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a vigorous campaign for justice by a group of five women from a tiny Catholic ghetto in east Belfast, Robert McCartney’s sisters, has the seven men of the IRA army council running around like headless chickens. In a second wonderful irony, their leading member Paula McCartney is a women’s studies student.

For Adams and McGuinness, politics was an extension of militarism. Just as the ideologues in the Soviet east realised that appropriating the language of “peace” could win them well-meaning, if naïve, allies in the west during the cold war, the two Republican leaders developed a “peace strategy” which they have purveyed to a wider public since the early 1990s.

The strategy served Adams and McGuinness well . . Now, at last, it is all threatening to blow apart – and, in a delicious irony, from inside their own “community”.

. . what has really caught the attention of the international media, otherwise bored with a repetitive sectarian story, has been the way the McCartney sisters’ simple clarion-call for justice has cut through all the ideological obfuscations (a French journalist friend once likened talking to Adams with interviewing the Vietnamese war hero General Giap, with his langue du bois). Now a rattled McGuinness has warned the sisters against engaging in party politics (there have been suggestions they might stand against Sinn Féin candidates), reflecting his own monopolistic conception of it.

The sisters want to be sure that witnesses to their brother’s murder can, without the widespread intimidation that has occurred since, go to the police and give their evidence in court. Paramilitaries, by contrast, see themselves as judge, jury and executioner – as revealed by the decidedly Orwellian five-hour exchange between IRA representatives and the McCartney sisters in which the former, magnanimously as they appear to have thought, suggested they would kill the killers.

The days when a Northern Ireland secretary (Mo Mowlam) could dismiss the IRA killing of a Catholic civilian as “internal housekeeping” must surely now be over.

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. . their two young sons Conlaed, 4, and Brandon, 2, are left to wonder why daddy does not come home at night.

The boys are too young to understand the political significance of a Catholic family from a hardline republican area daring to challenge the IRA.

if anyone did try to put it in their language, it would be a bit like the seven dwarfs deciding to take on the Power Rangers.

The IRA are self-styled super-heroes, not used to their authority being questioned by ordinary folk in republican areas. But the McCartney sisters are no ordinary folk.

Strong, courageous, bold, articulate, tenacious and formidable - just some of the adjectives used about them in recent weeks.

Gemma, a 41-year-old nurse, is the eldest. Next comes Paula, who is perhaps the best known of the sisters, because she has done most of the media interviews. A mother of five children, aged 19 to three, she is a mature student at Queen's University, doing women's studies.

She hasn't been at many lectures recently. In the six weeks since her brother died, Paula's modest home in the republican Short Strand area of east Belfast has become the unofficial headquarters of the campaign 'Justice for Robert'.

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Warning from McGuinness:

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Sinn Féin's Chief Negotiator, Martin McGuinness, has said the sisters of Robert McCartney . . needed to be very careful they did not step over the line into party politics.

. . 2003 Sinn Féin assembly election candidate, Cora Groogan, confirmed she was among around 70 people in the bar when the row that led to the killing began.

Deirdre Hargey, 23, is a community worker in Belfast and has been chosen as a candidate in the Laganbank area of Belfast for the local elections next May. . . Ms Hargey was still inside Magennis's on the night of Sunday 30 January when the police arrived. But she denied seeing the brawl.

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Paula McCartney has yet to decide whether to run for office:

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Catherine McCartney dismissed claims being spread by Sinn Féin in Belfast that their campaign was being orchestrated by the party's political enemies. "Would they be saying the same if it was six men? We do know a little about politics," Ms McCartney, a politics lecturer, said.

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The family believes that witnesses to the murder have been frightened into silence by the IRA men involved.

Gee, when the IRA offers to shoot the perpetrators, why would anyone be frightened?

IRA threats continue say McCartneys:

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Witnesses to the murder of Robert McCartney are still being intimidated by the IRA, his family alleged yesterday. Mr McCartney's widow and sisters suggested that as many as 12 IRA volunteers helped remove forensic evidence or intimidated witnesses after the murder in Belfast.

Catherine McCartney said: "The facts speak for themselves. Seventy people were in that bar _ no one has come forward with anything to the police that they can act upon."

Asked if witnesses would come forward following the IRA's assurances that there was nothing to fear, Northern Ireland's chief constable, Hugh Orde, said: "I don't think people believe the IRA statement _ Many people have been murdered by the IRA from their own community.

"They are no doubt using fear, intimidation and threats now probably on the suspects as well as everyone else in that community."

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ten IRA members visiting from Derry for the Bloody Sunday commemoration, including a very senior officer, knifed Robert McCartney, an innocent fork-lift driver and Sinn Fein supporter, to death. The killers then wiped the pub clean of their fingerprints, took the tape out of the security cameras, warned the seventy witnesses not to say anything on pain of death, and left.

That was standard operating procedure in the old days, when the IRA was seen as the Catholic community's only defence against the Protestants and the British authorities. But seven years after Sinn Fein committed itself to a peaceful political process it is just murder and intimidation, and Robert McCartney's five sisters, all lifelong IRA supporters themselves, refused to abide by the traditional code of silence.

The British government had long turned a blind eye to the IRA's involvement in these crimes in order not to damage the "peace process" . . Then came history's biggest bank job, followed by the murder of Robert McCartney and the extraordinary arrogance of the IRA's response. It has evolved into a primarily criminal organisation with a paramilitary veneer.

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Its indeed a bit of a conundrum for the witnesses to the McCartney murder. On the one hand, the IRA have acted as the defacto local police in the nationalist communities, and on the other hand the nationalist communities have never trusted the local Northern Ireland police...viewing them as a tool of the unionist community.

With the formation of the EU and both Ireland and the UK being member states, in a sense the republican movement has achieved their objective of a united Ireland...albeit in a "different" way then they had planned. I think that's a major factor in the gradual winding down of this conflict.

Probably over the long haul, what should happen is a "truth and reconciliation commission" modelled roughly on South Africa's.

[ 25 March 2005: Message edited by: radiorahim ]

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For Adams and McGuinness, politics was an extension of militarism. Just as the ideologues in the Soviet east realised that appropriating the language of “peace” could win them well-meaning, if naïve, allies in the west during the cold war ... as been the way the McCartney sisters’ simple clarion-call for justice has cut through all the ideological obfuscations

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As much as the IRA might be a collection of thugs, so are the Unionists and so are the British soldiers.

The reason the IRA has persisted for so long is because Unionist thugs held no qualms about beating and murdering Irish men and women who happened to be Catholic and because the British government routinely attacked and killed non-violent peace protestors. Bloody Sunday, anyone?

So why, suddenly, all the attention granted one death in a 500 year history of bloodshed and murder?

I bet it has nothing to do with this:

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Friday February 14, 2003
The Guardian

A British army brigadier and up to 20 other serving and retired soldiers and police officers could be prosecuted for allegedly conspiring with loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, it emerged yesterday.

Metropolitan police commissioner Sir John Stevens, the man in charge of the huge inquiry into the murder of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, said his team was preparing papers for the director of public prosecutions on Brigadier Gordon Kerr and several other former and current police and soldiers, whom he did not name. There is a possibility the brigadier could be accused of conspiracy to murder.

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When you don't want them to see the rats, point and scream "mouse!"

[ 25 March 2005: Message edited by: WingNut ]

Part of Sinn Fein's campaign objectives was to transform the RUC, make it a non-sectarian police force trusted by both communities, rename it the Northern Ireland Police Service, and recruit nationalists (Catholics) to join it. Which they did.

And now the McCartney sisters, lifelong republicans, trust the new police service more than they trust the IRA thugs who killed their brother. Success brings unexpected dividends.

[ 25 March 2005: Message edited by: Wilfred Day ]