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May 16 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Léirmheasanna (Reviews), Leabhair (Books), Polaitíocht (Politics), Stair (History)

History And Counter-History In Ireland – Confronting The Apologist Historians

Just a quick post to highlight Protestant Cork 1911-1926, one of the best resources I’ve seen so far on the issue of the alleged decline in the numbers of Protestants living in the region of Cork City and County in the closing years and aftermath of the Irish Revolution. The reason this issue is so important is because of the claims made in relation to it by apologist historians and journalists on behalf of British rule in Ireland (the misnamed “revisionists”). This site is no simple Irish Nationalist or Republican one but follows a neutral line between both sides in order to maintain objectivity and scholarly standing. Meticulously researched, analytical, and with a host of primary sources both old and new, it is essential reading for anyone interested in this artificially contentious subject.

“It has been claimed that the Irish War of Independence from Britain in Cork turned into an ethnic pogrom driven by fear of mostly Protestant outsiders.

This site shows that the story is far more complex and nuanced that this simplistic view.

The Population declined by 14470 in 15 years, but 10,714 non-Irish-born Protestants lived in Cork in 1911.

Most were military, or government. Has this story been told properly?”

The conclusion is fair and balanced – even to a Republican:

“This article aims to correct our understanding of the issue through using new resources online to improve older research. As much written about this topic has either been incompletely researched, unverifiable, or supposition dressed up as fact, it is difficult to winnow out the fact from the fiction. It has often been necessary to return to the original source to examine its accuracy. To their credit those who have followed standard academic referencing to a verifiable source allowed this process to happen; the unverifiable sources should not be treated as being anything other than hearsay.

The War of Independence was driven by nationalism, and as 1921 continued it descended into the mire of a bloody war of reprisals. While this may revolt some people, and others may question the need for it, the people involved at the time had no idea if they were going to win or lose. If they had known the outcome they may have stayed their hand. Equally, if they had not pursued the savage course they took would the British have offered a truce? Was the impetus for truce the fact that the Ulster Unionists had secured partition? These are the questions that need answering.

The Dunmanway killings are different in that they occurred after independence. The Irish State failed to protect its citizens. No evidence has been produced to suggest that the IRA garrison attempted to leave the barracks and take control of the town, and at the very least this was a dereliction of duty. All we do know for certain is that 16 Protestants, and one Catholic, were shot or disappeared in West Cork over a three day period. Others of both main faiths were shot at or targeted for shooting. We know who shot four of them in Macroom, and we can suspect who may have shot the others. However, there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with the killings. The murders were denounced by both sides of Sinn Féin, and vulnerable citizens were protected by the local Anti-Treaty IRA. Civilians and military were warned they would be shot if they didn’t hand in all guns to the local IRA commanders throughout the area. The killings resulted in the emigration of a small number of native Church of Ireland and other Protestant members from the county, but the contemporary Protestant sources stubbornly refuse to suggest a sectarian pogrom: Bolshevik certainly, agrarian definitely, nationalist undoubtedly but sectarian exceptionally.

There is no justification for the actual Dunmanway killings. Even if each and every one of the men shot were informers they had been granted amnesty by the Truce. If they had breached the Truce then they should have been brought before a court of law and tried. Whatever the reason for their killings, if the IRA were involved then it was a betrayal of their oath to the Republic. However to use this event to argue that there was a sustained campaign against Protestants because of their religion is not supported by any of the evidence from the time: Protestant, Catholic or Dissenter.

It is important neither to understate nor overstate what happened in the revolutionary period. This was a savage period in Irish history. A vicious war, using methods which eschewed the norms of war up to that point, was fought to a draw in July 1921. This was followed by an even more savage Civil War which led to a complete breakdown of law. Those with property, and known Treaty supporters were most at risk, and ex-Unionists fell into both these categories. The new Irish state did its best to protect all of its citizens, and yet there were appalling atrocities committed. The evidence does not support the theory that Protestants were targeted because of their religion. Historians are entitled to speculate, but in this case has the speculation run away with the story? Is it time to stop this pointless debate, and write true history?”

Some more analysis below.

Niall Meehan:

Irish Political Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, February 2012,  ‘The Further One Gets From Belfast’, a second reply to Jeff Dudgeon

Irish Political Review, Vol. 26 No 11, November 2011,  Reply to Jeffrey Dudgeon on Peter Hart

History Ireland, November-December 2011, Vol. 19 No 6 History Ireland letter on second edition of Gerard Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances

Spinwatch 24 May 2011, Distorting Irish History Two, the road from Dunmanway: Peter Hart’s treatment of the 1922 ‘April killings’ in West Cork

FINAL 16 NOV 2010 1 An ‘amazing coincidence’ that ‘could mean anything’: Gerard Murphy’s The Year of Disappearances

Spinwatch November 2010, Distorting Irish History, the stubborn facts of Kilmichael: Peter Hart and Irish Historiography

Irish Times Monday, October 12, 2009, Sectarian gloss on State’s early years is flawed

Dublin Review of Books, Issue Number 11 – Autumn 2009, Frank Gallagher and land agitation – A response to Tom Wall’s ‘Getting Them Out, Southern Loyalists in the War of Independence’ (drb, Issue 9 Spring 2009)

History Ireland, Vol 17 No 4 July August 2009, A response on use (and non-use) of sources to Professor David Fitzpatrick (TCD)

Irish Political Review, Vol 23, No3, March 2008, After the War of Independence, some further questions about West Cork, April 27-29 1922

Counterpunch, November 11/12, 2006, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” Sends Revisionists Yapping at History’s Heels

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc:
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May 05 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics), Stair (History)

Bobaí Ó Seachnasaigh

The British version of the Huffington Post, which strangely I’ve always found a wee bit right-wing given its liberal US origins, carries a lengthy article on Roibeárd “Bobaí” Ó Seachnasaigh or Bobby Sands, Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army and elected representative of the people of Fermanagh and South Tyrone in the British Occupied North of Ireland. What’s more extraordinary is its tone:

“”I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.”

With these words, written 31 years ago, Bobby Sands began the hunger strike which culminated in his death after 66 days on May 5 1981.

It was followed by the deaths of nine others who made the same sacrifice: Francis Hughes, Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martun Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine.

Just over three decades on it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the significance of the sacrifice made by Sands and his comrades, which even if you disagree with the aims for which they gave their lives remains a monumental testament to the power of the human spirit.

By the time of his death in 1981 the ‘troubles’ in the Six Counties in the North of Ireland had been raging since the late 1960s, when the Provisional IRA emerged from the failure of successive British governments to reform the sectarian and gerrymandered province, in which the minority Catholic/Nationalist population were regarded as second class citizens, denied the same political and civil rights as their protestant/unionist counterparts.

Young, otherwise ordinary working class Catholics such as Bobby Sands were forced to make a choice between acceptance of a status quo under which they and their families were persecuted, intimidated, and forced out of their homes by loyalist mobs backed up by a bigoted police force, or resistance.

Sands chose the path of resistance and was arrested and imprisoned twice as a result. Upon his second arrest in 1976 he was interrogated, tortured, and sentenced to 14 years in prison in a trial presided over by three judges with no jury. During his first period of incarceration – 1972 to 1976 – Sands had used his time well, immersing himself in books and study groups with his comrades to learn about the history of the Irish liberation struggle, national liberation and anti-colonial struggles throughout the developing world, literature, and the Irish language.

The removal of the political status of the prisoners had begun in 1976 under the then Labour government led by James Callaghan. This was timed to tie in with the construction of the new purpose built Maze Prison just outside Belfast, where both Republican and Loyalist prisoners were to be transferred from the existing Long Kesh Prison Camp nearby and other detention facilities across the province. Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, replacing Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979, were determined to continue the policy of criminalization of Republican prisoners as part of a new offensive against Irish Republicanism in general.

As determined as Sands and his comrades were to see their hunger strike through to the end, Thatcher was equally determined not to budge one inch from the policy of criminalisation. This continued even after Sands was elected as a British Member of Parliament in the midst of his hunger strike in a local by-election, and even in the face of growing international condemnation over the British government’s unwillingness to compromise.

The prisoners had five demands:

1. The right not to wear a prison uniform;
2. The right not to do prison work;
3. The right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
4. The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week;
5. Full restoration of remission lost through the protest

The enormity of what Bobby Sands and his comrades who died along with him on hunger strike achieved was reflected in its global impact. Upon Sands’s death, opposition MPs in the Indian Parliament observed a minute’s silence. Protest marches were held against the British government and in tribute to Sands and his comrades.

Following their example, Nelson Mandela led a hunger by prisoners on Robben Island to improve their own conditions. In Tehran the name of the street in which the British Embassy was located was changed to Bobby Sands Street, forcing it to relocate its entrance to avoid the embarrassment of Bobby Sands Street appearing on the letterhead of its stationery and official documents.”

Given the left-wing credentials of the author of the piece, journalist John Wright, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised but the British media have spent so much of the last 50 years fighting the good fight on behalf of the Pax Britannica in Ireland that its still shocking to see an article telling the truth. And not simply more of the same old lies and propaganda.

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Apr 20 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

More Cloak And Dagger Shenanigans In Fantasy Troubles

And so it rumbles on, the latest chapter in the tale of Britain’s super-superspy and double-agent extraordinaire Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci, with the audio recordings of calls between Ian Hurst (the nom de guerre of Martin Ingram, an alleged former British military Intelligence agent) and Sir John Wilsey (former General Officer Commanding the British Army in the Occupied North of Ireland during the early 1990s). Not much new, not much we didn’t know already, and all rather desperate really. But judge for yourself here.

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Apr 08 2012
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The Myths Of Easter 1916 – And The Truth

Introduction

The annual commemoration of Éirí Amach na Cásca or the Easter Rising of 1916 and the commencement of the Irish Revolution is upon us yet again. Some ninety-six years ago on Easter Monday, 1916, members of several Irish Republican organisations came together to unite in a general insurrection against British rule across the island of Ireland. Orchestrated by the secret revolutionary movement of the Bráithreachas Phoblacht na hÉireann (BPnahÉ) or in English the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB (popularly known as Na Fíníní or the Fenians), the organisations which took to the streets of the capital city and a number of other towns and districts around the country were to shape Irish history for decades to come. They included:

Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓnahÉ) “Irish Volunteers (IV)”

Arm Cathartha na hÉireann (ACnahÉ) ”Irish Citizen Army (ICA)”

Cumann na mBan (CnamB)

Na Fianna Éireann (NFÉ)

The Hibernian Rifles (HR)

Together they now comprised the new Arm Poblachtach na hÉireann (APnahÉ) or in the English language the Army of the Irish Republic or Irish Republican Army (IRA) whose purpose was to defend the Irish Republic and the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic proclaimed on the steps of General Post Office or GPO in Dublin. Unfortunately confusion about the timing and nature of the uprising meant a national insurrection failed to materialise and instead a number of isolated risings took place around the island of Ireland (largely in Dublin city and county, but with smaller actions in Waterford, Wexford, Meath, Louth, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Galway). After several days of fighting during which much of the city-centre of Dublin was destroyed by British ground and naval artillery, the Forces of the Irish Republic in the capital surrendered to the far larger British Occupation Forces which had now flooded the country with reinforcements. Within days fighting around the rest of the island came to a halt as well (though in fact skirmishes both in Dublin and elsewhere continued for some time, principally through sniping and isolated attacks).

How People Viewed The Rising

The reaction of the general public in Dublin, the centre of British rule in Ireland for 800 years and the most thoroughly colonised region of the island outside of the north-east, was mixed. Within the large local British or British Unionist population (Protestants and Roman Catholics who viewed themselves as Irish and British or exclusively British), the majority feeling was of hostility to the “Rebels” and support for the British state in Ireland. Since this community was closely invested in the continuance of British rule to protect its privileged political, social, economic and cultural standing in the country it was the one that was the most vocal it its expressions of loyalty to Britain and calls for “retribution” against the “Rebels”, their supporters, families and communities. Indeed when captured or surrendered Irish Republican revolutionaries paraded by the British Forces through British Unionist areas of the city came under verbal and physical assault from crowds of mainly working-class and some middle-class British loyalists publicly mixing together in ways that probably hadn’t been seen since the last visit of a British head of state to the island. Earlier during the actual fighting stage of the Rising crowds of British Unionists had also lined the streets to cheer passing British troops in the more middle-class southern suburbs of the city, after the soldiers had disembarked from transport-ships arriving from Britain.

On the other hand the reaction of the Irish or Irish Nationalist community in Dublin, the majority one in the region, was much more complex. Living under absolute and virtually unbroken British rule for centuries had inculcated in it the idea of the absolute might and mastery of the British Empire: not just in Ireland but across the globe (a belief encouraged by the British state itself through every aspect of intellectual life, from education to literature). The suggestion that Irish people could successfully rise up against the British in Ireland seemed like madness and simple wish fulfilment to most ordinary Dubliners. Most men and women simply couldn’t imagine such a thing happening (however much they may have desired it). Living in the “police state” created by British colonial rule, where the conspicuous presence of the paramilitary police force of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and dozens of British military garrisons around the island was a daily reminder of the might of Britain, very few could imagine anything else. Just as importantly generations of Irish people had been made to believe, through centuries of British propaganda, that the Irish as a race were “unfit” to govern themselves: too uneducated, unintelligent, uncivilized.

Fearing the reaction of the British to the “Rebellion” (and with good reason given the traditional savagery of British responses in the past) many in the Irish Nationalist community adopted a wait-and-see approach to the would-be revolution. If it failed, as most fully expected to happen, they did not want to be seen to be on the wrong side – by the British. The Irish people knew through long and bitter experience that those perceived by the British authorities as being “traitors” or “treasonous” in their attitudes would have found themselves at the very least forced into unemployment, perhaps homelessness and impoverishment too (and this in a city where institutional discrimination against the Irish Nationalist community remained commonplace and malnutrition, starvation and disease was rampant in the Nationalist inner-city ghettos). Worse they could have been arrested or interned without trial, and possibly “deported” or exiled from the country by British diktat. And, the greatest fear of all, they could have simply been rounded up and executed by the British Forces in a series of mass retributions or communal punishments from which there would be no escape.

Yet the history of the Easter Rising is replete with accounts of civilian men, women and children risking their lives to help the revolutionaries throughout the capital city and county. What’s more remarkable is the breadth of people who lent aid and succour to the insurrectionists, a breadth that seemed to cut across class divisions and boundaries. From washerwomen to businessmen, dockers to doctors, barmen to teachers, hundreds of people, both during the fighting and after the surrender did what they could when they could to aid the cause of the Irish Republic. And this at a time when the first British retributions had already taken place: when buildings in the city-centre and neighbouring working-class districts were being pounded by British artillery and machine-gun fire, killing involved and uninvolved alike; when civilians had been murdered in different parts of the city by attacking British Forces, some of them tortured before hand; when some captured “rebels” or suspected ”rebels” were simply being executed on the spot by British officers and soldiers infuriated by the temerity of the Irish to rise up against nearly a thousand years of ”ordained” and “lawful” British rule in Ireland.

In contrast to the affluent and often “ethnically British” southern suburbs of Dublin in the mainly Irish Nationalist areas of the inner city and northern reaches the long lines of captured “rebels” were applauded and cheered by crowds who refused to be cowed by the threatening British troops and watchful RIC policemen. Here and there groups of women and girls would suddenly rush forward pushing little parcels of food and clothes into the hands of the bewildered prisoners, and just as suddenly withdraw as the British bayonets would dash towards them. And sometimes a wounded man or a teenage boy would be dragged or carried away with them to disappear into the warren of back streets and alleyways to the fury of the British escorts. Across the city dozens of revolutionaries relied on the sanctuary offered by local people who hid them in cellars and attics, sheds and outhouse, as the British and their willing RIC servants went from house to house, street to street furiously seeking them out. Even as the British reinforcements had entered the city proper during the latter days of the Rising in many areas they had met a sullen, uncooperative population (something already experienced by some locally raised soldiers in the so-called “Irish Regiments”) and a marked hostility in some districts that puzzled or angered them. Later the feelings of much of the city’s inhabitants grew far worse: resentful of the Rising’s failure (even if the vast majority never though it would succeed in the first place), strangely and paradoxically proud that it had taken place at all, angry at the destruction of so much of the city’s heart by the British Occupation Forces, and already aware of the quickly circulated accounts of massacres and outrages carried out by its troops.

Outside of Dublin, in those rural areas where the British writ did not run so firmly, the civilian population was much more vocal in its support. In Galway and Wexford and other places the scattered revolutionaries were greeted as an army of liberation in some villages and parishes, while the handful of local RIC officers who enforced British rule with such iron determination barricaded themselves into their fortified police barracks or fled to the next biggest British military garrison. Only when the news of the surrender by the Provisional Government in Dublin reached them did local people in country districts retreat into their customary guise of silence and withdrawal, so as not to be singled out for retribution by the British state and its many, many servants in Ireland. Yet, even here, more “rebels” found a willing and helpful hand than not, and many young men simply discarded their weapons and equipment and returned home to their families and communities in the more isolated rural areas who closed ranks around them.

The Myths of 1916

The great myth of the Easter Rising is the claim that the decision by the British military and government to execute the members of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic and other principal figures who had participated in the insurrection, led to the turning of public opinion in Ireland in favour of the revolutionaries. The implication is that before those terrible, retributive deaths by British military firing squads the Irish people as a whole were opposed to the “Rebels” and were accepting of the need to put down the “Rebellion”. But, as we have seen, nothing further could be from the truth.

The great failure of the British was not to have ignored the wishes of the Irish people and to have executed Pádraig Mac Piarais, President of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Irish Republic, and all the other signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Their failure was that they did listen to the wishes of the Irish people and their demands for violent retribution. Unfortunately it was the wrong Irish people. British military commanders and politicians, already convinced of the need for a public show of force through the killing of the leaders of the Rising, needed simply enough public encouragement and momentum to go through with it. In Britain there was plenty, with demands for blood from across the political spectrum. But they also found it in Ireland. Not from Irish Ireland: but from British Ireland. Amongst the British Unionist population who dominated the locally raised British military and paramilitary forces in Ireland, the judiciary, the colonial civil service and administration, the business classes and landed aristocracy, and above all the media elite of the time: journalists, editors and newspaper owners.

The British population of Ireland demanded that the British Empire seek retribution upon its and their enemies. By baying for the blood of the ”Rebels” the Unionists expressed their loyalty to the existing order while protecting and securing their own place in it. Many believed in the aftermath of the executions that Ireland’s position in the so-called “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” had been secured forever. To some the insurrection had been a blessing in disguise and now the people of Britain would see the deceit and untrustworthiness of the “native, Catholic, Gaelic Irish” and that the limited reforms of the previous decades could be undone. Most expected the British to now impose military conscription upon Ireland in order to force tens of thousands of Irishmen into the ranks of the British Armed Forces to fight in the trenches of World War I and that the Nationalist politicians of Ireland would be rendered mute and even more ineffective than normal.

However, as we know, history took quite a different path. The British soon realised their mistake in listening to the advice of their “West British” co-nationals in Ireland, and within eight years the Unionist population in three-quarters of Ireland was abandoned to its own fate as the British colony in Ireland was reduced to a bloody rump centred in the north-eastern corner of the island where the single greatest concentration of an ethnically British population lived as a local majority. But that, as they say, is another story.

Suggested Links

If you want to learn more about the Easter Rising of 1916, the National Library of Ireland maintains a permanent online exhibition, The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives. You can view the flash-site or view individual guides in PDF format here.

Some more interesting sites are:

The Irish Volunteers Commemorative Organisation

The War Of Independence

The Irish Story

The Irish War

The Easter Rising

An Chéad Dáil Éireann

The Irish Republic

The Proclamation of the Irish Republic: Notes From Dublin

The 1916 Rising: Then and Now

The Irish Rebellion of 1916 and its Martyrs: Erin’s tragic Easter

Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, Easter, 1916

The Pursuit of Sovereignty & the Impact of Partition, 1912–1949

The Foundation and Development of Na Fianna Éireann

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Mar 06 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Scannáin (Movies)

The Murder Machine – The British War In Ireland

Several weeks ago I examined the acquittal in a British-run court in the North of Ireland of the long-time Irish Republican activist Colin Duffy. Following years of imprisonment while awaiting trial (colloquially known as “internment on remand”) he was found not guilty of the killings of two British soldiers shot dead during an attack on the Masserene Military Base outside Belfast by the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA). For Duffy and his supporters it was a validation of his claims to innocence and further evidence of a campaign of persecution conducted against him by the British state since the late1980s.

In the light of those developments I examined some of Colin Duffy’s history, in particular the attempted murder of Duffy and two other Republicans some twenty years previously. In March 1990, shortly after attending an appointment at a British paramilitary police base of the then Royal Ulster Constabulary (later reformed as the Police Service of Northern Ireland), Duffy and his companions, Tony McCaughey and Sam Marshall, were attacked by a group of British terrorists. Leaping from a car two British gunmen opened fire with a hail of bullets from automatic assault rifles wounding Sam Marshall who fell to the ground, while Duffy and McCaughey narrowly managed to escape. The badly injured 31 year old father was then shot to death as he lay defenceless on the street.

Returning to their vehicle the terrorists sped off, apparently “escorted” by a second car identified by several witnesses as a red Maestro. In 1999 a news documentary for the BBC revealed that the second vehicle was in fact a registered undercover car manned by members of British Military Intelligence and that a number of soldiers were present both on foot and in other vehicles observing the attack. These revelations further fueled already existing allegations that the assassination attempt was the result of co-operation between elements of the British Forces in Ireland and their British terrorist counterparts. The Irish Examiner now brings us the latest revelations in this ongoing scandal:

“…undercover British soldiers were at the scene of a high-profile killing carried out by loyalist paramilitaries in the North, a dramatic new report has revealed.

The revelations centre on a controversial attack where three republicans were ambushed minutes after they left a police station in Lurgan, Co Armagh, in 1990.

Former republican prisoner Sam Marshall was killed in a hail of automatic gunfire, but the presence nearby of a red Maestro car, later found to be a military intelligence vehicle, sparked claims of a security force role in the killing.

The presence of the Maestro, and questions over how the loyalists knew when the republican trio would be leaving the police station, sparked major controversy in the 1990s and led the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) and government to deny anything suspicious had taken place.

A review of the unsolved case by the police Historical Enquiries Team (HET) has now found:

  • At least eight undercover soldiers were deployed near the killing, with their commander monitoring from a remote location;
  • The armed military intelligence personnel at the scene were in six cars, including the noted red Maestro;
  • Two plain-clothed soldiers with camera equipment were in an observation post at the entrance of the police station as the three republicans arrived and left;
  • Two undercover soldiers followed the republicans on foot, and were within 50-100 yards of the attack, but said they did not to see the killing in which the gunmen fired 49 shots;
  • After the two masked loyalists jumped from a Rover car and started shooting, the troops did not return fire, claiming it was out of their line of sight and too far away, but alerted colleagues who launched an unsuccessful search for the killers. Despite being in a republican area, the soldiers make no reference to feeling at risk from the gunmen.
  • The killers’ guns are believed to have been used in four other murders and an attempted murder. Weapons of the same type have been linked by police to seven further killings and four attempted murders carried out in 1988/89;
  • The RUC found gloves near the gang’s burned-out getaway car, but the gloves were subsequently lost;
  • The RUC sought to deny the existence of a surveillance operation by giving “misleading or incomplete” statements. But RUC Special Branch had briefed the undercover troops;
  • Investigators could not rule in, or rule out, that the RUC leaked information to the loyalists.”

In a further twist to the story it has now been revealed in the Irish Times that the rifles used in the attack were part of a consignment of weapons from Apartheid-era South Africa smuggled into Ireland by British Intelligence agents to arm the British terror groups operating here.

“The guns used to kill Sam Marshall were from a haul smuggled into Northern Ireland by a top security force agent, the murdered man’s family has claimed.

Brian Nelson was a leading member of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and a prized asset of military intelligence.

He has been linked to a string of controversial killings, including the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989.

…the family obtained a copy of the original RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) report on the killing, after the document was handed to a US court as part of an extradition case in 1993.

* It confirmed the guns were VZ58 automatic rifles, similar in appearance to the infamous AK47 weapon.

* Victims groups have said the rifle model was among a consignment smuggled into Northern Ireland for use by loyalist paramilitaries in the late 1980s with the help of Brian Nelson.

* The rifles formed part of a major arms shipment from South Africa and the entire stockpile has been linked to 95 of the estimated 225 loyalist murders carried out in the six years following the arrival of the cache.

The family further claimed that by comparing information with other victims of loyalist violence, they have directly linked the guns that killed Sam Marshall to four other murders and an attempted murder.

The Marshall family has also questioned whether the description of a man seen acting suspiciously near Lurgan police station on a previous bail signing by the three republicans matched that of Robin Jackson.

The leading UVF member, known as “The Jackal”, featured in a recent HET report on the murder of members of the Miami Showband pop group in 1975, which pointed to collusion by security forces.

Rosemary Nelson, a Lurgan solicitor who took up the Marshall family’s case, was killed by loyalists in 1999 amid allegations of state collusion.”

Britain’s war in Ireland. Pitiless, remorseless, unending.

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Feb 14 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

Fantasy Troubles Part III – Britain’s Superspies!

Back in December 2011 I addressed the grossly exaggerated issue of the alleged penetration of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army by British Intelligence agents and double-agents in the 1980s and ‘90s, concluding that:

“The majority of tactical intelligence gathered by the British Forces, the sort of intelligence that saw weapons and explosives captured, ambushes and attacks thwarted, IRA Volunteers and Active Service Units counter-ambushed, arrested or assassinated, whole regions of the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland closed down for days or weeks on end, was derived from the new modes of electronic and computer-coordinated intelligence, surveillance and bugging that were made possible by the advances in technology that began to make their presence felt in the late 1980s and ‘90s.

British listening devices placed in phones, homes, cars, shops, pubs, regular meeting points, the use of long range, long term covert cameras (with real-time satellite and landline feeds), tracking devices placed on or into vehicles and other equipment (including guns and explosives), the widespread use of CCTV in urban areas accessible to the then RUC and the British Army, routine and co-ordinated communication interceptions and monitoring, indexing of suspected or known IRA Volunteers and continuous observation of their movements, homes, cars, work places (and of their families, friends and work colleagues), all these techniques were what powered the cutting edge of the British war machine in Ireland. The central collation and study of data, thousands of individual facts and figures, over a period of months or years, and the redistribution of that data to those who needed to know it is what weighed heavy in favour of the British in the closing years of the conflict.

Not the double-agents and “touts”, mythical or otherwise.”

My piece was followed up by Mick Fealty over on Slugger O’Toole, and now Paul Larkin casts a critical eye on the ongoing controversy in the Guardian:

“The refusal of the star witness, journalist Toby Harnden, to undergo cross examination at the Smithwick Tribunal in Dublin has thrown the whole inquiry into disarray and leads to questions about holding one in the first place.

The tribunal was set up by the Irish government to investigate claims that in 1989 a member of the Garda Síochána (Irish police) helped the IRA to murder two high-ranking RUC officers: Harry Breen and Ken Buchanan. This is despite the fact Canadian judge Peter Cory had already investigated these killings in 2003 and ruled that the IRA did not need the help of a traditionally hostile southern Irish police force to kill the two officers.”

The conclusion reached by Judge Cory after a lengthy series of investigations was clearly stated by him in his 2003 report:

“The intelligence reports received within days and the early weeks following the murder all suggest that PIRA members committed the murders without relying upon any information that the Gardaí or its employees could have supplied.”

He further recommended a public enquiry to examine the sources of the allegations of the claimed co-operation between An Garda Síochána and the Irish Republican Army in the assassination of the two RUC officers – not the claims themselves which he effectively dismissed. But to return to Larkin’s article:

“In a now familiar pattern, the Garda/IRA story was first circulated by former low-ranking agents of the British army’s force research unit (FRU). Most Irish people saw the decision to extend the Cory investigation as a sop to Unionists – a perverse quid pro quo for all that Irish republican fuss about Pat Finucane and the hundreds of other victims of Britain’s dirty war.

Perhaps the Irish government should have listened more closely to Judge Cory, who cast doubt on Harnden’s evidence in relation to the murders, saying he took unattributable testimony from security force or intelligence sources and repeated these as fact: “Statements and allegations were put forward as matters of fact, when in reality they were founded upon speculation and hypothesis.”

In the case of the two murders, for instance, FRU operatives say the formidable IRA units from north County Louth and South Armagh, which carried out the killings, were “riddled with spies” and that their favourite spy for Britain in the IRA, Freddie Scappaticci, knew all about these killings. This is pure fantasy; deadly IRA cells would have no need or desire to consult with anyone before launching this kind of attack – least of all a Belfast man like “Scap”. Territory is important in Ireland.

But don’t take my word for it. A high-ranking RUC Special Branch officer (witness 62) told the Smithwick tribunal: “No agent of the state or anyone who was recruited at that time was in any way involved in the shooting.” [ASF: For more on the evidence of the ex-RUC officer see here where he dismisses the testimony to the Tribunal of the wandering British "spy" Peter Keeley/Kevin Fulton]

[Freddie Scappaticci] was a member of a debrief unit that questioned IRA volunteers after certain operations and in certain areas. He was never briefed about upcoming operations. He was never in a so-called “nutting squad” and never in a position to walk into a particular area and demand prior details of an operation or the head of an IRA volunteer on a plate. Yet this FRU-inspired myth has become the accepted narrative.

The repeated (and incorrect) assertion that MI5 was running the IRA and pushing the peace process feeds the ire of armed groups in Ireland who oppose the Good Friday agreement. A headline that says “IRA riddled with spies” is, in that sense, an incendiary device and undermines our democratic all-Ireland decision to try another, unarmed, way to find justice and peace and ultimately end partition.”

Indeed, as I pointed out back in December the exaggerated claims in certain quarters about the numbers and successes of British intelligence agents placed in the Republican Movement is less about the past war and more about the present war.

As for Freddie “Scap” Scappaticci, the alleged head of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU), despite the tens of thousands of words written about him he remains as big a question mark as ever. His first name is Freddie yet the media frequently call him “Alfredo”. A serving IRA Volunteer from 1970 onward he was interned in 1971 and 1974 (along with his brother Umberto), and we are told that he turned traitor in 1978 after a personal dispute with a more senior (unnamed) IRA officer in Belfast. Shortly thereafter he was subject to a “punishment beating” by the IRA on the orders of this officer, leading Scappaticci to apparently walk into a local RUC paramilitary police base several days later offering up his services as an “informer”. Initially this was with the RUC Special Branch before he was “passed on” in the early 1980s to the deliberately disingenuously named Force Research Unit (FRU), which controlled a number of British Army spies and agents in the Irish Republican Army (and at least one leading member of the terror squads of the British separatist minority).

However other sources claim that Scappaticci became a double-agent after being arrested by the RUC in 1982 for a drink-driving offence and that he was immediately recruited by the FRU. Some have conflated both these events, while others have challenged the “foundation myth” that Scappaticci was attacked by fellow IRA Volunteers as part of a personal vendetta (a vendetta that seems to have never gone beyond a story in a number of British newspapers since there is no further history of it), stating that the “beating” taken by Scappaticci was the result of a youthful, drunken fistfight, a dispute over IRA policies with another IRA Volunteer or that it never happened in the first place.

Take your pick!

It is claimed by the conspiracy advocates that the FRU facilitated Scappaticci’s rise through the IRA’s ranks by eliminating rivals and giving him a number of “successes” against the British Forces (in other words a section of the British Army co-operated in guerrilla attacks upon its own soldiers!). By the mid-1980s he was now commanding the IRA’s security and counter-intelligence department (however, yet again, other sources claim that Scappaticci was in fact second-in-command and never rose beyond that position). This group, the Internal Security Unit (ISU), was in charge of the IRA’s counter-intelligence war: which primarily meant investigating some IRA operations that went wrong or were aborted in suspicious circumstances, individuals suspected or known to be agents or informers, the loss of munitions to “enemy action” where no reasonable explanation existed, conducting counter-surveillance operations or checks, and sometimes executing those convicted of “capital offenses” in IRA courts martial.

Many journalists (and some anonymous but much quoted “security sources”) have stated that the ISU “vetted” all new IRA recruits. This is untrue. It rarely acted in this manner. The ISU’s remit was largely restricted to the interrogation of suspected informers (and their families and friends) or people of a “dubious” background. Most individual IRA Active Service Units recruited their own Volunteers (relatively) free of interference from anyone higher than Brigade Staff-level, usually based upon personal or family links or recommendations.

The only real exceptions were in the case of the English Department, the IRA’s fighting arm in Britain and Europe, which was attached to the General Headquarters. Yet even here the ISU’s vetting seems to have been mixed, with most Volunteers being recruited from within the IRA’s existing ranks or through personal contacts or familiarity with senior IRA officers. In any case by the mid-1990s the traditional command-and-control structures for operations in Britain were being increasingly by-passed with greater reliance placed on Special Service Units recruited and directed by the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade and associated personnel (which was not the first time that local IRA units in Ireland took control of attacks in Britain).

Bizarrely we have Freddie Scappaticci’s own words from an anonymous interview he gave in 1993 for a British television documentary, “The Cook Report”, produced in order to publicly name senior alleged members of the IRA, including Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. How Scappaticci came to make the interview, and how his British Army “handlers” permitted their “prized spy” to give it in the middle of the ongoing conflict, remains one of the strangest episodes of Britain’s long and dirty war in Ireland. What marks it out, amongst other things, is the list of casual inaccuracies about the IRA’s internal structures that are surprising in someone supposedly at a high level within the organisation:

“Scappaticci: McGuinness? Oh, I know him very well. I know him about twenty years, you know. Basically, see the thing you were putting across on the programme the other night that he’s in charge of the IRA. He’s not as such. It’s a technical thing, right. The IRA’s split in two. There’s another command, a Southern Command. He’s in charge of Northern Command. He’s the Northern Command OC [ASF: Actually he was called the General Officer Commanding or GOC not OC]. There’s a Southern Command, it has nothing to do with the Northern Command. The Northern Command basically takes in the nine counties of Ulster, right [ASF: Wrong. The Northern Command comprised 11 counties not 6]. He controls all of that. He’s also on the IRA Army Council. There’s a five-man Army Council [ASF: Wrong. The Army Council had 7 members not 5]. He’s one of them. Nothing happens in Northern Command that he doesn’t okay, and I mean nothing. Now, he’s nothing to do with England. See what happens in England, he’s nothing to do with that. The person who controls England is a south Armagh fella, right? [ASF: Wrong again. At this time the Army Council controlled the English Department through the GHQ Staff and officially continued to do so]”

Elsewhere in the interview, Freddie Scappaticci claims that:

“No. Danny Morrison had nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it. He was director of publicity, but he was also on the IRA Army Council. But he’d no balls. That’s basically, right? He was a pen-pusher if you want to put it that way, right?”

Which is a rather odd allegation to make since many commentators believe Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s director of publicity for much of the 1980s, was not a member of the Army Council.

We are told that the 2003 revelation of Scappaticci’s identity as Britain’s chief spy in the IRA, the infamous “Stakeknife”, came from other British ex-agents angry over their lack of financial reward for the “dirty work” they did in Ireland:

“WE have, apparently, two other disgruntled double agents to thank for the unmasking of Stakeknife. The pair, Kevin Fulton [ASF: aka Peter Keeley, the "spy" dismissed as a virtual fantasist by the former senior RUC officer above] and Samuel Rosenfeld, passed his real name, Alfredo Scappaticci into the public domain, because the British Ministry of Defence was refusing to provide them with pensions.”

So, one wonders how much of this is simply disinformation, “black propaganda” designed to strike fear into the Irish Republican enemies of Britain, past, present and future? And how much is simply personal vendettas: disgruntled ex-spies embittered former employees and ego-boosting fantasists?

Update 17/02/2012: There is more on this issue, and a very heated debate in the Comments section involving several of the people mentioned here, over at Slugger O’Toole.

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Jan 19 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

When Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Nice article from Lindsey Catherine Cornum over at her Mixed Blood Messages blog, on some recent headline events:

“Three videos premièred on the internet this past week, all horrible and shocking in their own way and each garnering different degrees of the public’s attention. I must admit right from the start that I have not watched these videos with my own eyes. I rarely if ever watch the YouTube displays of atrocity that happen to hit the news cycle. I know that these videos contain images and realities that can awaken consciousness and spark riots, but there is also something about pressing play that makes me feel so uncomfortable I end up turning to the text description instead.

However, for those who are not prone to read written news reports and analysis, videos that seem to distill a complex situation– such as century-long class relations and imperialism– into a shaky minute-long video clips can be the one entry point into a dark, dark world.”

Read more here.

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Jan 09 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

Have You Seen The Size Of My Gun?!

The “Oirish” Daily Mirror carries an eye-grabbing headline:

“We could have killed the Queen on Ireland visit, claim Real IRA”

Well of course they would claim that but is there any more to this report than a mere headline?

“THE Real IRA last night claimed they planned to kill the Queen when she visited Ireland.

But they called off an assassination attempt on the Queen because they did not believe her life was worth one of their volunteers being jailed.

In an astonishing interview with the Irish Daily Mirror the Dublin leadership of the dissident group claim they met to plot the killing and were confident they could pull it off.

A spokesman said: “We considered killing the Queen. We could have managed to carry out a successful attack but it wouldn’t have been feasible to get away.

“Any volunteer would have been caught and locked up for life.

“A volunteer’s life is not worth the life of the Queen.”

A revolutionary army with a conscience? Aww. And I like the fact that they are so familiar with “the Queen”. That would be the British head of state, or the British Queen, as most Irish Republicans would phrase it. But hey, if you prefer “the Queen” you go with it. Sounds like entirely plausible language from an Irish Republican to me. No doubts there.

But wait! There’s more.

“The organisation, which refers to itself as the IRA, yesterday insisted it now has the firepower capable of launching a major assault.

Among the deadly arsenal weapons are rocket-propelled grenades and encrypted bombs.”

“Encrypted bombs”?! Wow. Are they better than unencrypted bombs?

“A spokesman said: “The gardai can count themselves lucky that she wasn’t attacked.

“It could have been very embarrassing.””

It’s not the only embarrassing thing here, but I digress.

“The spokesman said: “The so-called pillars of society were fawning over her but the streets of Dublin were empty.

“The Cork Brigade did carry out a grenade attack and members in Dublin organised in assisting youths in rebelling on the streets. The IRA mobilised the youths. The public protest showed that there were numbers on the streets willing to oppose the visit.””

Rebelling on the streets? Five men and a dog…?

“Despite this the RIRA claim they are more popular than ever and have plenty of support.

The spokesman said: “This year has been our best so far and we have had significant numbers of people joining our organisation.

“We have a young base but we also have a good number of former Provos.

“We wouldn’t put a number on our membership because we can’t know, but we are the strongest republican group in Ireland and definitely in the south.”

Have you stopped laughing yet? Yes, the RíRá have lots of new members – unfortunately they can’t say how many members they have because they, um, well, they don’t know.

“The group claimed that teachers, mechanics and students all signed up in the last year. It is widely believed that the RIRA are bankrolling their bloody actions through extortion rackets.

The spokesman added: “We have a lot of money spinners. We fundraise from fuel smuggling, cheap DVDs and cigarettes.

“We also use a lot of the same fundraising that has been used in the past. We do not tax drug dealers. If you tax them then you are as bad as them.”

Asked if the group sees any hypocrisy in criticising drug dealers while they sell illegal cigarettes, a member said: “There is a qualitative difference between cigarettes and drugs.

“The working class can’t afford cigarettes so we are meeting the needs of the community.

“Nobody is being pressured into buying the cigarettes.””

The Real IRA: they’re just like the St. Vincent de Paul or the Samaritans! And such an eloquent use of language in building their propaganda image: “fuel smuggling, cheap DVDs and cigarettes”. The Real IRA: coming to a market stall near you!

“The Real IRA recently admitted bombing two banks in the North as well as the UK City of Culture office in Derry.

The spokesman said: “Such attacks are an integral part of our strategy of targeting the financial infrastructure that supports the British government’s capitalist colonial system in Ireland.

“The impetus to carry out this type of attack is directly linked to pressure from working-class communities in Ireland as a whole.””

I’m always hearing people crying out for someone, anyone, to bomb the banks. Sure don’t you see it painted on walls all over Ireland? Bankers Out!

Oh look, here comes some rationality. Hello, Mister Believability, have you something sane and not at all embarrassing to say to us?

“A TOP [!] security expert has poured cold water on the Real IRA’s claims they could have killed Queen Elizabeth II.

However, former Army captain Tom Clonan said the dangerous group had the capacity to launch a disruptive strike.

Dr Clonan is a former army officer with experience in the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

Since his retirement he has spent several years researching dissident groups like the RIRA.

“From my research I have found that these guys are committed, they are not a criminal outfit who are looking after their own interests.

“They have beliefs that they stand for and this makes them a serious and credible threat…””

Indeed. A lot more credible than some other things I could mention. Talking of which, back in the magical world of revolutionary politics, the RIRA are revealing their massive arsenal of hi-tech weaponry with which they intend to drive the British invaders back into the sea (or something).

“”We have good engineering units that are able to develop weapons.

“We have rocket propelled grenades, electronic detonated bombs, mercury volt switch bombs, remote bombs that are encrypted, light machine guns, heavy machine guns and assault rifles.””

That’s right. Let the Brits know what weapons and equipment you have. That will frighten the bejesus out of them funny-talking imperialists.

“The RIRA claimed that they have an effective network transporting weapons across the border.

They say that this is controlled by so-called “unknown volunteers”.

The gang said: “We are not having our weapons seized unlike other groups.

“Our supply network from the south to the north is very strong and has not been broken.

“These volunteers have no previous history they have no Facebook pages and there would be only one person from the organisation who would deal with the unknown volunteers.””

Wow! Real IRA not on Facebook! Now, there’s your headline, folks!

As Mark McGregor points out, its a funny old war.

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Jan 09 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics), Stair (History)

Horrible Histories With The Sunday Independent

The Irish Independent’s pet “historian”, John Paul McCarthy, has written a lengthy article on some of the behind-the-scenes events relating to the 1981 Hunger Strikes documented in the Irish and British government papers released at the start of the year. As always he has his own very personal interpretation of Irish history.

“The State Papers for 1981 deal with the gravest political crisis in this Republic since the Civil War.

They show that the Irish Government’s response to Bobby Sands’ hunger strike was simultaneously weak and deceptive.

Marian Finucane’s guests last week on her radio show, especially John Bowman and Peter Taylor, worked these contradictions fairly hard rather than deal with the moral elephant in the room.

Firstly, they presented the hard-nosed Thatcherite stance on prison conditions as a calamitous own-goal, the fateful British stumble that supposedly catapulted Provisional Sinn Fein into the electoral stratosphere. They also failed to consider the possibility that the H-Block confrontation simply gave firm form to a potent, and pre-existing sentiment within a section of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland, a sentiment that would probably have emerged into the electoral field through another channel if the hunger-strikes had never happened.”

Seriously? What single shred of evidence is there that Provisional Sinn Féin existed as an electoral force in the North of Ireland (or indeed Ireland as a whole) before the early 1980s? Up to that time the party was little more than the civilian wing of the Republican Movement, the provider of “incident centres” in times of truce, a support service for POWs and their families, an interlocutor and liaison between the Irish Republican Army and the Irish communities in the north-east, and a friendly face for the national and international media. But beyond that? The party barely functioned as a political party, in any conventional sense, at all. To argue that the Hunger Strikes played no part, or indeed the deciding part, in the politicisation of the Republican Movement and the “greening” of the Irish civilian population in the North of Ireland is too ridiculous for words.

“This sentiment was the one that sustained the Provisional IRA’s campaign of sectarian violence throughout the Seventies, that tawdry decade of no-warning bombings in working-class British pubs, scores of murders of part-time police officers in front of their children, the incineration of helpless civilians in hotels like LaMon and, on one especially barbaric occasion, the torture-murder of SAS captain, Robert Nairac, that culminated in the feeding of his body into a mincing machine.”

Is this a “sentiment” or a “mandate”? Or is McCarthy too afraid of the answer to go down that particular line of reasoning?

As for the British Army SAS “hero” Robert Nairac, his execution by the IRA occurred in terrible circumstances. There was no honour in it. On a purely human level one can only feel revulsion at the manner of his death. However that revulsion equals the manner of his living and of his “active service” in Ireland. John Paul McCarthy condemns the IRA for their violence yet is silent on the violence of Robert Nairac and his role as the leader of a British military and paramilitary death squad in Ireland. Or does the murder of Irish citizens not overly bother the good professor too much? British civilians, soldiers and policemen, yes. But Irish men, women and children?

“The Provisional IRA was a treasonous entity, and it could only win if the Constitution was voided. Sands’ starvation was not a passive sacrifice, but rather an aggressive policy on a direct collision course with our State.”

Treasonous? Against whom? The British-ruled apartheid-state they were born into and which treated them as a second class citizens with second class rights? If McCarthy means the Irish state, would that be the same state who’s Supreme Court ruled that certain military actions in pursuance of the reunification of Ireland under Articles 2 and 3 were “political in nature”? Is that colliding with the state or acting on its behalf?

“Must the democratic state simply yield to a treasonous conspiracy like Sands’ simply because it temporarily adopts the tactics of Gandhi and Emmeline Pankhurst?”

The hunger strike:  known as a tactic of Irish Republicanism since the mid-1800s and the establishment of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood, and later adopted by many other democratic, revolutionary and nationalist movements and persons around the globe. This is what we call history, boys and girls.

“As Prof John A Murphy and former justice minister Patrick Cooney insisted at the time, the Republic remained in danger regardless of what the British did because Sands was exploiting our historic ambivalence about sectarian violence, unionism and the British connection.”

Ambivalence? As in rejecting the so-called “British connection”? Is this what you mean by ambivalence, John? The Irish people wishing to have a free and democratic nation of their own? Or perhaps you refer to your own “ambivalence” on the loss of the “British connection”?

However, perhaps, on principal, you are opposed to rewarding or giving in to all those who use violence for political ends?

“Nally was Secretary to the Irish Government from 1980-1993, and the principal architect of the Republic’s policy on Northern Ireland since Jack Lynch rescued him from obscurity in 1973.

Nally, writing in 1975, speculated on what would happen if Sands’ IRA actually achieved its goal of forcing a British scuttle from Northern Ireland — their stated aim in 1975 and again in 1981.

Nally predicted that an independent Ulster state would emerge after the British exit, but only after a communal catastrophe, mandarin-speak for a plain old Balkan-style sectarian slaughter.

So, as far back as 1975, Nally was warning Cosgrave that “the likely prelude to the establishment of a state comprising either the entire six counties or the part of it east of the Bann is so horrific for the entire island that I think we should, on no account, give any support or engage in any open analysis or discussion on the subject.” And in 1981 we now know that Nally seemed even more convinced that leniency in the H-Block confrontation could hasten that very nightmare.”

So, let me get this straight. We could not “give in” to the violence of the IRA – because we feared the violence of the British separatist minority on the island of Ireland even more? Well now, who say’s violence doesn’t pay? It’s paid the British national minority in Ireland very handsomely indeed, for the last 100 years and more.

“Nally’s hard words were written days after bricks, stones and bottles flew during a major riot outside the British Embassy in Dublin. Here, without anything like the body armour available today, a small force of gardai heroically contained a seething IRA mob intent on wrecking the embassy.”

Hmm, a “seething IRA mob”? All 2000 men and women who took part in the demonstration near the British Embassy that day were Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army? Remarkable.

John Paul McCarthy. Historian.

Sunday Independent. Newspaper.

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Jan 03 2012
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

Dissent In The Ranks?

According to a piece by Henry McDonald in the Belfast Telegraph the Resistance Republicans of CIRA, RIRA and ÓnahÉ (who remain committed to the policy of a military resistance to the continued British Occupation in the north-east of Ireland) may be witnessing a fracturing in their organisations coupled with a change of strategy and tactics.

“Don’t say it too loud, but in the second half of 2011 the disparate factions of anti-ceasefire republicanism have been relatively quiet.

So does this inaction reflect recent successes for the security forces? Or does the lack of armed activities since the murder of Constable Ronan Kerr (below) in April suggest a revision, or a rethink, in the strategies of the Continuity IRA, Real IRA or Oghlaigh na hEireann?”

I believe he means Óglaigh na hÉireann (by the by, the abbreviation of Óglaigh na hÉireann is ÓnahÉ – not ONH or ONE. The rules of the English language do not apply in the Irish language). But to continue:

“In terms of the first question, the most obvious place to look at is the Republic and, in particular, Dublin. Across the Republic’s capital, at least two of the hardline republican groups are engaged in diversionary struggles both among themselves and with criminal gangs in the city.

The Continuity IRA in Dublin insists it remains united, but there is a breakaway grouping which also has a base in Limerick city that is engaged in a shooting war with its larger rival.

This splintering has recently spread north into Maghaberry jail, with five republican inmates moved out of the main house holding dissident prisoners.

Their departure – under threat of death – is being linked to the battle between the CIRA and former colleagues. Given what we know about the often amoral and manipulative nature of the security forces’ secret ‘war’ against armed republican factions, it is not too fanciful to find the origins of this latest feuding as the work of agent provocateurs in the pay of the state.”

There seems little doubt that the situation in the Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA), the oldest of the breakaway Resistance Republican organisations, is fairly dire, both politically and militarily. The compromising of the group’s integrity and independence through the close association of certain members with Irish criminal gangs (in Limerick, Dublin and Belfast) has led to a slow downward spiral into internal anarchy. It is difficult now to state with any certainty who exactly is or isn’t a member of CIRA, since so many have assumed the title as a flag of convenience for gangland activities. Repeated splits within the ranks have been matched by those in the political party closest to it, Sinn Féin Poblachtach (Republican Sinn Féin or SFP), with two rival factions claiming legitimacy (and supremacy).

While agents of the Irish and British states have undoubtedly contributed to the continued (and growing) weakness of the CIRA, there is little doubt that the biggest factor is the “criminalisation” of the organisation by its own members and those on the fringes of it. This has been coupled with the inherent weaknesses and contradictions of the organisation’s core beliefs and its self-destructive refusal to accept the contemporary nation state of Éire / Ireland as the successor state of the 1916-1923 Irish Republic. These two things, more than anything else, have crippled it since birth and made its decline inevitable.

Meanwhile in the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA):

“In an interview with the Real IRA back in the early autumn, amid bellicose threats to bankers and the banking system, there was a telling comment on the internal debate ongoing within all strands of dissident republicanism.

The Real IRA representative revealed that there were discussions about the future, including the efficacy of the ‘armed struggle’.

There was a passing remark that some were arguing for a more economically-driven campaign against strategic capitalist targets like the banks – a kind of Irish Baader-Meinhoff-style of Leftist terrorism for the 21st century.

Those advocating such a departure are clearly hoping to capitalise on the widespread hatred directed at the banks and other capitalist institutions on the island.

This is why the Real IRA admitted a few months ago that it targeted the Santander bank in explosions at Derry and Newry this year as it seeks to identify itself with growing anti-capitalist sentiment.

It is difficult to determine if one representative from only one of the disparate factions was accurately reflecting the mixed state of thinking within dissident republicanism.”

It is indeed difficult to determine the (disparate) thinking of Resistance Republicans and I believe more is being read into these remarks than was intended. While undoubtedly some activists within the RIRA hanker back to a more left-wing style of socialist republicanism, the recent series of attacks on banks in the Occupied North of Ireland were driven just as much by a strategy of hitting relatively easy targets as any anti-capitalist propagandising. For a minimum investment in personnel, equipment, munitions and risk of failure (capture or death), RIRA received a maximum gain in publicity, disruption, and sheer inconvenience and harassment of the British or bilateral regional administrations in the North of Ireland.

It is the inability to launch direct military operations against the British Occupation Forces or their installations in the north-east which hampers the would-be armed struggle of RIRA (or indeed CIRA and ÓnahÉ) not ideological or political considerations (though, as with CIRA, the criminalisation of the increasingly porous edges of the organisation are one “financial” consideration that does seem to be gaining weight).

Yet, when it comes to “fighting the Brits”, the reality for most Resistance Republicans is this: if they could do it they would do it.

At the moment they cannot. However, as we have seen many times before in Irish history, that moment will pass.

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Dec 09 2011
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An Ghaeilge (Irish Language), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics), Stair (History)

Irish Republican Army – The History Of A Name

While many decry the growth of the internet for its allegedly deleterious effects on the absorption of information by the human mind, as well as the decline of the reign of the printed word, I tend to view such claims with scepticism. The world wide web, like any technology, is what you make of it. People who made use of the knowledge to be gained from books during the era of the hardcopy will be the same people who will make use of the knowledge gained from the internet in the era of the softcopy.

In fact the availability of a global information network has opened up sources of information to literally millions of human beings who previously would never have had the opportunity to access it. I sometimes wonder if that, indeed, is the subconscious motivation of some of those who object to such a wealth of freely available knowledge – a world-wide digital library or archive for all. The move from the literate elites to the literate masses is perhaps something that never everyone welcomes. After all, information is power. And when that information does not come through one prism, one political, media or cultural establishment, then a plurality of views and opinions is possible.

Which makes the demands for a “capitalist web” of fee-paying, membership-only sites and domains all the more interesting. There is more behind the calls to “monetize” the internet than simply a motivation to create new sources of revenue and income in a new environment.

However, all that (for the moment) is an aside. Let me turn instead to some of the benefits of the global archive for those of us with an inquiring mind. In this case I wondered if it was possible to find original, online sources for the first use of the term “Irish Republican Army” or “IRA”. Most people believe it to be a 20th century creation, from Ireland naturally enough. In fact its origins date back to the latter half of the 1800s and the United States of America. It was amongst the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood (FB or in the Irish language Bráithreachas na bhFíníní, abbreviated as BnabhF) that the name originated. This was the Irish-American sister-organisation of the Ireland-based Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB. In Irish this is translated as Bráithreachas Phoblacht na hÉireann or BPnahÉ), . It came to prominence during the period of the 1860s to 1880s in the Fenian Invasions of Canada as the title of the military wings of the various guises of the Fenian Brotherhood in North America, and occurred both as the “Irish Republican Army” and the “Army of the Irish Republic” (with the usual abbreviation of “IRA”).

I have been unable to discover what title was used, if any, by the formal military structure of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or its off-shoots) in Ireland during this period and at the time of the Fenian Rising of 1867. It seems that the name IRB (or the more circumspect “Organisation”) was sufficient, though I would be very interested if anyone has other information.

The title of the IRA faded from organisational use in Irish Republican and Fenian circles until the 1916 Revolution when it was revived again as the Army of the Irish Republic or Irish Republican Army, this time by the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic (the members of the Provisional Government of course were all members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and a “Provisional Government of the Irish Republic” was proclaimed by the IRB in the late 1800s). In fact this IRA was an amalgamation during the insurrection of two separate military organisations: the Irish Volunteers (or in Irish, Óglaigh na hÉireann or ÓnahÉ) and the Irish Citizen Army (ICA or Arm Cathartha na hÉireann: that is ACnahÉ). Three other revolutionary groups of the Easter Rising are sometimes included under this umbrella title: the Hibernian Rifles (the HR, “Rifles” or “Hibs”), the Cumann na mBan (CnamB), and Na Fianna Éireann (NFÉ or FÉ).

After 1916, as the revolution progressed, all these organisations retained their separate structures while the largest, the Irish Volunteers, quickly became the sole one synonymous with the name Irish Republican Army. Eventually the Volunteers adopted the term (or its long-standing abbreviation of IRA) as its normal English language title while its Irish language title remained Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓnahÉ). In fact, in the Irish language the Irish Republican Army is Arm Poblachtach na hÉireann (APnahÉ).

During Ireland’s Civil War of 1922-1923 the title of “Irish Republican Army” became indelibly associated with the majority Anti-Treaty IRA forces, while the break-away minority in the Pro-Treaty IRA became the Irish National Army (INA). Both, however, continued to style themselves in Irish as the Óglaigh na hÉireann. In fact, many INA units continued to call themselves the Irish Republican Army until relatively late in the conflict, refusing to give up their former title (much to the annoyance of the new Irish Free State’s political  establishment which was usurping the authority of the existing Irish Republic). In the 1930s, when the defeated Republicans of the Civil War rose to power again and many of the Anti-Treaty IRA volunteers joined and rose to positions of rank in the INA, it became, in English, simply the Irish Army.

Meanwhile, since the 1920s virtually all Irish Republican revolutionary forces have used the name Irish Republican Army in English while using Óglaigh na hÉireann in Irish (thus the Provisional, Continuity and Real IRAs all styled or do style themselves as Óglaigh na hÉireann or ÓnahÉ). Even the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) used the Irish term Óglaigh na hÉireann rather than a direct translation of its English name into Irish (Arm Saoirse Náisiúnta na hÉireann or ASNnahÉ). So far there has been a great reluctance by most Irish Republican military organisations to relinquish both the terms IRA and ÓnahÉ, especially as the former has such a historic and cultural pedigree. Strangely, given the Irish Nationalist cause they espouse, only two groups, Saor Uladh and Saor Éire, have used purely Irish names with no English equivalent.

So to my search and the four earliest (free-to-view!) mentions of the “Irish Republican Army” via Google News. All date from the latter half of the 19th century, the earliest 1866. They are small, but significant, snippets of Irish history.

“Irish Republican Army” – Manufacturers and Farmers Journal – Jun 14, 1866

“Irish Republican Army” – New York Times – Aug 1, 1867

“Irish Republican Army” – New York Times – May 9, 1868

“Irish Republican Army” – Aurora Daily Express – Sep 27, 1895

Out of interest I also searched for the “Army of the Irish Republic”, and here are some of the earliest results (the first is particularly good):

“Army of the Irish Republic” – New York Times – Jun 2, 1866

“Army of the Irish Republic” -New York Times – Jun 9, 1866

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Sep 15 2011
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Cúrsaí Reatha (Current Affairs), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

The Propaganda Of Deed, Born Of Frustration

The propaganda of deed is an old revolutionary idea that was given new force in the violent political struggles of Latin America in the 1960s and ‘70s, and was soon replanted back to Europe (from whence it came). At its simplest it could mean that any action that drew attention to the aims being pursued by a revolutionary movement or organisation was worthwhile. It meant that there did not need to be immediate military or political gains from any specific violent action. The deed was the gain. In its most well-known form tactics like the assassinations of chosen targets gave minimal risk for maximum return by highlighting the existence of the organisation behind the killing and the cause they were fighting for. Later, as technology advanced, bombings of specific targets were similarly valuable especially if there was little or no loss of life (or the opposite, if that was the intent).

But even the smallest of deeds could serve a useful propaganda end. Of course, such tactics could reach ridiculous degrees of pettiness but all had their effect of publically proclaiming, both to the enemy and to supporters – or would-be supporters – that the source of the trouble, political or otherwise, still existed. Such ideas still inspire to the present day. It is perhaps in this light that we should view yesterday’s attacks by Resistance Republicans, possibly the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), on two targets in Derry, one a member of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the British paramilitary police in the North, the other a medical officer with the PSNI. As the Irish Times reports:

‘BRITISH ARMY technical officers yesterday defused a bomb left in the garden of one of Derry’s best-known doctors.

The device was found by a PSNI patrol at the home of retired GP Dr Keith Munro at Learmount Road near the Co Derry village of Claudy at 2am yesterday.

Five hours later, about 16km away in the townland of Tamnaherin near Eglinton, a bomb exploded outside the unoccupied home of a Catholic police officer.

The explosion at Ervey Road caused blast damage to the front of the officer’s home but no one was injured in the no-warning blast. The officer joined the PSNI three years ago; his home is beside the grounds of Slaughtmanus GAA club and close to St Mary’s Church.

A senior police officer in Derry said he had no doubt that both attacks had been carried out by the Real IRA.

Dr Munro, chairman of the Foyle Hospice in Derry, has been a police medical officer for more than 40 years.

In that capacity he carried out medical examinations on suspects in police custody. A prominent member of the Baha’i community, he is also the author of a book, Building Bridges.

It is the first time a police medical officer has been targeted by a paramilitary group in the North.

Three men, two aged 36 and the third aged 28, were arrested in Derry yesterday morning and taken to the serious crime suite at Antrim police station for questioning about both incidents.’

The seeming futility of these attacks would be challenged by those who carried them out. They would argue strong and cogent reasons why they were necessary and the greater strategic purpose they served. But to my mind, like earlier operations, they reveal a degree of pointlessness, a lack of strategic vision or purpose, that undermines any arguments to their validity – or necessity. Rather than the propaganda of deed they have become the propaganda of frustration. Frustration with two governments, and several political parties, who promised more in the Belfast Agreement than they have yet to deliver.

While we are undoubtedly moving towards a reunited Ireland, an inevitability waiting for its moment since 1920, the pace of that movement is so slow that it leads some to wish to hurry it along. Young Irish men and women, especially those in the North who live under the continued British presence, though they can see progress happening in front of them do not see enough. They are impatient for more and that impatience is feeding into the growth of the Republican Resistance forces who now offer the means and mechanisms to express the anger and frustration of an entire generation.

If we are to stem a return to the warfare of the last forty years (though this time on a far shorter timescale and with far more profound results), we must put in place concrete expressions of the benefits of the Belfast Agreement for the Irish community in the North. The Government of Ireland must become an advocate for unity and the facilitator of an Irish citizenship and nationality that transcends the border – and the old reasons for violence.

While we wait for the inevitable change that is coming the government in Dublin, and all Irish nationalist parties, need to spell out what they believe a reunited Ireland will look like and how they will accommodate and integrate the present structures in the North, the executive, assembly, etcetera into that new state. The full legal, constitutional and institutional arrangements need to be teased out, explored and agreed.

All Irish political parties need to organise on an All-Ireland basis, offering the same membership and representation to all Irish citizens regardless of where they live in the nation. All Irish social, sporting, media and business organisations need to be persuaded or encouraged to organise on a similar all-island basis.

Stronger economic ties that make the border irrelevant, leading in time to a single All-Ireland economy with shared tax-raising and distribution powers, must be put in place. The logic for this is overwhelming especially after the crises of recent times.

MPs elected in the North must be given observer status or non-voting seats in Dáil Éireann, with limited speaking-rights and privileges, and access to Oireachtas committees. The election for the office of the President of Ireland must become available to all voters on the island of Ireland, and relations with the North should be moved entirely from the Department of Foreign Affairs to a new joint-governmental body.

And above all, the British separatist minority on the island must be given the guarantees it requires to feel protected and secure within an expanded all-island nation state.

We are all heading in one direction, towards the reunification of Ireland. The question is how do we wish to get there? Will it be through slow and steady political development and change, carefully managed and encouraged by the Irish government and all interested parties? Or another, but far bloodier, conflict?

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Aug 13 2011
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An Ghaeilge (Irish Language), Cogaíocht (Warfare), Creideamh (Religion), Stair (History)

The rise and fall of the Knights Templar in Ireland. (via Irish History Podcast)

The great and informative Irish History Podcast carries a piece on the Knights Templar in Ireland…

The rise and fall of the Knights Templar in Ireland. When we think of the Knights Templar, we picture the Middle Eastern Crusades or Dan Browne’s fantasy novel the The Da Vinci code. However this fascinating organisation were very much part of European society in the 12th and 13th century with houses, called preceptories, in most kingdoms in Medieval Europe. After the Norman Invasion of Ireland the Templars became a part of Norman society here for nearly 150 years. However like their counterparts a … Read More

via Irish History Podcast

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Jun 06 2011
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Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

The Irish Republican Army Way – And The Taliban Way

The War Nerd (aka Gary Brecher aka John Dolan) examines the Long War military and political strategies of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army versus that of the Taliban in an interesting, if at times flawed and occasionally uninformed, article.

Several claims are clearly open to question:

The IRA never used all its strength, played very cautiously, did just enough mayhem to remind Britain they were still around, hadn’t been broken. They even refused to do vengeance attacks on the UDA/UFF/UVF/LVF “Loyalist” hit squads that would kill Catholic civvies to try to force the IRA into a tit-for-tat Catholic vs. Protestant gang war.

True and untrue. The Irish Republican Army undoubtedly did at times reserve its full potential, and when necessary exercised a precise use of military force if leverage was required elsewhere (as in the political arena where strikes in Britain became regular exclamation points in the secret negotiations with the British government). It also, officially, had no truck with engaging in communal warfare with the British Unionist minority in Ireland. But official policies and what was happening on the ground (and what the Army Council and GHQ Staff were prepared to sanction at times) were very different things indeed. And to many in the Unionist community the killing of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (or RUC, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland from 1922 to 2001) or the Ulster Defence Regiment (or UDR, a branch of the British Army that functioned as a Unionist militia in the North from 1970 to 1992, until disbanded by the British as reciprocal part of the Peace Process) were seen as direct attacks on them since these forces were drawn exclusively from their community.

Some observations however are true (if overstated in the context of the conflict in the Occupied North):

It’s not how guerrilla war works at all, for an obvious reason that I should’ve realized: Guerrilla armies always represent the weaker, the smaller, the defeated side. Not necessarily smaller in population but in money, cohesion, power-projection. They win, not by battlefield victory, but by something like metal fatigue. They sag on their opponents like a fat heavyweight, they wear him out, they absorb his punches.

Others mix truth with an unintended comedy of ignorance:

The IRA had this “Nerf” strategy of not striking back at stuff like this, and not killing civilians, which seemed weak to me. But it worked way, way better than I could have imagined. First of all, by not reacting to LVF hit teams, the IRA kept the focus on the Brits, who they considered the real enemy. The Loyalist hit teams, I realize now, were a classic SAS attempt to turn the whole Ulster fight into a tribal war, so the British could come off as the impartial referees trying to keep the savages from tearing each other apart. If the IRA had settled for taking all these Loyalists down into nice soundproofed basements and giving them some hands-on experience of their favorite games, it would’ve been satisfying short-term but would have fed right into the enemy propaganda model.

One wonders what the CIRA, RIRA and ÓnahÉ would think of the following analysis?

In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!

And finally the conclusion that the Peace Process was largely the creation of the leadership of the Republican Movement and that it:

…set free every IRA prisoner, dissolved the old apartheid police (RUC) and set up a new one that went out recruiting in the same slums the IRA drew its people from (PSIS), and put Adams and McGuinness in power in a local Northern Ireland Assembly to replace the old No Papists one. Sinn Fein is now the biggest political party in the place and the Brits have basically conceded all the territory west of the Bann River to them. It’s the Loyalists who seem all confused and drifting now… Martin McGuinness, ex-IRA officer and Sinn Fein “terrorist,” is the Deputy Prime Minister… Meanwhile, Adams is pushing the party into the South as well…

It’s hard for an American to get your head around any of this, but the point, and it’s very “counter-intuitive” as they say, is that Al Qaeda did everything wrong, spending all their assets and going for maximum kill, and the IRA, the poster-boy for long, slow, crock-pot guerrilla warfare, did it exactly right. In fact, it’s sort of scary how Adams and/or McGuinness seem to have thought three or four moves ahead every step of the way…

And they did it against the Brits, too, the SAS, best counterinsurgency specialists in the world, too. What can I say? I was absolutely wrong… Al Qaeda style maximum-splatter is for hotheaded idiots who forget that the real job of a guerrilla force is to stay in existence, lean on the enemy, wear him out and bankrupt him.

Some interesting debating points here. Clearly the present transitional arrangements are not the 32 County Socialist Republic envisioned by some: and are never going to be. But neither is the North of Ireland 2011 a clone of Northern Ireland 1968. That political entity, the last old style part of the British colony in Ireland, is gone: long dead and buried. The North of Ireland is an entity that stands between nations now, with a foot in both camps.

The Irish Republican Army may not have won a British timetable for withdrawal but they have won the method by which it will be facilitated and are creating the circumstances in which it will happen. Whether it will be strictly through political means, or take the famous ‘one more push’, is for history to decide. But in having conceded the principal the British have carved the tombstone for the Six County statelet.

Far from the end of Republicanism some would claim, the Belfast Agreement and the Peace Process is the end of Britain’s colonial adventures in Ireland. So the War Nerd, for all his occasional ignorance, simplifications and Americanisms, may well be right after all.

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Jun 06 2011
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Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics), Uncategorized

Left Archive: An tÓglach – Offical Organ of the Irish Republican Army, December 1967 (via The Cedar Lounge Revolution)

Historian Brian Hanley looks at the Irish Republican Army in the late 1960s through its internal publication, An tÓglach ‘The Volunteer’. Fascinating stuff. The parallels with recent events are of course obvious…

Left Archive: An tOglach - Offical Organ of the Irish Republican Army, December 1967 This post to accompany this document was written by Brian Hanley and published in Saothar in 2007. Many thanks to Brian for allowing it to be reposted along with the document. He asked that people also note this link here to an excellent post on Dublin Opinion which deals with his thoughts on this very topic. Document Study: ‘Agitate, Educate, Organise’ the IRA’s An t-Oglac of the 1960s (Saothar 2007) Document Study: ‘Agitate, Educate, Organise’ … Read More

via The Cedar Lounge Revolution

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Jun 06 2011
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Cogaíocht (Warfare), Polaitíocht (Politics)

The Phoenix Rising?

According to a special investigative report in the British newspaper, the Independent on Sunday, the continuing rise of the Dissident Republican movements in Ireland, and the North in particular, goes on apace with the claim that, ‘Violent paramilitary opposition to the Northern Ireland peace agreement is at its fiercest for 10 years’.

Which, in truth, is not saying that much. In fact, alarmist headlines aside, there is little new in this ‘investigation’ – for an Irish readership anyway. Increasing dissatisfaction within the northern Nationalist community with the pace of the political processes promised by the implementation of the so-called Peace Process (the creation of true cross-border institutions facilitating the reintegration of the North into the national territory, a broad and comprehensive Irish Language Act and other parity of esteem measures) have led to an increased tolerance, if not active support, for anti-Belfast Agreement Republicans (or those who wish to militarily exploit the Agreement as a stepping stone to a United Ireland).

The attitudes of a minority of northern Nationalists, particularly the under-25s whose sense of Irish citizenship is much more sharply defined, is matched by a smaller minority of southern Nationalists (with the Generation G – for Gael – coming to the fore again). The rather forlorn hopes of those who see a fragmented Dissident Republican movement as a sign of weakness is in stark contrast to what is happening on the ground. The old view that northern Nationalists voted SDLP, while supporting the PIRA, could have a new, rather ironic expression: vote Sinn Féin but support CIRA, RIRA, ÓnahÉ, et al.

We are a quiet a way from that yet, but with a more intellectually muscular Nationalism and Republicanism making itself felt in the cultural highways and byways of Ireland, and the Neo-Unionist and British Apologist factions of the Irish political and media establishment on the back-foot (not least in the aftermath of the visit of the British head of state to the Garden of Remembrance) it is very difficult to predict the future. The set of circumstances that gave rise to the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the North of Ireland have changed substantially but the core issues remain: the British Occupation of part of the island of Ireland and part of the Irish people, the continued presence of a significant ethno-national British Unionist minority on the island willing to use violence to maintain the British Occupation, and all the tensions and conflicts that flow from that. The Belfast Agreement was a worthy effort to bring that to an end, or at least to put in place a process that could contain the various hopes and wishes of all parties to the conflict, and for Irish Republicans at least, facilitate an ultimate end to the longest of long wars.

That this process, in some Republican and Nationalist eyes, is moving too slowly or has stalled altogether, is undoubtedly (and unfortunately) one of the driving forces for the current campaign of armed resistance. Perhaps if the political establishment in Ireland had made more effort to reach out to the hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens still living under the foreign occupation that we freed ourselves from several decades ago, to give them a greater inclusion in the Irish nation we all share, we would not be where we are now. But then, perhaps, it is too late for that? Ten years too late: or nearly ten decades.

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May 30 2011
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Cogaíocht (Warfare), Léirmheasanna (Reviews), Leabhair (Books), Stair (History)

The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies

 

An edited version of my review of historian Alan Taylor’s ‘The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies’, an excellent account of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, is featuring now on the Wild Geese website.

Apologies for the photo!

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May 29 2011
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Cogaíocht (Warfare), Stair (History)

An Traoi – Troy

If you, like me, are fascinated (obsessed?) with the ancient Greek story of many-towered Ilium represented by the epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, then you’ll undoubtedly be interested in the whole history of Bronze Age Greece. The website Greek Age of Bronze provides an excellent overview of, as it states, ‘Weapons and warfare in the late Helladic time 1600-1100 BC’. The city of Troy and the famous siege comes alive here and for those of us interested in our own Heroic Age the site is a treasure trove of information with many Irish parallels. Also have a look at Barry Molloy’s excellent paper, ‘Martial arts and materiality: a combat archaeology perspective on Aegean swords of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC‘.

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