FEIN leader Gerry Adams was accused in court yesterday of abusing the human rights of people in the loyalist Shankill area of his West Belfast constitutency by refusing to take his seat at Westminster.
The claim was made by a lawyer for Frank McCoubrey, an independent unionist councillor in the Shankill, who applied for leave to seek a judicial review of the MP’s decision not to attend Parliament.
Before going into the High Court, Mr McCoubrey said the Shankill was one of the most deprived areas in the United Kingdom with mass unemployment, poverty, crime and low standards of education.
“By refusing to take his seat and in Parliament, Mr Adams is deliberately failing the people,” said Mr McCoubrey.
His lawyer, John O’Hara, QC, conceded at the outset that for the application to succeed under human rights legislation he had to establish that the MP was a “public authority.”
Mr O’Hara said Mr McCoubrey did not expect Mr Adams to support his unionist stance but he did expect him to intervene and do what he could on a non-party political basis in social and economic matters.
“Sinn Fein MPs at Westminster have been provided with facilities, presumably to fulfil a public function, but Mr Adams is declining to exercise that function,” he said.
“The result is that there is a section of the electorate which is frustrated and uprepresented.”
John Larkin, QC, for Mr Adams who was not in court, said it was impossible to see how he could regarded as a “public authority.”
“But if he is, it could only be in regard to proceedings in Parliament and he doesn’t sit there.”
Mr Larkin described as a “joke” the addresses of some of the 2,025 people who had signed a petition claiming that their MP had abandoned them. He said the addresses included a Pigeon Club and Blues Club.
Mr Adams and the four other Sinn Fein MPs are not allowed to take their seats because they refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen.
Mr Larkin said the oath was offensive to Mr Adams and it was Sinn Fein policy to abstain from attending Westminster.
Mr Justice Girvan asked: “If the oath was taken away would Mr Adams still refuse to sit?”
Mr Larkin replied: “That is a very detailed political question and I do not have instructions in that regard.”
Judgment was reserved. Outside the court, Mr Mc-Coubrey said he thought the case had gone “very well.”
“No matter what the outcome my opinion will not change,” he said.
“We have an MP who is abusing my rights and those of the people of the Shankill by not taking his seat in the House of Commons.”
Force Fed – Gerry Kelly recalls his time in Brixton when doctors attempted to force feed him more than 160 times
It was yet another shameful period in British penal history when Irish men and women were tortured and subjected to wooden bits and tubes being forced down their throats.
They were held down, bound and subjected to the hateful and deadly practice of forced feeding.
But it was not 200 or even 100 years ago. It happened as recently as the 1970s when young people were dancing to Jimi Hendrix and wearing bell-bottom jeans.
For a handful of Irish political prisoners being held in England in 1974 there was nothing but nakedness, brutality and fear as they languished alone in darkened cells. Nerves were frayed waiting for the moment when the doctors and screws would be at the door to take them to the room where it would be done.
A 19-year-old Gerry Kelly was one of those convicted in 1973 along with the Price sisters and the rest of his unit for the bombing of the Old Bailey.
He and his comrades were to endure an horrific protest for repatriation including a bitter hunger strike that would see them endure some of the worst excesses and brutality of the British penal system.
“There was an historic tradition of forced feeding, but it had been largely avoided by the British after Thomas Ashe died in 1917,” says Gerry Kelly.
Ashe died when his warders forced fed him the year after the Easter Rising and he suffered an horrific death drowning as food was forced into his lungs instead of his stomach. Sixty years later Gerry Kelly and his comrades would suffer the same deadly torture.
He recalls one of the first times when the doctors in the jail forced food down his throat. His shrunken stomach instantly rejected it. But on vomiting it up, the same food was poured back down seconds later.
“I was weak from being on hunger strike,” said Gerry Kelly, “and it was the first time they got this Complan-like stuff forced into my mouth. But my stomach just instantly rejected it. The doctor just lifted the kidney dish where I had vomited and put it back down my throat.”
Though Gerry Kelly was just a teenager, his resistance to the forced feeding eventually helped break the brutal practice.
He was held in Brixton, Winchester and Wormwood Scrubs Prisons and was attacked for forced feeding 167 times.
“It’s funny in a way. I was sitting naked and all I had around my neck was rosary beads. The doctors had told me horror stories about if you fought, the food would go down the wrong way.
“It was horrendous and horrific, but I was determined to fight. There were ten doctors in G2 ward, which was the mental observation wing of the jail. The operating theatre was right beside Hammersmith hospital.
“Out of the doctors three had refused to force feed. There was a doctor who was in charge. I told him I wasn’t doing it. When I heard them come I barricaded the door.
“There was only seven stone of me, but they lost the ‘bap’ and told me not to be so stupid. They got an eight-foot angle bar and put it against the door and pulled the lock down. I saw it coming apart in front of me and things were flying everywhere. About eight screws, the doctors and two nurses came in. I was pretty weak. They never brought back the nurses.”
The horrifying ordeal had begun and also the tactics to force Gerry Kelly to take the substance.
“They trailed me up and forced me down and secured me so much that I couldn’t move. When they got me flat they pulled me up and put me in the sitting position and then bent my head over the headboard.
“They tried to open my mouth and I learned then that your jaw muscles are some of the strongest in your body. They tried all crude stuff like pushing my nose up and getting my chin down. They tried to get in under my lips and trail them down.
“I got into a bit of a panic after they nipped my nose, but I just started breathing through my teeth. They pressed their knuckles into my jaws and pressed in hard.
“The way they finally did force feed me was getting forceps and running them up and down my gums. I opened my mouth, but I was able to resist after that.
“Then they tried – there’s a part of your nose, like a membrane and it’s very tender – and they started on that. It’s hard to describe the pain. It’s like someone pushing a knitting needle into the side of your eye. As soon as I opened my mouth they put in a wooden bit with a hole in the middle for the tube.
“They rammed it between my teeth and then tied it with cord around my head. Then they got paraffin and forced it down the tube. The danger is that every time it happened I thought I was going to die. The only things that moved was my eyes. They get a funnel and put the stuff down.”
But Gerry Kelly said he would not only use physical resistance but also psychological pressure on the doctors.
“The senior medical officer was a man who was a surgeon, but who developed arthritis and was very bitter. He would get the forceps and push the stuff down. It was a constant battle and it would be very painful waiting for this stuff.
“There was one young guy who I would argue with and I would ask him why he was doing it. He said it was to save my life, but I told him he was only doing it to be an English patriot. He was a bit left wing. He put down his tools and walked away.”
By June 3 1974 there was a change coming that force the British prison regime to stop forced feeding. Public opinion was moving against the British government,
“There was a court case about the legality of forced feeding.
“I don’t know if we won or the British government decided to end it before it got to that stage.
“I got a telephone call and we called off the hunger strike as we had been promised our own clothes and a transfer back to Ireland by Christmas.
“It was the first time there was ever a telephone call from prison to prison.”
But the British reneged and the prisoners were back on hunger strike by Christmas 1974.
In April 1975 the British government finally transferred the Price sisters to Armagh Gaol, and Gerry Kelly and his comrade Hugh Feeney to the Cages of Long Kesh.
Journalist:: Andrea McKernon
UUP rejects ‘Roman Catholic’ cemetery Sunday speakers – The week in the Council
Nationalist councillors in Newtownabbey have accused unionists of doing nothing to halt the crisis at Carnmoney cemetery after two Ulster Unionists supported by nine councillors voted to reject the setting up of a Friends of Carnmoney Cemetery Group.
The desecration of graves, and the ongoing protest that has including car bombs at Cemetery Sunday services dominated the first monthly meeting of 2004
The controversy of Carnmoney where the headstone of UDA victim Daniel McColgan has been damaged twice along with other Catholic graves rumbled on.
Nationalist councillors have accused unionists of opposing the cemetery Sunday services held each year in memory of the dead.
Over recent summers loyalist attacks and protests have marred the annual blessing of the graves.
Men dressed in Rangers shirts have for three years walked and stood about the graves as bereaved relatives said prayers for their loved ones.
They pulled out speaker wires from the PA system used to convey prayers and complained to journalists that they were being disturbed from remembering their own dead.
Ulster Unionist councillor Ivan Hunter complained about the PA being intrusive to other graveyard users.
St Bernard’s church was gutted in a sectarian arson attack in June 2001 and last September parish priest Fr Dan Whyte received a loyalist death threat after sectarian graffiti was daubed on the doors of St Mary’s on the Hill.
A leisure committee meeting on January 13 had taken minutes from the cemeteries’ working group held last December.
The group was established last year to come to an agreement over the blockade of the Catholic worshippers.
The minutes of the cemeteries group reported that a “Mr Stanley Clements of Risk Management Consultants gave a presentation to members during which he advised that any security solution to the Carnmoney cemetery problem would involve substantial expenditure on a combination of floodlighting, CCTV, fencing and constant monitoring”.
But before proposals could be approved to the leisure committee Councillor Ivan Hunter and his Ulster Unionist colleague Dineen Walker objected.
An amendment put forward by the unionist duo reads: “That (a) the decision of Item 3 be rejected – the setting up of a Friends of Carnmoney Cemetery Group.
“(b) consideration of item 4 – Cemetery Rules and Regulation be deferred pending further consultation with the Roman Catholic community regarding the use of public address systems in the cemetery.”
The SDLP’s Noreen McClelland hit out at the lack of progress on the Carnmoney issue.
“Nothing has been done in regard to security. Three months have gone by arguing about cemetery rules and I’m wondering if this working group was put together as a smokescreen. Is there any use in continuing with the working group?” she said.
The DUP’s Nigel Hamilton asked mayor Girvan what Cllr McClelland was implying.
“Is this council being admonished as deliberately being ineffective? I would like that clarified,” he demanded.
The DUP first citizen replied that Cllr Hamilton could take it the council was being admonished.
Tommy McTeague of the SDLP blasted “the way this working group has been treated”.
“I would have immediately resigned from it. Committees are disappearing and nobody’s said a word.
“Some of you do not believe in dialogue, which is the most important thing in politics.
“ There is more dialogue with the paramilitaries. The cemetery issue is very important. The Catholic population is not just going to sit back.”
Sinn Féin’s Breige Meehan said she had been told a meeting was to be held in January and that a letter was to be sent to the family of Daniel McColgan regarding their loved one’s damaged grave.
“I asked a council officer about holding an extraordinary general meeting and was told that a letter was being sent out to Mrs McColgan and that a meeting would be in January.
“We are now at the end of January and it’s been put on the back burner,” said Cllr Meehan.
Journalist:: Andrea McKernon
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