Word: irelands
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Headed for a Sunday-afternoon game of Gaelic football near the border, Aidan McAnespie, 23, a Roman Catholic Ulsterman, passed through a security checkpoint just outside the town of Aughnacloy in Northern Ireland last week. Shots rang out from a tower manned by British soldiers and McAnspie crumpled to the ground, fatally wounded. The British army promptly took into custody the man who fired the gun, Grenadier Guardsman David Jonathan Holden, 18. Holden claimed he had accidentally set off his weapon and that McAnespie was killed by a ricocheting bullet...
...incident was the latest squall in an increasingly stormy relationship between London and Dublin. Like the weather over the Irish Sea, ties between the two countries can be subject to abrupt changes. The sun came out in 1985, when the Anglo-Irish accord was signed, in which Britain granted Ireland a voice in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Since then a series of controversial British decisions has drawn complaints from Ireland...
Irish anger began to surge in late January, when the Thatcher government announced that, for reasons of "national security," it would not prosecute a group of officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's predominantly Protestant police force. The officers were involved in the R.U.C.'s alleged shoot-to-kill policy of 1982 and 1983. An official inquiry on the case has gone unpublished...
...debate in the House of Commons was heated and noisy, so naturally the Honorable Member from Brent East was in the thick of it. Discussing the deaths of suspected terrorists in Northern Ireland, Ken Livingstone suggested that the British Attorney General was an "accomplice to murder." Tories shouted, "Withdraw! Withdraw!" and the Speaker admonished the Labor M.P., demanding that he rephrase his comment. As Livingstone sat silently unrepentant, the Commons voted to oust him from the chamber. A sword-bearing sergeant at arms escorted him out the door...
...maiden Commons speech, Livingstone angered the House by accusing British security services of atrocities in Northern Ireland, one of his favorite issues. In November, after a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army killed eleven people in the town of Enniskillen, Livingstone caused another furor by saying Ulster was Britain's Viet Nam and predicting that the I.R.A. would win the conflict. Livingstone defied Kinnock by demanding that Britain cut its defense budget and withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By warning of a civil war within the party, he embarrassed Kinnock into dropping plans for a review...