BY EMILY FITZSIMMONS AND PEGGY KREINER
PITTSBURGH - Close to 1,000 people heard Sinn Fein
president Gerry Adams speak at Duquesne University here October
12. The audience was overwhelmingly young, including a busload
of high school students from McKeesport High School, a former
steel mill town outside of Pittsburgh.
"The republican belief is that the people are sovereign, based on our own sense of ourselves. Our country is partitioned and under British control. The vast majority of the island want unity and independence," Adams said. The Sinn Fein leader and member of the newly formed Northern Ireland Assembly described the history of Unionism in Ireland as the colonization and dispossession of a native people, like the oppression of other people around the world. "Ireland belongs to all who live in Ireland.... Under partition, Catholics have faced internment, apartheid slums, and for some, the denial of the vote up through the 1970s."
Adams fielded a number of questions from the audience after his half-hour presentation. Several related to the "Good Friday" agreement, which Adams said was not a peace settlement, but a range of measures aimed at reversing the discrimination against Catholics, releasing political prisoners, and creating a level playing field in the north of Ireland. He stressed that the cause of the conflict in Ireland lies with the British rulers, who "have the biggest imperative to war" and must be pushed to act to resolve it. He said the rulers in London believe they still have an empire, and they must come to a new view of the world.
Adams held a press conference after the event and then spoke in the evening at a fund-raiser at the convention center to a crowd of over 300, mostly longtime supporters of the Irish struggle. A number of local politicians, including city council members and Pittsburgh mayor Thomas Murphy made welcoming remarks.
David Trimble, first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly and leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and Seamus Mallon, deputy first minister of the assembly spoke in Pittsburgh October 9 as part of a 12-city tour promoting Northern Ireland as a good place to do business.
NEW YORK - Hundreds of people filed into Webster Hall, a popular nightclub, for a birthday concert celebration for Gerry Adams October 17. Many well-known Irish bands and singers entertained the overwhelmingly young crowd.
John Francis Mulligan, 29 years old, and a member of an Irish Gay and Lesbian organization, was there building there showing his support as well as building the October 19 vigil for Matthew Shepard, the young student recently killed in Wyoming. "I am concerned about the peace process because I don't know what the Irish people have been given," he said. "The RUC needs to be disbanded, they are a biases police force, and those issues need to be worked out before there's any real peace."
Lori Rowbotham, 33, from Passaic, New Jersey, recently visited Ireland with a group of 16 others, and has been working with Irish Northern Aid for the past four years.
Nancy Richardson, 23, from Montclair, New Jersey, got interested participating because "my brother was interested, so I began reading and finding out what is going on." Richardson traveled with the group Rowbotham went with, which visited the Irish Republic as well as Belfast and Derry in the north. "I am currently looking to participate in a group because I am trying to learn more," she said.
Adams also spoke to meetings in Boston and Lowell, Massachusetts; Albany, New York; Fairfield, Connecticut; and Philadelphia during his week-long visit to the United States.
Emily Fitzsimmons and Ruth Nebbia are members of the United Transportation Union. Peggy Kreiner is a member of the United Steelworkers of America.