Derry Journal February 15, 2002  Derry ‘exile’ takes case to MPs  A 30-year-old bar worker who claims he fled Derry under a Provisional IRA death threat last year took his case to the House of Commons in London yesterday. Joseph McCloskey told MPs he had no option but to leave his Shantallow home last April after removing a customer who had “republican contacts” from the Derry bar where he worked as a doorman. “About a week later, armed, masked men came to my house, started smashing the front door down with a sledge hammer and then I started getting threats that I had to leave Ireland, he told a news conference ahead of a Commons debate on paramilitary intimidation. Mr. McCloskey went on: “I left Ireland the next day. All in all it’s been a traumatic experience for me and my family. "We just want to get back home again.” Mr. McCloskey’s mother, Bridie McCloskey, said she had “no doubt” that the IRA was responsible for the raid and the threats, and said Sinn Fein leaders knew about it after she contacted them. She said: “I have no doubt in my mind it was them. Now they deny it - they don’t want to know. “After I chased them around for a while, Sinn Fein’s Mitchel McLaughlin said he would talk to me. “But all he wanted was my news; he wasn’t helping us with anything. He more or less told me it was a figment of my imagination. “But they did come to kill Joseph. They didn’t come to beat him up - they had no baseball bats. They just had the guns,” she said. “I’m now calling on Sinn Fein to go public about it all,” she said. Labour’s Harry Barnes, MP for NE Derbyshire and a member of the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee, asked Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to listen to the intimidation debate and to meet MPs afterwards. The Sinn Fein MPs have not taken their seats in Parliament as will not swear the oath of allegiance to the Queen, but they have been given the use of offices in the Commons. At the time of going to press, Mr. Barnes said he had not yet received a “positive response” from Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuinness, and thought it unlikely that they would watch the debate in Westminster Hall. Should be heard Mr. Barnes said of the McCloskey case: “It’s very, very important that the voice of those who suffer under this unacceptable action should be heard.” British prime minister Tony Blair, speaking earlier this week, said resolving the “exiles” issue was an important part of the peace process.  “If we are genuinely concerned as we should be about putting the past to rest in Northern Ireland, the one major part of that are people who were intimidated out of the country, the so-called exiles,” he said.  “Of course they should be allowed to return in peace and that, I think, would be a proper part of any significant undertaking in relation to the peace process.”  A spokesperson for Sinn Fein said: “Sinn Fein have always been very clear on the issue of exile. “If people exiled from a community want to make peace with the people in that community, it would be welcomed and supported.  “But there is no particular responsibility on Sinn Fein.”