‘The man who started the Troubles’

Pat McArt, Irish News, March 15th, 2025

For more than six decades, the name Eamonn McCann has been synonymous with civil rights and street protests. He spoke to Pat McArt about the Troubles, his proudest achievement and why, at 82, the fire still burns bright.

TWO things about Eamonn McCann you can bet your life on are his politics and his dress sense.

Be it summer or winter, you can spot him a mile away – black leather coat, jeans, and socks so colourful you’d be tempted to look for a switch to turn them off.

Having turned 82 years old on Monday and afflicted by a neurological condition called ataxia, I was expecting to find a somewhat diminished figure.

Not a chance. Within a couple of minutes I was disabused of that idea. The intellectual fire still burns as bright as ever, the brain as sharp as a razor, and his politics, you soon understand, still as much a part of him as the air he breathes.

An author, journalist, politician and community activist, he’s the man who, for many, wrote the definitive book on Derry, War in an Irish Town.

McCann’s fame in those turbulent years of the late 1960s went global, his name synonymous with the civil rights movement and street protests. Articulate, passionate and always good for a quote, he often found himself centre stage when the international media came calling.

He was present at Bloody Sunday on January 30 1972 and following that atrocity became prominent in the campaign to get the findings of the Widgery Tribunal – which effectively absolved the Parachute Regiment of any wrongdoing – overturned.

And like the story of Scottish king Robert the Bruce and the spider who never gave up trying to spin Eamonn McCann a web, he stood for election on the same socialist platform on numerous occasions over more than half a century before, finally, getting elected to public office as an MLA in 2016. He was, by then, 73.

“ The abrasion was that we were increasingly self-confident but our community was still being kept down in the way our parents and grandparents had been kept down

So I thought I’d begin our interview with a simple question: “Eamonn, how do you feel about being described as the man who started the Troubles?”

He didn’t even pause to take a breath.

“I don’t mind that at all. But the truth is you can’t attribute that to any one individual or group. I was certainly involved in the civil rights movement and the crucial march in October 1968.

“But it was all started really years earlier with the Housing Action Committee occupying Springtown Camp. This was an old British army camp, huts really, and people were so desperate they moved in there.

“The closure of the railways in Derry is also rarely mentioned. It was as if Derry was being downgraded inch by inch back then. And then the decision to award the second university to Coleraine was so blatantly sectarian.

“So, it was a combination of many things that lit the spark.”

When McCann talks, you soon realise who set the course of his life.

His father, Ned, was a Belfast man – one of 14 children – who came to Derry during the Second World War to work at the docks. He was a semi-skilled electrician, but his real passion was socialism and the trade union movement.

Ned had seen James Connolly address workers in Belfast and held the 1916 leader in the highest regard for the rest of his days – not for his republicanism but his socialism.

Children of the Dead End and the 11 plus

For his 14th birthday, Eamonn says his father gave him a copy of Children of the Dead End by the Donegal writer Patrick McGill. It’s a story of the near-slavery endured by the working class poor in Ireland and Scotland in the early 20th century.

Within five years the young McCann was devouring the works of Karl Marx. And around him there was a society in flux and he was watching it with an eagle eye.

“We all lived in the Bogside back then and my da went to work every morning with Jim Sharkey, father of the singer Feargal, and Frank Deane, father of Seamus the novelist and academic. All that was part of the context of our lives.”

Martin McGuinness and Colum Eastwood shake hands while Mr McCann looks on during one of the many times he stood for election of resentment.”

So, what where those lives like? “Without question we were formed by the 11-plus. Seamus Deane was, I was and so were so many others. The culture in the Bog was changing rapidly.

“With the benefit of education we were more self-confident than those gone before us. We didn’t feel inferior, or that we should have to be quieter than our counterparts in the unionist community.”

His first day at the famed St Columb’s College in Derry is seared, clearly, in his memory. It brought home to him in a concrete way something he had been feeling about the class divide in society.

“I remember Fr Regan going around asking boys where they came from. I said Eamonn McCann, Rossville Street. And he said ‘Oh, that’s where you wash once a week’.

“Now this a priest saying that to me when I was 11 years old. It was the open expression of derision, a sort of what are you doing here?

“Of course the same thing would have happened John Hume a few years earlier, would have happened Seamus Deane too. We were looked down on, and there was that feeling What the young McCann wasn’t aware of was that people like him were to be the vanguard of the emerging Catholic community.

“Looking back on it, I recall we were told by the president of St Columb’s, Father McFeely (later Bishop of Raphoe), that we would be the future lawyers, accountants, solicitors, business people etc who were going to shape the future of this town. And that it was up to us to take charge of our own destiny.

Radical Future

“The abrasion was that we were increasingly self-confident, but our community was still being kept down in the way our parents and grandparents had been kept down.”

And so the political activism began. In the 1960s, revolution was in the air and on the streets, in music, and in culture. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez were to the fore in challenging society. There were protests against the Vietnam war, black people in America were marching for civil rights, and there were student riots in France and Germany.

All the young radicals in Derry, Eamonn states with obvious pride and fondness, were up to speed on the activities of Black Panther leaders like Huey P Newton, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X and Angela Davis. But their activism was not universally popular. They were not all that welcome in some quarters.

“That for sure. There weren’t too many middle-class Catholics marching for civil rights in ’68. There was a class divide. I was working class and I wasn’t respectable at all.

“My parents were ambivalent about my activism too. Maybe they took a bit of pride in it, but they were worried I would come to bad end.

“In fairness I never spent more than a couple of days in jail. I was once held in Liverpool jail for three days. It was really odd. I never got an explanation why. No-one ever came near me. No-one asked me any questions. And then I was let out.”

Hume and McGuinness

And what of contemporaries like John Hume and Martin McGuinness? How did he regard them?

“In our younger days, we obviously had our differences but in later years I got to like John.

“John was ultra respectable, though he was working class the same as me. By the time we were 65/70 years of age we both, I think, had mellowed. We had shared the same experience.

“John was from the Lecky Road, just a couple of hundred yards from where I grew up at 10 Rossville Street. We would all have known each other most of our lives.

“In the last years of his life I would say we were friends. I would meet John in Badgers (bar) and we had friendly conversations, reminiscing. Some evenings we even got a taxi home together.”

And Martin McGuinness?

“On a personal level I got on well with Martin. One time I fell out with the Provos over a comment I made and Martin publicly denounced me.

“A couple of weeks later I met him in the street and he laughed said don’t worry about it. We got on well.

“But let’s get this clear, Martin was ruthless. Some of the things that happened in this town shouldn’t have happened. And I don’t buy the justification from those republicans who explain it away with ‘there was a war on’.”

In his long career, is there anything he is particularly proud of?

“Getting the American arms company Raytheon out of Derry would be top of my list.

“Look at what Raytheon are up to right now in Ukraine. Like all the big arms companies, they have no morals. It’s all about sales and profits and to hell with the victims.

“If you check them out, you’ll find they had to pay almost a billion dollars to the American government to resolve a whole host of criminal charges. That’s not the kind of company this town should be associated with. Several us were charged and went on trial for our actions in getting them out of this town, but I am proud of that role.”

And any regrets?

“I was asked to leave Queen’s after being involved in a riot. I was drunk. I don’t remember what happened at all.

“If you ask me the greatest regret of my life, it was drink. I was never an alcoholic but there was a period I would have been drinking every day, a couple of pints, or often a lot more than a couple of pints.

“I remember all the shameful things we did, like drink driving. Everyone did it. I am ashamed of that now. I didn’t treat people I was in relationships with well either. And then with a few pints in you, you get into rows and start falling out with people. You lose the run of yourself.

“I haven’t drank in more than 25 years. I smoke dope now. Despite all the pearl-clutching outrage at smoking dope, it’s nowhere near as evil as alcohol.”

And that rebellious spirit, allied to the idealism of youth, has not gone away. During the course of a very long conversation, he points to several examples where working class people came together and brought about change.

He refers in particular to a visit to the Shankill Road, where he expected to get a hard time but was warmly welcomed. Working-class solidarity is a point he keeps returning to, time after time.

“The great divide in the world is not between black and white, men and women, but between those who produce the wealth, the working class, and those who hoard the wealth, the capitalist class. That is the big divide in life.”

Eamonn McCann might be 82, but he’s not easing off all that much.

I had agreed to meet him at the Rathmore Centre in Derry’s Creggan estate. On entering the building, I saw him sitting on a bench with a cup of coffee and munching on a bun whilst engaging in conversation with a young man.

As I came close, the young man pointed at me and said, “Ask that man”.

Ask me what, I enquired.

He replied: “They have just unveiled a mural of Nell McCafferty down at Free Derry Corner. I am telling Eamonn he should pick his wall now. This man is a legend.”

And he is too. Despite health problems, he never misses a Derry City game. During our conversation he was asked by several people to attend various functions. He refused one invite for the following night because he was going to a Derry Trades Council meeting. He’s also still an active member of the National Union of Journalists.

Of course I couldn’t end the interview without asking one final question: looking back on almost 70 years of struggle, was it worth it?

“Of course it is. In a way struggle is its own justification. If we didn’t struggle, what’s the point? Should we just accept everything? I don’t buy that.

“All advances in society come about because of mass mobilisations. At least two million people involved in the Russian revolution. In India it wasn’t Gandhi who won independence but the tens of millions who supported the independence struggle.

“The masses have been written out of history yet it is they who have made the difference.

“If people work together we can change everything.”

Pat McArt is an Irish News columnist and was editor of the Derry Journal for 25 years.

Comment

Eamonn Mc Cann, a personal assessment.

In the early 1960s  Eamonn McCann was established as a student debating star in Queen's, a green revolutionary socialist of fierce eloquence and scathing wit.  It was a role he never quite outgrew for.  the rest of his life.

 In "War in an Irish Town"  he extended beyond polemic to capture the flavour of  gerrymandered Derry on the cusp of change in 1969. He writes in a spririt of divilment, with sheer elation at  outwitting the bewildered denizens of unionism like Willie Beattie, the elderly Mayor whose day job was as a primary school head. The oppressed Mick proles were so obviously cleverer than the petty bourgeois Prods. And in Derry  they equally obviously far outnumbered them. What remained of unionist mystique was blown away in weeks..  

History shows how easy it was to kick over the indefensible rigged  system.of council rule and housing allocation. Throughout Northern Ireland official unionism was already losing self confidence under the guise of O'Neillism. Derry's town clerk had written secretly to O'Neill to.tell him that  Londonderry Corporation could not continue.

It's often forgotten that the shock of failing to win the second university for Derry in 1964-5 was shared by many unionists. The then mayor Albert Anderson marched  alongside John Hume in protest to Stormont. But other unionist councillors dubbed " the faceless men"  had been lobbying behind the scenes to deny the boost the university would have given  to a mainly Catholic town. 

Forgotten too is that the beleaguered unionist government legislated for council reform and employment equality within six months of October 5th 1968, Northern Ireland's Bastille moment.

. Reform was to prove irreversible but  too little, too late. The  notorious Protestant backlash kicked in,  failing to halt reform  but succeeding  in destroying the Unionist state. All too soon we were all on the way to hell in a handcart.

If only the nationalist revolution had paused for reflection at that early moment.  

The civil rights movement split several ways within a couple of months.  I remember chairing a radio discussion between Eamonn and the late Ciaran Mc Keown debating the wisdom or folly of the Peoples Democracy march from Belfast to Derry which was attacked by unionists, some of them B Specials in  uniform at Burntollet.

At the time these seemed epic events but in retrospect they were innocent days.They abruptly ended in August 69. Violence created its own far more sinister momentum. 

 Eammon McCann remains  faithful to the spirit of those early days, an internationalist who remains firmly rooted in the Bogside and Creggan , a lonely prophet,  implacably anti- Brit but genuinely non sectarian.  For him - and at times it seemed only for him- the idea of  " the people" survived through it all. Perhaps the flight of most Prods from the West Bank helped  sustain the illusion. 

Eamonn like John Hume supported  City of Derry cricket and argued for nationalists to support  Northern Ireland soccer team. He championed a revolutionary republican case untainted by violence for a quarter of a century before the IRA went political. An Ulster Tom Paine, he was much admired but too much of an old lefty to be taken seriously away from the debating hall and the printed page . He presented no challenge to the Provos, feeding off army occupation.

How much better though  it would have been had he been heeded or had possessed the political skills to form alliances like John Hume who was  too.much of a green Tory for his taste.

A perennially unsuccessful candidate until rewarded with a brief spell in the Assembly for People before Profit in 2016-17,  Eamonn McCann surely merits  the title " national treasure".  Even though I suspect he would rather spit in your eye than acknowledge it.

Brian Walker, a fellow (London!) Derry man.

Never thought I'd say this but sounds like Eamon has much in common with Corrymeela ethos- that by working together people come together and produce change. Interesting too that it was established with this understanding in 1965 - before the crisis of the troubles got going (but when admittedly the rumblings of sectarianism were in the air).

Patricia Mallon

I would say there was a bit more than rumblings in the air, Patricia. There's a nice little vox pop RTE TV made in Derry circa 1966 or 67 trying to show the city and the nationalists' lot in a good light but clearly fails to do so and issues a sort of plea for tolerance and things to improve towards the Catholics. Clearly the issue here is Civil Rights, not a 32 county Republic. Such a pity we had to wait so long for those rights, and some might rightly say the job is still a work in progress. Check out the video, it's probably on the RTE website.

Ruairi ÓBriain

Is this someone boasting or being praised for "starting the troubles"?

Mairín De Burca

I read the McCann piece yesterday.  I'm so proud he is a friend and colleague.  He is going to NUJ DM conference in Blackpool at the end of April and I am so looking forward to meeting up again.  Last time I saw him was just before Christmas at a Palestine demo.

That is a man with real balls - admitting what he has done wrong, regretting it and making amends.  As a fellow non drinker, I also admired his comments about the oul waccy baccy.  Better a weedover than a hangover!

Kathryn Johnston

Hi Padraig. I'm surprised at you. Do you not remember that it was Charlie Haughey who started the Troubles. Are you forgetting the approach he arranged with that South Derry IRA member with the offer of guns and money if they, the Republican Movement, gave up their social agitation in ROI, concentrated on N.I. and remove 3 named members from the organisation. And how he went on to arrange for Sean McStiofan to give one of the Orations at the re-internment in Ireland of two 1940's executed IRA members in Britain to raise his profile to become the Leader of the break-away Provisionals---------And all to ensure that Fainna Fail would not be replaced by radical Republicanism, led by the mighty Cathal Goulding.

Regards, Tom from Newry.

Thanks Tom,

But this discussion has been about the role of Eamonn McCann in the troubles, not the birth of the Provisionals. The origins of the crisis long predate that event, as does Eamonn McCann’s involvement in radical socialist politics.

Padraig Yeates

McCann certainly deserves an award for political consistency and seven decades of devotion to the SWP now the Profit People.

Giving critical support to the Provos was however a step too far.

Jeffrey Dudgeon

Storm Éowyn reveals SFs internal contradictions

Sam McBride, Belfast Telegraph, March 15th, 2025

EVEN SOME REPUBLICANS ARE DISMAYED AT THE REALITY OF WHAT SINN FEIN IS DELIVERING AT STORMONT. THE ANSWER DOESN'T LIE IN TRIBAL DISPUTES WITH THE DUP, BUT IN BASIC — AND GAPING — INCOMPETENCE

Sinn Fein has this week finalised a policy whereby it is demanding compensation for those in the Republic who lost electricity in Storm Éowyn — while rejecting such compensation for people in Northern Ireland.

Picking a bizarre issue on which to demonstrate partitionism, Mary Lou McDonald's party has done something so indefensible that even a former Sinn Fein MP is condemning it.

What's happened this week is about something far deeper, however.

Sinn Fein is increasingly facing the accusation that it is losing too much in Stormont. The blame for this is generally laid at the DUP's feet.

More alarmingly for Sinn Fein's voters, the party is floundering in areas which have nothing to do with the DUP and which aren't remotely tribal. It seems to be rubber-stamping whatever comes out of a Stormont bureaucracy which is demonstrably flawed and about which the DUP is now far warier.

Sinn Fein markets Michelle O'Neill in a presidential manner. She doesn't do many in-depth interviews, largely communicating with the public through Assembly set-pieces, brief press conferences going into an event, or slick social media PR videos produced by a specialist Sinn Fein team.

Governing in Stormont has always been part of a wider strategy to secure a place in government in Dublin. That's about symbolism — further blurring the border — but it's also about substance. Sinn Fein's one non-negotiable demand for being in a southern coalition would be to harness the bureaucratic machinery of the Irish state to prepare for a border poll.

Achille’s Heel

Arguably that lack of preparation is now the greatest vulnerability to nationalism winning such a referendum.

After the debacle of Brexit, where people voted for an idea without any detailed planning as to what that idea meant, it would be impossible to persuade the crucial cohort of constitutional swing voters to do so in circumstances where the stakes are astronomically higher.

Sinn Fein's choice of Stormont departments was seen as evidence of its determination to show southern voters that it could be trusted with real power. A party which at the start of this century said no company should be able to even own land chose Stormont's two key economic ministries: the Department for the Economy (DfE) and the Department of Finance (DoF).

This isn't just about convincing voters. Having recently told multinational corporations in the Republic that they have nothing to fear from a Sinn Fein government, this was a chance for the party to show that it has embraced the capitalist system on which the southern economy depends. After little more than a year in government, the party has achieved the opposite.

For years, Northern Ireland's water and sewage system has been crumbling. Now there are huge swathes of Northern Ireland in which almost nothing can be built.

In other areas, houses have been built but are uninhabitable because you can't turn on the tap or flush the toilet.

Last year a company planning a £25m factory in Newry instead decided to build it in the Republic because the NI water system was inadequate.

Denial is not a policy

Faced with this crisis, Sinn Fein's response has been denial. It doesn't want water charges. That's a perfectly legitimate policy if it has some other way of finding the money. It doesn't.

The party's one idea — getting developers to pay for water and sewage in areas where they want to build — would involve water charges by the back door, with the bill simply passed on to those buying new houses. Since that was pointed out, the party has gone quiet on a plan which would never have resolved the problem anyway. Instead, it has trotted out inane lines which expose that it doesn't know what to do with much of the power it now has.

A fortnight ago, Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins told the Assembly about NI Water: “I do not believe that the current funding model is not working. The problem is that we do not have enough funding.”

That's akin to saying: I don't think the petrol supply is broken; the problem is that the car doesn't have enough petrol.

Alongside this, Sinn Fein has chosen to maintain the perverse system whereby ratepayers in the poorest homes subsidise the rates bills of the uber-wealthy, even if they live in multimillion-pound mansions.

Despite its left-wing rhetoric, Sinn Fein admitted that this wasn't something it did reluctantly because the DUP made it. Instead, Sinn Fein's then Finance Minister, Caoimhe Archibald, made clear she didn't think it was fair to ask the extremely wealthy to pay their full bills.

This week, Archibald, who is now the Economy Minister, has found herself at the heart of another economic absurdity.

On Monday, her department admitted that no one who lost their electricity for long periods during Storm Éowyn in January will be compensated — despite the Executive having led them to believe that was likely.

After a backlash to the decision, Archibald did an interview the following night in which she said that when it comes to electricity “there is a very complex legislative and legal framework… for good reasons”.

In fact, the complexity isn't for good reasons.

Inaction

As my colleague Liam Tunney reported on Wednesday, as far back as 2017 — eight years ago — the Utility Regulator recommended that Stormont update its legislation to enable payments for extreme weather events. It wasn't done.

It was proposed again in 2023. Nothing has been done.

Far from this being “for good reasons”, it's because Stormont has failed to do its job, leaving Northern Ireland the only part of the UK without such a scheme.

That's why people in Scotland who lost power in Storm Éowyn are entitled to £85 if their power was off for at least 48 hours — and a further £40 for every six-hour period after that, up to a maximum of £2,000.

This operates on a similar principle to taxation; the cost is ultimately borne by the public who see small increases in their electricity bills to fund those who have suffered the most.

In her interview with the BBC's John Campbell, Archibald went on to spout platitudes, saying: “I think it's important that all of us take stock of the storm and how the response played out.”

'Taking stock' isn't going to compensate those who lost a freezer full of food.

After eight years of thinking about it, it seems the department still doesn't know what it wants to do.

Pressed on the fact that there was a path to compensation but it just wasn't one that Northern Ireland Electricity Networks (NIE Networks) liked, the minister admitted that was true but said it would mean customers paying some of the bill, something that “would not be very appreciated by many customers”.

Sounding like a spokeswoman for NIE Networks, she said that if it had to put its hands into its (very deep) pockets, this could impact its cost of borrowing — and ultimately that could mean higher bills for customers.

Eventually, she admitted that she didn't think this should happen, saying compensation in those circumstances was “not the right way to go”.

Monday's statement from Archibald's department said that if NIE Networks paid the compensation, half of the cost would be paid for by customers and half by the company. Bizarrely, the statement said: “NIE shareholders would have to agree to bear the rest.”

Dublin Govt runs NIE

This makes no sense because NIE Networks doesn't have “shareholders”; it only has one shareholder, and that's ESB, a company owned entirely (save for a tiny number of shares owned by its employees) by the Irish Government.

That government is now wallowing in unprecedented levels of wealth. To suggest, as Archibald's department did, that it would be unfair to ask this shareholder to contribute half the cost of compensation is baffling.

It also draws attention to the acute political awkwardness of the Irish Government owning most of Northern Ireland's key electrical infrastructure — the grid, the system operator, even a major power plant.

Any other company can simply fall back on capitalistic rigidity by washing its hands of any payments it's not compelled by law to make. A government can't do that quite so easily.

Leaning on clichés, Archibald went on to say it was “important that we do learn the lessons from this storm and this weather event… there's a lot of learning”.

Asked if NIE Networks had behaved well, she said the company was “in a very difficult situation”.

It must have been thrilled to hear a minister who might have been pressuring it instead deflecting criticism on its behalf.

Forked tongue

That same day, Archibald's party colleague Matt Carthy was denouncing as “disgraceful” ESB's refusal to compensate southern customers who suffered during the storm.

This was entirely in keeping with Sinn Fein's position on the issue until now.

In January, Archibald's predecessor, Conor Murphy, told the public that it had been “agreed in principle” that people impacted by the storm would be compensated.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald herself denounced ESB's stance, demanding the Taoiseach explain “what you propose to do about this… there has to be an intervention”. Initially, ESB said it didn't plan to compensate customers who lost electricity, because the costs would be met by other customers. But after a backlash, it changed stance, saying that it was “far too early” to decide how the costs of the storm would be met.

Sinn Fein TD Claire Kerrane said she was “frankly stunned” at ESB's initial refusal to compensate.

I asked ESB whether southern customers will be compensated, and, if so, who would pay. It said it wasn't compelled to pay compensation, but people could apply to the Irish Government for compensation.

Stormont has wasted weeks debating meaningless motions yet hasn't found the time to do what, as a legislature, is its main job — legislate in an area where legislation is clearly needed.

NIE Network's last annual accounts show an operating profit of £135m, up £18m from the previous year.

Last month, the then Finance Minister, John O'Dowd, said compensation was “a matter for the Utility Regulator and NIE”.

This is part of the culture of parcel-passing; in fact, the regulator had asked Stormont to act on this years ago and it just never bothered.

There is a reasonable argument that it would be unfair to a company to force it to pay compensation for a freak weather event. But it's hard to make that argument when you've said it should do just that across the border.

This is far more significant than being about the handling of a single storm. Climate change means such storms will become more frequent — and even more violent.

In January, O'Neill said “we believe there should be a goodwill payment” and that it was “unacceptable” that householders had extra bills as a result of the electricity being off.

Having heard that, even former Sinn Fein MP Francie Molloy this week couldn't hide his dismay at how ministers had built up expectations of compensation only to quietly walk away.

The veteran republican, who lost his power for several days, said the Assembly should have changed the law years ago.

Yet when I asked Sinn Fein to explain its contradictory approach to compensation, all the party would say was this: “Sinn Fein has sought compensation for customers across Ireland affected by Storm Eowyn.

“The Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald set up a working group to examine routes to compensation. However, the group concluded that compensation could not be made retrospectively.”

Sharks running the aquarium

What that doesn't say is that the working group includes NIE Networks. It's a bit like inviting a buzzard to sit on a committee to protect rodents.

The other two members of the group were Archibald's own department (the department advising the department) and the regulator, who'd told Stormont years ago to act on this issue. We asked for a copy of the working group's report; Archibald's department said we can't see it.

Nor does Sinn Fein's statement admit that the minister agreed that it would be wrong to make NIE Networks pay.

Without the law in place, she couldn't force NIE Networks to pay. But she could have heaped enormous pressure on the company to do so, yet decided to instead back it.

All of this is, on one level, baffling. How could an all-island party get its policy so hopelessly muddled on an issue which impacts huge numbers of people and exposes it to ridicule?

Privately, some republicans are dismayed at the lack of challenge from within Sinn Fein's Stormont system, comparing it unfavourably to what happens in the far more competitive southern system.

This is a particular problem for Sinn Fein — and for the Executive. But it's ultimately a problem for all of us, who are being failed by many of the public services under the control of these ministers.

‘Progress on bilingual sign pilot’

Irish News, March 15th, 2025

INFRASTRUCTURE Minister Liz Kimmins, Sinn Fein, has confirmed that ‘good progress’ is being made on a pilot scheme to provide traffic signs in Irish and English in west Belfast’s Gaeltacht Quarter.

The scheme, which is to trial bilingual traffic signs on the Falls Road between Springfield Road and Whiterock Road, was first announced in October by then-minister John O’Dowd.

The first of its kind pilot in the north is being developed with input from local Irish language development agency Forbairt Feirste.

The Department for Infrastructure (DfI) is also designing the layouts of the signs using guidance issued by advocacy group Conradh na Gaeilge.

DfI says it has identified 93 upright traffic signs and 35 worded road markings within the pilot area, with the majority of these relating to bus lanes.

Ms Kimmins said: “I am committed to promoting the Irish language as widely as possible within my remit so am pleased to confirm that we are making good progress on the development of the bilingual road traffic sign pilot in the Gaeltacht Quarter in Belfast.”

“As we celebrate Seachtain na Gaelige, this is an important and positive development to demonstrate my support for the Irish language as a living language used daily by this thriving community, and the actions being taken by my department.”

The addition of Irish to road traffic signs falls within DfI’s remit, while councils are responsible for Irish street signs.

It was recently revealed that Belfast City Council would survey three ‘long streets’ in the north of the city for the addition of signs in Gaeilge.

The council is considering keeping English-only signs in parts of the street where bilingual signs are not wanted by residents.

This is currently in practice on the Donegall Road, where bilingual signs can be found on the Falls Road but not beyond the Broadway Roundabout towards the loyalist Village and Sandy Row areas.

Lyons 'more than happy to attend a GAA match'

David Young, Belfast Telegraph, March 15th, 2025

COMMUNITIES DEPT HEAD RESPONDS TO CRITICISM WITH COMMITMENT

Northern Ireland's Communities Minister has pledged to attend a GAA match this year.

It comes after reports that GAA president Jarlath Burns had criticised Gordon Lyons for not attending a senior-level GAA match.

Sport falls within the responsibilities of the Department of Communities.

Speaking to the PA news agency in Washington DC, Mr Lyons said he hoped to attend a match this season.

“Whether that's on Friday or on a Saturday, I'm happy to do that. I've already reached out to individuals within the GAA.

“I would like to make the point that I have been to GAA clubs, have been to GAA events, have met with the GAA.”

Mr Lyons would not be the first DUP politician to go to a GAA match, with Arlene Foster attending an Ulster final with the late Chris Stalford.

Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly and former Communities Minister and current Education Minister Paul Givan have also tried their hands at camogie, Gaelic football and hurling.

Casement Park

Mr Burns's criticism of Mr Lyons came as part of wider concern over the redevelopment of Casement Park.

The Stormont Executive committed to redevelop the venue in 2011 as part of a strategy to revamp football's Windsor Park and the rugby ground at Ravenhill.

While the other Belfast-based projects went ahead, the redevelopment of Casement was delayed because of legal challenges by local residents.

In September, the UK Government ended hopes that the west Belfast stadium would host Euro 2028 games when it said it would not bridge a funding gap to deliver the redevelopment in time.

It said the risk to the public purse of missing the tournament deadline was too high and expressed concerns about how the cost of the project had potentially risen to more than £400m.

Addressing the issue of his attendance at GAA matches, Mr Lyons added: “I think some people are trying to use this to deflect from some of the other issues that are out there in relation to Casement Park, but I want to promote all sport in Northern Ireland.

“I want to be a minister that is helping all of those that want to get more active more often.

“And I have received invites in the past that I haven't been able to attend, but, as I said from the start, I'm more than happy to attend a match, and it's not going to be in any way ground-breaking. This is something that the DUP have been doing for years.”

Mr Lyons said issues at Casement Park were due to a funding gap and not because the Department for Communities portfolio was held by a DUP minister.

The East Antrim MLA said he and Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn were due to discuss funding issues next week.

“I want to explore the options. I want to see what the Government is thinking in terms of extra investment for Northern Ireland in terms of sport. I want to make sure that is done on an equitable basis.”

Mr Lyons and Mr Benn are in Washington DC as part of a series of events for St Patrick's Day.

Also speaking to PA, Mr Benn said it is “very important” that work starts on Casement Park before planning permission runs out next summer, but he refused to say whether the UK Government would make a contribution.

Asked about concerns that the DUP is running down the clock, he said it “would make no sense at all” to allow planning permission to lapse.

He added: “I want Casement Park to be built. I can't say at the moment whether the UK Government will make a contribution; we have the spending review in play at the moment.

“But regardless of that, any contribution from the UK, there would still be a gap, and therefore all of the parties who want to see Casement Park completed are going to have to look at the nature of the project, its scale, reflecting on the changed circumstances, and also trying to see whether other sources of funding can be identified to get it built.”

Defending democracy or making millions from killing machines?

James McNaney, Belfast Telegraph, March 15th, 2025

Situated amid the supermarkets, sports shops and depots that line the Montgomery Road, an unassuming and boxy building is creating billions of pounds worth of supersonic missiles.

Positioned opposite a DVA driving test centre, Thales east Belfast is mostly hidden behind a high security wall. Staff wearing lanyards come in and out to a street full of parked cars.

Yet this unremarkable place finds itself at the centre of the latest attempts to fight Putin’s forces in Ukraine.

Two hundred new jobs are set to be created with the Government investing £1.6bn in the factory as part of an order for 5,000 air defence missiles for Ukraine.

Thales has a significant economic footprint in east Belfast, but is not as well known as some of the other firms emotionally connected to the area.

Locals, largely, are ambivalent about finding themselves in the crosshairs of the Russian president.

‘I’m not afraid of Vladimir Putin’

One told the Sunday Times recently: “I’m not afraid of Vladimir Putin, the evil wee man. I lived through the Seventies and Eighties here. I could have been getting on a bus and ‘bang’, but I still got on buses.”

Most in the neighbourhood who spoke to the Belfast Telegraph were either unaware of Thales’ factory, or did not want to share their opinions on it.

Unite the Union, which represents workers at the plant, also declined to speak about this story.

While the fortunes of local industrial titans have fluctuated, Thales has been a much steadier business.

It employs 900 people in Northern Ireland including around 700 in east Belfast, where it makes the LNM and the STARStreak missiles and assembles Saab’s “next generation light anti-tank weapon”.

The £1.6bn announced by Sir Keir Starmer earlier this month is a significant spend in the local economy — for context, the entire Executive’s budget is around £19.3bn.

The investment is also significant for the company. Its immediate parent, Thales UK, posted a £167m loss on a turnover of £1.1bn in its 2023 accounts.

Yet, as with many things here, reaction has been mixed.

While the DUP said defence was a “vital part of our economy”, First Minister Michelle O’Neill said she was “incredulous” that money was being spent on armaments instead of invested in public services. The defence sector is a growing slice of the local economy, partly because of how it connects to other high-technology manufacturing.

Leslie Orr, the director of ADS NI, the industry body that covers the aerospace, defence, security and space sectors here, said they contribute £2.2bn to the Northern Ireland economy.

“It’s a massive industry that employs about 10,000 people,” he explained.

‘Top Tier’ customers

“Defence products are really sold to governments. Often the value of procurement is seen as going to the primes: the top tier companies.

“In Northern Ireland’s defence sector, around 95% are SMEs. And we have a really major prime company in the defence world, and that’s Thales. A few years ago, during the Covid pandemic, the global aerospace industry was halted, basically grounded for two years.

“Over 100 companies in Northern Ireland were coming to us saying: ‘Find me some other business.’

“The most adjacent sector that will help them survive is the defence sector, which is very steady.”

Geopolitics is boosting defence expenditure across Europe. The UK Government has recently reallocated millions of pounds of money earmarked for foreign aid to boost its defence spending to 2.6% of GDP.

The German government is attempting to amend the country’s constitution to allow it to borrow more money, in part to fund a huge boost to arms manufacturing there.

The war in Ukraine has increased business for arms manufacturers.

Speaking to the NI Affairs committee last May, David McCourt, the director of strategy at Thales, said: “Our order books in 2023 and 2024 have grown exponentially as a result of what is happening in Ukraine, so we have doubled our production lines. We hope to double those even further.”

Mr Orr said that the industry’s purpose was “defending and protecting lives, and about defending and protecting democracy around the world.

Defending freedom or fuelling war?

“The situation in Ukraine is actually about defending people’s freedoms.”

Other figures have criticised increased arms sales, with Lindsey German, the national convenor of Stop the War Coalition, telling this paper it is “fuelling insecurity in international relations”.

“We are told that Russia is an imminent threat; that isn’t true. It is in possession of less than a fifth of Ukraine, has many problems with the war, has an economy the same size as Spain, and its arms spending is dwarfed by the EU states, let alone NATO,” she said.

Defence contractors are not as public-facing as other high-value companies. Their customers are mainly national governments, and they do not need a big public presence to improve sales.

The sector has become more visible since the start of the war in Ukraine. One of Europe’s best supported football clubs, Borussia Dortmund, has taken on arms manufacturer Rheinmetall as a sponsor. People attending the fan-owned club’s AGM in November saw tanks painted in the famous yellow and black of Dortmund’s shirts.

In Northern Ireland, Thales is a title sponsor of the Portrush Airshow, and its factory in east Belfast has been visited, and praised, by former Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Not all residents are comfortable with Thales’ visibility, or its presence in east Belfast. David Mitchell, an academic who lives and works in the city, said it is “chilling to think that there are weapons being made, in areas where we’re going about our daily lives taking kids to school, going to the swimming pool”.

Mr Mitchell (43) has lived in Belfast for over 20 years, and recently wrote a blog post criticising Thales. “I find it really depressing, especially when local and national politicians are celebrating this as some great economic boost,” he said.

“The reality about the defence industry is it’s all kind of a euphemism; it’s about creating killing machines designed to blow human beings into pieces.

“I don’t think people are that much aware of these companies, and they keep quite a low profile.” Helping to defend democracy around world or making killing machines... the multi-million pound east Belfast weapons factory

Freddie Scappaticci’s banal hideout in a sleepy Surrey town

Mark Paul in Guildford, Irish Times, March 15th, 2025

The man known as Stakeknife, the British army’s agent in the IRA, was hidden in Guildford

Frank Conway’s neighbours on his quiet residential road in England didn’t know who he really was. To them, he was the portly Irish man who lived reclusively in a big house behind a high hedge on their smart road on the edge of Guildford, an hour southwest of London, deep in suburban Surrey.

Conway’s daily life was as nondescript as his surroundings. He mostly stayed inside. He walked his dog. He kept his head down. He lived alone.

His neighbours had no clue the Belfast man’s real name was Freddie Scappaticci, a brutal killer who also spent years spying for the British military inside the IRA’s internal security unit. He was the double agent known as “Stakeknife”.

Scappaticci, born to an Italian family that came to Belfast in the 1940s, grew up in the Markets area of the city and was an active IRA member from the 1970s. He became a paid spy for the British army in the IRA some time that decade.

By the 1980s, he was a central figure in the heart of the IRA, in its internal security unit, charged with flushing out informers in a role that also gave him access to IRA secrets. The British army considered him a prized agent, its“golden egg”within the paramilitary group.

In 2003, he was unmasked as the agent codenamed Stakeknife by the media, outed by a former British military intelligence officer. He strongly denied being a double agent but fled the North, choosing a life of anonymity in England.

Later, Operation Kenova, the police inquiry set up in 2016 to investigate Scappaticci’s activities, linked Stakeknife to at least 14 murders and 15 abductions while working for the British army in the IRA. Following a seven-year investigation, costing £40 million, Kenova’s interim report, published last year, found Scappaticci probably cost more lives than he saved and that British security forces failed to prevent some murders to try to protect their agents in the IRA.

Scappaticci’s after-life

British intelligence officers eventually hid Scappaticci in Surrey, a few years after his cover blew in 2003. An incongruous aspect of the choice of location to stash the British army’s most senior mole in the IRA was that Guildford was also the site of one of the group’s most notorious pub bombings, in 1974.

Decades later, Scappaticci, as Conway, sometimes walked his spaniel in Stoughton fields near his house. But he was most often spotted at Whitmoor Common, a partly forested area a five-minute drive away, popular with local dog walkers. He rarely mixed with them. Some would pop into the Jolly Farmer pub on the far side of the Common afterwards, but never him.

“I’ve been drinking in here for 15 years and I never saw him in this pub once,” says a Jolly Farmer regular, giving his name as Dave, as he studies a photo of the former IRA man and tries to pronounce his real name.

He could recall, however, the time in January 2018 when the former IRA man was arrested by officers working for Operation Kenova. The inquiry is still examining allegations that police in the North colluded in IRA killings to protect Stakeknife’s cover. Its final report is due soon.

Unprompted in the pub, Dave opens up Google maps and zeros in on the house where Scappaticci lived, a detached Edwardian property fronting the main thoroughfare on the corner of a cul de sac. “Is that it?” he asks.

Kenova raid

Dave’s house is nearby. He used to pass Scappaticci’s every day as he headed for the A3, the main road running southwest out of London to Porstmouth, on his way to work. He remembers the arrest; scores of officers formed a line at the front and the side of the house.

“They stayed there for about a week,” he says. “I passed them every day.”

One of Scappaticci’s neighbours across the road was on holidays when the arrest took place, but when he came back the area was crawling with officers. They only found out afterwards their neighbour was Scappaticci. He can remember speaking to him just once. The neighbour was getting his driveway cobbled and Scappaticci, a bricklayer all his life, wandered across to inspect the job and chat to him about it.

Dave suggests speaking to Alex, who owns the cafe across the road, to see if he remembers more of Scappaticci’s movements.

“Anyone who lived for years here would have been a regular in that caff,” says Dave. But Alex insists he wasn’t. Try the estate agents, he says.

The estate agent says he knows nothing about “Conway” or Scappaticci. He does suggest he may have been involved in a transaction on the house; he did not clarify whether for its purchase in 2008, before Conway’s use, or its sale in 2019, soon after Scappaticci was convicted of keeping extreme pornography found on laptops in the house in the Kenova raid.

The estate agent suggested he had dealt with a man who told him he was the son of the man involved in a deal, but it seems more likely that he could have been unwittingly dealing with a representative of the British security services.

Official records show that the house was bought in March 2008 for £350,000, a 46 per cent uplift on the price it had sold for just 12 months previously, suggesting the buyer might not have been too interested in market value. From soon after this, Scappaticci lived there until his arrest in January 2018 – it is not known where he lived after that.

He died in poor health in early April 2023, with scant details known. His former home in Guildford was sold in September 2019 for £443,000. Similar houses in the area sold for between £600,000 and £700,000 over the past year. When he lived there, Scappaticci had not hidden in a pit of penury.

Many of his other former neighbours are not keen this week to talk much more about the IRA agent who had lived secretly in their midst. The neighbour on one side says he is “sick of all this” when asked if he can recall “Conway”. One source, however, says his family cared for Scappaticci’s dog when he had been ill. They were “sickened” when they found out afterwards who he really was.

Doors slam

A woman in another adjacent house looks similarly exasperated when asked about him. Doors slam shut. Neighbours shake their heads. Doorbells go unanswered. Scappaticci’s former house is now occupied by a family who have nothing to do with any of this. The garden is adorned with accoutrements of everyday family life – a trampoline, a swing. Life has moved on, back to the familiar humdrum beat of middle-class suburbia.

There is a post office and a Co-Op supermarket around the corner from the house. Despite having such conveniences on his doorstep, Scappaticci was said to have often driven out of the neighbourhood. There is also another pub, the Wooden Bridge, nearby. None of the locals in there this week know of Scappaticci having visited it. One man with a long beard, and a jacket-wearing dog named Diesel, says he knows nothing about any IRA agents. He used to be in the British army, he says, and served three tours in Northern Ireland.

“I think of that famous picture of Osama bin Laden hiding in that bare house in Pakistan, when he was filmed lying there watching telly,” says Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA prisoner-turned-author who in 2023 wrote the book Stakeknife’s Dirty War.

“I have this image of Freddie, living similarly, neglecting himself. He was very flexible, but his problem was that most of his family had cut him off. They didn’t bother with him a great deal in the end. But he would have been watching everything back home, from afar.”

People can only speculate about many of the details of Scappaticci’s Surrey life, says O’Rawe. But he believes he may have been preoccupied by a sense of betrayal by the British state, having been its agent for years, only to find Kenova agents coming after him. He referred to a recent book on Stakeknife by another author, Henry Hemming, who wrote that Scappaticci had apparently hinted to handlers that if he was going down, he was bringing them with him.

Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner who knew Scappaticci decades ago, says he might have lived a “lonely life” in Surrey but his “choices were limited”. Before Guildford, there were rumours Scappaticci had been hiding around Cheshire or Lancashire – he was a big Manchester City fan.

A lonely life

“Freddie had to live that lonely life,” says McIntyre. “He couldn’t let his guard down. He wasn’t going to make it easy for his enemies to get him.”

He says the relative domestic comfort in which it appears Scappaticci was hidden speaks to his seniority as an IRA mole for the British. McIntyre does not, however, believe Scappaticci was the British state’s most senior IRA asset – just the military’s top agent.

Belfast lawyer Kevin Winters of KRW Law, who represents more than 20 families of the victim’s of Scappaticci and his IRA “nutting squad”, last week wrote to Operation Kenova to suggest Stakeknife may not have been a single individual. Others such as McIntyre and O’Rawe do not agree with this.

Winters suggested the “industrial use” in the media of the name Stakeknife – he said it was not an official military code name – had served only to obscure some of the reality of the British state’s penetration of the IRA. He said Kenova’s scope of interest was too “Stakeknife-centric”, that there were many other agents and that more attention should be given to the fact that Stakeknife “was not alone”.

“If they are ever going to name Scappaticci as [the one and only] Stakeknife, the full background of it all needs to be laid out,” Winters said.

The families of Scappaticci’s victims want a public inquiry and to be given full details of what Kenova knows about what happened to their murdered loved ones. One of Winters’ clients is the family of Thomas Emmanuel Wilson, a Workers Party member who was killed, seemingly on Scappaticci’s order, in 1987. His family have always denied he was an informant.

Son of one victim says ‘we want to know everything’

The dead man’s son, Paul Wilson, recently visited Scappaticci’s base in Guildford with the makers of a BBC podcast series on Stakeknife. His impression was that the locals resented being deceived into having such a man hidden there.

“When I heard it was Guildford, I said ‘no way,’” says Wilson, drawing the link between its past as the location of a notorious IRA bombing, and its role as sanctuary for Scappaticci. He is also struck by how close it was to Aldershot Garrison, one of the army’s main facilities in southeast England, barely 15 minutes away.

Wilson just wants the British state to tell his family everything it knows about his father’s death. There also should be a public inquiry into Stakeknife, he says. While he believes Kenova investigators “did their job”, he fears the British establishment will intervene to turn the forthcoming final Kenova report into a “glossy piece of paper that says nothing”.

“If they’re redacting stuff, they’re telling me just enough to scrape by,” he says. “We want to know everything. If I have to, I’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement, I’ll sign anything. Just tell me who, what, why. Ultimately, the government will only tell you what they want you to know.”

By opening the inquiry, Wilson says, the British establishment has “opened a wound” for his family. He now fears “they are going to leave that wound open”.

Growing number of unionists open to united Ireland, McDonald says

Órla Ryan, Irish Times, March 15th, 2025

There has been ‘revolution in terms of how people self-define’, Sinn Féin leader tells Dublin event

Sinn Féin has long called for a Citizens' Assembly on the possibility of a united Ireland, ahead of a referendum. Photograph: iStock

An increasing number of unionists in Northern Ireland are open to having conversations about a united Ireland, Mary Lou McDonald has said.

Speaking at an event in Dublin on Friday evening, the Sinn Féin leader said: “Increasingly you’re meeting people, especially from a unionist, a Protestant, loyalist background who are looking at this, saying: ‘tell me about this, let me into this, do not other me in this’.”

Ms McDonald was speaking during a panel discussion held after a screening of The Irish Question, a documentary that explores what a united Ireland might look like, at the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar.

Sinn Féin has long called for a Citizens' Assembly to be held to examine the possibility of a united Ireland, ahead of a referendum on the topic.

She said a Border poll is inevitable and “if we prepare well, I think we can make an incredible opportunity for our country and for everybody: British, Irish, both, neither – because that’s a dynamic in our communities and on our island now as well.”

Ms McDonald said, in her lifetime, there has been “a revolution in terms of how people self-define”, adding that most no longer feel “solely defined, or worse, confined because of the religious belief in which you happened to be raised or born into”.

During the panel discussion, which was moderated by Irish Times journalist Mary Minihan, Ms McDonald acknowledging that some people have concerns that moving towards a united Ireland could reignite violence in the North.

“It would be very, very foolish for anybody to entirely dismiss that fear.”

No return to violence

However, she said there is “a wide public appetite for stability, for progress, and certainly for no return to violent actions from anybody from any quarter”.

Ms McDonald said “a lot of hurt and a lot of damage was done historically” but she believes people with different views on an united Ireland can move forward together by “accepting that you always have things to learn, and just being respectful”.

A recent opinion poll for The Irish Times found that support for Irish unity has grown significantly in the past three years in Northern Ireland, though a clear majority remains in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom.

Although the poll suggests that a Border poll would be soundly defeated in the North and passed comfortably in the South, the results over the past three years of annual polls suggest a rise in support for Irish unity in the North.

In addition, there are signs that “losers’ consent” among unionists – the willingness to accept the result of a referendum they would lose – is increasing.

Stanley Matchett, whose Bloody Sunday images won him Press Photographer of the Year has died

By Paul Ainsworth, Irish News, March 15th, 2023

One of the north’s best-known photographers has died at the age of 92 following a career that spanned more than four decades.

Stanley Matchett, who previously worked for the Belfast Telegraph and was awarded an MBE in 2003 for services to photography, died on Friday at his home in Carryduff.

He was known for iconic images including photos taken on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 of Father Edward Daly waving a bloodstained handkerchief as one of the victims Jack Duddy, was being carried through the streets.

Mr Matchett also famously captured shots of the Beatles during their performances in Belfast in 1963.

He was named NI Sports Photographer of the Year on three occasions and also won Press Photographer of the Year in the Rothmans Press Awards.

Along with his wife Maureen, Mr Matchett hosted photography course in Co Donegal for over 20 years, inspiring hundreds of amateur photographers to hone their skills further.

A death notice described him as the “dearly beloved husband of Maureen, much loved father of Karen, Joanne and Gavin, devoted grandfather, great-grandfather and dear brother of Norma”.