Speakers:

Brid Smith People Before Profit TD Dublin Sounth
Central
Fiona Ferguson – People Before Profit North Belfast
Candidate
Eamonn McCann – People Before Profit Foyle
Candidate
Bernadetter Devlin McAliskey

Entertainment:

Paddy Nash
Hollie Rose

All of the other parties standing in Foyle merely offer more of the same. The two largest parties are mainly concerned about which one takes three seats, which one takes two. But what does that matter to families in constant anxiety about cut-backs, joblessness, rock-bottom wages and fear that their children will never make a decent living in Derry.
The SDLP and Sinn Fein should be told that the seats are not theirs to divvy up between themselves.

People Before Profit welcomes the upsurge in radicalism represented by Jeremy Corby in England and Bernie Sanders in the US. These are the contemporary political movements we relate to.

We have been at the cutting edge of the great movement against water charges and austerity in the South. We will bring that spirit of people power into the Assembly and blow away the dusty ideas which have smothered progress for too long. We will give a voice to a new generation not trapped in the past.

We are not hidebound by Orange or Green designation. We stand on the Left. We will fight on every issue - women’s rights, the environment, State involvement in crime and collusion, etc. - on the basis of what serves the interests of all working-class people.
Gerry Carroll in West Belfast, Fiona Ferguson in North Belfast and myself in Foyle are confident of making a breakthrough on May 7th. A team of People Before Profit MLAs would immediately change the dynamic of politics across the North.

We represent real change. We believe there are thousands in Foyle who want the same thing

Eamonn McCann

https://www.facebook.com/events/1538234236470784/
‪#‎PeopleBeforeProfit‬ ‪#‎ChangeIsComing‬

That cuts tend to hit the most vulnerable hardest is a common statement. Never has it been more true than in relation to the proposal by the Education Authority to cut the number of hours that children with significant disabilities will receive in pre-school at one of the North’s 39 special schools. How can the Sinn Féin Minister for Education, John O’Dowd, allow such a short-sighted and discriminatory policy to proceed?  It is short-sighted because children with developmental delay benefit most from early intervention and it is discriminatory because, were the child to attend a mainstream pre-school setting, they would receive more than 2.5 hours a week.  One of the main reasons that special schools remain is because they provide the speech, physio and occupational therapy that disabled children need in order to be able to learn; the 2.5 hours a day that will be offered from next September will not allow them to access even these therapies, still less any of the pre-school educational opportunities that their non-disabled brothers and sisters take for granted.  Rather than cut provision to the truly most vulnerable of our children, the Minister could save tens of millions by moving to end the duplicated resources of our segregated education system.   Eamonn McCann

Here's something I haven't seen mentioned in any of the functions and features marking the "decade of centenaries".   
"We, the undersigned, Ulster Protestant men and women over the age of 16 years, hereby repudiate the claim of Sir Edward Carson to represent the United Protestant opinion of Ulster, reject the doctrine of armed resistance to the legitimate decrees of Parliament; and declare our abhorrence of the attempt to revive ancient bigotries and dying habits in this Province." 
That's the opening paragraph of an 'Alternative Covenant', or the Armour Declaration signed by 12,000 Protestants and published in 1913. No surprise, I suppose, that it's been almost lost to history. It's a difficult document to fit into the approved narrative of separate communities proceeding along parallel lines.
The reference to "ancient bigotries and dying habits" is interesting: a hundred years ago thousands of Protestants welcomed the fact, as they believed it to be, that any lingering sense of hostility between Protestants and Catholics could be seen as a flicker from a fading past.
 "We desire to live upon terms of friendship and equality with our Roman Catholic fellow countrymen and in the event of the present measure for the Better Government of Ireland becoming law, we are prepared to take our part with them in working for the good of our common country."
 The "present measure for the Better Government" was the Home Rule Bill.
 "We cannot consent to any proposal for the permanent exclusion of any part of our country from the life and interests of the whole: and we pledge ourselves before Almighty God to work for the promotion of peace and goodwill among all classes of Irishmen."
The Declaration had been drafted by the Rev J B Armour of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Ballymoney, a fervent adherent of the rich radical tradition of the area, at the prompting of Captain Jack White of Broughshane. The document was unveiled at an overflow meeting in Ballymoney Town Hall on October 24, 1913. The platform party included Armour, White, Sir Roger Casement and the historian Mrs Alice Stopford Green, granddaughter of the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath. To emphasise the Protestant nature of the occasion, Catholics had been asked not to attend.
White was the only son of Field Marshal George White VC, former Governor of Gilbraltar. He had followed his father into the military training college Sandhurst, where, he later recalled, he mostly learned about "fortifications and fornication". He won a DSO for bravery in the Boer War. The horrors of that conflict cured him of allegiance to the Crown. 
White led a packed life full of political adventure. He was the first training officer of the Irish Citizen Army. After the Easter Rising he toured the South Wales coalfields urging protest and strikes against the imminent execution of James Connolly. He wandered the world for a while, fetching up in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War.
His last foray into politics at home involved an attempt to run as a Republican Socialist in Antrim in the 1945 Westminster election, launching his campaign at a rally in Broughshane Orange hall where, with ecumenical even-handedness, he poured scorn on Hitler, the Pope, Lord Brookeborough and Eamon de Valera. But his health was failing. He died from cancer in a Belfast nursing home in 1946.
I had only then haziest knowledge of the Armour Declaration until Diane Greer phoned me at the weekend on the road from a session on "Shared Remembering" at Ballymoney Community Resource Centre. Diane is best known as vocalist with the brilliant Happy Enchiladas, but in her spare time contributes massively to community understanding and organisation. Had I ever heard of the Armour Declaration?
Rings a distant bell, I told her.
You should get your hands on it, she told me. "People should know about this sort of thing." And so we should.
 "We cannot consent to any proposal for the permanent exclusion of any part of our country from the life and interests of the whole: and we pledge ourselves before Almighty God to work for the promotion of peace and goodwill among all classes of Irishmen."
It is right that we should remember the past, but wrong to remember it only as a tale of two traditions. There's more to us than that. There are few figures from the past better placed to illuminate a brighter future than the Rev J B Armour and Jack White.

Eamonn McCann

The news that General Michael Jackson was gung-ho for the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2011 should come as no surprise to anyone in Derry.

The news comes in a book just published by the distinguished journalist Tom Bower.
Jackson was the man who devised – wrote out in his own hand – the cover-up lies after the Bloody Sunday massacre. He later repeatedly perjured himself to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

Jackson had been second-in-command of the paratroopers in the Bogside on the day. Although clearly guilty of, at the least, being an accessory to murder and perverting justice, Saville’s inquiry let him off the hook. Saville pinned all of the blame for the atrocity on lower-ranking soldiers - par for the course when it comes to official inquiries into official criminality.

Jackson should be prosecuted. If he isn’t, how can we say that truth and justice have seriously been sought?

Over the years, calls for Jackson to be put into the dock have been few and far between. None of the main parties shouted about the issue from the rooftops. To put a focus on Jackson would have been to indict the army top brass and their political associates – which would have made it impossible for Cameron to make his phoney “apology” while insisting that nobody of any importance had been involved in the events he was apologising for.

Saville let the families down. Successive British governments have striven to ensure that they stay down. The British authorities have been confident they could get away with this because they believed that they had squared off local political leaders who might have been expected to lead opposition to the stitch-up.

Some of them had been talking to the British about how to finesse popular response to the report’s publication. The British believed that they had arranged that the Bloody Sunday issue would now be regarded as resolved – in the name of “reconciliation”. The top Northern Ireland Official dealing with the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Mary Madden, blurted out the truth when she snarled at me in the corridor of the Guildhall on the day Saville’s report was published that I should stop bringing up awkward issues because, “Everybody had agreed that this was to be a day of reconciliation.”

It’s worth taking a minute to ponder what that statement could mean. Who is/are the “everybody” who, according to Madden, had agreed that the report would be the last word on Bloody Sunday. No more fractious argy-bargy to disrupt reconciliation…
How could such an agreement have been made unless both sides knew in advance what the Report’s conclusions were going to be and had signalled that they regarded these conclusions as a fair and satisfactory resolution of the affair?

Here’s a question: Did members or representatives of any political party operating in Derry hold confidential discussions with the NIO or other agents of government in the weeks prior to publication of the report?

Here’s another question: Did any discussions take place at that time about the Bloody Sunday March and whether the Report had enough in it to persuade family members and others to abandon the march?

There are other questions, too, but maybe those are enough for the time being.
Derry people – and others across this and the neighbouring island – can be assured that People Before Profit MLAs will see to it that the name of Michael Jackson rings around the Assembly – just as we will relentlessly bring up the cause of the Ballymurphy families, of Kathleen Thompson, Manus Deery, Julie Hambleton and the others bereaved in the Birmingham bombs, Caroline Mooreland – “executed” by the Provos on the word of an informer – etc., etc., etc., etc

People Before Profit will raise these issues in the name of all of the working class of the North. We say that when the State murders its citizens it must be held to account. Otherwise, democracy is a dead letter. For us, that’s the key.

To call for the truth about establishment involvement in the Bloody Sunday killings, and for Jackson to be brought to justice, is not to make a nationalist argument. Containing the Bloody Sunday cause within nationalism makes it virtually inevitable that it will become a matter of political negotiation not a matter of principle, and bogged down in Orange-Green deadlock.

I will have a lot more to say about Bloody Sunday in the coming weeks.
​
Eamonn McCann

Sinn Fein has lost momentum. Its performance in the Republic’s election fell short of what the party and media pundits had predicted.

The message for Foyle is that Sinn Fein won’t take a third seat. People Before Profit stands on the brink of entering the Assembly with two or possibly three seats - Foyle, West Belfast and North Belfast. In that event, we will give the place the sort of shaking it richly deserves but has never experienced.

If I’m in the Assembly, the Executive parties – not just Sinn Fein – will be confronted at every turn with their abject failure to deliver for Derry. They have let Derry down on the university, housing provision, jobs, the toxic dump at Campsie, transport planning and much else.

Just a while ago, Sinn Fein had a front organisation called “Stand Up For Derry”, which has now been stood down.

No party on the island is more dependent on continuous momentum than Sinn Fein. Having abandoned the idea of putting a united Ireland above everything else, they have to show rapid progress towards their new objective - a share of office in each jurisdiction. But the election didn’t mark the major step towards that aspiration which many had anticipated.

One of the reasons Sinn Fein faltered was that it moved steadily to the right as the campaign progressed. It had tried to brand itself as left-wing. But as the prospect of office appeared to come closer, they began inching into the centre. In the end, they were neither fish, flesh nor fowl.

On the eve of the poll, spokespersons were arguing that Sinn Fein’s spending plans were more in line with the wishes of the Central Bank and the Department of Finance than the policies of any other party.

Once it was said that the reason Sinn Fein came across as more Left-wing in the South than in the North is that spending limits in the North were set by the British Treasury. But that can’t account for the shift to the right in the Republic.
​
The party’s key consideration has been whatever it believes will bring them closer to office.