Sunday Life
C/o The Belfast Telegraph
124-144 Royal Avenue
Belfast BT1 1EB
Northern Ireland
Monday July 15, 2002
To the Editor;
We are writing in response to your newspaper’s liberal misuse of the facts in implying a link between the high rate of illness in Portlaoise Prison and Dundalk, to a supposed exposure to explosives.
The timing of your article is no accident, coming as it does two short weeks after the IRPWA’s report on secret asbestos removal operations, under cover of darkness, at Portlaoise Prison.
Family members and others outside the prison have documented the high levels of illness complaints at Portlaoise for some time now, and until the secret removals of asbestos were exposed last month by the IRPWA; no plausible explanation for these symptoms was given by the prison medical staff.
Kevin Murray, the Irish prisoner who “died suddenly from brain cancer”, was allowed to suffer appallingly at Portlaoise for over a year while his family, friends, and many others fought to have him released for proper medical care. Doctors at Portlaoise treated his blinding headaches and increasing loss of motor control with anti-depressants --- a seemingly universal prescription when it comes to Irish political prisoners. Kevin Murray was finally only released when the tumor had become totally inoperable, and died at a hospice a short time later.
Also, your suggestive comment that “two senior figures from the border area have now also been diagnosed with cancer”, neglects to mention that the statistical evidence for incidence of cancer in North Louth is 12% higher than the National average. North Louth was directly downwind of the fire at Windscale nuclear power plant (now called Sellafield), when it burned for 4 days in 1957. We resent your deliberate misrepresentation of an unresolved environmental crisis to make your own editorial points.
Additionally, the weak attempts to link the McKevitt brothers’ high blood pressure and heart difficulties with anything other than health factors common to the overall population are fallacious and insulting to the reader.
These shallow attempts to cover up for an institutionalized policy of abuse to Irish Political Prisoners are not lost on those of us here in the United States who will continue to monitor this situation very carefully.
Yours very sincerely;
D. Fennessy
P.O. Box 11417
Chicago IL 60611
USA