BY DOUG COOPER
SYDNEY, Australia - Some 200 people filled Sydney's Gaelic Club March 1 for a fund-raising event for the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein and to protest the November 1996 decision by the Australian government to bar Gerry Adams, president of the party, from visiting Australia to launch his autobiography Before the Dawn.

An appeal of the ban to the High Court of Australia is planned.

The Liberal-National government's action was based on Section 501 of the Migration Act, which permits the immigration minister to bar people who are not of "good character" because of past criminal conduct or their association with organizations believed to have been involved in criminal conduct. The ban was backed by Labor Party opposition leader Kim Beazley.

In the last two years, as the fight against British rule in Ireland picked up steam, Adams broke a long-standing visa ban on visits to the United States and a media ban on his voice being heard in the United Kingdom. At the end of February, however, the Clinton administration reportedly told Adams not to apply for another visa to enter the United States, while inviting leaders of the pro-British loyalist parties in northern Ireland to attend a St. Patrick's day event at the White House.

Sinn Fein is at the forefront of the struggle to bring British domination of six of Ireland's northern counties to an end. It will stand candidates, including Adams and other fighters, in the upcoming general election for the House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

The Sydney event, organized by Australian Aid for Ireland, included a live telephone hookup with Martin McGuinness, a central leader of Sinn Fein and the party's candidate in Mid-Ulster. McGuinness noted the likelihood that the Tory government of John Major would be replaced by a Labour government. He explained that despite no signs of a change in the British Labour Party's long-standing official support for the occupation of part of Ireland by Britain, Sinn Fein remained ready to sit down and negotiate with the British government on an equal footing.

McGuinness also condemned the barbaric treatment being meted out to Irish political prisoners in English jails, noting the case of Róisín McAliskey in particular. McAliskey, now seven months' pregnant, has been subjected to repeated strip searches and a lack of adequate medical attention while being held pending extradition to Germany on trumped-up charges connected to the bombing of a British military base there.

McGuinness welcomed the participation of Aboriginal activists at the event and said that he hoped the day would soon come when they would send a representative to Sinn Fein's annual national conference, the Ard Fheis. Longtime Aboriginal activist Lyall Munro ended the evening with an explanation of the common enemy facing both Aboriginal and Irish people and pledged continued support to the fight to gain a visa for Adams.

On March 2, 90 people gathered at a monument near the Sydney suburb of Castle Hill to commemorate the 1804 Castle Hill Rebellion. The event, sponsored by the Irish National Association of Australasia, marks an uprising led by convicts sent to New South Wales, who were veterans of the 1798 mass rebellion for Irish freedom. The Castle Hill Rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed by the British colonial administration at the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Its leaders were either summarily executed or hung within a few days of its defeat.

Event organizer Tom O'Gliasain described parts of Adams's autobiography and appealed for letters of protest to Canberra.

Doug Cooper is a member of the AWU-FIME amalgamated union.  
 
 
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