Republican News · Thursday 13 April 2000

[An Phoblacht]

Third victory for Anti-Extradition Campaign

CHANTS of ``We want Owen'' thundered around the usually sober confines of Dublin's Four Courts on Friday 6 April, as word spread through the crowd of anti-extradition protestors outside that the release of Owen Carron had been ordered. Minutes later, the former Fermanagh/South Tyrone MP emerged from the imposing columns at the front of the building and into the midday sunshine - a free man. He was immediately thronged by crowds of demonstrators, well wishers, relatives, former constituents and the press and was carried by a sea of bodies onto the street.

The decision by the Supreme Court to release him came, ironically, on the same day that the Six-County Direct Ruler was meeting 26-County Foreign Minister Gerry Collins at Iveagh House and also on the same weekend as the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, where a motion called for an end to political extradition to Britain and the North.

The court's five judges ruled that the allegations against the man who had been election agent for Bobby Sands in 1981 were connected to political offences committed by another Fermanagh man.

Carron was arrested by the RUC at Letterbree, County Fermanagh in December 1985 after he had given a lift to James Maguire, who was later concvicted of possessing a rifle and ammunition while a passenger in the car. Maguire told the court in an affidavit that these were for the purpose of forcing British forces to leave the Six Counties.

Phoblacht, Thursday 12 April, 1990


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