A Chara, - As I sat in the bustling community centre of Portadown's Garvaghy Road on Tuesday morning, it was with utter disbelief and frustration that I and many local people read Ruth Dudley Edwards's latest diatribe against this besieged and beleaguered community.
Writing from the ivory tower of Drumcree loyalist encampment overlooking this estate, she obviously views the situation through orange tinted glasses. She demonizes people like Breandan Mac Cionnaith who have become voices of the voiceless in this terrorised estate. In a somersault of logic, she describes her brethren friends as being "non-sectarian", "refusing to yield to intimidation" and "facing dangers few in the Republic could dream of".
If she hasn't started to wear a sash then maybe she ought to take a walk a few hundred yards from the media scrum at Drumcree churchyard down into the Garvaghy estate which has been under complete siege for over a week now. Then she would know all about "danger" and "intimidation". She would find a frightened working-class community who have been living on strong coffee and adrenalin for a week or more; a people unable to sleep due to low-flying helicopters, all-night Lambeg drumming and fear of neither knowing the day nor the hour when their neighbourhood may experience a military invasion and loyalist assault, as happened in 1996 and 1997. A security ring of steel has turned the estate into one large prison. This morning women were prevented from going to work and children due to be sent on a summer project to the US were turned back at the checkpoints.
Food is becoming scarcer in the local shops, people have been prevented from entering the town centre (which for Catholics is a virtual no-go area anyway), and already groups of loyalists have managed to breach the security cordon and have terrorised Catholics in Ballyoran at the top of the Garvaghy Road.
Would it be too much to ask of Ms Dudley Edwards and her neo-loyalist friends in the south to lay down their poison pens, come out of their ivory towers and call a permanent ceasefire to their mean-spirited campaign against vulnerable nationalist communities? I won't be holding my breath! - Is mise, F O Suilleabhain,
Bothar Garhbh Achaidh, Portadown.