" Owen Paterson, orders someone into prison because he reckons we'd all be better off with her out of the way. At least that's how it seems......

Owen Paterson, has sent the traditional republican Marian Price back to jail because, he says, she breached the terms of the licence on which she had been released in 1980 from a life sentence for the March 1973 Provisional IRA bombing of London.,,,,

Price's lawyers insist that she had been freed by Royal pardon, not on licence, and that Paterson doesn't have the authority to overrule a pardon. They have demanded production of the document, so that its terms can be established. Paterson says that the only copy has been lost or shredded.......

There are many people - by no means all of them sympathetic to Price's politics - who are quite prepared to disbelieve this.......

Others will find it impossible to believe that a Secretary of State could supply incorrect and misleading information in a fraught and sensitive case. But, oh yes, he could......

Speaking last week of Mr Justice Girvan's handling of the matter, Hain scoffed that "It wouldn't have happened anywhere else in the UK"......."

Right enough. If it had happened anywhere else, Hain would have been run out of public life.

But this is wild and wacky Northern Ireland, where normal rules don't apply, where due process is optional and, at the whim of a politician, where anything goes........

Swearing to "incorrect and misleading information," he added, "would appear to fall within the concept of perverting the course of justice".....

Eamonn McCann  - Belfast Telegraph