Stalwarts of freedom
Ardoyne is a small community in Belfast which has borne more than its
share of suffering in the past twenty years of conflict. This week
its people came together to remember their dead and to rededicate
themselves to the struggle for lasting peace in their community and
their country.
If the privileged few who rule Ireland North and South were to be
believed, the people who celebrated Easter in Ardoyne are terrorists
and terrorist sympathisers who have brought violence on themselves
and who want more violence. That is how the privileged have always
described those who demand their rights and who are prepared if
necessary to lay down their lives to achieve them. Twenty years after
the nationalists of the north rose from their knees, the
establishment in Ireland is telling them to go back down.
The condemnations of ``men of violence'' and the deliberate censorship
of the will of nationalist communities is but the other side of the
coin to the terror of loyalist gangs which in Ardoyne and North
Belfast generally have murdered hundreds of civilians because they
were Catholics. That terror is part and parcel of the British
government's strategy of intimidating and silencing an entire
community.
Phoblacht, 30 March 1989.
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)