Members of the UK Unionist Party staged a picket outside an Easons bookshop in Belfast yesterday in protest at the company's refusal to stock a pamphlet by their leader, Mr Robert McCartney. They carried placards saying: "Easons ban McCartney but sell John Hume and Gerry Adams".
Mr McCartney denied he was a conspiracy theorist but said he was amazed at Easons' attitude to his pamphlet, The McCartney Report on Consent, which contains a foreword by Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien.
"We asked Easons to distribute the pamphlet to its shops and keep 50 per cent of the cover price and they refused. We thought it was just because the pamphlet was too small. They said they would have no problem selling it in their shops so we arranged for another company to distribute the pamphlet."
The pamphlets went on sale in an Easons branch in Botanic Avenue, but were then removed from the shelves, according to Mr McCartney. "The order apparently came from head office," he said.
"When I phoned Easons they told me they couldn't stock my pamphlet because it was company policy not to handle material published by political parties. But my pamphlet is not party political. It's simply a pamphlet about a political issue.
"It wasn't published by the UK Unionist Party. It's a personal report by Robert McCartney on the consent principle."
Mr McCartney accused Easons of double standards by stocking works by the SDLP leader, Mr John Hume, and the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams. He said the British government "doesn't want people to read material explaining the principle of consent in case people catch on to what the government is up to. Easons would be in breach of the right of free speech in most democratic countries with a written constitution." Mr McCartney's group is boycotting the peace talks.
No one from Easons was available for comment yesterday. However, a director of the company, Mr John McKelvey, is quoted in yesterday's News Letter as saying: "Our policy is not to handle any material, including pamphlets, published by political parties. There is no exception."