U.K. Govt blocks visit

Press, 10 December 1982, Page 8

U.K. Govt blocks visit

NZPA London The British Government has stopped three hard-line Irish Republican leaders visiting London as guests of the Greater London Council’s Left-wing leader after a guerrilla bomb attack killed 16 people in a Northern Ireland bar on Monday. The Home Secretary, Mr William Whitelaw, signed orders yesterday barring the three, who are officials of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, from entering Britain. A Government spokesman said that the London police had asked for the ban on the basis of information that the men — the Sinn Fein vicepresident, Gerry Adams, and the publicity officer, Daniel Morrison, and a former LR.A. leader, Martin

McGuinness — had been involved in guerrilla activities. Mr McGuinness was once the most wanted man on Northern Ireland police lists. The three are members of Northern Ireland’s new Provincial Assembly, but have refused to take their seats in common with most other representatives of the Catholic minority who say it gives no place to their aspirations for a united Ireland. „ Mr Adams and Mr Mornson had been invited to meet Labour members of the Greater London Council in London on Tuesday. The British Army, reacting to the bombing yesterday ordered its 10,090 troops in Northern Ireland to remain in barracks when off duty. The order came as the

Defence Secretary, Mr John Nott, visited the scene of carnage at the "Droppin Well” pub in Ballykelly, near Londonderry. Military sources said the confined-to-base order was temporary while Army commanders reviewed measures to protect soldiers when they were out of uniform. The ban does not apply to soldiers’ families. Wives went shopping yesterday in Ballykelly, a town of 5000 where Catholics and Protestants had lived free of the sectarian violence that has killed more than 2300 people in the last 13 years. k Some soldiers were angry about the ban, saying that it played into the hands of guerrillas trying to drive the British out of Northern Ireland.