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Date Posted: 07:50:47 11/15/08 Sat GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Hearings begin for Irish fugitive seeking asylum (San Antonio Express-News)

Hearing begins for Irish fugitive seeking asylum, U.S. green card
Border Patrol caught the ex-IRA rebel in S. Texas
By LYNN BREZOSKY
San Antonio Express-news
Nov. 12, 2008, 11:4

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RAYMONDVILLE — Twenty-five years after breaking out of a Northern Ireland prison and slipping into the United States under an assumed identity, former Irish Republican Army militant Pól Brennan was in immigration court Wednesday, hoping for political asylum and a green card.
Brennan, 56, has been in detention centers since January, when he and his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, were stopped at a South Texas immigration checkpoint.
The two were on their way home from visiting his wife's mother on South Padre Island. Border Patrol agents checked his history after noticing Brennan's expired work permit. The San Francisco carpenter has been held since, denied bail.
Testimony in what's expected to be a two-day hearing began with Irish legal expert Eamann Patrick McMénamin providing a history on the centuries of religious turmoil leading up to the 1970s violence in Ireland that sent a young Brennan to prison.
McMénamin is retired from the Irish firm Madden and Finucane, which built a practice representing members of the IRA — a guerrilla group that used terrorist tactics — during the height of bloody conflicts between Catholics and Protestant loyalists in Northern Ireland.
The firm was able to win cases that proved IRA members were coerced into confessions and endured inhumane treatment and physical abuse in Protestant-controlled prisons.
Some of the abuses were brought to international attention by hunger strikes in 1981. Ten inmates died.
Brennan, who was serving a sentence for possessing firearms and explosives, escaped with 37 others from the Maze prison near Belfast in 1983.
He was one of 19 who were never recaptured.
But while cases against other escapees were dissolved by the Good Friday accord of 1998, a peace agreement, McMénamin said Brennan fell under the "anomaly of the 'on the runs'. "
As such, he said, Brennan might have to be extradited to Northern Ireland to finish out his initial 15-year prison term to qualify for release under the Good Friday accord.
The government might also prosecute him separately for the escape, he said.
He said Brennan could also face threats or violence from remaining loyalist splinter groups, and detailed how Catholic schoolchildren, a priest, and even taxi drivers and mail carriers had been threatened or attacked in Protestant neighborhoods.
He said police in recent years had visited some 2,000 Catholics to tell them their names were on documents seized from loyalist groups and advise them to consider their lives under threat.
"He would be quite a high-profile target because of the publicity involved," McMénamin said. "If Pól is extradited, he'll be all over the papers."

lbrezosky@express-news.net

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