Irish Republican Facing Prison For Act Allegedly Committed Thirty Years Ago.

national | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Tuesday March 22, 2011 11:05 by Diarmuid Breatnach - Personal Capacity

Conviction of Gerry McGeough raises questions about the Good Friday Agreement, the alleged political use of the courts in Northern Ireland and the whole asylum-seeking process.

Gerry McGeough was convicted last month of attempted murder of a UDR soldier in 1981 and faces up to twenty years in jail. There is a widespread concern that his arrest is as a result of his campaigning against the Northern Ireland Police Force and about Sweden's release to the British authorities of an application for political asylum to that country in 1981, the contents of which were used to convict him.

Gerry McGeough is accused of having joined the IRA in 1974 – he was just 16 at the time. In 1981, during the hunger strikes in which ten Irish Republicans died on hunger strike (three from the INLA and seven from the IRA), it was alleged that McGeough attempted to kill a member of the UDR, Sammy Brush (also a member of the Democratic Unionist Party). The Ulster Defence Regiment grew out of the Royal Ulster Constabulary B Special Reserve, a part-time sectarian police militia hated by the nationalist community of the Six Counties (Northern Ireland).

Many nationalists would say that trying to kill one of the armed forces of British occupation in Ireland is understandable, because of what they consider their oppression under British rule and all those Irish people who have been killed by British forces in the recent and older past. Some would say that such an action was excusable, especially in those days. Some would even say that it was a duty of freedom fighters.

But it is not the conviction of an alleged IRA man that is causing disquiet – there have been plenty of those before, for actual murder, attempted murder, carrying arms or or just membership of the IRA, an organisation banned by both the British and Irish governments. What is causing unease among some and outrage among others are two factors: the timing of the arrest and the evidence used to obtain the convictions.

The Good Friday Agreement included an amnesty on the convictions of members of the Provisional IRA and Loyalist prisoners, even if their convictions had been for actual murder and a moratorium on pending charges. Under the terms of the GFA, all but a couple were released, both sides of the Border. Members of other organisations such as the INLA or the Real IRA, who had not signed up to the Agreement, remained in prison, but the moratorium extended throughout for the Provisonal IRA, as negotiated by the political party of their choice, Provisional Sinn Féin. As a Provisional IRA prisoner, it was wholly expected that the moratorium would include McGeough. And for many years after, it seemed that it had. So when he was arrested in 2007 for alleged crimes committed in 1981, there was speculation that the reason was not the alleged crime twenty-six years earlier, but rather his political activities of the moment.

The other factor in McGeough’s conviction that caused so much unease was that the evidence against him was a statement in an asylum application he had made to Sweden. Such documents are usually protected by a 50-year rule but the Swedish state handed the papers over to the British and the judge allowed it to be used in his trial, where it became the crucial element in the Prosecution’s case. Human rights activists are known to be very concerned at this use of an asylum application; for applicants to make a reasonable case for political asylum, they need to be secure in the knowledge that their application will be kept confidential and certainly not handed over to the very state from which they are declaring that they fear persecution and from which they cannot expect due process and a fair trial.

How Gerry McGeough came to be in this situation is an interesting story, both as a personal one and as a small part of the recent history of the Six Counties.

Gerry McGeough was born in 1958 in South Tyrone, where his family and ancestors had lived for centuries. He was ten years of age and coming to the end of his primary-level schooling when the first of the civil rights marches took place in the Six Counties*, and eleven when the Catholic minorities in Derry and Belfast rose up in rebellion, using stones, petrol bombs and a handful of guns against the armed sectarian police force and rampaging Loyalist mobs, many of whom were also armed.

Three years later, McGeough was thirteen as the British rounded up hundreds of nationalists and interned them without trial. One year later, as thousands demonstrated against internment in Derry, the British Army shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians and another died later of his wounds. Later that same year the Ballymurphy Massacre took place, when the British shot dead eleven unarmed civilians in one area over a period of three days.

McGeough is accused of having joined the IRA two years later in 1974 but that is unlikely – he was only 16 then and the IRA does not generally recruit that young. He may have been a member of the Republican equivalent of the Scouts and Brownies – na Fianna Éireann. Certainly, his sympathies by now would have been strongly with the Irish Republican movement.

In 1977 McGeough was 19 and it is then that he appears to have joined the East Tyrone Brigade of the IRA. One year later, at the age of twenty, McGeough was deported from Britain back to the Six Counties under the provisions of the ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act’, which the Government had introduced to Britain in 1974. This in itself is a curiosity – as Britain claims ownership and exercises control over ‘Northern Ireland’, how can they deport someone from one part of their state to another? Many have commented that this amounts to internal exile, which is opposed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1981, three years later, Mc Geough was active in the election campaign for Bobby Sands, who was then dying on hunger strike in a fight for political prisoner status. Sands was elected with 30, 493 votes, a greater number than brought Margaret Thatcher her parliamentary seat in Finchley and beating his Ulster Unionist Party opponent by a thousand votes. McGeough was part of the 100,000 people followed Sands’ funeral cortege when he died a month later, his death leading to official marks of respect in many countries around the world. Nine more Irish Republicans were to die on hunger strike during the following months of that year. Republican political activity, which had been flagging, saw an upsurge and so too did rioting and their armed activity.

That year the British armed forces (which includes the police) fired 29,695 plastic bullets, injuring many and killing seven unarmed people. They also shot people dead with bullets, as did Loyalists in sectarian attacks. During the same year the IRA killed 13 policemen, 8 British soldiers and five members of the Ulster Defence Regiment. Altogether a total of 61 people were killed that year -- the the year that Mc Geough is alleged to have tried to kill UDR member Sammy Brush.

One year later, a warrant was issued by the USA for McGeough’s arrest on charges of trying to procure arms in an FBI ‘sting’ operation in the ‘States but he had left the country without being caught.

Seven years later, in 1989, McGeough was arrested in Germany in connection with a series of attack on British Army targets on the Continent; he was wanted in five countries at the time. Then thirty years of age, he was to spend the next four years in a German prison and for two of those tried in a special underground bunker-courtroom in front of a panel of five judges. But he was never convicted, instead being extradited to the USA in 1992 on that ten year-old warrant, where eventually he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Back in Ireland after his release, Mc Geough concentrated on developing his personal and political life. He became active in Sinn Féin and in time was elected to its executive board, the Ard-Chomhairle. He also became a fluent Irish (Gaelic) speaker. He met his Barcelona wife, Maria, while he was living in Dublin; they got married and over the course of several years now have four children.

The year 2001 was a very eventful year for McGeough, equally divided between a sweet national event and a bitter political and personal one. It was the year he had been National Director for Sinn Féin’s campaign against the Nice Treaty which, along with a number of other campaigns, ended with a referendum majority in the country answering “No”. But it was also the year McGeough resigned from Sinn Féin, feeling that their commitment to Republican principles was slipping away; it was a break with a movement to which he had given his allegiance throughout his teens and for all of his adult life so far.

In 2003, the year he turned 45, after four years of study and months working on building sites, McGeough graduated from Trinity College Dublin with an Honours Degree in – not suprisingly – History. The following year he graduated from University College Dublin with a degree in Education and became a history teacher.

In May 2006, McGeough co-founded and edited theHibernian magazine, a publication considered by many to represent a right-wing Catholic view of the world. In 2008, after twenty-nine editions, the magazine folded due to McGeough’s having to focus on his forthcoming trial.

One of the issues which had convinced Mc Geough to part with the party to which he had given allegiance for most of his life was Sinn Féin’s decision to participate in managing the police force of the Six Counties. The Police Service of Norther Ireland, formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had been a major enemy of Republicans from the beginning. It was they who had attacked the Civil Rights marchers with batons, water cannon and CS gas. Every year they escorted Loyalist marches through Catholic housing areas, allowing the marchers to mock and threaten the residents and attacking any who showed resistance. They had shot dead people too and were implicated in sectarian assassinations of Catholics and extra-judicial assassinations of Republican activists. Many of them, particularly in the former B-Special Reserve, were also members of Loyalist paramilitary groups.

Previously, Sinn Féin’s position, with which most Catholics and even some Protestants would have agreed, had been that the force was hopelessly corrupt and sectarian and should be scrapped, to be replaced by a totally new police force. It had also always been their position that the statelet too was undemocratic, corrupt, sectarian and that it too should be scrapped – but here they were now part of the Executive of that very same state. And, as some Republican critics of Sinn Féin had predicted, they were now moving to endorse the sectarian police force.

A number of former supporters of Sinn Féin declared publicly their opposition to this development and Gerry McGeough was one of those. It was as he stood for election on a Republican anti-PSNI platform in March 2007 that he was arrested and charged with the alleged events of 1981. And many saw the reason for the arrest, not in the events of twenty-six years earlier, but in his current political activities, in the curbing of any threat to the agreement between Sinn Féin and the British to manage the transition from opponents of the colonial state to participants in its management.

There have been a number of refutations of this conspiracy theory. One of those was that Vincent Mc Anespie, who is not a political opponent of Sinn Féin or of the Good Friday Agreement, in fact husband to Sinn Féin councillor Brenda McAnespie, was arrested on the same charges as McGeough. But the Prosecution reduced McAnespie’s charges to possession of weapons back in 1981, rather than attempted murder, and on 18th February this year he was acquitted of all charges.

Another is that the state says that the Good Friday Agreement pardon did not apply to McGeough, as he had not served at least a mandatory two years in prison following his guilty verdict. However, his defence team believe that others in a similar situation have had this pardon applied to them and did not have to serve any time prior to the pardon and are currently researching this.

What is clear however is that McGeough is the only person to have been charged in recent years arising from events so long ago. There are many unsolved murders, especially by Loyalists, where not even an investigation is taking place, including the murder of Robert Hamill in 1997, yards away from police watching from a van. With regard to the British Army and the police, where the identities of those who killed unarmed people and colluded in killing others are all known to the authorities, no prosecutions either – not even for those who killed the unarmed fourteen on Bloody Sunday in Derry or the Ballymurphy Eleven in 1972, nor for many others since.

Gerry McGeough was due to appear in Belfast court on the 18th March for sentencing of up to 20 years in prison but was taken from prison to hospital instead, suffering from chest pains. What appears to be discrimination in the application of the law and the persecution of Gerry McGeough because of his legal political activities rather than for alleged acts committed in the course of an intense war between separatists and a colonial power, as well as the use of confidential and protected asylum documents to convict the asylum seeker, will continue to outrage some and to cause discomfort to others. And so they should. Many will say that whatever one thinks of Gerry McGeough and his past activities or indeed of his present political ones, it is clear that an injustice is being committed here and that the man should be set free.

*In this respect at least part of the first verse of I’ll Wear No Convict’s Uniform, a Republican ballad about the struggle for political status in the H Blocks and in Maghaberry, could have been written about Gerry McGeough
.... But when my age was barely ten,
my country’s wrongs were told again
By tens of thousands marching then
And my heart stirred to the cause.
I learned of centuries of strife,
of cruel laws, injustice rife,
I saw now in my own young life
The fruits of foreign sway:
Protesters batoned, tortured, maimed,
Divisions nurtured, passions flamed,
Outrage provoked, right’s cause defamed
-- this is the conquerors’ way.”