[page 10]
accidentally while engaged in the struggle against British Imperialism in Ireland. Rose Curry is the first woman freedom fighter to die in Ireland in the present wave of fighting. Her death was honoured by a gun salute fired by female and male volunteers.
This symbolises the role which women have achieved in the struggle for national liberation in Ireland.
The attempt to prop up the sectarian Unionist regime by introducing internment, indefinite imprisonment without trial, has been a fiasco. This was justified as a move against •terrorist gunmen', the final solution to violence in the North, But the violence on both sides has escalated since internment. It has served merely to clarify the role of the British Army in Ireland and to polarise the Irish population. Internment was a clear attempt to deprive the Catholies of their political leadership, and to crush the civil rights and republican movements. The majority of those arrested were those not actively engaged in armed struggle, but those who could give that struggle political direction. The only success has not been military, but in silencing some republican and civil right: speakers.
Among those arrested were a blind man and a four year old child. The only Protestant detained was a civil rights supporter. Much has been written of the brutal treatment meted out to detainees by the British Army - of the sacks over the head, the gauntlet running over broken glass, the beatings, ete. It is important Lo realise that this is not being done merely by a few psychopaths (though there are many of these in the British Army, over eager to carry out orders), but that the tortures are part of a delermined policy to gain information, carried out with the co-operation of the British Army, the Special Branch and the R.U.C. Maudling himself admitted this policy when he stated that more information would be learned as more people were detained.
An article in the Irish Times! by Michael Maguire, a recently released detainee, shows how this policy operates. Intensively interrogated for 40 hours by Scotland Yard, the R.U.C. and the British Army, he was tortured physically and mentally to near breaking point. He was offered bribes for information, one being E100 to entice • friend to go Lo Belfast from London so that he could be interned.
No women have yet been interned, though there have been linte that this might be coming. T.E.
Ulley, the "Daily Telegraph's! pro-Unionist leader writer, who has strong financial ties with the Stormont government, has written of I.A. *gun-women' - part of the process of softening up British public opinion for the internment of women.
The weeks following internment have seen an escalation of the struggle by the nationalist minority on all fronts, Internment has led to a strengthening of determination to resist oppression, For the mass of the Catholic population it has been the final stage in revealing the role of the British army in Ireland.
They now no longer look to that regime for a solution. The cent and rates strike called by the Civil Rights Association is more then 90% effective in all Catholic areas in the North, Originally called as a protest against internment, the CiA is now making demands which transcend the civil rights stage - the demand for the "dismantling of the entire Orange-Unionist system of administration, symbolised in Stormont". The simificance of this is that the mass of the Catholic population now deny the legitimacy of
[page 11]
insults at the troops, This treatment has been known to reduce a soldier in spite of the protection of all the many secret weapons introduced into the British