Queen Visits Her Torturers

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SOCIALIST PRESS › * BRITAIN 6 issues 12 issues 24 issues Six years after the introduction of internment the Queen visited her Irish colony. To permit this royal inspection of a subjugated part of the Irish people to go forward a massive influx of troops was sent on ahead to saturate the nationalist areas of Belfast.

Despite the alarm whipped up in the mass media that some Republican marksman would waste a bullet on this parasitical drone, the undisguisable fact of the matter was that the entire oppressed nationalist minority boycotted the royal 'good will' circus.

Even the Catholic middle class party of Gerry Fitt, the Social Democratic Labour Party, feeling the unanimous hostility of the nationalist population was obliged to refuse to attend any of the royal festivities.

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And all glossed over the fact that she had not gone where she pleased and that she had only met a handful of predominantly middle class Protestants in secluded surroundings in the predominantly Protestant towns of Hillsborough and Coleraine.

Even to achieve these meetings she needed the protection of 32,000 police and soldiers, the deployment of innumerable helicopters and an undisclosed number of submarines to protect the royal yacht.

All told it was the greatest security operation ever mounted in the north-greater than internment, operation motorman or either loyalist strike.

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Dartmouth ›n NW5 1HR. £2.10 £4.20 €8.40 to Behind the visit however lies the sordid deal that Michael Foot has cooked up with the Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster. It is with this gang of backwoods Tory MPs that one-time so-called left Michael Foot has secured agreement.

O WITHDRAWAL In return for their support in getting the Callaghan-Healey Phase 3 package through against the working class the Unionists have been given heightened military repression against the Catholics plus a royal visit whose purpose is to declare that there will be no troop withdrawal.

Indeed no sooner has this Windsor woman returned to England than Tory spokesman Airey Neave demands that the visit be followed up with "constitutional changes"

What these would be is quite clear. A restored Stormont under unionist domination. A domination of the nationalist population secured by the RUC.

This expanded, militarised, and now "non-sectarian" RUC is the key element in the British government's strategy. The fraudulent character of the English propaganda on the new impartial and reformed RUC is well exposed by two Catholic priests over the case of Gerry Dowdall.

GRENADIERS Dowdall was hit several times in the front of his body in a shooting incident in South Derry by members of the Grenadier Guards.

£1.50 £3.00 £6.00 So bad Guards' Dowdall dead.

were the wounds from the high velocity rifles that was at first assumed to be Taken to Musgrave Park top security hospital in Belfast surgeons had to wait several weeks before they felt Dowdall was strong enough to face an operation.

Two major operations on his abdomen had to be spaced out. Though he lost a kidney, his chances of recovery after surviving the second operation were thought to be good until visitors to his hospital bed on June 8 found that he had been abducted by the RUC and taken to the notorious Castlereagh interrogation centre in East Belfast.

Beaten and abused, his still sensitive wounds pulled open by the police, Dowdall was held for five days of intensive questioning before being transferred to Crumlin Road prison.

HUNGER STRIKE

Denied exercise granted to other prisoners and subject to constant victimisations by the prison, Dowdall protested by a hunger and thirst strike. To which the authorities responded by wrecking his cell.

Dowdall's treatment was brought to public attention by two priests Murray and Faul. Their pamphlets containing exposures of British Army atrocities and sectarian murders carried out by Her Majesty's Ulster Defence Regiment in the Tyrone 'murder triangle' are banned in the Republic.

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