Community ‘hammered’ A COLERAINE nationalist resident who spoke to SAOIRSE at the end of January said that the community was "being hammered" by nightly pipe-bomb attacks. Coleraine, Ballymoney, Ballymena and Larne have suffered numerous attacks since the New Year. "I have no doubt that these attacks are being organised by the UDA/UFF who have taken control of the area and are being allowed to attack at will," the man, who did not wish to be identified, told SAOIRSE. "Nationalists are feeling isolated, especially in the Harper’s Hill estate where the loyalists are trying to force all of them to flee." He said the claims by the RUC that they were increasing patrolling in the town were a joke. "They drive around their barracks but are not patrolling the estates where the pipe-bombing is happening. "There is no comeback at present either from the community protecting itself or the British Crown Forces moving to control the death squads they sponsor. It is as if we don’t matter. "The politicians, churches and media are deliberately ignoring our plight in the interests of this bogus ‘peace’." In north Belfast the brother of a Republican Sinn Féin member was informed by the RUC on January 28 that his name was on a loyalist death list. The nationalist man considers the threat to be very serious. The British colonial police returned to his home in Butler Walk three days later with a warning that a pipe bomb had been left at his house by the Red Hand Defenders. Nothing was found there but a pipe bomb found outside the Wishing Well community centre in Ardoyne the same day was thought to have been intended for use against the nationalist home. Homes pipe-bombed ELEVEN people escaped annihilation in Ballymena, Co Antrim when a British-instigated death squad attack their homes on January 7. In the first of two attacks which occurred within an hour of each other, a pipe-bomb was hurled through the living-room window of a house on the Cushendall Road, Ballymena at 8.30pm. The device landed on a chair while two adults were watching television. Three children in the house escaped injury when the bomb failed to explode. A man was seen running towards a car parked at the gates of a cemetery just yards from the house. The car, a blue Ford Escort drove out of the town with two other occupants. In the second attack a pipe-bomb was thrown at a house on Clonavon Road near Ballymena town centre at around 9.20pm. Three adults and three children escaped injury.

AS WE went to press it appeared that Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern were edging towards the conclusion of a deal to keep the Stormont Agreement afloat throughout the forthcoming election period in the 26 Counties and Britain.

Such a stop-gap deal is designed to ‘fireproof’ the UUP, SDLP and Provisionals in the Westminster election, which has been flagged for May of this year.

The intention is that the UUP would then be able to stand up to the DUP electoral challenge and to similarly strengthen the hand of the SDLP and the Provos against revolutionary Republicanism.

Such a deal would most likely cobble together a renamed RUC with the destruction of arms dumps by the Provisionals and the dismantling of a couple of British army watchtowers in south Armagh.

The hidden agenda not being mentioned by anyone in relation to the dismantling of watchtowers is that the British would be requiring the Provos to fill the vacuum created by policing the areas affected in the interests of continuing British rule.

This would be the same way as the Free State army held the 26 Counties for the British Empire in 1922-23.

In this context the remarks by a Provo spokesperson at a Bloody Sunday rally in Derry city on January 28. He promised to vigorously campaign against "any re-packaged RUC". His party had campaigned for decades against repression and injustice (but not for Irish freedom).

This is the organisation that in the recent past made commitments:

• never to enter Stormont;
• that the war would continue until Irish freedom was won;
• rejected the Unionist veto and campaigned to remove Articles 2 & 3 of the 1937 Constitution while their posters defending the same articles were still hanging on the lampposts;
• to ‘disband the RUC’ and now the repackaging simply does not go far enough.

Only time will expose the whole emerging deal. The desire of London and Dublin is to put something, anything for sale in the shop window. It does not matter if it is a dud.

In this regard also, the replacement British secretary of state is irrelevant as it has been amply proven that Tony Blair is in control of the British government’s policy. John Reid, like his predecessors, is a unionist whose allegiance is to the British government.

Following on the reselection of the anti-Agreement David Burnside as the UUP candidate for south Antrim on January 12 David Trimble had a narrow escape from humiliation when his ally James Cooper beat his fellow UUP member, Arlene Foster, by just nine votes in the January 29 selection for the Fermanagh-South Tyrone Westminster seat.

Meanwhile the nationalist nightmare continues in the Six Counties. An organised and increasing level of gun and pipe-bomb attacks on nationalists by the UDA/UFF in three major towns of Antrim as well as east Derry and north Belfast is reported.

There is no sanction on the perpetrators of these attacks for violating their "cease-fire".

Republican Sinn Féin repeats its view that these attacks are tolerated as the groups involved are "officially" supporting the Stormont Agreement.

If nationalists/Republicans opposed to the Agreement resisted these attacks or mounted attacks on British Crown Forces, the same governments and church and establishments would be loud in their condemnation and swift in responding with physical force.

It is not the physical actions that count but the political position of those behind the attacks. If they support the current process, a blind eye will be turned.

This latest deal will fail like the rest because it is based on continuing English rule in Ireland and on the minority Unionist Veto on Irish national independence. All of which can only lead to further unrest and resistance with consequent chronic stability.

The only way out is for the British to go to be replaced by a four-province federal system of government in Ireland with direct participatory democracy.

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