Labour settling old scores over Suu Kyi

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column with Dara Bradley 

It is 14 years since Galway awarded its highest honour to a Burmese Nobel Peace Laureate.

In June 2005, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Freedom of the City. At the time, Mayor of Galway, Catherine Connolly – then a Labour Party City Councillor, and now an Independent TD for Galway West – said she was “very proud” the City Council agreed unanimously to confer the honour.

The special ceremony coincided with Ms Suu Kyi’s 60th birthday, which she had celebrated under house arrest, having been confined in Rangoon for 10 years over her non-violent struggle for peace and democracy.

The activist, who returned to look after her ailing mother, led the National League of Democracy to victory in the 1990 general election, but the military regime ignored the results.

Ms Suu Kyi survived physical abuse, deprivation of food, assassination attempts, and she was not allowed to leave Burma when her husband, English academic Michael Aris, died in 1999.

However, in recent years, there has been international concern over persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and de-facto leader of the country, Ms Suu Kyi’s silence on the matter.

Dublin City Council voted in 2017 to strip Ms Suu Kyi of the Freedom of Dublin.

Galway City Council is a bit late to the game, and only discussed the matter, briefly, at its most recent meeting (January 2019), when it was agreed it would be put on the agenda as an item for discussion and a vote at the February meeting.

Mayor Niall McNelis (Lab) indicated that it had been discussed at the Council’s procedures committee previously. But Mike Crowe (FF), queried whether there was any more solid information available to councillors about Suu Kyi, that would persuade him to vote one way or the other.

MJ said the Freedom of the City honour has never been revoked by Galway before, and they’d want to have pretty good reasons to take the honour back.

Leaving aside the contention that councillors should probably have better things to be bothering them, it’d make you wonder has this attempt to strip Suu Kyi of the award more to do with embarrassing Queen of the Claddagh, Catherine Connolly, than it does about the former’s fall from grace?

We might never know, because councillors are contemplating holding the debate ‘in-camera’, which means the prying eyes of the media, and by extension the public, will be excluded from hearing both sides of the argument.

For more Bradley Bytes about busking bylaws, nurses jumping SIPTU ship and FF and Mike Cubbard see this week’s Galway City Tribune