A Killing in Belfast Is Turning Backers Against a Defiant I.R.A.

[liberalpragmatist]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/international/europe/07ireland.html

LONDON, March 6 - In the Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast, the Irish Republican Army has long served as judge, jury and, in some cases, executioner, meting out its own brand of vigilante justice. Catholics who defy the I.R.A.'s dictates end up with broken kneecaps. Those who betray the I.R.A. wind up dead.

But now five sisters are turning that tradition upside down, spurred by the extraordinarily brutal killing on Jan. 30 of their brother, Robert McCartney, and what is widely seen as a subsequent I.R.A. cover-up.

Mr. McCartney was attacked in a crowded Belfast bar, then taken outside and beaten with iron pipes. His throat was slit and his torso was slashed open with a knife. The attackers left him to bleed while they went back to the bar, scrubbed it of evidence and warned customers that the fight had been an internal I.R.A. matter.

<snip>

The sisters have bluntly pressed for justice. "All of Ireland knows who the men are," Catherine McCartney, 36, a teacher, said of the attackers in an interview last week inside her sister Paula's home in Belfast. "But people know what the I.R.A. are capable of. They butchered a man and slit his throat. I would be afraid, too."

[mark414]

1. yeah the ira really don't fuck around

[Warpy]

2. I remember reading in one of the Irish papers

during the height of the violence in Thatcher's day that the biggest reason for kneecappings was auto theft and joyriding.

However, everybody on both sides is sick to death of the violent "armies" that both sides have formed. However, until the climate of fear is lessened, they won't feel safe in turning them in.

[Briar]

3. Lets hope the IRA's American backers also think again

Hurrah for the five brave sisters who are shaming these self-mythologising thugs.

[Gyre]

4. Yeah, it would be nice to see some due process by the IRA

but I guess they don't have any danged opportunities to put on powdered wigs and THEN play god like the big boys who occupy a substantial portion of their country.

Collaborators seem like "fair game" to me. If they're too stupid or arrogant to keep from ratting out their own, on their own turf, it's little wonder they end up dead. Collaborator, in this case means those siding with occupation forces to further the enslavement of the occupied.

Gyre

[liberalpragmatist]

5. Did you read the full article?

He wasn't a collaborator - he got into a scuffle with some IRA members. And his whole Catholic neighborhood has sided with the victim. These are Catholic women protesting actions by the IRA in killing their brother in a bar brawl and blackmailing the witnesses.