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Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province. Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness after their meeting in Washington last year "I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when...

Family perish in house fireSeven members of the one family - including five children - were killed today in one of Northern Ireland's worst ever fire tragedies. A man and a woman - named locally as farmer Arthur McElhill and Lorraine McGovern - and five children, aged from 13 to just a few months old, perished as fire swept through their terrace house at Lammy Crescent in Omagh at 4.55am today. Neighbours, who made desperate attempts to rescue the family as the tiled roof of their home collapsed, told how they heard screams as the blaze caught hold. After five...

Loyalists make Catholic Poles welcome Wartime debt to Britain's East European allies boosts a battle against racism on estate Henry McDonald, Ireland editor Sunday February 18, 2007 The Observer The contribution made by Polish pilots during the Second World War is being used as a weapon in the fight against racism in Northern Ireland. An estate infamous for the expulsion of Catholics during the Anglo-Irish Agreement protests is welcoming an influx of Catholic residents from eastern Europe. And the Ulster Defence Association is so keen to prevent the new arrivals from leaving, it has leafleted Lisburn urging loyalists to support...

There is a cold hour just before dawn, when the light is the colour of lead, when the past seems a little closer and a lot more real than it does in the clearer light that comes later in the day. --SNIP-- On that day, IRA gunmen burst into a string of houses that lay along my route to the conference centre and shot dead 14 British officers and intelligence officials. The Ireland of those days was inured to brutality on all sides but there was something about these killings that shocked the Dublin public. Maybe it was the curiously...

A watchdog committee at Westminster has said the Goverment isn`t tackling the underperformance of Protestant pupils urgently enough. The committee has sent the Department of Education an end of term report. It grades the department on what it has done to lift exam results in loyalist areas. The verdict: could do a lot better. GCSE Maths: Appalling performance; literacy and numeracy: progress manifestly unsatisfactory. In fact the latter criticism applies across Northern Ireland. The Public Accounts Committe reports that one in five pupils leaves school here without being able to read and write properly. But though concerned with the broad...

The Ulster Museum was last night at the centre of a probe into a famous painting that's suspected of being plundered by Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering. Leading art detective Clemens 'Fifty Per Cent' Toussaint is set to travel to Belfast in a bid to establish if the museum's most prized Flemish painting - St Christopher Carrying The Christ Child - was stolen by Hitler's right-hand man during the Second World War. If the millionaire French art sleuth proves Jacob Jordaens' 17th century masterpiece - previously owned by Dutch art collector Jacques Goudstikker - was looted by Goering, the museum...

IRA 'has ceased its criminality' The IRA is no longer involved in any centrally organised criminality, the British and Irish governments believe. Speaking after meeting Irish ministers, NI Secretary Peter Hain said cross-border intelligence indicated the IRA was living up to its commitments. Mr Hain said individual IRA members may still be involved in criminal activities, but that should not prevent political progress from being made. However, the DUP's Nigel Dodds said Mr Hain was "living in fantasy land". "This latest assessment from the secretary of state lacks credibility and will be treated by the vast majority of people in...

IRA murdered mother 'not an informer' 07/07/2006 - 12:34:40 A mother of 10 who was abducted and shot dead by the IRA nearly 34 years ago was officially cleared today of allegations that she was an informer. Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan said her investigators had found no evidence Jean McConville passed information to the security services. The IRA claimed Mrs McConville, who was seized as she went to the aid of a fatally wounded British soldier outside her front door in December 1972, worked for the intelligence’s agencies. Public pressure forced them into making an apology for the...

Man jailed for five years for IRA membership 28/06/2006 - 13:50:34 A Dublin man who a top garda said had been a member of the IRA since he was 15 years old, has been jailed for five years at the Special Criminal Court. Vincent Kelly, who was arrested wearing an Oglaigh na hEireann t-shirt, was found guilty by the three-judge court earlier this month of being a member of the IRA on June 7 last year. Kelly, who is now 21, of Empress Place, Ballybough, Dublin was arrested when gardaí found a handgun hidden inside a van on the Malahide...

IRA were behind 48pc of Troubles murders A UNIVERSITY of Ulster academic yesterday blamed the IRA for the overwhelming majority of murders during the Troubles. Henry Patterson, Professor of History at Jordanstown, challenged the view that the Northern Ireland conflict was a simple "war of liberation" by republicans against colonial interests and said there were key differences between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and struggles in Africa and Latin America. He told the sixth International Conference of The Spanish Association for Irish Studies at the University of Valladolid in Spain that the Provisional IRA was responsible for 48 per cent...

Sinn Féin MP Martin McGuinness has rubbished claims by a number of tabloid newspapers that he is a high-level British spy. The claims were made on Sunday, but Mr McGuinness said today that he was certain no evidence would ever be produced to support the allegations. He also accused the Democratic Unionist Party of being in league with the British spy-handler who was allegedly the source of the allegation. "This is a dirty trick manufactured and constructed by people within the DUP who are now hooked up to others hostile to the [peace] process," he said

DAN Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, was first published in 2003. By April 2005 it had sold 17 million copies in 44 languages and it is still selling well, as any traveller by plane, bus or train will confirm. It is a novel of the popular, conspiracy theory type. The central thesis is that “the Church” has covered up the fact that Mary Magdalene married Christ. Christ’s divinity was a myth invented by Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD and the pair had descendants. Brown suggests that Mary Magdalene’s character was unjustly impugned by “the Church” in...

Wednesday, May 10, 2006 It’s time to stop the sinister Shinners By: John Cooney THE week-end news story which jumped out of the pages was the revelation that Sinn Fein is linked to a major abuse of the voting register. The Sunday Tribune’s front-page report was based on allegations by Fianna Fail back-bencher Sean Ardagh, one of my local T.D.’s in the Dublin South Central constituency. Sean, who is chairman of the Joint Oireachtas Justice committee, has done a civic service to voters by brining to the Government’s notice the first concrete evidence of electoral fraud that is imputed to...

Provisionals linked to expulsion of family at centre of row after killing The Provisional IRA has been linked to the forcing out of a family at the centre of a dispute in west Belfast following the murder of Gerard Devlin. However, the latest assessment by the IMC said the organisation had not sanctioned the use of violence in relation to the expulsion. Mr Devlin (39), a father-of-six, was stabbed to death on February 3 in Ballymurphy. His killing sparked a wave of attacks. The IMC said that after the murder the IRA "sought to defuse tensions and that despite popular...

Judge throws out Omagh bomb suspect's legal challenge 28/04/2006 - 15:04:46 The trial of the man charged with the Omagh bomb atrocity should go ahead in September, a judge ruled today. Confirmation that Sean Hoey, aged 36, should stand trial came when a judge threw out an application by lawyers acting for the electrician that the charges should be dropped. In a ruling at Belfast Crown Court Mr Justice Weir said he had carefully considered submissions made by both the defence and the Crown during a No Bills Application and had decided there was a case to answer and the...

26 April 2006 IMC report finds IRA committed to 'political and peaceful path' The Independent Monitoring Commission today published its tenth report, revealing that the body set up to monitor paramilitary activity had found the IRA leadership to be committed to "following a political and peaceful path." In the report, the IMC stated that it had also reason to believe that the IRA had reduced its criminal activity and intelligence gathering. They still had reason to believe that some of its senior members were still involved in criminal activity, however. The report also claimed that not all of the organisation's...

Councillors to hear proposal for nuclear plant in Derry 20/04/2006 - 11:19:56 Councillors in Derry are due to hear proposals today for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the city. The plan is being put forward by businessman Robert Andrew, who says a 2,000-megawatt plant could generate the same amount of power as 300,000 wind farms. Mr Andrew says the facility would meet all of the North's energy needs and would also create 500 stable jobs. However, local Green Party spokesman Peter Doran is urging councillors to reject the idea, saying it flies in the face of public...

Imminent Ulster car bomb attack foiled by police (Filed: 19/04/2006) Police in Northern Ireland have seized 250lb of home-made explosives, foiling a potentially devastating car bomb attack. Local youths threw petrol bombs at police after the raid A senior policeman said those behind the plot - likely to be dissident republicans - planned to explode the device "as soon as possible". Four men were arrested during the raid on a breaker's yard in Lurgan, Co Armagh. A car was also taken away for forensic examination. Superintendent Alan Todd, Lurgan's police commander, said the police had no knowledge of a specific...

Judge lashes US anti-terror laws 'No choice' over deporting ex-INLA man to Britain By Sean O'Driscoll 14 April 2006 A new Jersey federal judge has lambasted the US government's anti-terrorism policies while agreeing that she had "no choice" but to allow the deportation of a former INLA member and two of his children. In a very strongly worded opinion, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, a sister of billionaire mogul Donald Trump, said the words engraved under the Statue of Liberty in New York were now meaningless. She said that Malachy McAllister's conviction for conspiracy to murder an RUC officer was part...

IRA suspect convicted of 1989 attack on British base A former member of the IRA was convicted today for his role in a 1989 attack on a British military base in Germany and sentenced to six years in jail. A German state court in Celle found Leonard Joseph Hardy, aged 45, from Antrim, guilty on several counts of attempted murder and of deliberately causing an explosion. Hardy, who was arrested in August in a hotel in the Spanish resort city of Torremolinos and did not fight extradition to Germany in January, has admitted being a member of an IRA “Active...