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Group pictured at the launch of A Bitter Harvest: The Good Life and Unresolved Murder of a Derry GAA Man, at Wolfe Tones Bellaghy GAC on May 17, 2026. Front: Garbhán Downey (Colmcille Press), Bridie Brown and Clare Loughran. Back Paul O'Connor (Pat Finucane Centre) and Siobhán Brown. New book from Colmcille Press and Pat Finucane Centre investigates murder, collusion and thirty-year cover-up In the middle of A Bitter Harvest, you’ll find a pair of grainy, family photographs, of the Browns gathering turf out in the middle of Seamus Heaney country, on a summer’s day about 30 years ago. In one of them, Seán is standing on top of a trailer-load of sods, with Bridie and Damian, and their friends Francis and Rose Murray, in the bog nearby. All of them tired but satisfied, after a good day’s digging. A few years after his father’s death, Seán’s son Seán told the author Des Fahy how his father ‘saw himself’ in Seamus Heaney’s poetry – and was ‘intimately familiar’ with the places and people celebrated in his old neighbour’s work. Indeed, in February 1996, Seán the father would organise, and then deliver, the massive, cross-community homecoming in Bellaghy, after the poet received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was one of his proudest moments - and indeed one of the poet’s. A little over a year later, Seamus Heaney would pen a heartfelt eulogy to Seán in the Irish News, in which he described his murder, at the gates of the clubhouse here, as ‘a crime against the ancient Olympic spirit’. ‘He was a man of integrity and goodwill,’ the poet wrote, ‘he represented something better than we have grown used to.’ This is a universally-held sentiment. As Laurence Diamond told the Irish Times on the 25th anniversary of his friend’s death, ‘Above all, Seán Brown was a great human being – he is such a loss.’ In Derry city, during the long campaign for an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, our campaigners also drew comfort, and inspiration, from the words of Seamus Heaney. In times of despair The Cure at Troy reminded families, and supporters, to ‘hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge’ and to ‘believe that a further shore is reachable from here’. As advice goes, it was both fitting and uplifting. The inquiry, for all its imperfections, proved to be a catharsis for many. It afforded the people of the city their opportunity – their right – to experience that ‘sea-change’; that ‘self-healing’ and ‘self-revealing’. In 1972, the day after the Bloody Sunday funerals, the Derry Journal reported how ‘Even the Skies Wept’. Thirty-eight years later, the widow of victim Barney McGuigan, another Bridie, spoke at the conclusion of the Saville Inquiry, remarking that even the sun shone in Derry to welcome the findings. Bizarrely, however, for a society that has supposedly progressed out of the dark days of the Troubles and into a ‘new dispensation’, the Browns have now been kept waiting for an inquiry even longer than the Bloody Sunday families were. As our other Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats wrote, ‘Peace comes dropping slow’. Too slow. Seán’s son Damian, who led the campaign for more than two decades, tragically did not live to see justice - and Bridie, now eighty-eight, worries that neither will she. And this, as Niall Murphy the Brown's lawyer has reminded us, is not a case where there is a mere allegation of wrongdoing by state agents. The direct involvement of the state in Seán’s murder - the collusion - is a matter of fact. It has been established by the High Court and confirmed in the public record. As Damian himself predicted, long before the documents were finally released, his father’s death ‘was state-sponsored murder’. What we are left considering now is how long the state can continue to conceal what it did, and what it knows. Or, more pointedly, how much it did, and how much it knows. Tellingly, Seamus Heaney again warned us, in his collection North, about those who deliberately fail to act. Those who stand dumb; those who ‘cast the stones of silence’; and those who would ‘connive in civilised outrage’. Or in contemporary parlance, those who issue Immunity Certificates and refuse to allow even the most private of hearings; those who run to their own courts and hide from others; those in office who claim they have ‘enormous sympathy’ - just not enough to act. Perhaps they need to read Seamus Heaney’s rules for good governance, in The Republic of Conscience, in which he advises: ‘At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law – and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.’ After countless delays and numerous setbacks, the Browns and the Pat Finucane Centre have now decided on a new and different course of action. To try yet another furrow. And, while the book they have produced can never fully right the wrong, it will stand as a measure of their love for Seán Brown, as a measure of their own most real outrage. And it will stand as a measure of their determination never to give up until they win justice for ‘a great human being’. The final picture in the photo-gallery was taken by Margaret McLaughlin at the Walk for Truth this time last year. At the head of the march are four generations of the Brown family – and they are followed by thousands and thousands of campaigners who came to Bellaghy to voice support for their crusade. This campaign, which in the early years was sustained by just a handful of dedicated family members and loyal friends, is now a movement. It is a national and international touchstone. The Irish government, the High Court, the Northern Ireland Coroner and the GAA are all demanding a public inquiry. Even the Chief Constable says the Browns have been ‘failed by the Establishment’. So, as our mentor-poet instructed us, we must continue to believe in ‘miracles, and cures and healing wells’. The state cannot hold back the ‘longed-for tidal wave of justice’ forever. The Browns will prevail. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. And hope and history will rhyme once more.

RICHARD STERLING, former President of the Londonderry Chamber of Commerce and driving force behind the Group 22 lobby campaign which convinced Stormont to extend the Scotland-Ireland gas interconnector to the North West, urges Derry and Coleraine to team up in the face of UU's cutbacks. The downsizing currently being planned at Ulster University is a travesty and a disgrace. The career path I followed avoided university but was one in which I developed real grit for the challenges I was to face in my working life. But I have learned the foundational importance of a university to the social and economic fabric of any community. Grit is what is needed today to face down this abomination. Not protest. Once again, areas outside of Belfast have been dealt a massive blow, with the recent announcement from the ‘powers that be’ that there will be staff cutbacks at both Magee (Derry) and Coleraine campuses. If followed through, this will be devastating for both communities. In 1965, when Derry and Coleraine were in fierce competition, each striving to secure the ‘New University’ - our second major university after Queens - Coleraine won a pyrrhic victory. A ‘town and gown’ partnership slowly developed there, yet continues unabated. Now, those efforts will be significantly damaged. Magee battled on, with plans today for major university expansion. But now? We are all left to imagine in the subsequent decades since 1965 how things for Derry might have been different if the huge socio-economic uplift which a major head-quartered university can bring had been delivered to Derry. Now, with an axe being swung, the city faces potential serious regression. This time Derry and Coleraine are not in competition. Each being attacked. They need to join forces. I can claim some knowledge and experience of identifying, challenging, and rectifying an important area of social and economic disparity. Separate subject - natural gas. Whatever the arguments today for and against, natural gas as a fossil fuel is a much cleaner and more efficient means to create electricity and to heat homes and businesses than the environmentally dirtier alternatives of oil and coal. I recall former Secretary of State Richard Needham writing that, when flying in from Brussels in the mid 1980’s, ‘Belfast was the only city in the UK where the city was hidden under a layer of smog’ - so it’s not as if clean-up wasn’t needed. In 1992, when the electricity industry was sold off to private interests, it was never a stated objective to clean up our environment through the widespread availability of natural gas, and reduce the cost of electricity to the consumer by recognising the symbiotic relationship between electricity and the almost environmentally benign natural gas, creating a powerful win-win combination. The ‘powers that be’ never saw it. When natural gas did arrive at Larne from Scotland in 1996 - it was decided by those ‘powers that be’ that this new energy source should be the sole preserve of The Greater Belfast Area - with absolutely no notion of expansion beyond, or of developing a gas fuelled power station outside that cherished territory. No rationale could be found by the civil servants to expand gas to the north and north west, and certainly no means to see a new gas fired power station which could underpin the economics of such expansion, and cut the cost of generating electricity significantly through the use of cleaner and more efficient technologies. The win-win. Both Coleraine and Derry were losing out - along with Ballymena and many other towns outside Belfast denied access to natural gas It was only through the emergence of Group 22 in 1998 - a cross sector lobby group - that the serious wrongs of this were highlighted. The North-West had no gas infrastructure at all, and it was the intention of the Belfast based civil servants to keep it that way. Group 22 challenged strongly, but they did much more. They carried out detailed analysis highlighting the social, economic and environmental cost to the region of NOT having access to this new energy source. Powerful arguments, but which the civil servants refused to accept. The Energy Regulator at the time was a powerful voice within the industry. He too could see the inequity and the significant benefits which natural gas could bring to a region which constantly dragged behind the north east. He ‘got it’. Yet it took two brave Ministers who absolutely ‘got it’ - Empey (Unionist) and Durkan (Nationalist) - to overrule the advice from the civil servants, and with support from the Republic, offer a funding package for the development of a north west gas pipeline. This also allowed the replacement of the retiring oil fired Coolkeeragh Power Station with a new state-of-the-art gas fired station. Combined, an investment of c.£300 million. With the widespread availability of natural gas throughout Derry City, Coleraine, Limavady, Portstewart and many other towns, this region today enjoys a cleaner environment, fuel choice and economic enhancement. It is estimated that the new Coolkeeragh alone contributes some £7 million to the local economy annually. None of this could have happened without Group 22. Empowerment of a community and their actions brought about policy change. My point in writing this is that Derry and Coleraine again face a major socio economic challenge. These campus job losses will bring devastating and largely unforeseen consequences far into the future. I had the privilege of being the driving force behind Group 22. The years are now against me to repeat the experience, but in the words of several leading politicos at the time it was the best organised lobby group they had ever seen. Strong leadership and cogent argument from the cross sectoral and cross border Group 22 - industry, Councils, trade unions, Chambers of Commerce, politicians, community groups - created a singular voice which we made sure was heard. Some words come to mind - preparation, trust, respect, commitment, integrity, courage, partnership, and not least serious determination. It’s imperative that Derry and Coleraine - led by their Councils and Chambers of Commerce - quickly find shared leadership, and rise up with a common voice. They must convince the politicians at Stormont and Westminster with detailed arguments and analyses that this is wrong and will have devastating long term consequences for an important sub region on this island, before its too late.

'North West has a fiscal duty to enact new university options' Conal McFeely of the Derry University Group says public representatives in the North West must immediately suspend all City Deal payments to Ulster University. He also called on the Irish government to appoint an independent regulator to oversee its £38m investment at Magee College, which UU currently controls. Mr McFeely was speaking in advance of tomorrow's meeting of Derry City and Strabane District Council, which will discuss UU's recent announcement of 450 job losses and a freeze on capital spending. 'Council has a fiscal responsibility to its ratepayers to suspend all payments to UU, which - as we repeatedly warned - is failing to deliver on commitments to Derry and the North West,' said Mr McFeely. 'Instead of delivering 10,000 students and hundreds of new jobs by 2030 as guaranteed by the two governments in New Decade New Approach (2020), UU is set, yet again, to fail Derry so it can serve Belfast. 'UU is now holding Derry hostage as a marker against its massive, self-inflicted Belfast debt. Neither UU nor Stormont has any interest in this region; every single minuscule change to the Magee campus has resulted from direct instruction from London and Dublin. 'The UU Taskforce's claims that growth in Derry can continue - while UU is announcing massive job cuts and a building freeze - defy basic logic. Scores of workers in the North West face the loss of their jobs, and hundreds more jobs promised to the region will never materialise. 'Council needs to summon the Stormont Economy Minister, along with senior representatives of the British and Irish governments, to Derry to explain how they intend to deliver on their 2020 commitments to this region. In the interim, all governments must ensure independent oversight of UU's processes, which led to this catastrophe. We need independent scrutiny of Higher Education in the North such as exists in all other parts of these island, and Dublin needs to appoint an independent regulator to oversee, and secure, its investment in this region. 'The NI Strategic Investment Board, which is owed tens of millions by UU, can no longer act as an impartial advisor to our Council. The North West needs its own cross-border strategy board - just as it needs its own independent cross-border university. Council must seize this opportunity for change and enact new university partnerships for Magee with the South, as per the recommendations of the Royal Irish Academy.' ENDS