Tional Sinn Fein walked free irom a court Wednesday after Charges of conspiracy, and IRA membership were suddenly dropped by the prosecution.
The Sinn Fein members had been under tnreal or prose cution since December 1977, when security forces in Belfast E Danny Morrison — one of the twelve.
Socialist Challenge 1 March 1979 page 12 private homes and the offices of Sinn Fein and Republican In April last year the twelve, as well as leading Republican Gerry Adams, were eventually charged.
OBLY were immealately patched to Long Kesh, where they were remanded.
Adams served seven months in prison before the charge against him was dismissed by the North of Ireland's Lord Chief Justice, Robert Lowrv, This acquittal gained the release of the others who were Charged with Adams. wasn't until last week that the prosecution admitted there was "insufficient evidence' to send the five women and seven men But the case should not be regarded as a humiliation for the state forces. At the time of the arrests Sinn Fein maintained that the motivation behind them was to disrupt the work of its organisation by operating the now taminat This practice is best shown by the case of Antony McDonagh, who was arrested in August 1977 in connection shooting.
For nine months McDonagh The maj- was remanded in custody each dis- week until the case finally came up for a preliminary hearing. It took a further nine months for the case to be finally heard and then, last week, the judge ruled that the prosecution had failed to make a case against McDonagh, and he was freed. But the point about the case is that for the past 18 months but it McDonagh has been in prison, although words of the judge, prepared a case against him' But as with the Sinn Fein 12, the whole charade had, for the police, served a useful purpose — it had put one suspected 'troublemaker' That there was no evidence against this individual in the first place was, for the system of law in the North of Ireland, system of entirely incidental.
name their sources.
Ron Knowles, with a Journalists, charges police, in the *had not bars.
*Like many of those who live on reservations, artists resort to incest, producing more visual images of all kinds allows us to acknowledged as "art".
PETER FULLER explores and more paintings about paintings about paintings.
insist that their nail clippings or excrement should be 'Others have gone insane, and sit about in tubs of bull's blood, gather twigs, or • as 'art'.
This distortion of history should not blind us to the fact that there was no unbroken stretching back into the earliest social formations. All constant was that in every civilisation men and women produced images of one sort and another, which took ditferent forms different uses in different cultures.
Indeed, during the 19th century, many new forms of producing and reproducing images began to emerge, including lithography, photography. and new printing techniques.
Between 1870 and 1914 in Britain and America, the old competitive entrepreneurial capitalism which had given rise to the professional fine art tradition was itself displaced by the monopoly capitalist system.
Visual images under capitalism became more diverse and more before: new mechanical, electrical, cinematic and holographic means of reproducing images proliferated This unprecedented explosion of say that monopoly capitalism gave rise to the first mega-visual tradition Advertising became the dominant form of static, visual imagery under monopoly continuum of "art' that remained and were pur lo displaced about monopoly Never as "Art' most recently the art nor to anyone else, achievements freedom'.
Just as tree within the designing posters, bill-boards, and so on were every bit as controlled as their counterparts in the USSR One can see immediately that the Keynesian experiment was doomed to failure. It helped to create an enclave of socially redundant, over-subsidised fine artists wno nad every freedom except the only one without which the others count as nothing: the freedom to act socially. Artists have become like a protected species into government reservation; there is nothing for them to do. The government subsidies even prevent them from dying out: they just have to be artists.
Like many of those who live on reservations, they resort to incest, producing more and more paintings paintings about paintings. Others have gone insane, and sit about in tubs of bull's blood, gather twigs, or insist that their nail clippings or excrement should be acknowledged The Keynesian 'hands-off' system of state patronage has thus proved an unmitigated failure. Politically, it is threatened because the squalor within corral longer demonstrates to those nasty Russians, , the magnificent of Western artistic This is now even acknowledged patronising institutions