Over the past number of weeks, our family and a number of close friends have met together on a very regular basis to discuss and to plan a way forward which will secure my dad’s release and his return to Martine, to my brothers and sisters and to our wider family circle.

As part of that planning process, family members met with and held lengthy and very positive discussions with quite a number of people from various walks of life across the Six Counties. During those discussions, we received great encouragement and advice as we explored with them the various options open to us in developing a campaign which would expose the unjust imprisonment and the continued persecution by the state of my dad, Colin.

We have received great encouragement and very constructive advice as a result of those discussions. All of those with whom we have met have pledged our family their full support. Some of them are present here tonight.

One of the options which we explored has been the possibility to putting my dad forward as a candidate in the forthcoming EU elections. When this option was first made public, we were contacted by literally hundreds of people from across the North, as well as the Twenty Six Counties and from the United States – all wanting to know how they could help.

We have fully explored, in detail, with those from whom we sought counsel and advice, all the logistics involved in a mounting an effective campaign across the Six Counties - the manpower required to mount door-to-door canvasses in every area, the financial costs of producing a quarter of a million leaflets, the production of thousands of posters, the co-ordination required to manage the effective distribution of all of that to every nationalist household in the Six Counties.

In the end, we have come to a very simple conclusion – that for a family-based campaign which is in its infancy, even with the best will in world, and in the very limited four week window available to us, we would not be able to mount the effective, well co-ordinated and well-resourced campaign required to do justice both to my dad, Colin, and to all those who have pledged our family their full support. Indeed, we have also concluded that such an electoral intervention would be used by the establishment and by some sections of the media to portray a single-issue campaign for justice in another light and to attach ulterior motives to our campaign in order to suit their own agendas.

While this decision by our family will come as a disappointment to many of those who have supported us, it will no doubt be viewed with relief in certain other quarters. Unlike those political parties who fully support the very police force which has imprisoned my dad, our family does not have luxury of being in receipt of hundreds of thousands of pounds from the British government to help finance an effective election campaign.

So leaving that issue completely aside tonight, we now intend to proceed with detailing our campaign to have my dad, Colin, released and to highlight the issue of prolonged detention in the Six Counties.