Brexit-aren ondoren: Irlanda, Eskozia eta EB

Britainia Handiak 2020ko urtarrilaren 31n Europako Batasuna formalki utzi zuenean, bere aldekoek ospatu zuten “subiranotasun britainiarra” berrezarri zela, baina Brexitak bultzada berri bat eman dio estatu britainiarraren desintegrazioari, Eskoziaren independentziari eta Irlandaren batasunari emandako babesa handituz. EBk, oro har, begiko ditu asmo horiek, baina neurri handi batean pasiboa izan da, haustura politikoarekiko duen higuina dela eta. Baliteke jarrera hori aldatu behar izatea.

Irlandako mugak zailtasun larriak eragin ditu Brexit-aren negoziazioetan eta ordutik hona. EBren muga porotsu berri batek, gatazka osteko eremu batean, merkatu bakarra eta EBko aduana-batasuna mehatxatzen zituen, eta irudimenezko konponbideak eskatzen zituen. Azken erantzunak, Brexita Erretiratzeko Akordioaren “Irlanda/Ipar Irlandari buruzko Protokoloak”, eszenatoki bat negoziatu zuen “bi munduetako onena” jasoz: merkatu bakarra, eskualde-ekonomia, jurisdikzio britainiarra eta 1998ko Ostiral Santuko Akordioan ezarritako eskubideak babestea.

Hala ere, Britainia Handiak mugari eta Irlandako iparraldeari emandako tratu arduragabeak bultzada berri bat eman dio Irlandako batasunari buruzko eztabaidari. 

Irakurri artikulu osoa Gure Esku - Periskopioan.

Después del Brexit: Irlanda, Escocia y la UE

Cuando Gran Bretaña abandonó formalmente la Unión Europea (UE) el 31 de enero de 2020, sus partidarios lo celebraron como una restauración de la «soberanía británica», pero el Brexit ha dado un nuevo impulso a la desintegración del Estado británico, con el aumento del apoyo a la independencia de Escocia y a la unidad de Irlanda. La UE, aunque en general simpatiza con estas aspiraciones, ha permanecido en gran medida pasiva debido a su instintiva aversión a la ruptura política. Es posible que esta postura tenga que cambiar.

La frontera irlandesa ha causado graves dificultades tanto durante las negociaciones del Brexit como desde entonces. Una nueva frontera porosa de la UE en una zona post-conflicto, amenazaba el mercado único y la unión aduanera de la UE y exigía soluciones imaginativas. La respuesta final, el «Protocolo sobre Irlanda/Irlanda del Norte» del Acuerdo de Retirada del Brexit, negoció un escenario recogiendo «lo mejor de ambos mundos»: proteger el Mercado Único, la economía regional, la jurisdicción británica y los derechos establecidos en el Acuerdo de Viernes Santo de 1998.

Sin embargo, el imprudente trato de Gran Bretaña a la frontera y al Norte de Irlanda ha dado un nuevo impulso al debate sobre la unidad irlandesa.

Lea el artículo completo en Gure Esku - Periskopioa.

After Brexit: Ireland, Scotland and the EU

When Britain formally left the European Union (EU) on January 31, 2020, its supporters celebrated it as a restoration of “British sovereignty”, but Brexit has given fresh impetus to the disintegration of the British state, with support for Scottish independence and Irish unity rising. The EU, while generally sympathetic to these aspirations, has remained largely passive due to its instinctive dislike of political rupture. This stance may need to change.

The Irish border has caused serious difficulties both during Brexit negotiations and since. A porous new EU frontier in a post-conflict zone, it threatened the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union and demanded imaginative solutions. The eventual answer, the “Protocol on Ireland/ Northern Ireland” to the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, negotiated a “best of both worlds” scenario: protecting the Single Market, the regional economy, British jurisdiction, and rights set out in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

However, Britain’s reckless treatment of the border and the North of Ireland has breathed fresh life into the Irish unity debate. 

Read the full article at Gure Esku - Periskopioa.

Ireland: British collusion exposed in hundreds of paramilitary murders

The BBC’s Panorama program on May 28 made explosive revelations about British state collusion with paramilitaries in the North of Ireland, implicating it in the murder of hundreds of people, and in subsequent cover-ups.

The documentary, titled "Britain’s Secret Terror Deals", detailed British security forces collusion with illegal paramilitary groups in the North on a vast scale, running thousands of informants and agents, many of them known criminals and murderers.

Former Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’Loan told the program that some paramilitary informants recruited by the security forces during “the Troubles” were serial killers, and that their crimes – including murder, intimidation, drug smuggling and terrorism – were covered up.

“They were running informants and they were using them,” O’Loan told the program.

“Their argument was that by so doing they were saving lives, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died because those people were not brought to justice and weren’t stopped in their tracks,” she said.

"There was impunity really for these people to go on committing their crimes. Many of them were killers, some were serial killers."

Outcry at plans to make a comedy about Irish Famine

Irish Famine Memorial in Dublin

On 30 December, the Irish Times set off waves of outrage and disbelief when it reported that British TV station Channel 4 was commissioning a comedy set to the backdrop of the Irish Famine.

The Famine (or An Gorta Mór, as it is known in Irish), lasted from 1845 until 1852, and saw well over one million people in Ireland die from starvation and disease.

Many of them were buried without coffins, in mass pauper graves; others were left where they dropped for fear of contagion, their mouths green from the grass they ate in desperation to stay alive.

For many that died, their names and deaths were not recorded; their memory lost forever. A further one and a half million emigrated during the Famine to places like Boston, New York, Liverpool and Australia.

The Irish population dropped by 30 percent in six short years, and the political and cultural impact of the Famine can still be felt to this day. So too can the demographic impact – the Irish population has never properly recovered from the impact of the Famine, and is still lower than pre-Famine levels.

A Change.org petition calling on Channel 4 to not make the show has already reached close to 40,000 signatures.

Hillsborough – a disaster forged in ruling-class hate

Twenty-three years too late, the real truth is finally being told about the Hillsborough disaster of April 15, 1989, which killed 96 football fans and injured hundreds more.

A new 354-page report, released by the Hillsborough Independent Panel after accessing over 400,000 pages of secret documents, has implicated the police, media and British government in what has been described as “the biggest cover-up of British legal history”.

Importantly, it has also cleared Liverpool fans of the vile accusations that the media, police and politicians have thrown at them for over two decades, and has opened the way for justice to finally be won.

On April 15, 1989, Sheffield’s Hillsborough football stadium played host to the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest.

At 2:52pm, Chief superintendent David Duckenfield directed South Yorkshire police to herd thousands of Liverpool fans into an already dangerously over-packed part of the stands on the Lepping’s Lane end of the ground.

As they surged forward, those being crushed at the front sought to have the gates opened to the nearly-empty neighbouring stands, and tried to climb over the high fences to safety.

The police refused to open the gates or help fans. Instead they beat them with truncheons back into the deadly crush.

As the bodies of the injured and dying began to pile up on the field, police lined up three rows deep to keep fans off the pitch, calling in dog-handlers, and assaulting and arresting those trying to give first aid to the injured.

Elections punish Lib-Dems, boost Scottish independence

Voting across Britain on May 5 resulted in a rejection of changes to the electoral system, but election results in Scotland may herald the end of Britain as we know it.

The referendum on introducing an “Alternative Vote” voting system (much like the preferential voting system in Australia) to replace the current “First Past The Post” system was decisively defeated. With a turnout of only 42%, 67.87% voted against the change.

In council elections held on the same day across England, the Labour party was the biggest winner, achieving a 10% swing to take 37% of the popular vote and pick up 857 new councillors.

Labour’s gains were particularly strong in the north, where its traditional heartland is suffering the brunt of the Conservative Party-dominated government’s austerity drive.

Despite presiding over the austerity measures, the Conservative vote actually increased slightly to 38%. The bulk of Labour's swing came from the Liberal Democrats.

The Liberal Democrats, who are in coalition government with the Conservatives, dropped 9% to 17% overall, and lost 748 local councillors.

Bobby Sands: 30 years on hunger strike - never defeated.

On March 1, 1981, Irish Republican political prisoner Roibeárd Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh - known to all the world as Bobby Sands - went on hunger strike in Britain's "H-Block" prison cells of Long Kesh prison.

He went on hunger strike after he and fellow Republican prisoners had gone on a failed "blanket strike" - refusing to wear prison uniforms - as a protest against Britain's refusal to recognise their status as political prisoners in the struggle for Irish freedom.

In 1978, after a number of them were attacked leaving their cells to empty their chamber pots, their protest escalated into a "dirty protest" - the prisoners refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement.

When that strategy too failed to budge the Brits, some among the "blanket men" decided to raise the stakes for political recognition, and volunteered for hunger strike.

The first hunger strike - in late 1980 - won the promise of recognition. However, when Britain refused to carry through its promises, a new coordinated effort began with Bobby Sands on March 1, 1981.

Sands - despite being elected to British parliament from his prison cell - was allowed to starve to death, without his demands being met, the Thatcher government refusing to compromise.

Sands' hunger strike lasted 66 days before - wasted and starved - his body collapsed.

He was followed into the darkness by Patsy O'Hara, Francis Hughes, Ray McCreesh, Kiernan Doherty, Kevin Lynch, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson and Mickie Devine.

In all, ten men dead.

Bobby Sands himself was born in March, 1954, into a poor, working-class family in Newtownabbey, a Unionist area of Belfast. When the neighbours discovered that his family was both Catholic and Nationalist, they were intimidated, harassed, and driven out.

He endured sectarian violence - including stabbings - and losing his apprenticeship at gunpoint, before joining the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1972.

That same autumn he was picked up by the police and tortured - a common police practice - before he was sentenced to five years in the Long Kesh concentration camp.

While in prison, he became a strong and disciplined Republican, facilitating the teaching of Irish. While there he established what came to be known as the Long Kesh "Gaeltacht" (Irish-speaking area).

After three and a half years he was released, returned to the IRA, married, had a son, and became deeply involved in social justice issues in his local community, before being arrested again in 1976, tortured, beaten and sentenced - with 5 friends - on flimsy evidence to 14 years in Long Kesh for supposedly having a gun under the back seat of a car.

Throughout his adult life Bobby Sands endured pain and suffering. Yet these same years of pain, filth and stench saw him bloom as a poet, musician and author, and he became the spokesperson and negotiator for his fellow prisoners in their struggle for dignity and recognition.

Bobby wrote, "I refuse to change to suit people who oppress, torture and imprison me. They have suppressed my body and attacked my dignity, but I have the spirit of freedom that cannot be quenched by even the most horrendous treatment. Of course I can be murdered, but while I remain alive I remain what I am - a political prisoner."

Sands kept a diary during the early stages of his hunger strike. The final entry was made - in Irish - on only March 17.

“Mura bhfuil siad in inmhe an fonn saoirse a scriosadh, ní bheadh siad in inmhe tú féin a bhriseadh. Ní bhrisfidh siad mé mar tá an fonn saoirse, agus saoirse mhuintir na hEireann i mo chroí. Tiocfaidh lá éigin nuair a bheidh an fonn saoirse seo le taispeáint ag daoine go léir na hEireann ansin tchífidh muid éirí na gealaí.”

Translated, it reads:

"If they aren't able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won't break you. They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will come when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon."

At the end of March, Frank Maguire, the independent MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone died of sudden heart-attack. Sinn Fein decided to run Bobby Sands as a candidate.

Sands won with 30,492 votes, humiliating the British.

Still Thatcher and Britain wouldn't yield. Instead, they passed a law preventing prisoners from running for election.

Finally, on May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands, one of the greatest Irish people of the Twentieth - or any other - century, died in the Hospital Wing of Long Kesh prison.

On May 7, 100,000 people marched silently behind the coffin and nearly as many more lined the streets. The funeral of Bobby Sands MP was the largest in Ireland since that of Parnell.As Gerry Adams remarked of Sands' election to parliament, "His victory exposed the lie that the hunger strikers - and by extension the IRA and the whole republican movement - had no popular support".

Following Sands' death, Iran renamed the street on which the British Embassy was located after him, the Indian parliament held a minute's silence, and Cuba later erected a monument to all 100 hunger strikers, which was unveiled by Gerry Adams and Fidel Castro.

Bobby Sands became a symbol internationally of the Irish struggle for freedom and independence, and stands as a reminder that Imperialism cannot be parleyed with or trusted, but must be defeated at every turn, in every heart and every mind.

Thirty years on, Bobby Sands' words still echo down the years, reminding us of the victory that we seek, from Belfast to Beirut, from Derry to Dili, from Armagh to Asunción. Not a violent, vengeful future, but a future where all of humanity can live in peace and happiness, in freedom and in equality.

"Let our revenge be the laughter of our children".

Tiocfaidh ár lá!

English woodlands under Tory threat

Plans by Britain’s Conservative Party government to sell off all of England’s public forests have sparked a rural revolt and mass public outrage across the country.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government has announced that it plans to sell off 15 per cent of all English land managed by the government-owned Forestry Commission by 2015 – the largest sell-off the Government can authorise without an act of parliament – for around £100 million.

There are also plans to sell the remaining 85 percent, and a clause in a new Public Bodies Bill would give the Environment Secretary the power to do so – the biggest change in land ownership in England since the Second World War.

The Forestry Commission manages over 250,000 hectares – almost 20 percent of the total woodland in England – comprising approximately 1,500 forests, including the New Forest, the ancient and beautiful Forest of Dean, and parts of the famous Sherwood Forest.

The public forest estates in Wales (126,000 hectares) and Scotland (660,000 hectares) – also managed by the Forestry Commission – remain under the control of the devolved assemblies in those countries (rather than the UK government). There are no plans to sell off the Scottish forests, and the Welsh Assembly has said it will keep forests in public ownership.

Kingsnorth verdict a 'tipping point' in climate struggle

On September 10 a British jury acquitted six Greenpeace protesters who were on trial for trying to shut down a coal-fired power station on the grounds that they were trying to stop global warming.

Last year, the protesters climbed the chimneystack of the Kingsnorth power station, in Kent, to paint "Gordon, bin it" (as in, "bin coal") on the side, but were arrested before they could complete the task. They were charged with causing criminal damage equivalent to around $80,000 – the costs cleaning the 200 metre stack.


However, in a majority verdict, the jury in Maidstone Crown Court found that the protesters had a "lawful excuse" for their acts, because they were trying to protect property that would be damaged by climate change, including parts of Kent at risk from sea level rise, parts of Greenland, the Pacific island of Tuvalu, coastal areas of Bangladesh and the city of New Orleans.