Salon.com > Angelique Chrisafis

Sister act

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 15:40:00 +0000

In Quality Sandwiches, the gourmet Belfast lunch stop she owns, Donna McCartney is setting out the brown rolls and the German salami. Every morning, as she lays out the newspapers on her shelves, the face of her dead brother stares back at her. Usually, he is holding his son, imprisoned in a joyful holiday snap on Newcastle beach in County Down.

In the past week or so, Donna has caught sight of her own face amid the newsprint as well, as the five McCartney sisters take their campaign for justice over their brother's death to anyone who will listen. Raised in the Short Strand, a tiny Catholic enclave in east Belfast -- a republican heartland where tribal loyalty and the old rubric of "whatever you say, say nothing" holds -- they are finally squaring up to their one-time "protectors," demanding answers. Killing Catholics is not what the Irish Republican Army is supposed to do; killing a totally innocent one and then covering up the murder is beyond the pale.

Ready to shoot

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 15:08:00 +0000

The IRA offered to shoot the men involved in the murder of Robert McCartney, but his family refused the use of violence, republicans said Tuesday night. In a five-page statement, the Irish Republican Army gave its most detailed account yet of McCartney's brutal murder, saying four men were behind the killing, two of whom were its members.

The timing of the IRA's third detailed statement on the McCartney murder could hardly have been more significant, coming only hours after the White House confirmed that President Bush had invited McCartney's sisters to Washington to meet him on St. Patrick's Day. With Sinn Fein and the other Northern Ireland parties pointedly not invited to next week's celebration, the McCartneys' appearance is sure to cause extreme discomfort in the country where republicans have huge support and have traditionally raised funds.

As political figures lined up to criticize the IRA, the McCartney family said they rejected the IRA offer to shoot the murderers because that would have been seeking revenge, and they wanted to get those responsible into court. Gerard Quinn, a cousin of McCartney's, said: "I think the feeling is that to shoot and possibly kill these people is revenge and not justice. And revenge is not what the family is looking for."

From pub brawl to national crisis

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:24:00 +0000

Who will be next? said the placard carried by the McCartney family Sunday as they were clapped and cheered to a makeshift platform outside the Short Strand shops in east Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was once the respected protector of this small nationalist enclave in the city, where 3,000 Catholics are still protected by "peace" walls from the 60,000 Protestants surrounding them. But Sunday afternoon, as 1,000 people gathered in protest at the murder of Robert McCartney at a bar last month, apparently by members of the IRA, trust in the organization had run out.

A movement once known as the Ra was being called the "Rafia" -- the lies it has told about the killing compared with those the British army "continue to tell about Bloody Sunday," said some locals, and the local IRA commander was angrily confronted to give his men up.

For republicans to kill an innocent man and one of their own community was shock enough. But the coverup, intimidation and lies that residents said continued this past weekend, despite an IRA statement expelling three of those involved, had badly damaged their standing.

Bush’s missing Irish link?

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:17:00 +0000

It is perhaps not the best omen for U.S. foreign affairs. Local historians in Wexford, Ireland, have discovered that George W. Bush is a descendant of Richard Strongbow de Clare, the power-hungry warlord who led the Norman invasion of Ireland, thus heralding 800 years of mutual misery. With a long line of Scots Irish presidents including Woodrow Wilson, the Irish are normally quick to claim U.S. leaders as their own. But despite President Bush's large Ulster Scots vote in the American Bible belt, Ireland had let his family escape the genealogical microscope.

But now Ann Griffin Bernstorff, an artist working on a tapestry to commemorate Ireland's Norman heritage, has discovered what she claims is the Bushes' missing Irish link.

Griffin Bernstorff was researching Strongbow's son-in-law, William Marshal, when she discovered the connection. A descendant of Marshal's married Anne Marbury Hutchinson, a famous 16th century religious dissenter who had already been linked to Bush. "It is one of those bizarre developments," she said. "We traced the Bush genealogy through a Republican source in Chicago and found it was correct. People here are absolutely shocked. I'm not sure what the wider reaction will be; Bush has not been seen as a great friend of the Irish." Indeed, when Bush visited a County Clare castle last year, radio talk show hosts asked: "Is this the most hated American ever to set foot on Irish soil?"