[Livingstone and children before the tears THE FUNERALS…]
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-08-27Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 11
Livingstone and children before the tears THE FUNERALS of repubhunger strikers have hican been attacked by the press more often than by the army.
The family of one of the first hunger strikers to die flew his young son trom Britain to the funeral. The child followed the coffin as other children have tollowed the coffins of their parents bewildered and grief-stricken.
lor the press he and his family were i natural target. They accused the Provisionals of using the child as propaganda.
But now those same newspapers show us that it is they themselves who are the master craftsmen of the propaganda of the gutter.
Bemused
The Paisleyite council of Ballymena.. sent three children aged between nine and 13 to London to stage a confrontation with GLO leader Ken Livingstone. Their mother had been killed in a bomb blast in 1976.
Hunger striker Tom McElwee was "convicted" of her manslaughter and it was his mother who was publiciy welcomed a few weeks ago by Livingstone.
Needless to say the children's first engagement in London was a press conference.
The Evening Standard had already published photo of the children flying to London (their photographer presumably just happened to be passing along the fuselage).
The accompanying story said they came to tell Livingstone "what they thought of his support for the Maze hunger strikers"
The paper reported that the children were overwhelmed by the reception from C'onservative Party members and officials al County Hall. " They were "quiet, reserved and seemed bemused."
This should have been a warning for those who fixed the visit of the PR disaster they were about to engineer.
When the children were ushered in to see Livingstone he immediately agreed to be photographed with them. The tongue-tied children failed to produce the outburst that had been drummed into them.
The councillors who had brought the children began to give Livingstone a horrifyingly graphic account of how the children's mother had been burned to death. The children - no doubt to the satisfaction of their escorts - burst into tears and were led away.
The next day photographs of Livingstone with the children appeared in every national daily and in several papers the story was given precedence over the Permanagh by-election vicSocialist Organiser, Thursday 27 August, 1981 Page 12
Scan page 12
NAZI THREAT