May 1, 2004 Congressman Demands Answers on Detention
By Ray O'Hanlon

Describing the Good Friday detention in Belfast of republican activist Sean Mackin as an "outrageous act," United States Rep. Eliot Engel said this week that he would be asking the U.S. State Department to investigate the incident.

"We're not going to take this lightly. We're not going to allow a going back to the bad old days," the New York Democrat said.

Engel's anger over the detention of Mackin, who is now a U.S. citizen, mirrored similar condemnation of the arrest by Irish-American political activists.

Engel, who was Mackin's congressman until redistricting separated the voter from the representative, said he had marched with Mackin and his family just a few weeks ago in the Pearl River St. Patrick's Day Parade.

"I was shocked when I heard what had happened," Engel said.

Engel said that he had immediately called both the State Department and the British embassy in Washington.

"I thought it important not to sweep this under the rug. If they wanted to return to the bad old days, I wasn't going to let then do it quietly," Engel said.

"The thing that most irked me is that Sean Mackin has gone back and forth to Northern Ireland many times and there was no hint of this. And there was no raising of a 1983 murder in his asylum hearings, Engel said in reference to reports that Mackin was questioned about the murder of police reservist Colin Carson, who was gunned down in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, that year.

Rep. Joe Crowley, a co-chair of the congressional Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs, said in a statement that he had contacted the U.S. Consulate in Belfast as soon as he had heard of Mackin's arrest.

The arrest was "utterly outrageous," Crowley said, citing that Mackin had gained political asylum in the U.S. based on his fear of being killed by loyalists.

"His fears of persecution still ring true when he cannot visit family in Belfast without being subjected to harassment and detainment by the PSNI," Crowley said.

"While the PSNI is supposedly the 'new face of policing in Northern Ireland,' the arrest of Sean Mackin, after he has been granted asylum and U.S. citizenship, shows that the police force is still targeting republicans based on their political leanings."

Irish-American political activists, meanwhile, were quick to draw a link between the arrest of Mackin and the recent row over policing in Northern Ireland that followed an op-ed page ad in the New York Times that was taken out on behalf of Sinn Féin by the U.S.-based Friends of Sinn Féin fundraising group.

FOSF president Larry Downes said there was "no question" that the arrest of Mackin was directed at Irish Americans who were still critical of the policing situation, or were calling for an inquiry into the 1989 murder of Belfast attorney Pat Finucane and others.

Downes said that the Mackin arrest pointed to the continued existence of a political police force. He said Hugh Orde, as PSNI chief constable, bore responsibility for what had been an erroneous arrest.

"The whole thing stinks," he said. "This is a message to Irish America that the police are angry over Irish America standing up for police reform and an inquiry into Pat Finucane's murder."

Mackin, though he has frequently helped the work of Friends of Sinn Féin, was not an officer of the organization, said attorney Sean Downes, who was part of Mackin's legal team when he secured political asylum over a decade ago.

"Sean has helped everybody," Sean Downes said in reference to Mackin's fundraising efforts on behalf of various worthy causes in the Irish-American community.

Father Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus said that the Mackin arrest had "all the hallmarks" of a police policy of "keeping uppity people" in their place.

"The question is whether or not this was the [PSNI] Special Branch sticking it to Hugh Orde, or did Orde order the picking up of Mackin?" McManus said.

After hearing of the arrest, McManus wrote to the Bush administration's special envoy to the North peace process, Dr. Mitchell Reiss, requesting help in securing Mackin's release.

Mackin had been "vindictively arrested," McManus wrote Reiss. "This is the same police force that you have so strongly identified yourself with, and which you have asked Irish-Americans to endorse.

"At the State Department briefing on March 18, Chief Constable Hugh Orde, sitting at your right hand, assured us that the bad old days were over, that there was now a kinder, gentler police, which Catholics could trust. Yet Mr. Orde had Sean Mackin arrested on Good Friday."

Meanwhile, Irish American Unity Conference spokesman, Tom Madigan, said in a statement that IAUC members were wondering if the arrest amounted to "petty harassment, a warning shot to Irish America for our position on police reform, or just PSNI Special Branch institutional muscle flexing."