Mac Coitir was speaking as éirígí announced the details of a protest on the issue that is to be held in Belfast this week.
This coming Saturday [June 18], people are being asked to gather at Belfast’s Grosvenor Road barracks at 1pm to demonstrate against the mistreatment republicans are receiving on a daily basis at the hands of MI5 and the PSNI.
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| éirígí’s Pádraic Mac Coitir |
Mac Coitir said: “The harassment of republicans, particularly republican ex-prisoners, seems to have gone into overdrive in recent weeks.
“The PSNI, using the 2007 Justice & Security Act, and British intelligence agencies, using the most ham-fisted of approaches, have been targeting people across the Six Counties.
“This harassment has included physical assaults, arrests, house searches, threats and intimidation and the traumatising of children. On an even more sinister level, British intelligence agencies are regularly attempting to pressurise republicans into becoming informers and threatening these people when they refuse. All the while, respectable society has turned a blind eye and carried on with the farcical pretence of the ‘new Northern Ireland’.”
Mac Coitir added: “The state making a misery of the lives of republican activists and their families was wrong in the past and it is wrong now.
“In the past number of weeks, I have been told of PSNI officers dragging crying children from their parents’ cars, of the same officers attempting to search toddlers and of republicans being followed and harassed while abroad on holiday.
“It is time for all of us to take a stand against this disgraceful state of affairs. We need to send a message out to the British government and its agencies of repression that we will not allow members of our community to be isolated and intimidated.
“From here on in, republicans will regard the harassment of one as the harassment of all.”
Saturday’s protest at Grosvenor Road barracks will begin at 1pm. Bígí Linn!
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