Swinger | Israel’s reign of terror | Commission on the Future of Ireland

SwingerI spent the last week in Dublin in the Four Courts as part of the outworking of my case against the BBC’s Spotlight programme nine years ago. But more of that when it’s over which could take another fortnight.On the morning that the case started our Gearóid phoned me to say that his father-in-law Paddy ‘Swinger’ McBride was dead. The news was a great shock. I had spent a half hour or more a few days before chatting with Paddy in his home. He was just out after a spell in hospital, and although he was ill his spirit was strong and he was full of craic and talk about the current politics, his son Patrick’s Man of the Match performance for Antrim against Armagh, the need to build Casement and how a son of Tony Benn could behave the way Hillary Benn does.Israel’s reign of terrorAs this column goes to press the Israeli government is calling up tens of thousands of army reservists for a full scale military invasion, subjugation and occupation of the Gaza Strip. After almost 20 months of genocide against the Palestinian people the Israeli state is now embarking on its final solution – the displacement of two million people and the mass murder of more Palestinians.Last Saturday was World Press Freedom Day – but not in Gaza. In the year and a half of this current reign of terror by Israel at least 211 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip while the international press corps is denied access to report on events in that huge concentration camp. Britain and most western and European states are silent on this. They are silent also on the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against two million people, many of them children, who live in Gaza. According to UNICEF over three hundred thousand children under the age of five are suffering severe malnutrition.Commission on the Future of IrelandAs momentum in the demand for Irish Unity grows the work of Sinn Féin’s Commission on the Future of Ireland continues to expand.In the last two months the Commission has held a Mid Ulster Peoples Assembly in the Seamus Heaney Homeplace in Bellaghy; a Tionól Pobail Bhaile Ghib in County Meath; a climate crisis conference - One Island, One Environment – in Dublin and an EU & Irish Unity- What next?- event in the European Parliament in Brussels.