Anti-immigration movement split over ex-UVF man's speech at Dublin's GPO
Armed robber Mark Sinclair addressed a rally at Dublin's GPO last weekend – the building regarded as a shrine by republicans as it the headquarters of the 1916 Easter Rising – spouting his anti-immigrant views.
One woman passer-by who saw him said: 'Pádraig Pearse would be spinning in his grave.'
Sinclair – who was jailed for 17 years in Scotland for bank robbing – is the cousin of notorious Shankill Butcher Billy Moore, who was jailed for 11 gruesome sectarian murders.
But yesterday one prominent anti-immigration faction warned the top loyalist to keep well away from any future Dublin rallies.
Three weeks ago the Sunday World revealed that Sinclair had been broadcasting live on his YouTube channel from a protest in Limerick.
A Dublin councillor who is prominent in the campaign for tougher laws on immigration said yesterday that it was a disgrace that Sinclair spoke at the GPO rally.
Former UVF man Mark Sinclair who spoke at a far right rally in Dublin outside the GPO
Councillor Malachy Steenson told us: 'Former UVF prisoner Mark Sinclair spoke at the rally and he encouraged other loyalists to attend as many rallies as possible.
'Sinclair is a convicted bank robber and a self-confessed former member of the UVF.
'He has a close family connection to the Shankill Butchers gang, who gruesomely murdered Catholics over a period of years.
'Sinclair has attended a number of nationalist rallies in the Republic and I strongly condemn that.
'The organiser of this event was warned by myself and other prominent figures to disassociate from this individual and end her toxic and embarrassing relationship with loyalists.'
The Sunday World has learned Sinclair's presence at rallies south of the border has split the anti-immigration movement, with many activists calling to have him banned. However, it is not just a section of anti-immigration campaigners who have said Sinclair is not welcome.
Dublin community activist Joe Mooney, a well-known anti-racism campaigner, said: 'I don't want to see anyone with a racist or anti-immigrant profile being welcomed on the streets of Dublin or anywhere else in Ireland.
Former UVF man Mark Sinclair
'I mean people like Mark Sinclair belonged to an organisation which bombed the streets of this city. These people should refrain from attending marches on the streets of Dublin. I was only a kid when Dublin was bombed by the UVF, but I remember the terror and the horror of what these people did.
'The UVF knew that those streets would be filled with workers on their way home.
'To think those people set out to kill as many people as they could on the streets of Dublin and Monaghan. And to think that today they would find some sort of status on the streets of Dublin is absolutely reprehensible.
'I'm involved with Dublin Communities Against Racism and I've spent a long time as a community activist and I deal with lots of issues.
'I don't believe its racist to ask questions about immigration. But when you take to the street and march or abuse people with dark-coloured skin that's completely and utterly wrong.'
Dublin Communities Against Racism also hit out at Sinclair's presence at the GPO rally, saying it exposed the links between what it called 'Irish racists' and loyalists.
It said: 'Dublin Communities Against Racism takes this opportunity to highlight the links between these anti-Irish bigots and the fake 'patriot' racists.'
Referring to the UVF attacks on Dublin during the Troubles, it said: 'In 2024 and 2025, loyalists came to Dublin, this time invited and welcomed by racists and anti-immigrant campaigners.
'How times have changed, and shockingly so.
'Irish racists have long worked closely with loyalist terror supporters and extreme unionist and British fascist figures, going as far back as the 1930s. What all of their friends have in common is that they are violently anti-Irish and always have been.
Mark Sinclair
'This anti-Irish and sectarian hatred has not gone away, but is conveniently covered up to unite and together target asylum seekers, immigrants and other foreign (and foreign-looking) people. Their anti-Irish hatred is not far beneath the surface.
'In recent weeks, some anti-immigrant and racist right figures have issued statements claiming to 'disassociate' themselves from loyalist figures.
'We do not accept this as genuine. This response is only due to the backlash created by the exposure and highlighting of these links.'
Sinclair's cousin Billy was the man who kept the Shankill Butchers' murder machine oiled when 'Master Butcher' Lenny Murphy was taken off the streets and jailed on firearms charges.
Jailing Moore for life, Judge Turlough O'Donnell told him: 'You Moore pleaded guilty to 11 murders carried out in a manner so cruel and revolting, as to be beyond the comprehension of any normal human being.'
His cousin Mark Sinclair – from Kilburn Street off Belfast's staunchly loyalist Donegall Road – was sent down for 17 years for a series of robberies in Scotland.
Sinclair – who now uses the social media title 'Freedom Dad' – carried out the bank heists in Ayrshire and Dumfries & Galloway. And he was scooped by police hiding out in Moore's rented flat in Edinburgh.
At his trial at the High Court in Ayr, Sinclair told the judge he had been recruited by MI5 to carry out surveillance on Scottish groups sympathetic to Ulster loyalism in Northern Ireland.
Mark Sinclair
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Extra.ie
12 hours ago
- Extra.ie
President issues statement following meeting with Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs
President Michael D. Higgins has described his meeting this morning with Mauro Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, as productive, with the two discussing environmental justice and sustainable development. Yesterday, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Harris welcomed Vieira to Dublin to commence the first-ever official visit by a Brazilian foreign minister to Ireland, despite a high population of Brazilian immigrants in Ireland. In 2018, Brazil was ranked first in the top 10 registered nationalities in Ireland at 16% of the overall total, according to the Irish census. 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Ireland and Brazil officially establishing diplomatic relations. Vieira's visit is the highest level of diplomatic engagement by a Brazilian politician to Ireland since. In his statement, President Higgins thanked Vieira and praised Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's work on climate-related issues amid 'extremely challenging conditions' in the country. After President Lula won the 2022 election over far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, supporters of Bolsonaro attacked federal government buildings in Brazil's capital, refusing to accept Lula's presidency. 'I very much welcome the opportunity of meeting with Foreign Minister Vieira today and of expressing my support as President of Ireland for the vital work which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Government are doing, in extremely challenging conditions,' the President wrote. The visit came at a historic time for Brazil, as the country is set to host the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in November. President Higgins referenced diplomat, humanitarian and Easter Rising leader Roger Casement, who worked as a consul in the region of Belém in 1907. Casement was renowned for his reports exposing atrocities committed against native workers in the Amazon. 'For those who believe in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and sustainable development, globally and within Europe, he [President Lula] is the best ally which they have internationally in achieving these goals,' President Higgins wrote. 'At COP30 in Belém in Brazil in November, a city with which Ireland has a connection through the work of Roger Casement, there needs to be an effective alliance to resist the domination of COP by lobbyists on behalf of oil and logging.' Brazil held the presidency of the G20 in 2024, which focused heavily on environmental issues. Under the G20, Brazil drafted the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, a multilateral treaty supporting the elimination of hunger and poverty to regions around the world, which Ireland signed at last year's G20 summit. 'I commend Brazil on the strong focus placed on sustainable development during its Presidency of the G20, and I am very pleased that Ireland has joined the Global Alliance Against Poverty and Hunger established by President Lula,' President Higgins wrote. The President also discussed the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation, which aims to encourage and facilitate sustainable development of the Amazon. The Amazon Rainforest is the largest and most biodiverse rainforest in the world, covering 40% of the South American continent and producing 20% of Earth's oxygen. However, 40% of the areas of the Amazon rainforest most critical to curbing climate change had not been granted special government protection in 2024 amid massive deforestation. Economic losses because of deforestation in Brazil are estimated to be 7 times more than the cost of all commodities produced through deforestation. According to the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information, up to 23.7 million hectares of forest in the Amazon may have been lost in the past five years— an area around 3.5 times that of Ireland. The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation has been one way Brazil and its allies have attempted to combat the negative impacts of deforestation through regional cooperation and strategising for a solution. 'The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation represents one of the most positive voices with regard to the long view of climate change,' President Higgins wrote. 'Under grave difficulties, they are seeking to fight against the speculative money funding illegal logging and the thousands involved in lobbying for fossil fuel conglomerates. President Lula and Brazil should be given support by all those who believe in the importance of reversing the perilous position into which the future of all forms of life on the planet have been plunged.' Along with climate issues, the President also expressed support for Brazil's indigenous population of nearly 1,700,000 as COP30 approaches. While 21% of the Amazon in Brazil has been secured as indigenous land and a Ministry of Native People was established in 2023 to protect indigenous interests, deforestation threatens these communities' safety and security. 'It is also important that the recognition and presence of indigenous people, whom Brazil and President Lula want to get appropriate recognition and centrality, should not be reduced to being a sideshow of COP30,' President Higgins wrote. 'The support of Ireland and those EU member states who share our perspective will be vital in achieving this.' Read the full statement here.
Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Irish Examiner
Sarah Harte: Proud revolutionary history of the GPO deserves better than shops and offices
Against the backdrop of increased 'Ireland for the Irish' protests, the story of who we are feels more pertinent than ever, which is why developing the GPO to include offices and retail spaces is a crummy idea. It demonstrates a depressing lack of cultural confidence, which isn't a surprise because the British were so adept at separating us from a sense of pride and culture that we ended up a nation of property developers. Nothing wrong with property developers. As someone who is pro-business, I have the utmost respect for visionary businesspeople who take risks and make things happen, but in their lane. If the French had a GPO with a comparable history, would they have partially developed it as shops and offices? They would deem the idea 'sauvage'. Is it too much to ask that the New Ireland be more confident? Last Saturday, Sinn Féin organised a hands-off our rebel history protest against the development of the GPO into office and retail space. Just over nine years ago, around 500,000 people lined the streets of Dublin on Easter Sunday to commemorate the Easter Rising and what some view as the genesis of the modern independent republic. On both days, people who turned up will inevitably have different perspectives on the Easter Rising. This was also true at the time of the rising, with a plethora of different reactions to the five-day event, which subsequently grew either more hostile or more sympathetic from those who had initially viewed it as a 'putsch without popular support.' When WB Yeats wrote his famous political poem 'Easter 1916', Maude Gonne wrote him a tetchy letter from Passy in Paris telling him how much she disliked it, telling him that 'above all it isn't worthy of the subject.' She sternly told him that MacDonagh, Pearse, and Connolly were 'men of genius, with large, comprehensive, speculative and active brains.' Certainly, our history has never been straightforward and cannot be explained by simplified narratives. Yet, the revisionist line that the signatories to the proclamation were a bunch of bloodthirsty psychopathic terrorists without an electoral mandate who set themselves up as a provisional government and should not have been commemorated at all in 2016 is one that is at best reductive, with an inherent, tedious bias that is markedly telling. A view from the kind of people who get excited at the sniff of the word Royal and see us as a kind of empire affiliate, people who would now happily rejoin the Commonwealth (in a poll last year, 40% were persuadable) and think an honours system here would be great. A South Dublin medic once told me that Chelsea was the epicentre of the cultural world. I greatly enjoyed the laugh that this gave me (head thrown back territory actually), but I suppose one man's feast is another woman's famine. We are all prisoners of our past. Myths are how we explain ourselves to ourselves on the level of family, community and country. The past is shaped by who's telling the story, and that story can never be scientific in its accuracy; it shifts like grains of sand and is always personal and ideological As Richard Cohen, author of Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, wrote: 'Every man of genius who writes history infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit. His characters ... seem to have only one manner of thinking and feeling, and that is the manner of the author.' A consideration moving forward is not only how we choose to view and celebrate the past, but also how we honour who we are now. These questions are closely connected. An engagement with the past should dictate an investment in the future, but what do we mean when we say 'invest'? Cultural, intellectual, religious and political influences are increasingly more diverse here. This inevitably means an expanding definition of what it means to be Irish. This necessitates guarding against polemical utterances on who is Irish, because we have new mythmakers who peddle hate and sow dissension, who appropriate the Tricolour for their hollow strains of ethno-nationalism. The shattered remains of the General Post Office after the Easter Rising. Picture: Getty Images As it happens, there is already an interpretive centre in the GPO which narrates our past. We could add to this curation and preservation of our history a place of artistic excellence, intellectual exchange and education that would honour the idealism and bravery of previous revolutionaries. And I don't just mean the signatories to the Proclamation. I mean all the men and women who fought for Ireland in 1916, in the War of Independence, in the Civil War, regardless of what side they were on, who made sacrifices, were sometimes forced into brutal acts, but who had a dream of which we are the beneficiaries. A dream that went beyond shops, offices and high-end apartments for pension funds. They are turning in their graves In other words, in a bullet-riddled historic building, we make new history with a range of voices for a new, confident Ireland, in a broadened culture. We support theatre, dance, art, music, poetry, photography, and literature through artist residencies in dedicated spaces because, in a new Ireland, the cultural ideals on which a claim of nationality rests need to develop. Una Mullally in The Irish Times has written repeatedly and persuasively about the opportunity inherent in developing the GPO and O'Connell Street 'that can inspire and facilitate generations to come'. She's on the nose, although the founder of the Little Museum of Dublin, Trevor White, considers the cultural development of the GPO to be a performative virtue-signalling soporific one. His solution involves converting part of the GPO into owner-occupied apartments, with the proceeds then used to develop social and affordable housing in affluent suburbs. On paper, this might sound plausible, except experience tells us that development for a niche market rarely leads to affordable social housing. Ultimately, this is a well-intentioned pipe dream. To paraphrase him, it's gentrification on steroids. It's beyond the word count of this column to analyse the outcomes of the Part V rules, which compel developers to hold back 10% of a development for social housing. They have been in force since 2000, and saying they haven't been a success is an understatement. I don't disagree with White that people should live on O'Connell Street and in the city centre, but which people? Regardless of your perspective on what 1916 signifies, or even if you miss the days when Ireland was run from Dublin Castle and you continue to tug what you view as your metropolitan forelock to Blighty, our colonisation is undeniable as the defining event of who we are. This feels more germane than ever as we witness imperialist adventures in Ukraine and Gaza, which, as historian Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College Dublin points out, are 'legacies of empire'. As the Irish Examiner editorial wrote on Monday, 'We can learn well or badly from history ... we have a duty of care, not only to our own descendants but the wider world we'd like to see.' The marked idealism that characterised the run-up to and aftermath of 1916 is in woefully short supply. That 'wider world' or vibrant civic culture will never be achieved by building more shops and offices, or, for that matter, high-end apartments. Spare us.
Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Irish Examiner
Irish Examiner view: People in poverty are left behind
For a country that dragged itself out of poverty to wealth, we have certainly left a lot of people behind. St Vincent de Paul, at the coalface of citizens' attempts to keep up, not with the neighbours, but with the bare essentials, has called for a €16-a-week welfare increase to keep pace with the cost of living. And that's just the core rate, and not including other allowances that are vital to many people's survival. The core rate increase amounts to just over €830 a year — and frankly, one wonders if that's even enough, given the rates of inflation in recent years and the global uncertainty that a US-EU trade war might bring, not to mention the ever-present threat or reality of homelessness for far too many of our fellow citizens. The charity expects to get 250,000 calls this year. Let us recall that the population of the island is about 5.2m. SvP's head of social policy, Louise Bayliss, described it as 'policy failure', given this country's wealth. With the Government ruling out one-off measures to deal with the cost of living, urgency turns to how we can protect our most vulnerable people. One wonders how countries with similar populations that follow the Nordic model, such as Denmark and Finland, can seemingly deliver better outcomes for the people there than Ireland, which has a bigger GDP? The sad reality is that our problems are generally within our capability to solve, yet show no signs of abating even in the medium term. And that's a reality we should all sit with and contemplate — after all, how many of us are one lost job or one missed payment away from serious trouble? Times change, and relevance fades Cork city councillor Terry Shannon has objected to a process to rename Cork's Bishop Lucey Park, saying that Ireland is now 'a cold place' for Catholics. But is it? There is merit, certainly, in retaining elements of history, given how they inform our overall identity, as explored by Sarah Harte on these pages and in Monday's editorial. However, times do change, whether people like it or not, and what may be a touchstone for a previous generation may not have the same resonance for the current. The idea of wanting to rename areas associated with religious figures, given the numerous sexual abuse scandals involving the Church, as well as its historic role in oppressing women and children via mother and baby homes or industrial schools, seems quite reasonable. Let us remember that this is a vote simply to begin a process: The destination has yet to be reached. The suggestion of renaming the park isn't new, and can be found at least as far back as the aftermath of the commission into mother and baby homes in 2020. Although Cornelius Lucey — an opponent of contraception and a believer that the Church was right in everything including politics — may not be personally involved in any of the controversies affecting the institution, the stains on the Church affect him by association. For instance, he was responsible for founding the St Anne's Adoption Society in 1954 to arrange the adoption of babies born to unmarried Irish mothers in Britain. An Irish Examiner investigation in 2018 found that an unmarked plot in St Finbarr's Cemetery was bought by the society, which closed in 2003. Four children are buried in it, with the deaths occurring between 1979 and 1990. A neighbouring plot is owned by a different organisation that ran nursery services for the St Anne's Society. The Irish Examiner has reported extensively on the issues relating to adoption in this country. It is enough to warrant wariness in a republic that, for all its faults, endeavours to look forward rather than dogmatically back. Of the at least 5.2m people in the country, almost 70% identify as Catholics, which suggests that even as Mass attendance continues to shrink, that there is still plenty of warmth in that as a broad identity. How relevant people see religion as being part of their everyday life is another debate entirely, and one that predominantly remains between an individual and their own heart. Ultimately, what councillors voted in favour of is a renaming process — a decision on the name is still some way off, and what's to say the original name won't stay? The park, which councillors have noted will bear no resemblance to the one that closed for a revamp in 2023, will belong to the people of Cork. Shouldn't it be up to them to decide if they want to stick with the old or give it a brand new identity? Healy is an inspiration For a relatively small island, we have always tended to punch above our weight in culture and sport, with cyclist Ben Healy now taking his place on our list of elite names by being the first Irishman in 38 years to take a yellow jersey at the Tour de France. The last were Stephen Roche (1987) and Sean Kelly (1983), more than a whole generation ago, with Shay Elliot being the first in 1963. At 24, Healy, born in England and of Waterford ancestry, has plenty of life left in his legs, and even if he doesn't win the overall competition, it is exciting to see how well he's done at this nascent stage of his career, having only turned pro in 2022. Alongside our cluster of Olympic gold medallists, one hopes he can help inspire the next generation of Irish youth, at home and in the diaspora. No pressure, Ben.
