Martin Corey: Exposing the truth behind Britain’s role in Ireland

The actions of the British Government’s Northern Ireland Office (sic) and the British Direct Ruler Owen Paterson in overturning a decision of the Belfast High Court to release veteran Republican Martin Corey underlines the fact  - as was pointed out last year with the imprisonment of the seriously ill Brendan Lillis – that the default position of the British Government when dealing with Ireland is naked repression. All the fine talk of the rule of law upon which the British state is supposedly based counts for naught when it comes dealing with  those in Ireland or elsewhere whose only ‘crime’ is to seek to break away from that state and assert the independence of their respective nations or engage in political activism on issues which the British establishment deems inimical to its ‘national interests’ . In this case the British state has subverted its own courts in order to block the release of an Irish Republican. What the imprisonment of Martin Corey has done is to lift the veil on the Six-County state and what is revealed is a state where there is no rule of law, where a person can be locked up on the secret evidence of a shadowy and hidden intelligence agency such as MI5. Nobody is safe in such a state and those foolish enough to dismiss Martin Corey’s case as relevant only to ‘Dissident Republicans’ would do well to remember the words of the German anti-Nazi theologian Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

“Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

“Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me”

What has happened to Martin Corey constitutes not only an attack on Martin’s human and civil rights but are an attack on the human and civil rights of all people within the Six Counties. The continued imprisonment of Marian Price on trumped up charges coupled with the vindictive imprisonment of Gerry McGeough tell us much about the true nature of British involvement in Ireland. The apologists and cheerleaders for the Stormont Agreement and the political arrangements it has led to propogate the big lie that everything is, if not normal, then is  rapidly approaching normality. They trumpet the new ‘human rights’ agenda of the Stormont Regime with its new police force etc. Strip away the spin and the dross and what remains is the same discredited, sectarian undemocratic and colonial statelet with its special courts, special laws and its re-packaged colonial police force, the RUC/PSNI to enforce the writ of the British Crown. Nothing has changed in terms of the relationship of the British state towards the Irish people or indeed any other people or groups who dare to step outside the conventions set out for them by the state. Ample illustration of this is to be found in Britain where the muslim community are being subjected to a campaign of demonisation and criminalisation, where arbitary house raids and arrests coupled with detention without-trial are the norm. Again this merely echoes the experience of the the Irish community in Britain throughout the 1970s and 80s.  Off course by and large the subverting of the judicial process within the Six Counties this week has largely been ignored by the media particulaly in the 26 Counties and within Britian itself. Where it has been written or spoken about in the media the emphasis has been on the background to Martin’s previous 19 year sentence in Long Kesh prison. Again to do otherwise would be to shine a light on the abnormality of the Six-County state and that is a political boat which the establishment simply will not allowed to be rocked. People need to organise around issues such as the internment without-trial of Martin Corey. One does not have to travel far to find injustice and inhumanity they are to be found right on your own doorstep.