Kate McMenamin

[KNEECAP @KNEECAPCEOL]

Yesterday we met Gareth Peirce in London to present her with something small from us.

As she said to us walking into the Royal Courts of Justice a few months back:

"Don't be fooled by the fine architecture, this is where many great miss carriages of justice take place".

She made sure that wasn't Mo Chara - a legend 👏🏻💚🤍🧡

[Fiachra McGuinness @fiachramcg]

Bobby Sands was extraordinary, a leader in very difficult times, and also a visionary.

Everything the SDLP are not.

[Danny Morrison @molloy1916]

Paul Doherty's resignation, as far as I'm concerned, is based on genuine opposition to whoever in the SDLP disastrously misread nationalist feelings about the effect of DUP attacks on IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands MP. His decision was sound.

[PaulleyTicks @PaulleyTicks]

BREAKING: Believing himself to be the new Messiah, Donald Trump walks into the Strait of Hormuz to attempt to open it permanently, by parting the seas like Moses did.

[charlie mc menamin @Bogsideandproud]

Easter Sunday Parade Derry City assemble 2.00pm Westland Street after the local commemorations.main address this year will be delivered by Belfast republican Séanna Walsh
Waterside Monument - 1pm
Shantallow Monument - 1pm
Creggan Monument - 1.30pm
Bogside/Brandywell - 1.30pm

[Derry Journal @derryjournal]

Christopher Jackson says Sinn Féin warned of planned attack on Derry office by dissident republicans over Easter
https://t.co/i9MqbI4rnB

[Maggie Keane @barrymags2001]

My mother,in the RA obvs 😎

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

Take your fucking hat off you piece of shit. You’ve already murdered the six patriots and now you disrespect them in their families as well. You’ve committed war crimes and you will pay the maximum price.

[KNEECAP @KNEECAPCEOL]

Today Israel murdered more children.

Hit with US missiles as they slept.

Israel still blocks all journalists from entering Gaza - they cannot allow the world see their barbarity.

Free Palestine

[Madden & Finucane Solicitors @madden_finucane]

An open letter to Gavin Robinson from Robin Livingstone

Dear Gavin,

Last Wednesday you advised the families of the Bloody Sunday dead to “move on”. You were speaking after the PPS decided not to prosecute members of the Parachute Regiment for perjury. The families should stop, you added, “the endless pursuit of others”.

Although I’ve lost someone close to me in violent and unexpected circumstances, and although I write for a living, I will never if I live to write another billion words come anywhere near to bettering a description of the chest-emptying reality of grief and loss that I heard some years ago. Let me share it with you…

“The only relief I get is when I wake up in the morning. There’s a few seconds when you’re still half-asleep, a few more seconds until you’re properly awake, and a few more seconds while you ease into the new day.

“Then, you remember…”

The woman who spoke those words that I’ve just quoted might like to “move on”, I don’t know. Speaking from my own family’s experience and that of the countless victims I’ve met as I potter towards the end of a long career in journalism, I’d say she would. I don’t know for sure, but why wouldn’t she? Who would choose to start every day with an electric jolt of newly-remembered grief in the heart? Who would choose to sob on hearing a bar of a half-remembered song? Who would choose to be suddenly racked with guilt during a moment of family joy? Who would choose not to open a biscuit tin of old family photos because sorrowful smiles are 99 per cent sorrow and one per cent smile.

Your concept of what the Bloody Sunday families are in pursuit of, with its concomitant imperatives of punishment and incarceration, is not one that I recognise. I can’t and don’t as a bereaved relative speak for every name in Lost Lives, that hefty Book of the Dead that’s still as essential to my desk in work as the notebook, phone and keyboard. I can’t and don’t even speak for every member of my family. But I know that what I feel is common coin in the place where grief lives.

Like the Bloody Sunday family, my family is in pursuit of justice, in our case for Julie. We probably won’t know what justice is until we get it – or until we get something that feels like it. At this point all I know about the British soldier who shot my sister dead at 14 is that he’s Welsh. I don’t know his name or where he lives. I have not the faintest idea of what he looks like. Heck, I don’t even know if he’s alive.

Why don’t I know these things? Simply because the man was never made the subject of the kind of meaningful investigation that would necessitate these things being divulged. What’s more, I don’t particularly want to know his name or where he lives – I don’t know if I have sufficient storage in my emotional hard drive to let him into my life. But if these things are made known as we try to complete the picture of how Julie died and why, then so be it.

What I do know, Gavin, is that I don’t want this anonymous Welshman – if indeed he is still alive – to spend a second in jail, never mind long years. What I do know is that the idea of punishing him has never entered my mind. But it goes deeper than that. The man who fired the plastic bullet is likely my age – probably just a little bit older. If, like me, he has children and grandchildren, I hope he loves and enjoys them as much as I do mine. The idea of pursuing him has not only never occurred to me, it is something that I don’t even understand. He is at this point merely a means to an end; as much a part of the drama of Julie’s death as the armoured vehicle and the plastic bullet gun; with more agency, granted, but not much. If he ends up being interviewed I hope it’s on his sofa in Wales and not in a barracks in Belfast. If he ends up being charged I can’t help that, but if he was convicted I’d step forward to ask the judge that he not be jailed, no doubt while your DUP colleagues queued up to get their pictures taken with him and claim him as one of their own.

It’s no surprise to me that you fail to understand that people can no more move on from doing right by those they have lost than they can move on from breathing. Why would you? What does surprise me is that you think victims of the British state like the Bloody Sunday families are in “pursuit” of human beings – of “others”. That is a venal and catastrophic misunderstanding of the sacred and immutable nature of a commitment made while standing over a coffin.

What they are in pursuit of, Gavin, is not Soldier X, or Y or Z. They are merely old and rusted signposts on the road to their journey’s end. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can fall asleep at night in the knowledge that they have finally kept a promise they made – spoken or unspoken – to the innocent grey face among the mass cards; to the mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, son or daughter they lost. What they are in pursuit of is a time when they can wake up, and alongside the every-morning shock of that moment of re-remembering, feel for the first time a surge of pride in a promise delivered.

I don’t know what’s happened to you in the last year or so – maybe a little longer. I specify that time scale because December 2024 was when you crossed the city to get a drive-by picture taken on the Falls Road beside some pro-Palestine graffiti. I don’t think I need to remind you about the extent and nature of the wall art that you passed without comment in your East Belfast constituency to get here, so I won’t mention that except to point out that I don’t remember you ever having your picture taken beside any of it. It struck me forcefully then that this didn’t seem like the kind of stunt that a generally mild-mannered bloke like you would pull.

Then last March you again stuck your barrel chest out, thumbed your lapels and issued another stirring message to Loyal Ulster: you were going to instruct your MLAs to “put a marker down” in relation to the Irish language at Grand Central Station. That also didn’t strike me as a Gavin-style move. And in the autumn you got even more in touch with your inner-Jamie by welcoming the Soldier F acquittal on social media not just with the expected comment that it was a “common sense judgement” but with a big old Para flag. And now, in case anyone thought that the Para flag was a slip of your phone thumb, here you are telling the people still trying to get their heads round your Para play to “move on”.

The most recent LucidTalk poll shows your party up 1% to 19%, and the Belfast Telegraph was reliably excited enough to suggest that this statistically negligible figure points suggests your party’s “shift to the right” has won back voters. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a single point to suggest that the DUP is back, whatever the unionist papers say. I’ve no doubt that your Palestine picture, your Irish language way cry and now your “move on” exhortation will bring familiar fish to the top in the pool you’re currently fishing in. But you need to drop your line in deeper waters and you need a bigger catch if you’re to move out of your polling teens. And in that sense, it may be you who most needs to move on.

[Robin Percival 🇾🇪🇾🇪🇾🇪 @RobinPercival2]

President Connolly with relatives of those killed on Bloody Sunday at the ⁦@MuseumFreeDerry⁩ today.

[Órfhlaith Begley @OrfhlaithBegley]

Mo Chara has been dragged back to court today by the British Government.

This is all part of a calculated attempt to silence those who stand up and speak out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Don't stop talking about Palestine.

[Artilleryyouthcentre @artilleryyc]

Our year in numbers:
34 young people worked their very first job in our Cafe
52 pensioners gardens transformed
44 public spaces painted, cleaned up and brought back to life
90 safety lights installed
Over 300 bags of litter lifted
Our 2025 work programme helped young and old…

[Martin McGuinness Peace Foundation @McGuinnessPF]

🎄Looking for the perfect Christmas gift?
Our Martin tells the story of our Chieftain — his life, leadership and legacy.
📩 DM me if you need a copy.
A great read for the festive season.

[KRW Law Human Rights @KRWLaw]

Statement on behalf of Naoise Ó Cuilin

It is wholly inappropriate for anyone to identify someone as a “suspect” in circumstances where the PPS has determined that there is insufficient evidence to bring any criminal charge

Our Niall Murphy is instructed

https://t.co/lZcT2w3F5l

[Tony Doherty @tonydutchdoc]

Well stated. The families are hugely thankful to Madden & Finucane Solicitors for their unstinting support over the decades. Míle Buíochas daoibh go léir

[Andersonstown News @ATownNews]

ANDRÉE MURPHY: The Paras' reputation is not 'proud' and they are not 'valiant' https://t.co/TziF4Xs5wG via @ATownNews

[Gerry Adams @GerryAdamsSF]

I have instructed my legal team that it is my intention to pursue legal action against Keir Starmer’s decision to retrospectively change a law which a Conservative govt broke over 50 years ago. https://t.co/XedRFkagwD

[Allison Morris @AllisonMorris1]

'You used them very well' They may hope the atheists are right, or there is a very hot eternity waiting on this pair