happen, but it all can't happen quick enough, bricks, etc. need to find alternatives institutions, there need to be alternative international criminal courts, they need to be alternative league of nations, there needs to be an alternative set of people that inspect uh nuclear weapons, because all of the established institutions on an international level have failed as far as i can see, so china, now the issue is china has cordial relations with israel, russia has farther more than cordial relations, it has over million and a half russian jews who've moved into uh israel, there's a huge sensitivity, the russian oligarchs for instance, are are extremely close to zionists themselves, that many of them are zionists, so putin has very delicate situation internally with russia, in terms of going easy on israel, of course putin stop israel of bombing syria at will, although syria is uh russia's ally, nonetheless it doesn't stop israel coming into... from uh syrian

sovereign territory, now this all shows that actually russia and china ultimately are not also principled on that level, they are economically inclined, they want their own sphere of influence, apart from the islamic republic of iran, i don't think very many other nations are playing the principle game, and even the islamic republic of iran is really in a way out a lim because it's already encircled by us bases, it's already encircled by enemies left, right and center. the nuclear weapons sitting in israel and america or are mostly targeting tehran uh itself, so if iran makes a move, of course it brings its entire population into play, and you could see devastation a world war, nuclear scale, if iran was really pitch in with his ballistics, so why iran isn't immediately going in or hezbollah is not going in, because this is not child's play, i mean what what could happen with these trigger happy uh religious uh ultra nationalist, cryptofascist zionists are...

israel and their masters behind them, they are trigger happy and they're quite happy to blow up things to be honest, the the reconstruction industry, okay we're we're going to have to uh end it there, i need to cut you off the uh say, but i want to thank you both for joining us on the program here, we are out of time, anthony hall, professor of globalization, joining us out of canada and say journalist and political commentator joining us from the united kingdom, stay safe of to both of you, thank you both and viewers, that's a wrap for this press tv news bulletin, but stay tuned, we're following everything thing related to the besieg gauza strip right here on press tv and bye-bye for now. hello, i'm shawn murray and this is the conversation where we take an alternative look at political events and current affairs through anice lens. in this show we hope to pick, probe, investigate and uncover the stories that you want to hear. we go. where

mainstream won't go. this week we look at the recent legacy bill that was passed at westminster. how does this ni affect victims and what can be done to repeal it? my next guest is a columnist and regular political commentator on broadcast television. she is also deputy director of relatives for justice a national victim support ngo which provides advocacy and therapy support for the berieved and injured of the conflict. but before we speak to our next guest, let's get a quick overview on this week's.

as always, we are joined by our resident co-presenter michelle gildernew. michelle is the current np for fermana south toron. she has served in the northern iran assembly as a former minister for agriculture and rural development. and chairperson of the health

committee amongst other things. michelle has been a shinfian activist since her teams and has been elected almost continuously since 1998 and today's guest is andre murphy, andre is human rights advocate working on behalf of victims affected by political violence during the recent conflict. andre murphy, welcome to the show. thank you sean, lovely to be here, great to see you. so andre, tell me a bit about your child, grown up? well, i was born in dublin, um, and the 1970s, grew up in um, what was, i suppose a really emerging ireland at that stage, you know, we it was very poor, there was a massive recession, especially during the 198. um and we were just you know family affected by all of that economic environment when i was 15 we um moved to talla which was at that stage a big sprawling housing estate where there was no footpaths you had to go across fields to be able to get

to a bus maybe every hour that ran and i can remember it just being a little bit grinding you know that everything seed in black and white and dublin where everywhere else looked like it was in color, but i loved it, and we always interested in human rights, so where did that come from? i think um, growing up in dublin, and what what i just described where you'd be in a place where nobody had any money, and particularly women, and women at that stage had no effective rights in, you know, i can remember when the marriage bar went in the civil service, um, you know, my mother, because my parents split up um received. did a benefit called the deserted wives allowance, if you were a child, if you were unmarried at that stage, you got uh and you had children, you were you had a uh unmarried mother's allowence and whatever, that was the type of society we lived in, yet women ran everything, while men were

unemployed or maybe had to go away, women kept dubling running and the communities that we were in, and i can remember then that sense of you know we here have no money, we've no access effective education, we've no, we've got women who are going through all of this, and you know, where's the rights, where are we as equal citizens? there is no sense of equal citizenship, and you became deputy director of relative justice, what what kind of can you just for the audience's sake tell us what kind of services that that victims can kind of avail of? yes, so valds for justice comes from families coming together to say us too, so people. who were affected by state violence in particular, their experience of violence and of violent bereevement was completely dismissed um where they weren't seen as equal victims and so all of our services, whether it's um advocacy where they're pursuing legal justice through

different avenues, whether it's recording their own story, trying to break imposed state narratives or censored narratives, or whether it's um even seeking um support with the traumatic effects of that experience was very very difficult for many families. how do you go if you've been affected by a state violation to an arm of the state and talk about your life falling apart? you're afraid that the state is also going to perhaps take your children, you're afraid that you're going to be sectioned and taken away from your family. so for us our support came very very organically where we were stepping into the... places where the state had failed families. how can you support someone going to inquest for example if they don't have money to be able to pay the rent or to buy food? how can you engage in any sort of education if you can't even walk through the

door at night because you're so afraid because your father was killed at night and you've never been able to cross the door since those are the type of organic connected support services were. provide now, so andre, you've been nurturing victims for decades now, how do the people that you work with feel about the the latest proposals that have been forced through the british government around legacy? michelle, i've been doing this for over 20 years with families who have seen the very worst of days, um, and the legacy bill is having an impact that i have never seen before, so for them it is the british government. saying their loved ones didn't matter, it's saying that what they did is completely okay, and it's saying they as living relatives and their experiences don't matter, it's saying that they are second class citizens, that they are not beneficiaries of our peace process in any way

shape or form, that they are inconvenient, that they are to be dismissed, so for this is intergenerational, so we can think of people who when their brother or sister were killed when they were children, they will talk about on that day we lost our parents as well because the trauma was so horrendous and the silence descended on their families, so for them... to be able to then 10, 20 years later, in the context of the peace process, pursue justice, recorded narratives, say let's have um due process for for my brother or my sister, the and their parents pass away and pass one a mantle to them. for this to happen now with this legacy legislation is telling that family that they are not only letting down their brother and sister, they're also... letten down their parents and the devastation, i'm sorry, that can be

nowhere, i'm really sorry, the devastation for that family is not about a piece of law, it's not about whether they can get into a court, it is about the erasing of the memory their child, of their brother, sister, their spouse, their parents, that's what this is doing, and what that does to family and impact can only be seen through our phones the day after where people are expressing suicidal thoughts, they're not just saying i am traumatized, i'm not coping, they're saying i want to take my own life, because the life my life is no longer worth living, not only was the life of my loved one taken away, but my life is no longer worth living. christon harris was quaffing champagne the night this was passed, because they think they've done a good thing, because they don't have to look in the eyes of these mothers who

know they are going to die, who are going to die before their children's justices delivered the truth about their child, who was not a gun man or a gun woman, who was not someone that the british army could just take away and snuff out their life and then cover up the files and hide them away for until 2064 or 2070. those women know they're going to die without having any of truth and without any justice. chris heat and harris doesn't have to look into any of their eyes and it doesn't matter if it was the british army or the rc or the ira or loyalist that took those lives. those loved ones mattered and those families matter and what this is doing is inhumane in in an extraordinary way that no one in a developed country in 2023 should even be called. listen off and andre, so so what can we do, i mean, what can the general public do or what can we do to repeal

this or or for to have this reversed? it occurs to me that there are many people who don't even know what's happened. i think maybe people in the north in these six counties know, people in the south don't know, people in mainland britain certainly don't know unless their loved one happen to be in in way caught up in the conflict, maybe as a british soldier who died here, or if the they were caught in bombing committed by the ira in in britain, that's the only way that they would know, because there has been no, there has been no conversation about this, it hasn't impacted, you can tell even that the politicians who passed this haven't thought twice about it, because they don't matter, irish lives haven't mattered, for people to get involved, they need to start saying these people matter. "they need to, they need to find out the names of those who've killed, so the julie livingstones, the caroline kellys,

they need to find out those names and then they need to go to the mps, they need to sit in front of them and say this is wrong, they need to say to the irish government who are currently in fairness saying this was a unilateral action outside the terms, the good friday agreement, in a breach of the peace process. the irish government needs to know that they have the back of people, that people have their backs when they'. we could take this to the european um court of human rights as an interstate case, they need to go and do that, and they know they need to go and do it, but they need to know that they have the support of people when they go and do it, because it's a very, very significant step to take. people in america need to really tell the british government, this is going to have implications, we said during brexit that that would have it financial implications when the british government acted unilaterally because it threatened the good friday agreement. and why isn't that same pressure coming on the british government now from america? why why isn't

the same pressure coming on from citizens here? we need we need to stand up for not only the dead but also for the families who are living so that they don't feel that they need to that their lives are not worth worth living. we facilitated meetings in westminster with some of the victims families and um there to be honest there wasn't a lot of interest from manpees in britain. um what do you think is next? for the victims in in terms of the next practical steps? practically we need to, we need to put the pressure on the irish government, we need to "we need to say to them about an interstate case that goes to the european court, there are some families who are working with their lawyers and collectively where the law firms where there are going to be challenges that go through the domestic courts, this won't go away, you know, it will just mean that the parents will all be dead, most of the spouses will be dead, it will be the children and grandchildren of those killed, and we are

sentencing our two countries to perpetual trauma if we don't resolve this. just moving on slightly uh andre, you spoke uh recently about uh censorship in the media, now we're seeing the changing landscape obviously with proliferation of digital and social media, but just for the audience say just to give them a awareness of high draconian legislation was here for marginal ays voices and and thinking saxs and 31 in particular, can you give the audience a sense of what that what that was like? it was so much more than just a piece of legislation, it was was a way of thinking, section 31 had always been part of the broadcasting act in the south, but in the early 1970s, there was a decision by the government, along with new rte to decide how they would report the north, who they would, whose voices they would exclude, we only ever talked about ireland as the 26

counties, so the north was excluded, the conflict that was raiding the human rights violations that were happening were completely under-reported to the point that you know the dublin and moniton bombings went off when i was baby right? i grew up not knowing that the bombs happened, let alone many people blaming the ira for those bombs having gone off, even though it was the largest single atrocity in the entire of our conflict, and that was the impact of section 31, it said that the north was other, the voices of those being harmed where other, dangerous, something you didn't want to be engaged in, and it meant then that peace was much harder to achieve, it meant that you, i think we're still recovering from the imposition of a form of partition where people are, you know, the same of same

citizens, same background, same history, an example might be something like the rte program, the lately. show seen on the entirety of this island a friday night, the biggest show on the island on both sides of the border, has a competition and it excludes the the six countries, puts a map up, a physical map where it's like the sea is there instead of the northern six counties, what does that say to all of the citizens who are here, it's saying there other, but it also says to the citizens in the 26th countries, they are other, it was so effective. have been doing that, but i think most aggregously what it did was, it said to a people who were under militarization, who were experiencing daily violations that their voices could be silenced, it wasn't just members of the ira, it wasn't just members of shin feine who were censored, it was also the entire community from which they came, and that was totally

deliberate, it was total political onslot against a... community and who were engaged in resisting military occupation, resisting the orange state, resisting discrimination and basic human rights abuses and you know it went way beyond law, it was much more of mindset when it was introduced in the british broadcasting act too, it compounded the idea that people who were representative of and representing those who had been marginalized and discriminated against could be silenced, so that meant that those violations were silenced too. that they were considered dangerous and somehow illegitimate, it illegitimized an entire community, and then when that community kept on saying, but we want the conditions for peace, we want to build the conditions where there are universal human rights, not partial, not something that was something for one community and not another, then that in some way could be silenced as well, and i think it

made the peace process far harder to achieve, sustain and flourish, and then so there's a very real. lasting legacy of the legislation, do you think is it still difficult? um, is the landscape still difficult for those marginalized to voice their opinions? do you think that, even though the act itself is gone, the impact is still felt? i think you absolutely see it, you know, i think, i think that during the conflict there was an idea that state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, for instance was republican propaganda. since those days we've had repeated state state reports evidencing that collusion, but even still today you will have people who can say that the... there doesn't need to be accountability for those crimes, there doesn't need to be - any sense of the british government doing anything more than saying we apologize and then moving on, and

so they can still form the narrative that this was two communities in fighting with each other, the british government was in some ways some neutral agent, you know, this legislation is a really good example of that where they pretend they are neutral and they are only trying to bring reconciliation between these warring communities when in fact there's something very very different at work is vested interests in saying what this conflict looked like and what their involvement in this conflict look like perpetuate those myths all the time so it is twice as hard if not 10 times as hard for victim of state violence or of collusion to be heard as legitimate voice compared to someones perhaps affected by republican actions and that is really. incredible because of course we don't want to create a disparity between victims in any way shape or form, but my goodness we see words like innocent coming in or we see all kinds of

different variations of how we will treat victims and survivors or how we will treat narratives of the conflict in any way shape or form and that that hampers our recovery. so so and we all know what the british have been trying to do with this bill, we've suffered it within our own communities uh. british state of pression for many many years, we've we've understood the offiscation, we've understood them hating uh truth for victims for for for many, many years, this leg this legacy bill only cover fastens what we already know, but thinking uh from more international sense of things and this could be another view, how do you see that the this current legacy bill in a international dynamic uh, for example the british abroad and how that effects may be atrocities be committed in the future abroad? absolutely, so um, i think a big turning point for the debate was when article two was applied to iraq, where there were british,

there were victims of british state violence in iraq in holding centers essentially, and so the article, article three and article two the echr was applied, and so all of sudden you had vested interests in britain then saying, oh, we... "we thought that we could just go to all of these foreign places and we thought that we could do whatever we wanted and never be held accountable, and then the accountability things starts to happen, where it isn't just that people release reports or concerns, they actually start to be held to account for their actions quite like here, and so then they change what they can do, so first of all they thought they could get away with foreign theaters, they thought that that if they committed the violations in afghanistan or iraq, they were just..." created environment of amnesty for those actions, but then they realized that they would have to do it here as well, because families were securing tiny, tiny measures of accountability for british state actions on

this island, so they've created amnesty for all of it, and that has got to be of concern to the international community, the idea that sovereign nation who is a founding signatory to the european convention, to the international conventions on human rights, that they would... able to circumvent all of their human rights obligations, go to any country, carry out the most agregous of violations and then count themselves completely unaccountable, surely that has to worry the entire international community, but unfortunately we haven't heard enough condemnation either, and and i think that's where we need to, that's the next step, i think you're right, i think that you can see the human rights community, so the united nations have said, this is terrible, this um european commissioner for human rights has voiced concerns, but the nation states haven't. we haven't seen that engagement from the states, and that's the difference to brexit, where there was a rogue state

attitude around leaving the eu and their their way of leaving the eu, the states got involved because they could see that it was in their interest to do it, on this, families have been completely abandoned and human rights have been completely abandoned by the nation states and that's who we need to, you know, would make a quantifiable difference if we saw the kinds of commentry that we had seen from the likes of luxembourg or from the swedish nation or whatever around brexit, we started seeing that around legacy, i think it could make a big difference. well, andre, we we're all very proud of your work, the work that you and mark do relative justice and we want to thank you for coming in today, it's always good to see you, thanks so much for having me, this week we take a look at the use of censorship during the recent conflict. both section 31 enacted in the irish republic as well as the british broadcasting bond were deployed to margilez growing support for chenfien with the party as popular as ever

with voters as they've ever been. was censorship aways the sason and hands said censorship has been widely deployed as a tool to silence radical or alternative voices during the recent conflict. in 1971, fanified minister for justice jerry collin invoked section 31 of the republic of ireland's broadcasting bond, forbidding broadcasters to interview or report statements by anyone speaking on behalf of number of organizations, the most prominent of which was shifen. the labour party minister connor cruz further strengthened the bond in 1977 an effort to help the increasingly sophisticated media communication skills of the party. a similar bond was replicated by britain in october 1988. the restrictions announced by the home secretary douglas hurd covered 11 organizations based in the north of ireland. broadcasters quickly found ways around the bond chiefly by using actors to dub the voices of band speakers with the renowned actor stephen ray becoming the voice of jerry

adams. restrictions caused difficulties for british and irish journalists who spoke out against censorship imposed by various other countries such as iraq and india. after the legislation around section 31 laps in january 1994 in the republic of ireland, the british prime minister john major lifted the broadcast bond on the 16th of september 1994, a fort night after the first provisional irish republican army cere, declared on the 31st of august 1994. for the first... time in many years, level political playing field, so marginal and alternative voices emerged from the cold, and that does it for another week, we love for you to join the conversation by sharing the link to today's program to help us grow our audience across all our social media platforms. i'd like to thank our special guest andre and our resident co-host michelle gilderny. in the meantime, the conversation will be back next week with more investications and analysis. i'm sean murray, bye for now.

is really attack still raging in the god. the strip and occupied westbank, civilian targets include schools and hospitals are all being bombed. palestinian refugee agency unra is warning as fuel depot and gaza will no longer be able to supply hospitals in few days time. nirish opposition party demands israeli regime be taken to account at the international criminal.