Govt negligence prolongs Bridie's agony
Suzanne Breen, Sunday Life, April 6th, 2025
AFTER 58 COURT BATTLES, WIDOW OF SLAIN GAA OFFICIAL IS STILL FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE
THE sight of 87-year-old Bridie Brown barely able to walk, being supported into court by her two daughters, should shame the British Government to its core.
This Labour administration has so far displayed no more of a conscience than the Tory one that preceded it.
Because if the suits who hold power in London possessed an ounce of morality, they'd already be hanging their heads in embarrassment about how Bridie and her family have been treated for almost three decades.
They'd be seeking to right the wrongs inflicted on the Browns, not to prolong their agony.
On Thursday, Bridie was in court for the 58th time, fighting for her murdered husband Sean.
The Court of Appeal said the Government's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the killing was unlawful. It gave the secretary of state four weeks to reconsider his decision.
Bridie addressed him directly after the hearing. “Five judges have told you what to do. Do the right thing and please don't have me going to London,” she said.
Surely Hilary Benn realises how awful it would look for Bridie to have to board planes and trains, and cross the Irish Sea and fight for Sean in the Supreme Court?
What a damning indictment of British justice that would be.
Never ending battle
This woman has been forced to wage a never-ending legal battle to simply establish the truth about her husband's murder.
The father-of-six (left) was attacked by an LVF gang as he locked the gates of the Wolfe Tones GAA clubhouse in Bellaghy at 11.30pm on May 12, 1997.
Sean was 61, but he was fit. He'd done the maracycle the previous year.
There was a struggle, but he was overpowered and bundled into the back of his own car.
He was driven in a three-vehicle convoy to a secluded laneway in Randalstown 10 miles away. He was dragged out of his car, which was set on fire, and he was shot six times in the head.
His body was partially burned from the intense heat of the blazing vehicle. When her husband hadn't come home, Bridie knew something was wrong.
At 2.30 am, she'd taken a torch and walked the quarter-mile journey from the family home to the GAA clubhouse. She shone the torch around the building, but there was nothing to see.
When police arrived at her door a few hours later, she didn't need to be told the news. “Where's his body?” she asked them.
From the very start of this shocking story, Bridie showed the courage and conviction she still displays.
Open coffin
Despite Sean's injuries, she insisted on an open coffin. She said that everyone should see just what her husband's killers had done.
Nobody has ever been convicted of his murder.
The RUC investigation was beyond woeful. The LVF gang were caught on camera as they drove past Toomebridge police station, but that footage is now missing.
The inquest was delayed for years. Bridie finally thought she'd secure justice when it opened last year. It heard more than 25 people were linked to the murder, including several state agents. One suspect was a Royal Irish Regiment member.
The security services had one LVF suspect under long-term surveillance — it stopped the night before the killing and resumed the morning after.
The inquest was abandoned after the coroner confirmed he was unable to complete the legal process due to PSNI and MI5 failures to disclose vital information.
He called for a public inquiry. The High Court ordered in December that one be set up. Benn challenged that instruction, but lost in the Court of Appeal last Thursday.
Lady Chief Justice Siobhan Keegan couldn't have been clearer. She described it as “a shocking state of affairs” that more than 25 years had passed with “no lawful inquiry into the circumstances” of Sean's death.
ICRIR referral
Benn had argued that the new legacy body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, could deal with the case.
The Brown family, like so many others, have no faith in that body and believe any probe by it would be wholly inadequate. The court agreed with them that a public inquiry was the only way forward.
A further legal hearing takes place on May 2. The British Government has already put Bridie and her children through enough. At the 59th minute of the 11th hour, it has a final opportunity to do the right thing.
TALK IS CHEAP
Irish-language row is sign of deeper malaise
Sam McBride, Sunday Independent, April 6th, 2025
After a year of uncharacteristic harmony, the DUP and Sinn Féin are falling back on what they know best: Tribal disputes. While they bicker, essential public services are unravelling — but a structural change to Northern Ireland's government means this is now embedded in the system.
The scale of Northern Ireland's decline is overwhelming. Unionists once looked down their noses on the South, seeing their society as superior both economically and culturally.
Now the gulf between the two jurisdictions is distinctly in the other direction, and is growing not just because of the Republic's accruing wealth but because of Stormont overseeing the trashing of everything from the environment to the NHS.
Lough Neagh — from which 40pc of Northern Ireland's drinking water is drawn — is headed for another summer where it resembles a cesspit. Amid a growing housing crisis, houses across Northern Ireland can't be inhabited because there's no running water and the toilets can't be flushed. The health system is in perpetual and deepening crisis and the justice system is straining beneath the weight of a barristers' strike and seriously inadequate police numbers.
But for more than a week, Stormont's two main parties have been locked in dispute about whether £150,000 (€176,000) should be spent on Irish- language signage at Belfast's Grand Central Station — the new gateway to Northern Ireland's capital for most people who arrive from the Republic by bus or train.
Both the DUP and Sinn Féin are in their comfort zone here because this suits them electorally. There's no disincentive to avoid rows like this being repeated because voters don't punish or reward parties based on how their ministers fulfil their responsibilities. Instead, many voters care less about good government than about having a strong tribal champion or punishing the other side by voting for the party they dislike the most.
Likely to get worse
This is likely to get worse. As part of the deal to restore devolution in 2020, the DUP agreed to an Irish Language Act. The lead unionist party's actions had fuelled the campaign for the legislation, with leading figures like Gregory Campbell publicly mocking the language and saying at one point that his party would treat "Sinn Féin's entire wish list” — of which legislative support for the language was a key element — as "toilet paper”.
Such swaggering boorishness culminated in a deal where the DUP quietly agreed to an Irish Language Act — so long as it wasn't called that. It added in Ulster Scots legislation, something few unionists wanted, in an attempt to disguise that it had lost on the substantive issue. Central to that legislation is the appointment of an Irish-language commissioner.
For years, the DUP has stalled on that, but it couldn't forever avoid the consequences of its own deal and last month Stormont finally advertised for the role. The job advert for that commissioner — who'll be paid up to £89,000 a year — says they need to have "maximum impact”.
At the core of the position will be pushing for greater and greater government support for the language. This creates a structural problem for the DUP — but is entirely in keeping with how it repeatedly gets over one hurdle by placing a larger one a few yards down the track.
It could take the view that this is no big deal: Scots Gaelic and Welsh are increasingly visible in other parts of the UK, and so this is not antithetical to being British in the way it was in Georgian or Victorian times.
Keeping ahead of TUV
But the party is so weakened and so terrified of losing further support to the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) it is now trying to block Sinn Féin in the Executive and is believed to be preparing to take its Executive partners to the High Court over the Grand Central Station signage.
Viewed in the arc of the last quarter of a century, the DUP has clearly been losing this battle.
There is far more Irish being seen and used in Northern Ireland than there has been for centuries, and the DUP's grudging opposition has arguably made the language seem edgier and cooler than in the Republic, where government largesse and bureaucratic compulsion have failed to create the sort of Gaelic Ireland envisioned by Éamon de Valera and Eoin MacNeill.
North of the Border, while just 6,000 people (0.3pc) of the population claim to use Irish as their main home language and 71,900 people say they can speak it, the greatest percentage of those with some ability in Irish are 16-24-year-olds (16pc).
Passing on the problem
But there is also peril here for Irish-language activists who believe the tide of history is on their side. If they instinctively back every increase in expenditure on the language at a time when public services are in some areas imploding, it will look absurd to many of those who don't feel any affinity to the language, even if they're not at all hostile to it.
There is also the danger that they fail to question how this money is being spent. Is £150,000 really necessary to put some words on signs and into the software of ticket machines?
This dispute is the visual manifestation of a deeper malaise. In 1989, John Hume told the London Review of Books: "When people who differ share a piece of earth, they sit down and sort out their differences: that is what happens in every stable and peaceful democracy in the world.
"We either take up that challenge now, sit down with representatives of the rest of this island, in the confidence that we can not only represent but safeguard our various traditions, or we do not — and instead pass on this outdated and costly quarrel to the next generation.”
Some 36 years later, much of Hume's vision has been realised. The slaughter has ended, the Good Friday Agreement encapsulated his key ideas, and there is a power-sharing administration. But the costly row goes on and is poisonous to government.
An Executive at war with itself isn't going to resolve any of the problems hurting everyone, regardless of their politics, religion or the languages they speak.
