Tag Archives: An Cogadh Fada (The Long War)

Margaret Thatcher And The “Valiant” UVF

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Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

Throughout the late 20th century and into the early 21st century the Ulster Volunteer Force or UVF was one of the largest British terrorist organisations on the island of Ireland. From its establishment in 1965 to its cessation of attacks in 2007 the grouping was responsible for thousands of acts of major and minor terrorism. Indeed the forty year war which blighted the north-east of Ireland under the euphemistic title of “the Troubles” began in 1966 with a series of gun and bomb attacks by the UVF that left several people dead, including a 74 year old grandmother and an 18 year old teenager.

Yet the organisation was intimately connected to the British military and paramilitary forces in Ireland, and beyond them the British government itself. Many members of the UVF were serving or former members of the British Army or of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the notorious paramilitary police in the Occupied North of Ireland. They served as soldiers and policemen by day – and gunmen and bombers by night.

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, '80s and '90s

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s

From the early 1970s onwards the British military and intelligence services organised, trained, armed and financed all the main British terrorist factions in Ireland including the UVF. However, despite the fact that they supposedly fought as part of Britain’s counter-insurgency war against Irish Republicanism the British terror gangs rarely targeted other combatants. Tellingly some 86% of the UVF’s victims were members of the civilian population: Irish men, women and children.

This was not counter-insurgency. This was state-terrorism.

So much so that by the late 1970s even the British no longer could tell the difference between their military, paramilitary and terrorist arms in Ireland. From the Irish human rights organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre, come’s this revelation about Margaret Thatcher’s knowledge of the war against the “Irish liars“:

“As Margaret Thatcher is laid to rest we thought it appropriate to publish two documents we found in the British National Archives. Both have been published before in the chapter we contributed on Loyalist [British terrorist] infiltration of the UDR.

The first document contains the minutes of a meeting between the then head of the Conservative opposition in 1975 (Margaret Thatcher) and the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, just weeks after the Miami Showband Massacre involving members of the UDR. At page 3 the following fascinating admission is made:

the Secretary of State said….

‘Unfortunately there were certain elements in the police who were very close to the UVF, and who were prepared to hand over information, for example, to Mr Paisley. The Army’s judgement was that the UDR was heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants, and that in a crisis situation they could not be relied on to be loyal.’

Let no-one claim that the levels of collusion between the RUC, UDR and Loyalist paramilitaries was not known at the highest levels of the British Government and opposition.

The second document also concerns the UVF only by this stage, 1979, Thatcher is the Prime Minister. In a hand written note she urged mention of the‘Volunteer Ulster Defence Regiment (? Is that the name)’. Her officials clearly had difficulty reading her handwriting and the typed version of her comment reads.

(viii) The Prime Minister would also like to see some reference to the valiant work being carried by the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Apparently neither she not her officials were fully cognisant of the difference between the UDR, the largest regiment in the British Army, and the UVF, a Loyalist paramilitary group. On this point at least she found herself in agreement with the [Irish] Nationalist/ Republican community.”

Indeed.

The British government acknowledges the infiltration of the RUC and the UDR by the British terror factions in Ireland, London, 1975

The British government acknowledges the infiltration of the RUC and the UDR by the British terror factions in Ireland, London, 1975

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher confuses the UVF, a British terrorist group in Ireland, with the UDR, a British Army militia in Ireland, 1979

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher confuses the UVF, a British terrorist group in Ireland, with the UDR, a British Army militia in Ireland, 1979

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Margaret Thatcher – She Came, She Saw, She Failed

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Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, '80s and '90s

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s

As a citizen of Ireland there is only one Margaret Thatcher that I remember. From the archives of the Guardian newspaper:

“Margaret Thatcher horrified her advisers when she recommended that the government should revive the memory of Oliver Cromwell – dubbed the butcher of Ireland – and encourage tens of thousands of Catholics to leave Ulster for the south.

A year after she was nearly killed in the IRA’s 1984 Brighton bomb, the then prime minister expressed dismay at Catholic opposition to British rule when they could follow the example of ancestors who were evicted from Ulster at the barrel of a Cromwellian gun in the 17th century.

Lady Thatcher’s extraordinary solution to the Troubles has been disclosed by her advisers at the time of the negotiations on the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.

Sir David Goodall, then a diplomat who was one of the most senior British officials negotiating with the Irish government, told a BBC four-part documentary, Endgame in Ireland, that Lady Thatcher made the “outrageous” proposal during a late night conversation at Chequers.

“She said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don’t they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn’t there?

“Nobody could think what it was. So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime minister? She said, that’s right, Cromwell.”

Lady Thatcher’s “outrageous” plan did not stop at reviving the memory of Cromwell.

Sir Charles Powell, then her private secretary, told the programme that she also called for Northern Ireland’s border with the republic to be redrawn.

“She thought that if we had a straight line border, not one with all those kinks and wiggles in it, it would be easier to defend,” he said.

The zigzag border is notoriously difficult to patrol. But Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, then cabinet secretary, told Lady Thatcher of the folly of her idea.

“It wasn’t as simple as that because the nationalist communities were not all in one place, not all in Fermanagh and Tyrone and South Armagh and so on,” he told the programme.

“There were many in Belfast, and the idea of partition in Belfast or moving large numbers of population didn’t seem to be very attractive.”

However, she would not abandon her idea and called for a “security zone” on both sides of the border to help the British army and the RUC to chase IRA terrorists who used to slip over the border after attacks in the north.”

Over on Bloomberg News Timothy Lavin offers an analysis of the effects on Ireland of Thatcher’s premiership:

“…the conflict did not bring out the best in her.

It showed how the character traits for which she is best remembered had some very dark consequences, and how her celebrated “resolve” often came at a brutally high human and moral cost. In Northern Ireland, in fact, that resolve directly obstructed the cause of peace.

The most illuminating example is the hunger strike in the Maze (or Long Kesh) prison from 1980-1981. In many obituaries published today, the story goes that Thatcher “faced down” Irish Republican Army hunger strikers, as the BBC put it. By “faced down” they mean “let them starve to death.” This is often treated as a victory of democratic determination over terrorism.

But history shows quite the opposite: Thatcher’s uncompromising treatment of the hunger strikers led only to an increase in terrorism and the ascension of the IRA as a potent political force.

Violent deaths related to the conflict rose to 101 in 1981 from 76 the year before, including 44 members of the security forces. Injuries rose to 1,350 from 801. Shootings increased to 1,142 from 642, and bombings reached nearly 400 that year. Far from demonstrating that the IRA’s struggle was a lost one, Thatcher only intensified its opposition to rule by what it considered an ever more brutal occupying force.

The other significant consequence of Thatcher’s unyielding position was that public sympathy for the hunger strikers quickly morphed into political support for Republicanism. Bobby Sands, one of the strikers, was elected to the British House of Commons for Fermanagh-South Tyrone while imprisoned. His victory “undermined the entire shaky edifice of British policy in Northern Ireland, which had been so painfully constructed on the hypothesis that blame for the ‘Troubles’ could be placed on a small gang of thugs and hoodlums who enjoyed no community support,” wrote David Beresford in “Ten Men Dead.”

In 1983, Sinn Fein — the IRA’s political wing – gathered 13.4 percent of the Westminster vote in Northern Ireland, compared with 17.9 percent for the moderate nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Gerry Adams, then Sinn Fein’s vice president, was elected in West Belfast over the moderate Gerry Fitt. For the British government, these were ominous omens. Today, Sinn Fein is the largest nationalist bloc in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the fourth-largest party in the parliament of the Irish Republic.

Still, “a crime is a crime is a crime,” Thatcher insisted at the time. “It is not political, it is a crime.”

This was to deny reality, especially as international sympathy for the strikers surged. But Thatcher never took a particularly realistic approach to the hunger strike, or to Northern Ireland generally.

[she was] …someone who could occasionally show a staggering indifference to human suffering.”

As Levine continues in the Comments underneath:

“…it isn’t hard, in this case, to differentiate between what violence is “political” and what isn’t. The men in the Maze prison didn’t become political prisoners because they went on a hunger strike. They became political prisoners because they were arrested — often without trial — for violence or activism intended to overthrow what they viewed as an oppressive political order and an illegal occupation.

Let me be clear: This doesn’t make violence a legitimate response.

But the fact that the political order in Northern Ireland at the time violated Catholic civil rights on a grand scale is beyond dispute. And the IRA itself was an objectively political organization: Its terrorism, although reprehensible, was intertwined with a legitimate movement for Catholic civil rights and a party, Sinn Fein, that adhered to an overt platform of political objectives. (Roughly the same platform, as it happens, that Irish revolutionaries had been asserting for 800 years.) Most crucially, the IRA’s intended targets were the military and security forces of occupation and other paramilitaries — not civilians.”

My own feelings on hearing of her passing are best summed up in this post by Football Clichés and another by author Terry Glavin. Like other British leaders who brought war to Ireland she has passed but we the Irish people have endured.

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Guns For Hire – From RIC To RUC

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In the 1920s, following the British defeat in Ireland’s War of Independence, many serving members of Britain’ paramilitary police force in Ireland, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), went on to become “guns-for-hire” throughout the waning British Empire. What they failed to do in Ireland, the defeat of an anti-colonial revolution, they attempted to do in many an outpost of the Pax Britannica. The most infamous of these ex-RIC officers were the former gunmen of the Royal Irish Constabulary Special Reserve (the loathed Black and Tans) and the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (the notoriously barbaric Auxies). Many ended up in the Middle East fighting with Britain’s Palestinian Police Force, the Transjordan Frontier Force and other paramilitary outfits against Arab and Israeli nationalists while others served in India and the Far East.

A decade after Britain’s compromise peace in the North of Ireland some former members of the British paramilitary police force in the north-east of the country, the hated Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), are once again turning up in Britain’s overseas conflicts, in an eerie rerun of history. Journalist and Irish civil rights activist Eamonn McCann touches upon this in an article for CounterPunch:

“Norman Baxter may find policing in Kabul these days more congenial than policing in Belfast. The former RUC and PSNI Detective Chief Superintendant is one of a number of senior Northern Ireland police officers who have decided that the new, reformed force is not for them, have taken redundancy and signed up with a private firm of “security consultants” with a contract from the Pentagon to help train the new Afghan police force.

Since leaving the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2008, Baxter has spoken and written of his anger and frustration at changes which have seemed to him to belittle the sacrifices of Royal Ulster Constabulary in the long fight against the IRA and at policies brought in under the peace process which he believes now hamper the force in its continuing fight against terrorism. A year and a half ago, Baxter joined New Century, founded and led by Belfast-born Tim Collins, a commander in the Royal Irish Rangers.

He has been joined in the upper echelons of New Century by a cluster of colleagues, including Mark Cochrane, former RUC officer in charge of covert training; David Sterritt, a 29-year RUC/PSNI veteran and specialist in recruitment and assessment of agents; Joe Napolitano, 25 years in the RUC/PSNI, retiring as a Detective Inspector running intelligence-led policing operations; Raymond Sheehan, 29 years a Special Branch agent handler; Leslie Woods, 27 years in the RUC/PSNI, with extensive Special Branch handling the selection, assessment and training of officers for covert intelligence-led operations. And many others.”

The whole article is essential reading for anyone wanting to know why the echoes of Britain’s dirty war in Ireland continue to rumble so loudly. And why it continues to be unfinished business.

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Fantasy Troubles Part III – Britain’s Superspies!

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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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British Ethnic Terrorists In Ireland – Still At War?

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While in recent months the main focus of the national and international news media has been on the actions of Resistance Republicans, various terrorist groups belonging to the British separatist minority in Ireland have continued to operate a low-intensity conflict that rarely makes the headlines. The South Belfast News or SBN (via the Belfast Media Group) carries a report detailing the latest attack by the British militants in the north-eastern part of the country with the attempted murder of an Irish teenager, James Turley:

“Loyalist paramilitaries [ethnic British terrorists] were behind the vicious attack on a Catholic teenager working on a film set in South Belfast this week, the SBN can reveal.

UVF thugs embarked on the brutal assault on an 18-year-old film extra in the Village last Friday (January 6), after discovering Catholic teenagers from the Short Strand were working on the film.

Since the vicious attack, which saw the teenager badly beaten, placed in a wheelie bin and left for dead, local UVF men have visited a local community centre which hosted the film crew to warn them not to bring anyone else into the area “without their permission”.

The paramilitary group also ordered community workers not to speak to the press about the attack, saying “there would be consequences” if they disobeyed.

The crew, which was filming for a number of days for the movie The Good Man starring The Wire actor Aiden Gillen, were in and around Frenchpark Street and Ebor Street on the day of the attack. They had been using the nearby Windsor Women’s Centre as a base of operations while continuing to film around the Village.

However around 3.50pm, a group of loyalists confronted the crew, hurling sectarian insults and threats. As the crew went to drive off, 18-year-old James Turley was caught by the mob who beat him severely before placing him in a wheelie bin. The vicious assault only stopped when his attackers thought he was dead.”

Do not expect see this story being reported or followed-up in most of the Irish, British or global news media. It doesn’t match the agreed narrative of life in the “new” North of Ireland. And it certainly doesn’t match the British government’s insistence that the British terrorist organisations in the north-east of Ireland are on “ceasefire”. An insistence that grows ever more hollow with each passing week.

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Silent Voices

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Concubhar Ó Liatháin, an Irish journalist and blogger, editor of the now closed Lá Nua newspaper, and presently a member of the board of management of TG4, has written an article for the Irish Independent strongly condemning the TV channel for broadcasting a series of programmes featuring former female members of the Irish Republican Army, titled Mná an IRA (“Women of the IRA”).

“Dr Rose Dugdale was arrested in 1974 for her part in the robbery of several old masters from Russborough House in Co Wicklow and the attempted bombing from the air of Strabane RUC station.

Decades later, she turned up on TG4 last week to retrospectively justify her actions. It certainly soured Nollaig na mBan for me, following what was a very successful Christmas season of programmes on TG4.

Mna an IRA is a new series on the Irish language station, which prides itself for its ‘suil eile’, and it will profile women who were involved in that illegal organisation over the next six weeks. If the first programme is any indication of what’s to come, it will be nauseating and heartbreaking for the victims of the IRA and their relatives.

As a board member of TG4, appointed in September 2010 following a public competition, I am generally proud of what is being achieved by the station. It has won several awards for its documentaries and other programmes and has recast the Irish language as an integral part of Irish culture that is attractive and useful. Mna an IRA is a stain on this record of achievement.

Right from the title sequence, where Dr Dugdale was described as a ‘saighdiuir/ soldier’ and a member of ‘Oglaigh na hEireann’, Mna an IRA struck the wrong chord with me. How could Dr Dugdale be described as a ‘soldier’ despite never having enlisted in a real army, bound by international laws and conventions regarding human rights, as opposed to an illegal paramilitary force?

How could a programme, funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) and broadcast on TG4, be allowed to describe the Provisional IRA as ‘Oglaigh na hEireann’ when the only force on this island to legitimately use that name is our Defence Forces?”

Ó Liatháin, who is a long-standing critic of Sinn Féin, then goes on to condemn the programme for an alleged lack of balance and a failure to challenge Rosie Dugdale’s views and statements.

“Republicans have reviled the revisionists over the years for giving an alternative view of Irish history, which cast the IRA and Sinn Fein in a poor light. As evidenced here, revisionism isn’t a one-way street as it appears republicans can be as revisionist as any of those they reviled in order to paint their actions in the best possible light. That’s fair enough for An Phoblacht TV — but TG4, as a publicly funded TV station, needs to abide by higher standards lest its impressive record be tarnished by shoddy, one-sided productions such as Mna an IRA.”

Rather unfortunately Ó Liatháin links the programme to a coincidental attack on a PSNI paramilitary police officer in the North of Ireland:

“That the programme was broadcast on the same night as the dissidents attempted to blow up a member of the PSNI underlines the dangers of broadcasting programmes such as Mna an IRA without a rigorous examination of the content of the programme and their relevance in contemporary Ireland.

I have an abhorrence of those who attack TG4 and who would deny those who speak Irish such a vital resource as a modern television station, as if Irish speakers were second-class citizens.”

Concubhar Ó Liatháin may undoubtedly abhor those who treat Irish speakers as second class citizens but judging by the reaction to his article he has given them plenty of ammunition to do so in the future including a new name for TG4 that is now spreading amongst the extreme edges of the Anglophone media and online community in Ireland: “An Phoblacht TV”.

The matter is examined further in the Irish Times:

“MANAGEMENT AT TG4 has defended a series of programmes about women in the Republican movement, in response to criticism by a member of the station’s board.

Concubhar Ó Liatháin accused the programme makers of Mná an IRA of bias and described the first programme, on Dr Rose Dugdale, as “slipshod” and “one-sided”. The programme was broadcast last Thursday.

Mr Ó Liatháin, a former editor of the now defunct Lá Nua newspaper, said the programme “went against everything I know to be holy writ about making programmes as in there is another side to the story”.

He said no attempt was made to interview the victims of Dugdale’s actions and her views as an unrepentant Republican were not challenged.

However, TG4 deputy director general Pádhraic Ó Ciardha said the station was standing by both the Dr Rose Dugdale programme and the rest of the Mná an IRA programmes.

He confirmed they had received letters from Mr Ó Liatháin, and said these would be responded to.

He said the board was the proper forum for board members to bring up issues of importance.

“We don’t make any comment on internal discussions,” he said.

Mr Ó Liatháin said two of the four contributors to the programme, Séanna Breathnach, the former officer commanding of the IRA in the H-Blocks, and Ite Ní Chionnaith, a former member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of the INLA, were supporters of the Republican cause and there was no attempt to provide balance from those who opposed the armed struggle.

The programme also featured contributions from former Limerick Labour Party councillor Frank Prendergast and academic and human rights lawyer Fionnuala Ní Aoláin who spoke about the effects of violence on those who perpetrate it.

Future programmes in the series will be about former Republican prisoners Josephine Hayden and Rosaleen Walsh; Pamela Kane, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for a bank robbery in Enniscorthy; Sinn Féin MLA and junior minister in the Northern Assembley Martina Anderson; and Rosie McCorley, who was sentenced to 66 years for IRA activities but was later released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement.”

Ó Concubhar’s criticisms echo those found earlier in the Herald, albeit in a far more insidious manner:

“AS the centenary of 1916 approaches we can expect all manner of documentaries commemorating this apparently glorious event, although hopefully some brave programme-maker (which obviously excludes anyone from RTE) will allow, say, Kevin Myers the leeway to present the view that the Rising was a terrorist atrocity which only led to even more barbarity.

Unsung rhetoric aside though, TG4 really stirred up a raft of publicity yesterday with the brouhaha surrounding a new documentary series which began last night.

One might expect a programme called Mna an IRA to be a look back at times past, featuring interviews with old grannies recalling the days when they were Bridie, Warrior Princess of Cumann na mBan or Mary Kate, She-Wolf of the ‘Ra, but no, this focused on those who’d seen service in the IRA ‘in modern times’.

Coming soon to TG4 — ‘Victims of the IRA’. Don’t hold your breath.”

Concubhar Ó Liatháin has stated on several occasions his opposition to the Official Languages Act of 2003 (which enshrines to a limited degree a level of equality between Irish and English speaking citizens) and the Language Commissioner (who oversees the fair implementation of the Act and deals with complaints by citizens in relation to its contravention by state bodies). His view is that the legislation, as currently formatted, is largely irrelevant to the needs of Irish speakers. However there is no doubting his commitment to the Irish language, and the Irish speaking communities of the Gaeltachtaí in particular, and the breadth of his vision for TG4 in the coming decades is both impressive and welcome. However in airing this public criticism of TG4 in a notoriously anti-Irish newspaper Ó Liatháin has done the Irish language station or the cause of the Irish speaking communities of Ireland no favours. Such views should have been made internally on the board of management of TG4, and with whatever vigour Ó Liatháin felt necessary. If that failed to meet his satisfaction then a resort to a public statement on the issue would have been understandable.

As it is this alleged controversy will simply add more fuel to the campaign by the Anglophone zealots in our political and media establishments to close TG4, and while Concubhar Ó Liatháin cannot be accused of creating the controversy in the first place he has certainly not helped in dampening it down. All that said, in the interests of free speech and the value of opposing opinions, I hope Concubhar Ó Liatháin is not forced to resign his position from the TG4 board, as some are now calling for. Though I regard the position taken by him as censorious, and a reminder of the draconian days of Section 31 when a plurality of views in this nation on the conflict in the north-eastern part of the country became unacceptable, I believe that opinions like his, which undoubtedly many people share, should be heard. Free speech is just that. The freedom to speak as one would wish.

After all, these are the same principles which underlie the making of the Mná an IRA documentary series in the first place.

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Playing Fantasy Troubles

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Three Volunteers of an Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

A lot of articles, books, documentaries and news pieces have been produced over the last two decades exploring the origins of the Peace Process in the North of Ireland, and none more so than in the murky world of Britain’s Dirty War. It has become de rigueur in certain British nationalist circles (and amongst their sympathisers) to claim that it was “the Brits wot won it!” thanks to the alleged penetration of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) by various branches of the British intelligence services. It was not boots on the ground that brought about the peace, or even the “hit squads” of the infamous Special Air Service (SAS), but rather “human intelligence” – and in particular informers and double-agents.

The successful penetration of PIRA at all levels by British spies and agents, from top to bottom, helped the British to turn the organisation around, point it in the direction they wanted it to go, convinced it there was nothing further to be gained by continuing the armed struggle, and set it off on the path of peace (a few bumps and hiccups along the way not withstanding). Or so the story goes. Some even go so far as to claim that the British succeeded in a complex, decades-long strategy of bringing Irish Republicans into the governance of the north-eastern part of Ireland on behalf of the British – a masterstroke indeed.

If true.

This particular narrative has gained legs in recent years with the dramatic unmasking of several senior British agents at high levels within the Republican Movement, in both the military and political wings. Not simply the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army but Sinn Féin itself was compromised, it would seem. So the cries went up: the Brits knew everything! The Brits ran everything! The whole last decade of the war, the whole peace process itself was nothing more than a sham.

All of which is complete and utter nonsense.

In fact it is a James Bond fantasy come to life for people who simply cannot understand the complex history of a three decades Long War. Or even Ireland’s history in general. Worse, it is a propaganda myth with a purpose – to sow fear, doubt and confusion in the ranks of an old enemy (or any new ones who may contemplate replacing what came before).

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army on active service in the British Occupied North of Ireland, armed with an American-supplied M16 assault rifle, early 1980s

Yes, of course, the British Forces in several guises, the RUC Special Branch (SB), British Military Intelligence (BMI), the Security Service (SS or MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) and other shadowy groups, managed to place a high number of agents within PIRA, or rather in most cases “turned” PIRA Volunteers to become spies and informers. These men (and women) did what they did for a wide variety of reasons: idealism, financial inducement, intimidation, blackmail, exploited psychological or medical problems, petty jealousies or personal rivalries. The list goes on and on. Patriots and traitors, heroes and cowards, the full gamut of human character is to be found in amongst these individuals.

But what will not be found are the answers as to why the conflict slowly ground to a halt. Nor, in any accepted sense of the word, is a “defeat” of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army to be found here either. There was none. There was a peace settlement, with all the compromises on all sides that such a political, diplomatic and military exercise entails. A fact that the British themselves acknowledge, as reported in the Sunday Herald in June 2004:

“MI5 has caused outrage after one of its spies stated publicly that the IRA “fought a just cause” and won a “successful campaign” during the 30-year Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The Sunday Herald is unable to name the MI5 officer following a threat of legal action from the government. However, the spy’s comments have provoked fury from the victims of IRA violence and Ulster politicians.

The controversy centres on a briefing given by the MI5 officer, a former Royal Navy commander, at a maritime security conference on Orkney. Details have been given to the Sunday Herald by Mark Hirst, the former head of communications at Orkney Islands Council, who attended the seminar.

Hirst says the MI5 officer said the IRA was “the biggest threat to British national security”. But the officer then said “in our opinion they [the IRA] have fought a just cause”.

“The conclusion of MI5, according to this officer,” said Hirst, “was based on the fact there had been legitimate grievances among, and discrimination against, the nationalist community and this had sustained the IRA through the length of the campaign.”

The MI5 officer then added: “Has it been a successful campaign? The answer is yes.”

Hirst said: “He referred to the fact Sinn Fein had two ministers in power. What better success can you wish for, he said, than to have your people in positions of power in government.”

Hirst said the comments were “not off-the-cuff as they were supported by an official MI5 PowerPoint presentation, complete with the official crest”.

“Presumably this was sanctioned at some level,” he added.

The DoT confirmed that the briefing took place, adding: “This was part of a programme to ensure that security staff at UK ports were up to date with the terrorism threat they are countering. We are not prepared to comment further.”

…Kevin Fulton, a former double-agent who infiltrated the IRA, said he was not surprised by the MI5 officer’s comment.

Martin Ingram, a former intelligence officer in the army’s spying arm, the Force Research Unit, said: “I think what this officer is saying is an honest appraisal. The nationalist community was unjustly treated and that led to the resurgence of the IRA, although I disagree with the IRA’s methodology.

“What this man has said will be detrimental to his career, but there are those in senior positions in MI5 who would probably agree with him.”

Did the Irish Republican Amy wage a successful campaign? Yes, undoubtedly. Did they have to compromise on their ultimate war aims? Without a doubt. Did Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign contribute to that compromise? Of course.

However the gross exaggeration of the numbers of British spies in IRA ranks simply detracts from the credibility of what the British did do. Claims that by 1994 the British had managed to turn 1 in every 4 Volunteers into a “friendly” or willing agent, or that 1 in every 2 senior officers was a spy, is beyond laughable. This is not just hype. It is patent madness and flies against all reason or logic. The claims do not match the facts. The compromising of the IRA’s leadership, particularly the Internal Security Unit (ISU) and elements of the Northern Command (the IRA’s counter-intelligence and fighting arms), was undoubtedly key to the last years of Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign. But it was not, despite all the hysteria, the most crucial key.

An Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army launches an anti-aircraft attack with a HMG (Heavy Machine Gun) in the British Occupied North of Ireland, late 1980s

If we remove IRA prisoners-of-war (POWs), those living overseas (“on the runs”), and a few others, the IRA’s nominal strength in 1994 was somewhere around 450-500 Volunteers. Of this number some 250-300 were on Active Service; that is they were regularly engaged in military operations, the majority in or around the North of Ireland (by military operations I mean attacks on the British Occupation Forces or other targets, acquiring, maintaining or transporting weapons, explosives or other equipment and vehicles, active intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, etc.). Taking the upper number of 500 the conspiracy theorists would allege that at this time around 200 of these Volunteers were agents of the British (or Irish) state. This is clearly nonsense. It flies against all reason and what journalists and commentators on the ground, as well as many others, know to have been observable facts. It is simply impossible that in 1994 out of 500 IRA Volunteers around 200 were informers or “touts”.

A far more reasonable and probably accurate estimate would place the number of “double-agents” in IRA ranks in 1994 at around 20-30. Even that itself is a remarkable figure, especially as some were positioned in a number of key areas within the military organisation. The penetration of the IRA’s intelligence, or more accurately, counter-intelligence network was a coup of epic proportions and the British rightly did whatever they needed to do to protect it. But “human intelligence” was not the only weapon in the British arsenal, important though such sources were. 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.

It was the Irish Republican Army’s initial difficulties in keeping pace in the technology war, its inability to find genuinely effective means or tactics to thwart a virtual 24/7 police state (not to mention the related advances in forensic sciences), that began to tell in the early 1990s. Undoubtedly, given time, a way would have been found (as Palestinian guerrilla groups have proved in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon. Or Iraqi and Taliban insurgents have shown in their respective theatres of conflict). In fact the early signs of a developing counter-struggle were already there in the mid-1990s as Republicans became more adept with counter-surveillance and detection techniques, and the use of mobile communication devices and computer technology. But such (temporary and ongoing) solutions came just as the overtures for peace began to take real substance and the electronic war became one of several key facts that persuaded the Irish Republican Army to explore “victory through negotiations”.

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

Units of the Derry Brigade of the Irish Republican Army parade through Derry City, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

However some in the British press, the British military and intelligence fetishists, as well as their cheerleaders elsewhere, would have us believe otherwise. So to the latest “revelation” in the Belfast Telegraph:

“Half of all senior IRA members in the Troubles were working for intelligence services, a secret dossier of evidence into the murder of two RUC men has claimed.

The remarkable document has laid bare a startling series of claims about the infiltration of both the police and terror groups during the ‘Dirty War’.

It claims the IRA ran agents in the RUC and also that Dundalk Garda station was regarded by British intelligence as “a nest of vipers”, with at least two officers actively assisting the Provos.

The information is contained in a secret 24-page document in the name of Ian Hurst — a British intelligence whistleblower — which has been seen by the Belfast Telegraph.

The sensational claims are due to be made to Justice Peter Smithwick’s Dublin tribunal of inquiry into the murder of two senior RUC officers in 1989.

The victims, Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Robert Buchanan, died in a hail of IRA gunfire as they crossed the border following an intelligence exchange with the Garda in Dundalk.

The dossier also claims:

•The shadowy Force Research Unit (FRU) had a file on suspected rogue gardai prepared to pass information to the IRA and act as its agents. MI5 also had a network of agents with the Garda.

•The IRA had a network of informants in public agencies such as social security offices and vehicle licensing departments.

•One in four IRA members was an agent, rising to one in two among senior members.

•Martin McGuinness was involved in all strategic military decisions taken by the IRA.

At the centre of the web of intrigue sat the IRA’s head of internal security, the agent known as Stakeknife, who took information from rogue gardai while himself working for British intelligence.

Perhaps the most shocking claim is that a rogue Garda Sergeant leaked intelligence to Stakeknife. Stakeknife has been identified as Freddie Scappaticci, a veteran Belfast republican.

Scappaticci has strongly denied working for British intelligence and said he had cut his links with the IRA in 1990. He is legally represented at the Smitwick Tribunal and is now considering giving evidence in person.”

In fact this much-heralded exclusive is anything but. The so-called “secret” document has been freely available on Cryptome for the last two months. The problems with it lie in the complex mixture of truth and falsehood that pervade the file. Undoubtedly everyone was spying on everyone else. But much of the Ian Hurst statement needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Or two.

Volunteers of the Derry Brigade of the Irish Republican Army parade through Derry City, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

For instance it contradicts some of the claims made by him in previous statements and interviews (usually under his long-standing nom de guerre of Martin Ingram). In 2006 he stated that:

““It’s time ordinary republicans stopped being led like sheep and started asking questions. At grassroots level, around one in 20 members are British agents. Higher up, it’s one in three.”

Somewhat different from the numbers given by Hurst now. To say the least.

His alleged statement to the Smithwick Tribunal starts with an introduction:

“I was born in the north of England. When I was 20 I joined the British Army. Within a few months of joining the Army 07 01 1980 I joined the Intelligence Corps at Templar Barracks, Ashford, Kent. When I left Templar Barracks I had graduated into the Intelligence Corps as a lance corporal and posted as requested to Northern Ireland. All Intelligence Corps soldiers are negatively vetted (NV) on entry into the Intelligence Corps – which allows regular access to secret material but only occasional access to Top secret.

In 1981 I was posted to 3SCT (Special Collation Team) based at HQNI. The unit manually typed RUC source documents (RIRAC) onto the Intelligence computer system 3702 and was also responsible for Vengeful the Vehicle Intelligence system.

A few months later I moved to 121 Intelligence cell to cover the Derry desk. 121 Int cell is the Intelligence unit within Head Quarters Northern Ireland (HQNI) that supported both General Office Commanding Northern Ireland (GOC) his G2 staff officers, MI5 detachment and HQNI FRU. Employment within HQNI 121 Intelligence required access to computer 3702 level 1 access and access to classified intelligence.

In early 1982 I applied to join FRU (Force Research Unit) as a collator in Derry, Having completed my FRU collator training course, I was posted to FRU North, based in Derry. FRU (N) is a very busy office that deals with Human Intelligence sources within the counties of Londonderry, Tyrone, Northern Fermanagh, Northern Antrim, Derry City. The following areas were also part of FRU (N) responsibilities (AOR) Donegal, Sligo shared with FRU (W). This office along with every other FRU office dealt with Agents both within Republican Paramilitaries and the general public who were in a position to supply information of Intelligence value.

FRU (N) in accordance with province wide FRU instructions recruited NO loyalist paramilitary members; this rule could only be deviated upon unless the person/agent was a former member of the Britsh Army. A good example of that Policy was Willie Carlin & Brian Nelson who were handled by FRU (E) (N) respectively.

FRU is a force unit hence the name Force Research Unit. That means it is different to most British Army units operating within Ireland and during my service in the Intelligence Corps the following units were Force units and were active in NI:

a. 22 (SAS) – RUC controlled

b. 14 Coy – RUC controlled

c. FRU – No direct RUC operational control

The major advantage of being a force unit was being outside the normal command structure thus we had more power and influence for operational matters and from a soldiers point of view we had increased pay and allowances. FRU was an Intelligence Corps unit but was manned (Handlers) with approximately 60% Intelligence Corps and 40% other unit members. FRU was in operation from 1980 until the early 1990s when its name was changed to the Joint Services Group.

In Aug 1984 my father became seriously ill and I was compassionately posted to an Intelligence & security detachment in the north of England to be close to him until his death. At this time I was promoted to the rank of sergeant. Subsequently, I was seconded to L Branch, Repton Manor, Templar Barracks involved in the resettlement of exposed agents like Willie Carlin and Mr Frank Hegarty (RIP). I was seconded for six months to Belize and returned to England in 1987. I then completed a current FRU handler course in Templar Barracks and was then posted to FRU West, based in Enniskillen. During late 1990 I was posted to Ministry of defence in London with a recommendation for promotion and considered suitable for commissioning. Whilst serving as a middle eastern desk Intelligence officer in the MOD defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) This post required that I was enhanced positively vetted (EPV) which allowed access to the highest grade intelligence available within the UK including Sig Int and Satellite Imagery. That vetting was completed in Northern Ireland over a 6 month period prior to me taking up employment at the ministry of defence (MOD).”

He then continues with some more background information on the British Intelligence system in Ireland, as well as numerous allegations about the use of agents and counter-agents, and the manner in which all participants in the conflict penetrated each other’s organisations to one extent or another. The full statement is here in a downloadable PDF format.

All very interesting, and indeed plausible sounding on the face of it. However that’s the problem. When one starts to dig down into the many and varied statements of Ian Hurst “Britain’s top spy in Ireland!” one soon finds that the face takes on a thousand sides. Hurst, under his assumed name of Martin Ingram, emerges from the Bloody Sunday Inquiry examining the attack upon an Irish civil rights protest by British troops in Derry, 1972, as a less than credible witness:

“It is the case that Martin Ingram claimed that he had access to all documents while he was working at HQNI.  However, he was at that time only a Lance Corporal.

…We are of the view that Martin Ingram to a substantial degree exaggerated the importance of his role at HQNI and his level of knowledge and access to intelligence.

…Martin Ingram was too junior to be entrusted with the information.

Martin Ingram told us that while he was working in the Army’s Force Research Unit in the early 1980s he saw documents relating to the IRA’s plans for the day…

Martin Ingram gave confused accounts in the course of his evidence about the intelligence that he said he saw.

We formed the view that Martin Ingram had, at best, an imperfect recollection of events and that it would be unwise to rely upon his evidence.”

For some Hurst/Ingram provides more evidence of the hidden hand behind three decades of conflict in the north-east of Ireland. It feeds their version of what can only be described as form of “Fantasy Troubles”. For others it is just another dark and murky corner of Britain’s ongoing Dirty War in Ireland.

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army on active service in the British Occupied North of Ireland, armed with an AKM assault rifle, early 1990s

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Colonially Speaking

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While in my earlier post it was good to see positive news for Ireland’s Irish-speaking population, it’s depressing to be reminded yet again of the same old bigotry and discrimination that is so prevalent elsewhere. Last week I reported on the hostile reaction of politicians from the British minority in the north-east of Ireland to moves recognising the Irish communities they share that part of the country with. As the Droichead na Banna Banbridge Leader reports the extreme of British Unionism in Ireland continues to behave as if they were a superior colonial minority over an inferior native majority:

“FALLOUT from a proposal to erect Irish language signage in the district continues to concentrate in Dromore, where this week it brought “outrage” and more calls for Unionist unity to block any such plan.

Lagan Valley MLA Paul Givan warned of the potential for ratepayers from Dromore to Kinallen, Quilly to Gransha, seeing their money spent on “unnecessary street signs that nobody would understand”, while a former Dromore DUP councillor registered her opposition to her rates being spent on “this ridiculous proposal”.

Dromore woman Norah Beare, until recently a local DUP councillor, said she was “absolutely outraged” that Sinn Fein would even suggest the erection of Irish language signage in the district when it could mean spending thousands of pounds “needlessly”.

“English is a universal language and I for one want to register my total opposition to my rates being spent on this ridiculous proposal. Will it benefit the residents of the district in any way?

“I also wonder how many Irish speakers we have within the district who will understand it. It just proves Sinn Fein will never change.”

Mr. Givan called on Dromore’s Ulster Unionist councillors to “unite and join with their DUP colleagues and oppose proposals to introduce Irish language signs”.

He added, “The Irish Language has been used and abused by Republicans to antagonise the Unionist community and this latest attempt should be opposed by every Unionist councillor.

“Should this proposal go ahead, the people of Dromore, including areas such as Kinallen, Gransha and Quilly, could have their ratepayers’ money used on unnecessary street signs that nobody would understand and is only being driven forward as a Republican objective.”

More depressing than all of the above is the knowledge that the views of many in the British ethnic minority, in their absolute hatred of all expressions of indigenous Irish language and culture, will find ready support in many of the political and media classes throughout the island of Ireland – even supposedly Irish men and women.

There is a colonial mentality and the mentality of a slave. Much of the British separatist community in Ireland embrace the colonial mentality and filter everything they see or do through that prism. Unfortunately they are joined in that distortion of reality by many in the Irish majority who willingly embrace the mentality of a slave. And don’t even recognise themselves as doing so.

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Fighting The Peace

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Sign in County Down with Irish and Ulster Scot...

Outreach? What outreach?!

Looking on at the hostility of many in the British separatist minority as they react to the half-hearted overtures by the Joint First Minister Peter Robinson to northern “Roman Catholic voters” one is struck yet again by the fact that many who regard themselves as “British in Ireland” will never come to terms with the reality of sharing this island with a much larger majority who are simply Irish in Ireland. You cannot reconcile the irreconcilable and diehard British ethnic separatists, whose origins lie in a complex and tangled history of colonial settlement and rule, will never accept anything other than British rule.

In our ongoing “peace war”, where even events to promote the peace become simply another arena of the conflict, everything comes down to this contest of wills. From the British Unionist press, a report in the Newsletter:

“PROTESTANT youths celebrating the end of a successful cross-border “reconciliation” event stormed out following a speech by a Sinn Fein junior minister.

Around 140 young people were attending the dinner on Saturday night in Donegal when Martina Anderson MLA delivered a speech, described by one participant as “glorifying” the IRA’s role in the Troubles.

The year-long cross-border, cross-community project involved various youth and community groups coming together to explore the joint sacrifice of the Irish and Ulster divisions during the First World War.

According to east Belfast woman Gwen Ferguson, who attended Saturday’s dinner as a member of the Cregagh Community Association (CCA) in east Belfast, the group was “shocked and disgusted” that Ms Anderson had been invited to speak.

Ms Ferguson has been involved in youth work for eight years and said that while there are certain cross-community projects addressing political differences, the Inishowen Development Partnership initiative had taken place in a “politically neutral” environment.

Ms Ferguson said her whole party felt they had no option but to walk out during the junior minister’s address: “The groups got on so well so it would be a shame if this destroyed everything. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The whole project has been all about the history of the Irish and Ulster soldiers who fought in the war, and nothing else.

“She started off speaking in Irish and then started going on about how proud she was to be a republican and that she had served time in jail.”

Ok. Given the circumstances a speech by Martina Anderson referencing the recent Irish armed struggle in any sort of triumphalist manner might well have been questionable. It certainly gave yet another casus belli to the vicious online Commentariat of the British minority to get all hot and bothered about. Rather stranger is the objection to her use of the Irish language. From reports it seems that the members of the British community present were insulted not just by her words but quite literally by her language too. They didn’t want their ears or minds “contaminated” by the indigenous language of the island they are living on (where does that remind you of?).

However, there is a problem with the story. A major problem.

It’s not true.

In fact retired Garda PJ Hallinan who attended the event has made it clear that there were no speeches about the Irish Republican Army, and that the majority of those who walked out of the meeting did so before Martina Anderson made her address. There was no storming out of “Protestant youths” (and how emotionally loaded and charged are those terms? What next? Black men impregnating our young white girls? German youth being defiled by mixing with Jews?). In other words, it was a staged anti-Sinn Féin stunt, presumably prearranged beforehand by those who object to the very existence the party. And at a cross-community, cross-border peace event!

The Peace Process, for all its welcome nature, was, and is, nothing more than the staving off of the inevitable. Indeed Partition itself has been little more than the ultimate “long finger”. And we all know how “successful” that has been. The eventual reunification of Ireland without some sort of “ethno-national conflict” between the Irish majority and a sizeable proportion of the British minority living on the island of Ireland is a pipedream. Partition, the “Border”, “Northern Ireland” itself, was simply a way of keeping that greater conflict at bay for as long as possible.

While we can, and should, strive to be understanding of the British community in the north-east of the country, and of their genuine fears and genuine sense of “otherness”, it should not blind us to reality. Comfortable self-delusion contributed to decades of war in the North. By all means we should facilitate the continuing peace by making the (perhaps painful) constitutional, legal and political guarantees or arrangements that will be required by at least part of the British minority if they are to accept living in the reunified state. It will, after all, be their state too.

However, we know that many, perhaps even the majority, will not accept any compromise on the position they currently now have. Their attitude is one found throughout multi-ethnic and –national Europe: what we have we hold.

The unfortunate and dreadful truth is this: the final reckoning, the last bloody death spasms of the British colony in Ireland, is inevitable. Eventually it will happen; and sooner than we think.

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What’s All This Shouting? We’ll Have No Trouble Here!

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Following on from the DUP leader Peter Robinson’s “outreach” to “Catholic voters” in the North of Ireland (by which he means, one presumes, British Catholic voters in the North of Ireland), another dose of reality, via UTV:

“Crowds gathered outside as the council met to further discuss the row that was sparked when Sinn Féin’s Niall Ó Donnghaile [Belfast City Lord Mayor] refused to present a Duke of Edinburgh award to an Army [British Army] cadet.

But, with an amended motion to accept his apology passed by the majority, cars were attacked as councillors left the building.”

Not the kind of outreach the Joint First Minster was proposing, I suspect. But then one never knows with politicians from the British separatist minority in Ireland. They do tend to have more than one face – or even more than one hat (ahem).

Meanwhile over on Slugger O’Toole (where British Unionist bloggers seem to spend more time sniping at fellow contributors who hold, er, contrary opinions, than anything else) writer Chris Donnelly tackles the fallacies of British nationalist ideology in Ireland and the long-cherished belief that people who are Irish, and citizens of Ireland, are actually British, and subjects of Britain, and that all it simply takes is the right kind of mood music (and some financial bribery) to make them see the light.

The inability of most leaders of the British national minority in the north-east of Ireland to recognise, or to come to terms with, any nationality in the country but their own is of course pretty much a description of the last century of Irish history. Judging by the real mood music of the British ethnic community that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

Liberal Britain, Or Don’t Mention The War. The Irish One, That Is.

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The British left and the issue of Britain’s continued colonial presence in Ireland. A natural match you may think? Er, think again. In fact Britain’s liberal and socialist groupings (and voters) have been just as virulently nationalistic when it came to the issue of Ireland as any on the right. Introduce the word “Irish” into a conversation with even the most ardent left-wing, Palestinian-loving, class conscious, wrap the red flag around me politico in Britain and you’re liable to be given a lengthy rant on the justifications for British rule in Ireland. Oh, it will be well qualified, with lots of talk about “past mistakes” and “old grievances”, yet one just has to wait for that inevitable magic word: “but…”.

So to the Guardian newspaper and a Ronán Bennett article that seems to have caused outrage amongst the liberal readership of that most liberal of British press institutions.

“Martin McGuinness was one of the bogeymen, one of the so-called men of violence. There was a time when there could be no talks with the men of violence. …In the pre-ceasefire mental arrangement, McGuinness had a special standing: he was raptor-in-chief in an organisation of blooded hawks. Even if Gerry Adams might like to talk, McGuinness would not.

In times of war it’s understandable, though rarely useful, to attribute to your enemy all the qualities of the beast. But we have come a long way since then. The IRA campaign is over. Sinn Féin is firmly established in Northern Ireland as the second largest party, behind Peter Robinson’sDUP. In the Irish Republic, the latest Irish Times-Ipsos MRBI poll now also puts Sinn Féin second. McGuinness has been elected three times to Westminster and five times as an assembly member. In 2007 he was nominated deputy first minister in the Northern Ireland assembly. He is now running for president of Ireland.

The Fine Gael environment minister, Phil Hogan, said recently that putting McGuinness in charge of the state “would leave us looking like a banana republic”. Ireland, he continued ominously, would be “denuded of serious levels of corporate investment within 24 months”. His panicky warning coincided with the return of McGuinness and Robinson from the US with further promises of investment for the North. Far from having investors running for cover, McGuinness is well regarded in New York and Washington.

As president, McGuinness knows he would be the representative of all the republic’s interests, even those to which he may be adverse. But he long ago absorbed the need for political inclusiveness. Even at the height of the Troubles he said he would talk to anyone at any time without preconditions in order to find a way to bring the conflict to a close. When negotiators eventually agreed to meet, they found him affable, straight-talking and easy to get along with. They were impressed. Against all expectation, they even liked him.

With arch republican foe Ian Paisley, McGuinness formed a close and apparently warm working relationship.

Principled and effective, McGuinness’s popularity with his supporters comes from a mix of integrity, straight dealing, and a refusal to be compromised by the trappings of success. Born into a large, poor Derry family, he has avoided airs and graces. Nor does he share the Cherie Blair fear of descending again into poverty that she has tried to use as a licence for her and her husband to milk it while they can. Like all Sinn Féin’s elected representatives, McGuinness gives his public salary to the party and takes an average wage in return. His nose remains firmly out of the trough.

The violence in Ireland was appalling. McGuinness has already said that much of it was unjustifiable. But it was not the work of killers addicted to killing. What happened in McGuinness’s home town of Derry in the summer of 1969 was an Irish spring, a spontaneous rebellion against a regime that discriminated and excluded from power a majority of its own citizens. Many reached for the gun in those strange, paranoid, idealistic and angry days. Martin McGuinness was one of them. But he put the gun down and he persuaded the British government to address the issues that sparked the conflict. The North is a better place because of him. The republic can be too.”

Cue outrage. In Ireland most believe the Long War is over. In Britain they are still fighting it – even the liberals.

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Lies, Damned Lies And The War In Ireland

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Journalist Martina Devlin sets the readership of the Irish Independent (and others) fairly hopping with outrage over her latest opinion piece. Can she be long for the Indo Group? One suspects not. In Ireland’s news media élite being More-British-Than-The-British is considered de rigueur. But it’s fun while it lasts:

“It’s the blatant revisionism that gets my goat: the deception being peddled that the IRA was solely responsible for the Troubles and therefore culpable for all the evils of the Northern state.

According to this false gospel, the IRA initiated the violence and continued it alone. Sooner or later those nice unionists would have realised it was wrong to deny equality to their fellow citizens, and knuckled down to cut a deal with the SDLP. But the IRA’s self-serving agenda derailed the potential for agreement to be reached, delaying the formation of a just society.

Herman Melville’s novel ‘White-Jacket’ contains the following passage: “You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper [underling] of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong but are useless for right.” Melville was suggesting that moderates allow iniquity to be perpetuated because they do not challenge the status quo, and never support what is sometimes necessary to expunge tyranny — such as the tyranny of the Northern state, where ethnic cleansing lite was tolerated and citizens were denied fundamental human rights. There is more than one kind of violence.

This acceptance by revisionists of subjugation in the North allows them to claim it was wrong to resist the status quo, except peacefully. Conveniently, they forget how the agents of the state used rifles and batons to force civil rights campaigners off the streets. They ignore statistics showing how one sector of Northern society was favoured for jobs and housing at the expense of another. Left to them, the Northern state would have stayed gerrymandered, defective, deviant.

Politicians in the Republic countenanced gross inequalities in the state on their doorstep, perpetuated against people who defined themselves as Irish. Few commentators or voters called them on it. Yes, IRA violence was remorseless, but what caused it — and, more important, who helped bring it to an end? As history books about this period are written, whose names figure on their pages?

My final thought on the North is this: peace-makers are thin on the ground compared with bomb-makers.”

Just for the record, and to meet head-on the propagators of counter-factual myths that pass for history in the Anglomedia ranks, some salient facts.

The so-called “Troubles” did not begin at the end of 1969 with the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or in the early months of 1970 with the first attacks by PIRA units (the first British soldier was not killed until 1971!). In fact the conflict had been going on for several years previous to this (the Provisional IRA came into existence on the 28th of December 1969. The day before on the 27th the UVF carried out a bomb attack in Dublin city!).

The first violence, the first killings, the first shootings, the first bombings of the Troubles began in 1966. Over a period of several months terrorists from the British separatist minority in Ireland, the UVF, murdered three people, two Roman Catholic men and a Protestant woman, as well as injuring a number of others and causing substantial damage to property. The objective was simple, something they made clear in a statement issued to the general public:

“From this day, we declare war against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid, then more extreme methods will be adopted… we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.”

And the cause? Killing Irish men, women and children, and driving those who survived from the last remnants of Britain’s colony in Ireland. This is the start of the Troubles. The British ethnic minority in Ireland using violence and the threat of violence to intimidate and terrorise the majority population on the island. As it was throughout the last 300 years.

The Facts of the Troubles the Media don’t want you to know:

The first shooting of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1966.

The first bombing of civilian targets in the “Troubles? British terrorists, 1968.

The first ethnic cleansing of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first killing of a paramilitary police officer in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first bombing of a capital city in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first armed action of the Provisional IRA in the “Troubles”? 1970

The first killing of a British soldier in the “Troubles”? 1971

Do we need to go on?

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The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament

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Irish journalist Jason Walsh reviews new book The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament by veteran Republican Tommy McKearney over at Spiked Online. Well worth reading, both the review and book. I’ll post my own review soon.

Martin McGuinness – Uachtarán na hÉireann?

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The politics of Ireland has been turned on its head with Sinn Féin’s announcement yesterday that Martin McGuinness MLA, the deputy First Minister in the North of Ireland, will run as a “Republican candidate” for the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann. The news confounded the expectations of many commentators that a lesser SF figure would enter the race for Áras an Uachtaráin and has stunned political circles in Dublin. As Reuters reports the story:

“Martin McGuinness’ journey from guerrilla commander to mainstream politician took a new turn on Friday when his Sinn Fein party said he would be put forward to run for president of the Republic of Ireland.

A hero among Catholics in Northern Ireland for helping to end three decades of sectarian bloodshed and give them an equal voice in a power-sharing government, McGuinness is a more controversial figure south of the border.

Left-wing Sinn Fein, the former political wing of the now defunct Irish Republican Army (IRA), has capitalised on anger in the Republic over its financial crisis.

In parliamentary elections in February, Sinn Fein more than tripled its number of seats to 14 in the 166 seat lower chamber to emerge as the Republic’s second largest opposition party.

Once an organisation whose members were officially banned from speaking on Irish media until 1993, a victory for McGuiness in the October 27 poll would crown Sinn Fein’s position in the Irish mainstream both north and south of the border.

While the role is chiefly ceremonial, Ireland’s president has the right to refer legislation to the Supreme Court, presenting potential difficulties for Prime Minister Enda Kenny should McGuinness get elected.

Sinn Fein has been a staunch critic of Kenny’s coalition government and its adherence to the tough fiscal targets under an EU-IMF bailout.

McGuinness’ main rivals will be Gay Mitchell, candidate for Kenny’s Fine Gael party and front-runner Michael D. Higgins who is representing the junior government Labour Party.

McGuinness’s selection as a Sinn Fein candidate will go for party approval on Sunday.

“I feel very honoured that I have been asked to stand for the Irish presidency,” McGuinness told BBC television on Friday, during a visit to the United States.

Once McGuinness has sealed the nomination, he would temporarily stand down as deputy first minister, Sinn Fein said.

A former trainee butcher, McGuinness abandoned his apprenticeship in 1970 to join the IRA when the guerrilla group began its 30-year campaign against British rule, swiftly rising to become a senior commander.

He was briefly jailed in the Irish Republic in the 1970s for membership of the IRA. Fellow nationalist inmates recall him as a fierce football player in the exercise yard.

Along with party leader Gerry Adams, he was instrumental in transforming Sinn Fein into Northern Ireland’s most powerful nationalist group and played a central role in talks leading to a 1998 peace deal that mostly ended the bloody period.

McGuinness spent years on the run. A devout Catholic, he is a keen fisherman and has written poetry.

If McGuinness wins the presidential race he would preside over the centenary celebrations of Dublin’s 1916 Rising, a failed attempt at revolution against British rule that proved the spark for a successful independence campaign.’”

It is clear that this is a win-win situation for Sinn Féin. Even if they don’t succeed in getting Martin McGuinness elected to the presidency a respectable vote will garner enough of a return for the party in terms of publicity and prestige that it’s hard to see any downside to the tactic. Indeed it is part of SF’s broader strategy to undermine both the Border and partition itself, portraying it as an anachronism in modern Ireland, a disastrous 20th century solution to a 20th century problem lingering on into the 21st century.

Additionally, with the outside chance of a Sinn Féin nominated President of Ireland presiding over the 2016 Commemorations of the Easter Rising of 1916 how could Republicans possibly turn down the chance of fielding their strongest player? And symbolising (and legitimising?) to the world their most recent struggle?

It has been argued that the general election of 1918, in which Sinn Féin won a landslide victory across the island of Ireland, retrospectively legitimised the insurrection of 1916 (something recognised by the British head of state at the Garden of Commemoration in Dublin, several decades later). Which begs the question: what would a Sinn Féin victory in the coming presidential election mean for the thirty years of armed struggle – the Long War? A retrospective mandate from the Irish people, not just from the northern nationalist community but from its southern counterpart too?

Perhaps what we are now witnessing is the emergence of a new All-Ireland body politic, where northerners can come south and southerners can go north, without remark or hindrance? If so it is a remarkable tribute to the overall strategy of Sinn Féin and the success of their policies over the last decade.

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No Irish Wanted Here!

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Robin Swann MLA with Royal British Legion

A familiarly depressing report from the Associated Press in relation to the recent Líofa 2015 initiative launched by the North’s minister of culture. The aim of the project is to have 1000 new fluent Irish speakers in positions of influence in the North of Ireland, and the event was notable for the number of members of the PSNI (the paramilitary police force in the North) who publically expressed interest in joining the scheme.

However not everyone is so welcoming and several objections have been made by Robin Swann MLA, a member of the UUP, a “liberal” Unionist party (no sniggering at the back there!). According to the AP story:

‘Ulster Unionist MLA Robin Swann called for “parity of esteem” for Unionists and warned more should be done to promote Ulster Scots. He was criticising Líofa, a project to create many new Irish speakers.

He was speaking after a Culture, Arts and Leisure Committee meeting at Stormont during which culture minister Caral Ní Chuilin gave evidence.

Mr Swann said: “My personal opinion would be that Líofa was part of a Sinn Féin agenda. We know what Sinn Féin’s agenda is with regard to the Irish language, her actions actually would further politicise it and make it a segregated issue.”

Líofa 2015 is separate from the long-running political deadlock over securing legislative protection for Irish and Ulster Scots.

More than 100 police officers were among the first to sign up to learn Irish after the launch of a new project to support the language.

Representatives of the sporting bodies for Gaelic games, football and rugby also joined the minister at Stormont recently to launch the plan to create 1,000 new Irish speakers by 2015.’

For those of you who may be unaware of what exactly Ulster Scots is (that would be 99.99% of the population of the island of Ireland) the supposed “language” is in fact a dialect of the English language invented in the 1970s by a few crank academics in the British minority in the north-east of Ireland to give their community a greater sense of “ethnicity”. Indeed most of these self-same gentlemen also believed in the “secret history of the Ulsterfolk”, a bizarre tangle of 19th century occultism, religious fundamentalism and racial supremacy which preached that the British ethnic community in Ireland were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Journalist Jason Walsh explored the matter further in Forth Magazine:

‘Some years ago I was employed in a production capacity by an Irish unionist newspaper and it was here that I first came head-to-head with the bizarre twilight world of Ulster Scots. As I came from the republican stronghold of west Belfast I knew little of this ‘language’ but a good friend of mine in the newsroom was responsible for laying-out ‘the Ulster Scot’, a free supplement all about this make-believe lingo.

At the time I thought it was nothing short of hilarious: clearly unionists were chafing at the sight of the Irish language undergoing a genuine (though frequently overstated) renaissance that was dragging it out of its comfortable romantic obscurity and into the modern world. What was the best thing to do about this, pondered unionist politicians, until one had the astonishingly grandiose idea of actually inventing their own language. Of course, synthetic languages like Loglan and Esperanto are difficult to learn and it’s even harder to persuade people to actually learn the damn things, so in order to facilitate rapid growth the new language of Ulster Scots would be simply the dialect of English spoken in North Antrim with a kind of dyslexic phonetic spelling system and a few inscrutable phrases pilfered from Lowland Scots dialect of English. If Ulster Scots is a language then so are the dialects used in Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ or James Kelman’s ‘How Late it Was, How Late.’ When BBC Radio Ulster announced, sadly incorrectly, that the Ulster Scots term for mentally disabled children was “wee daftie weans” I almost fell over, so hard was I laughing at the antics of these clowns.

I later enjoyed, if that is the correct word, a further dunking in the stagnant waters of the unionist identity project when BBC Northern Ireland screened the execrable ‘On Eagle’s Wing’, an all-singing, all-dancing, and above all, almightily camp musical that appears to be a kind of ‘Ulster kulsher’ response to the dreadful Riverdance. Revelling in unionist victimology, ‘On Eagle’s Wing’ tells the story of the stout Ulstemen and their redoubtable womenfolk as they made their way to the New World in order to escape persecution from the British Establishment in Ireland. Tellingly, the so-called ‘Scots-Irish-Americans’ are virtually unknown today, not because they were unsuccessful, but precisely because they thrived, threw off the chains of their former identities and merged completely into American society – precisely the opposite of what their born-again boosters are now promoting.

Fringe stuff indeed, but the ‘Ulster Scots’ project is gaining acceptance in post-Belfast Agreement Ireland. Notwithstanding the fact that Sinn Féin has pioneered cultural politics, thus softening up the ground for this curious rehabilitation of unionism as a ‘national’ identity, elements of the old unionist establishment are beginning to get on board.”

Indeed they are and none more so than the bold Robin Swann. In fact Swann is the very embodiment of the kulturkampf movement amongst the British separatist minority in Ireland. He is a “Brother” of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland (commonly called the Orange Order, a Masonic-like Protestant fundamentalist society which is virulently anti-Catholic), a “Knight” of the Imperial Grand Black Chapter Of The British Commonwealth (a more secretive fundamentalist grouping, higher than the Orange Order) and a member of the Associated Clubs of the Apprentice Boys of Derry (another British anti-Catholic society).

Nelson McCausland, Brother Of The Orange Order Displaying His, Um, Culture

So no surprise then that this political representative of the British separatist tradition in Ireland supports the Tolkienesque fantasy dialect of Ulster-Scots while opposing the Irish language, and equality for the North’s Irish-speaking communities. After all a follow representative, the DUP’s Nelson McCausland, and another Ulster-Scots zealot is also an advocate for Creationism, as reported by the Guardian:

‘Northern Ireland’s born-again Christian culture minister has called on the Ulster Museum to put on exhibits reflecting the view that the world was made by God only several thousand years ago.

Nelson McCausland, who believes that Ulster Protestants are one of the lost tribes of Israel, has written to the museum’s board of trustees urging them to reflect creationist and intelligent design theories of the universe’s origins.

The Democratic Unionist minister said the inclusion of anti-Darwinian theories in the museum was “a human rights issue”.

McCausland defended a letter he wrote to the trustees calling for anti-evolution exhibitions at the museum.

His call was condemned by the evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, who said: “If the museum was to go down that road then perhaps they should bring in the stork theory of where babies come from. Or perhaps the museum should introduce the flat earth theory.”

Dawkins said it was irrelevant if a large number of people in Northern Ireland refused to believe in evolution. “Scientific evidence can’t be democratically decided,” Dawkins said.

McCausland’s party colleague and North Antrim assembly member Mervyn Storey has been at the forefront of a campaign to force museums in Northern Ireland to promote anti-Darwinian theories.

Storey, who has chaired the Northern Ireland assembly’s education committee, has denied that man descended from apes. He believes in the theory that the world was created several thousand years ago, even though the most famous tourist attraction in his own constituency – the Giant’s Causeway on the North Antrim coast – is according to all the geological evidence millions of years old.

Last year Storey raised objections to notices at the Giant’s Causeway informing the public that the unique rock formation was about 550m years old. Storey believes in the literal truth of the Bible and that the earth was created only several thousand years before Christ’s birth.

The belief that the Earth was divinely created in 4004 BC originates with the writings of another Ulster-based Protestant, Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher, in 1654. Ussher calculated the date based on textual clues in the Old Testament, even settling on a date and time for the moment of creation: in the early hours of 23 October.’

This cult-like (or is it occult?) aspect of the culture of the British ethnic minority has been one of the driving forces in Unionism in Ireland for the last three centuries and no more so than in the last forty years. But the main story is the same one it always has been, the same old settler versus native prejudices.

You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Be British In Ireland – But It Helps

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Fascists, Neo-Nazis And The British Unionist Minority In Ireland

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During a Far Right gathering British and German Neo-Nazis show their support for the UDA – UFF, the largest British state-sponsored terrorist group in Ireland, 2009

Interesting review in the Belfast Telegraph of Mathew Collins’ book, Hate, which charts his journey through Britain’s nationalist and Neo-Nazi movements, including the decades old links to the British separatist minority in Ireland. Journalist Henry McDonald writes:

‘Recalling his days selling race-hate literature in London’s East End, Matthew Collins says: “We took the traditional Brick Lane Sunday drink with the BNP that day, watching strippers and eating a selection of mussels and whelks off the bar.”

All they would have needed was a Cockney-style sing-song of Horst Wessel Lied and Deutschland Uber Alles around the old Joanna and that would have topped off a perfect National Socialist Sabbath for Matthew and his comrades.

There are, however, more sinister segments of the book and they include his relationship with Ulster loyalists who had latched onto the NF and other neo-Nazi organisations in Britain.

Of these the most prominent is Eddie Whicker, a UDA member from Belfast who became somewhat of a personality on the London far right scene at the time Collins was an active fascist. Whicker was one of the most militant of the extreme right street thugs taking on leftists, some of whom marched in pro-IRA rallies in the UK capital and other British cities.

There can be no doubting the connections established from the early 1970s onwards between the NF, BNP and the more extreme Combat 18 to the two main loyalist paramilitary organisations. On a political and, dare one say social level, the disparate British far right were the only supporters of the Ulster loyalist cause in Britain.

Apart from their traditional allies in Scotland, particularly within the Orange Order and the Rangers football team’s support base, loyalism’s allies were few and far between.

While loyalists across the sea could feel very much at home in parts of Scotland’s central belt or the Ayrshire coast, your average working class Ulster Protestant would feel a greater sense of isolation in English cities, particularly the multi-cultural/racial conurbations.

As Collins attests to in his book, the NF and other rival organisations at least provided a home for an Ulster loyalist away from home but still in touch with the cause.

There were a number of gun running plots such as the one involving Frank Portinari, an English UDA member of Italian Catholic extract in direct touch with ‘C’ Company and a friend of the UDA killer John White.

Charlie Sergeant, for instance, crops up several times in Collins’ book as a prominent Combat 18 thug and strong supporter of Ulster loyalists. Yet after Sergeant was tried and convicted of stabbing a rival neo-Nazi to death it transpired he was also a police informant whose work included spying on any potential loyalist arms smuggling operations in the south-east of England.

The Ulster Volunteer Force did, of course, meet with the extreme neo-Nazi Belgian VMO in the early 1980s. The Flemish fascists were fascinated with the home-made engineering skills of Ulster loyalists who were manufacturing their own sub-machine guns. In return, the VMO promised to hand over plastic explosives, as long as the UVF attacked a Jewish target in Belfast.

On a propaganda level the activities of a handful of loyalists in England like Whicker was undoubtedly damaging. It only projected and solidified the notion that the average loyalist was as much a bone-headed, shaven, beery-breathed bigot as their neo-Nazi buddies smashing up Brick Lane.

Observers of the far right will point to the career of Johnny Adair, who started his politico-paramilitary career in the NF.’

Despite some attempts to downplay the links between the British terrorist organisations operating in Ireland and the far right in Britain there can be little doubt that Neo-Nazi groups like the National Front, Combat 18, the BNP and others provided a political, social and financial milieu in Britain in which Unionist terrorists could move.

The financial aspects of this support was to become particularly crucial in the late 1980s when the British terrorist groupings in the North found it necessary to look beyond the clandestine funding of the British state and became heavily involved in what is now described as narco-terrorism. The UDA, UVF and LVF became the dominant force in the drugs trade in the North of Ireland at this time, effectively controlling all smuggling, distribution and sales, and in the process amassing vast fortunes for some leading members.

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

The social and organisational ties with the British extreme right was crucial in the earliest years of this new criminal exercise especially in Scotland and northern England. It also helped Unionist terrorists forge ties with the intelligence services of Apartheid-era South Africa which eventually led to the pariah state supplying the British extremists in Ireland with substantial quantities of arms.

The British Far Right movement, the EDL, displays a flag showing their support for the British Neo-Nazi terrorist group Combat-18 and the UFF terror gangs in Ireland

The full history of British Far Right links to British Unionism in Ireland were described in a 2002 issue of ‘No Quarter’, the magazine of the group Anti-Fascist Action:

‘Links between Unionists/Loyalists in the North and British Fascists go back over 80 years. As far back as the 1920s the ‘British Fascisti’ set up a group in Co. Down which led a pogrom against Catholics and in the 1930s members of the Glasgow fascist gang the ‘Billy Boys’ visited Belfast to take part in sectarian rioting during the 12th of July weekend. However this article will focus on links in recent years.

The convicted UDA terrorist Johnny Adair, recently released from Maghaberry Jail, is a man with a background even more sinister than that of the average death squad commander.

In 1994 Adair pleaded guilty to ‘directing terrorism’ and was sentenced to 16 years, serving only five until he was released under the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he admitted to being the loyalist known as ‘Mad Dog’ and boasted of being involved in the sectarian murders of 20 Catholics. While in jail Adair forged close links with Billy Wright, leader of the LVF, and the UDA carried out sectarian murders of Catholics to avenge Wright’s death in 1997. Adair and Wright were also linked by their prominent involvement in drug dealing in the North.

But Adair, who rose to leadership in the Belfast UDA/UFF in the early 1990s, has a far longer political pedigree.

Belfast National Front 1980s

In the mid 1980′s there were about 200 National Front supporters in Belfast, one of them the young Johnny Adair. In September 1983 a National Front March took place in Belfast, attended by about 100 fascist skinheads. Prominent in the parade was Johnny Adair, along with his sidekick Sam McCrory. This march became known as the ‘gluesniffers march’, because many of the skinheads were drunk on cider and openly sniffing glue from plastic bags as they paraded from the city centre to the Shankill chanting anti-Black and anti-Republican slogans.

In April 1983 a group of young Loyalist skinheads from a gang called ‘NF Skinz’ killed a homeless alcoholic on the Lower Shankill. Patrick Barkey, a Catholic, died after being beaten unconscious and hit on the head with a concrete block. Three skinheads, William Madine, Clifford Bickerstaff and Albert Martin were charged with murder. Madine and Bickerstaff pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got two years and eleven months at a young offenders centre. Martin was found guilty of GBH and got a 12 month suspended sentence. Press reports stated that the skinheads were provided with character references by [unnamed] Belfast Unionist politicians.

The Belfast NF broke up anti-racist and punk gigs in the city. The NF was active around football and sold their publications at Northern Ireland games at Windsor Park. The NF youth paper ‘Bulldog’ published a ‘league of louts’ – detailing the most racist fans – Linfield and Coleraine featured regularly.

In January 1998 Mo Mowlam visited the Maze prison to meet the leaders of the loyalist prisoners. The UDA/UFF leaders in the Maze were Adair and Sam McCrory, both from the Shankill Road. At the time of Mowlam’s jail visit the media reported that McCrory has ‘White Power’ and ‘Skins’ tattoos on his right hand.

Investigations by Anti-Fascist Action revealed that in the early 1980s both ‘Skelly’ McCrory and Adair played in a Belfast Nazi skinhead band called ‘Offensive Weapon’. This band played a few gigs on the Nazi skinhead circuit in Britain in the mid 80s. In August 1998 the Irish News printed a photograph of Adair and McCrory on the ‘gluesniffers’ NF March in Belfast in September 1983. With them was Donald Hodgen, another skinhead who also became a UDA member and later a prominent activist in the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party.

Nearly twenty years later the 30 to 40 young skinheads who led the National Front branch in Belfast in the 1980s now form the core of Adair’s ‘C Company’ of the UFF. They moved on to more serious sectarian violence but never left behind their ‘white power’ beliefs. From a small gang of teenage thugs they turned themselves into so-called ‘defenders of the people’, which involved murdering scores of innocent Catholics. In 2000 they tore their community apart in a savage feud with the rival UVF. They are a classic example of what happens if fascism is not forcefully opposed when it first appears.

The early 1990s, when Adair was leader of the UDA/UFF on the Shankill, marked a period of increased contact between Northern loyalists and Fascists in Britain as close links developed between the UDA and London based Fascists. Eddie Whicker and Frank Portinari were both ‘UDA Organisers’ in Britain. Portinari was jailed in 1993 for gun running to the UDA. Portanari was involved in C18 in the 1990s but now heads a pro-UDA group in London called the British Ulster Alliance.

Charlie Sargeant, the former leader of Combat 18 now serving life in England for the murder of a fellow fascist, often boasted of his personal friendship with Johnny Adair.

In the mid 1990s C18′s control of the Blood and Honour ‘music’ network allowed them to put on several gigs in the North. ‘Blood and Honour’ magazine boasted of Welsh band Celtic Warrior’s visit to Belfast and published photographs of Loyalist bandsmen playing alongside them at a ‘White Christmas’ gig on the Lower Shankill Road. ‘Blood and Honour’ magazine also printed photographs of two UDA prisoners in Long Kesh, who sent greetings to C18 and said that they were ‘dedicated to keeping Ulster British and white’ and the loyalists’ prison journal ‘Warrior’ also published pro-C18 articles.

C18/LVF and Portadown

The annual attempt by the Orange Order to march down the Garvaghy Road, and the 12th weekend generally, has become a point of pilgrimage as English fascists from different groups visit the North to link up with their loyalist friends.

In July 1999 Combat 18 brought 25 supporters from Britain to Portadown. Combat 18 members attended at the unveiling of a memorial to Billy Wright and he is also idolised on C18 websites. On July 11th 1999 a ‘Blood and Honour’ gig was held in a social club in Portadown. The English fascist bands ‘Razors Edge’, ‘Chingford Attack’ and ‘No Remorse’ played alongside loyalist flute bands. According to a C18 report on the event:

‘A spokeswoman for the Loyalist Volunteer Force, who hosted the gig, took the stage and thanked Combat 18 officially for the support shown to her organisation and its prisoners of war both in C18 publications and financially. All the profits from the gig were donated to the LVF Prisoners’ Fund and links between C18 and the LVF were strengthened on the evening’. C18 members also attended the Orange march in Portadown and the demonstration at Drumcree on July 12th.

In July 2000 another C18 delegation attended the Drumcree march. The fascists, from Bolton, Burnley and Preston in the North of England, stayed with LVF members in Portadown’s Corcrain and Brownstown estates. A TV documentary showed a prominent Orangeman from Portadown, Ivan Hewitt, displaying his ‘Blood and Honour’, ‘SS’ and other Nazi tattoos. David Jones, leader of the Orange Order in Portadown, claimed that he did not know Hewitt.

British Nationalism In Ireland – Racism And Sectarianism As The Orange Order Identifies With The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – One Reflection Of British Anti-Irishness

‘Free Johnny Adair’

In September 2000 a group of UDA supporters and English fascists, including convicted loyalist gun runners Terry Blackham and Frank Portinari, took part in a National Front protest in Downing Street demanding the release of Johnny Adair. A similar protest took place in January 2001.

At the funeral of Steven McKeag, a major drug dealer, on the Shankill in September 2000 a large wreath was carried which read ‘C18′. McKeag, who had died accidentally from drink and drugs, was the notorious UFF gunman nicknamed ‘Top Gun’. He was known to be personally responsible for at least a dozen sectarian murders. He had been a teenage member of the NF and Adair’s right hand man, taking over command of the Shankill UDA when Adair was jailed in 1994.

Greysteel Killer and C18 

In July 2000 Stephen Irwin, a Loyalist convicted of the murder of seven people in a UDA attack on the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, Co Derry at Hallowe’en 1993, was released from the Maze. It was Irwin who shouted ‘Trick or Treat’ before he opened fire. Just four months after his release Irwin attended a C18 ‘Remembrance Day’ event in London and was photographed shouting slogans and giving the Nazi salute. While in prison Irwin had corresponded with other fascists and sent out pictures of himself for their publications.

The LVF 

The Loyalist Volunteer Force website has the following ad in its merchandise section ‘Our best item by far yet is the Billy Wright CD Which has been produced by Blood & Honour Combat 18 & has been largely in demand, the CD consists of many songs by prominent Blood & Honour bands with songs dedicated to the Loyalist cause’.

There have been revelations in recent years of strong links between the LVF and Nazis in the North West of Britain. These include C18 members and supporters within the British Army. In May 1999 C18 members distributed leaflets at Blackburn’s football ground attacking Rosemary Nelson, the human rights solicitor murdered by Loyalists.

Ian Thompson, a former soldier of the Royal Irish Regiment, was the LVF’s main linkman with Combat 18, he organised the visits of British Fascists to Portadown. He was arrested in March 2000 on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Rosemary Nelson. The RUC found the personal details of Combat 18 leaders and scores of Nazi music CDs in his home in Hamiltonsbawn, Co Armagh. In 2001 Thompson was sentenced to 9 years for arms offences.

The internet guestbooks of many fascist groups contain support messages for the UDA, LVF, Orange Volunteers, Red Hand Defenders, etc. A support group called the ‘Loyalist Prisoners Welfare Association’ holds fundraisers and events in Britain.

The second leader of the LVF, Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton, was found dead in his cell in Maghaberry prison in June 2002. A post mortem showed he had committed suicide. Within hours fascist websites carried tributes to him, including one from C18 which stated. “Mark Fulton. Rest in peace comrade, you were a loyal soldier and brave warrior in our struggle for freedom. You will never be forgotten. Valahalla will welcome such a great man with open arms! condolences sent from all C18 units worldwide! 14/88″.

National Front 

In July 2000 the ‘White Nationalist Report’, a National Front newsletter, printed a report and picture of NF members selling their literature in the Sandy Row Rangers Supporters Club. The photo included Terry Blackham, their ‘National Activities Organiser’, who runs the NF anti-refugee campaigns in England. In 1994 Blackham was jailed for 4 years for attempting to smuggle sub-machine guns, a grenade launcher and 2,000 rounds of ammunition to the UDA in East Belfast.

British National Party 

The British National Party [BNP] has also been active in the North in recent years. It sells a magazine called ‘True Brit’ at Orange rallies and at Linfield and Glentoran matches. It is based mainly around Newtonabbey and has also been involved in intimidation of Catholics in Kilkeel, Co Down. In December 1998 it held a wreath laying ceremony at the grave of George Seawright, the DUP politician best known for saying that ‘Catholics should be incinerated’. His brother, David Seawright, has been active in both the NF and the UVF in Scotland.

The Ulster BNP plans to run in South Belfast in the next general election in the North and say it’s platform will be a return of the death penalty and an end to ‘bogus asylum seekers flooding over the border into Ulster’.

Andrew McAlorie has recently reappeared as a BNP spokeperson in the North. McAlorie, a teacher, was last heard of in 1986 when as NI treasurer of the National Front he was jailed for two years for his involvement in the petrol bombing of RUC homes during the ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign against the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Ulster Independence Movement 

The UIM is a one man band led by David Kerr, formerly prominent in the Ulster National Front in the 1980s. The UIM supports the policy of the ‘Third Way’, an ideology that supposedly rejects both communism and capitalism. ‘Third Way’ is connected to the ‘International Third Position’ in Britain, a somewhat contradictory position as ITP leadership consists of traditionalist Catholics. The UIM also professes support for far right groups in America and sells pro-Confederate merchandise on its website. It also produces a magazine called ‘Ulster Nation’.

David Kerr ran as the ‘Ulster Third Way’ candidate both the General and local elections in June 2001. Describing himself as a ‘non-sectarian radical Ulster nationalist’, he gathered a less than spectacular 116 votes in West Belfast and a magnificent 28 in the council elections. His campaign may not have been helped by his stated policy of support for free over the counter sales of heroin and cocaine.

Conclusion 

The political, paramilitary and criminal links between Loyalism and Fascism should be no surprise, given that both ideologies are based on extreme right wing supremacist ideas. The regular exposure of such links lead to denials or tepid condemnation by loyalist politicians, but no serious attempt to end them.’

Right Wing Norwegian Mass Murderer Anders Breivik, Who Has Links To British Neo-Nazi And Terrorist Groupings

The links between British Neo-Nazis and the British separatist minority in Ireland coalesce around one of the most notorious assassinations in the history of the conflict, the killing of lawyer Rosemary Nelson. As the Guardian reported in 2000:

‘The names, addresses and telephone numbers of members of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 have been passed to detectives investigating the murder of the Northern Ireland solicitor Rosemary Nelson.

Details of Combat 18′s links with the Loyalist Volunteer Force – the organisation which placed the bomb under Nelson’s car – were found during a search of the home of Ian Thompson, a loyalist who has been charged with an offence connected to the solicitor’s murder.

Thompson was arrested at his home in Hamilton’s Bawn, a Protestant village outside Armagh city, more than a fortnight ago. Senior RUC detectives said police in England planned to arrest and question several Combat 18 activists about their links with Ulster loyalists.

Along with the personal details of Combat 18 members, including their leader Bill Browning, a former British soldier from south London, the RUC found scores of race-hate CDs. The CDs of racist skinhead bands were being sold to raise money in Britain for the LVF. Browning has a conviction for assaulting a gay man and another for distributing race hate material.

Thompson, also a former British soldier who served in the locally recruited Royal Irish Regiment, was the LVF’s main link with Combat 18. He went to Wigan for an event organised by Combat 18 in 1998 which almost degenerated into a war between rival factions of the fascist group. Members from North-East England protested at Thompson’s plan to take over an LVF-aligned flute band to play at the function.

The North-East branch of Combat 18, organised principally around a core of Sunderland soccer hooligans, supports the largest loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association. When they learnt that an LVF-allied band was to play, they threatened to disrupt the social. The invitation to the band was quietly dropped.

The investigation into Combat 18′s connections to the LVF will focus on a nucleus of English fascists based in North-West England, particularly a group in Bolton. They include a tattooist who comes to Northern Ireland regularly to engrave the image of murdered LVF founder Billy Wright on to local loyalists.

It was Thompson who invited Browning along with 24 other neo-Nazis to Northern Ireland last summer for the loyalist marching season. While the Combat 18 delegation were staying in Portadown, the LVF’s Mid-Ulster stronghold, members of the neo-Nazi group attacked a Chinese family living in the town’s staunchly loyalist Corcrain estate.

One of the UDA’s English members, who was arrested on arms charges in the early Nineties, was Frank Portanari. Now out of jail, Portanari heads a pro-loyalist campaign group in London called the British/Ulster Alliance.’

BNP Politicians Giving Nazi Salutes At British War Memorial, Britain

The power and influence of the British terrorist organisations in Ireland has fallen considerably since their heyday at the height of the conflict when they were the cutting edge of Britain’s counter-insurgency war. Many have been abandoned by their old masters in the British state (or been turned upon). Yet, through renewed links to Neo-Nazi and fascist groups in Britain, they continue to exist and indeed may be on something of a comeback.

Racist And Neo-Nazi Propoganda Of The British Minority In Ireland, 2004

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British Journalism And The ‘Agreed Narrative’ On News From Ireland

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There is a highly critical post by the British journalist and media lecturer Roy Greenslade in his Guardian blog today, where he brings the British news media to task for yet again ignoring a story from Ireland that does not suit the agreed narrative on Irish affairs promulgated by Britain’s media establishment. In this case the story is the remarkable address by the Reverend David Latimer, a Protestant cleric and former chaplain with the British Armed Forces, to Sinn Féin’s annual Ard-Fheis held last weekend in Belfast.

‘I doubt that many of you have ever heard of the Reverend David Latimer…

And it would appear that Britain’s national newspapers are determined to ensure that he remains unknown to you.

Yet Latimer made history last Friday evening by becoming the first ordained Protestant minister to give an address to the annual Sinn Féin ard fheis (conference).

In so doing, he called Martin McGuinness one of the “true great leaders of modern times”. It brought the republican audience to its feet.

Indeed, the party was also making history of its own by staging the event in Belfast, the first time its ard fheis has taken place in Northern Ireland.

And another first – the Prince’s Trust charity, founded by Prince Charles, had a stand in the lobby at the Waterfront Hall.

I would call that trio of firsts a news story of no little significance.

But there was nothing in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Independent,The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The BBC covered the story online in several articles, such as here (with video) and here and here (a good overview by Martina Purdey, the corporation’s Northern Ireland political correspondent).

The story was covered in the Irish media,in the Irish Times and in the Irish Independent. It was the splash, as shown here, in Belfast’s Irish News and made headlines in the Belfast Telegraph.

But this was not just a local story, nor even just an Irish story given that Northern Ireland is, whether one likes it or not, part of the UK.

So why was it absent from our London-based papers? If a bomb had gone off in Belfast on Friday you can bet that would have been covered.

Are we to imagine that editors believe positive political news from Northern Ireland is of no consequence? Or is it due to an absence of correspondents in Ulster’s six disputed counties?

Even if that was the case, the Press Association reported the speech, so it certainly passed across the screens of the nationals.

I have written many times before about the failure of the British press to cover Northern Ireland properly, and its major consequence – an absence of knowledge among British people about the realities of life there.

This further example is particularly significant because it shows how good news is ignored in favour of bad news.

Latimer’s appearance was the kind of bombshell political intervention that was momentous. But the British electorate don’t know that.’

There is very little in Professor Greenslade’s words that one can disagree with. British news coverage of Irish affairs, and the conflict in the north-east of the country, are notoriously poor and agenda-driven. Indeed for most of the last 40 years that agenda has been simply one of propping up British rule in Ireland with little in the way of journalistic ethics. It is only with the adevent of the Peace Process, and some ten years on, that a handful of British newspapers are beginning to seriously examine just what was done in Ireland and in their name.

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The History House – Armagh’s Irish Republican Museum

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Fascinating article in the Guardian on the ‘History House’, a private Irish Republican museum open to invitation-only guests:

‘In a garden in a quiet cul-de-sac in north Armagh, a nondescript brown shed contains the Irish republican version of the Imperial War Museum.

The private collection contains the toilet-roll holder from the room where IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands died in May 1981, letters from supporters to Sands, an original rebel uniform from the 1916 Easter rising, secret communications smuggled out of the Maze prison and a 19th-century cell door from London’s Pentonville jail where Irish republican prisoners were incarcerated. There are piles of original black rubber bullets fired during riots in the early 1970s. There are even Airfix-style models recreating the Maze prison.

Its owner – who lost close relatives during the Troubles – is so security-conscious he doesn’t allow his name or the museum’s address to be published. All visits are arranged quietly on the “republican grapevine”, but have managed to bring together former republican rivals who were once deadly enemies. Former members of the Provisional and Official IRAs as well as the Irish National Liberation army have met again during private visits to the collection. Earlier this month the surviving “hooded men” – republican suspects used as “torture guinea-pigs” by the British army early in the Troubles in 1971 – gathered together for the first time in a reunion at the museum.

The Guardian was given access last week to the privately owned museum which also hosts visits by foreign tourists and even some Ulster loyalists. And the “curator” of the “History House” revealed that officials from the Republic’s National Museum of Ireland in Dublin recently paid a visit.

“They wanted to buy some of the artefacts, but I wasn’t for selling,” the owner said. “I want this museum to remain private yet accessible and completely free. I would never charge a penny to those I allow to view it.”

Over more than two decades he has amassed a vast array of flags, badges, posters, the casings of bullets fired from IRA rifles during the Troubles and even a crystal radio set smuggled into the Maze so that the H-Block prisoners could track the news of Sands’s triumph in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election the month before he died.

The collection also includes an original copy of the IRA’s so-called Green Book, the code of practice for armed republicans drawn up in the 1950s. From the same era, the owner of the “History House” has put on display the steel cups IRA prisoners drank from inside the Victorian Crumlin Road jail in Belfast.

Among other artefacts are two Celtic-style crosses. Both were made from matchsticks because prison authorities denied the IRA inmates access to woodwork material. One comes from an IRA man held in Crumlin Road jail in the 1950s; the other is from the 21st century and was hand-crafted in his cell by a republican dissident prisoner.

“These crosses show how Irish republican history sometimes goes in circles,” the owner said. “In the 50s, the authorities would not give republicans wood for them to make Celtic crosses, Irish harps and other Irish traditional crafts. They cited security reasons but the prisoners showed ingenuity by using matchsticks instead. They are citing the same reason today in Maghaberry jail [where prisoners are challenging conditions], and the dissident republicans are resorting back to the same tactics as their predecessors.”

As if to underline his point, the owner displayed two more artefacts from his museum. They were a poster from the 1970s highlighting the case of Martin Corey, a Provisional IRA prisoner and Lurgan republican and a huge Irish Harp he made with his own hands while incarcerated in the Maze. He added that Corey is currently back in jail, locked up in Maghaberry, this time as a prisoner on the Continuity IRA wing.’

To access the audio-video show click here.

For information on Belfast’s better known Iarsmalann na Staire Poblachtach Éireannach or Irish Republican History Museum (which is open to the general public) click here.

 

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Black Provos – The ANC And The IRA

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Sinn Féin and the ANC – Martin McGuinness, Nelson Mandela and Gerry Adams

One of the more famous descriptions of former ANC leader and South African president Nelson Mandela to have emerged in the last 30 years came from Frank Miller, a senior Ulster Unionist Party politician from the British ethnic minority in Ireland, who dismissed Mandela as a ‘black Provo’ (aka. Provisional IRA). Miller represented a view common amongst the British Unionist minority in Ireland, also shared with their right-wing nationalist contemporaries in Britain, which saw little difference between the political parties of the ANC and Sinn Féin, or the associated guerilla armies of MK and the IRA. All were left-wing, anti-colonial and progressive nationalist movements that had to be defeated. Indeed most members of the British minority felt a close affinity with the Boer minority in Apartheid-era South Africa: a centuries-old colonial community in a foreign land surrounded by a sea of ignorant, hostile natives, trying to preserve their own settler identity, language, culture and religion – not to mention complete political, economic and military hegemony over the natives.

In Britain the conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher impeded economic and political sanctions against the racist regime in South Africa, despite the condemnation of both the international community and domestic critics. She regarded the ANC as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’ and later explained on a visit to South Africa that her refusal to meet the imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela was simple: ‘the Prime Minister of England does not talk to terrorists’. These sentiments were widely echoed throughout her government and party with Tory Party conferences proposing motions calling for Mandela to be executed while members wore suits with collars, ties and lapel badges emblazoned with the words ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ (one of Thatcher’s closest political allies, Sir Teddy Taylor stated that Mandela ’should be shot’, a view Thatcher never disassociated herself from).

ANC / MK – SF / IRA

Even today, decades on, though the current Tory leader and Prime Minster of Britain, David Cameron, has admitted that Margaret Thatcher and her then government were wrong in their policies on Apartheid South Africa, there are still those in his party who remain wedded to their old views.

So it is probably with some outrage and a reaffirmation of their ancient prejudices that they heard today’s new revelations reported in the Irish Times of just how close the two liberation movements were:

‘THE IRA helped carry out one of the biggest bomb attacks against the South African apartheid government in the early 1980s, according to the memoirs of former senior ANC activist and politician Kader Asmal.

The former ANC cabinet minister and Trinity law professor, who died earlier this year, reveals in his memoirs published this week how volunteers recruited from Ireland carried out reconnaissance on one of the country’s most strategic installations – the Sasol oil refinery in Sasolburg, near Johannesburg, before it was bombed on June 1st, 1980.

The attack was carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, better known as MK, the military wing of the ANC, and struck a major blow against the apartheid state at the time.

In his book, Politics in my Blood , Asmal, founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM), also claims Gerry Adams provided the IRA volunteers to carry out the mission after he contacted go-between Michael O’Riordan, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland.

“I went to see the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O’Riordan, who was a man of great integrity and whom I trusted to keep a secret. He in turn contacted Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin and it was arranged that two military experts would come to Dublin to meet two MK personnel and take them to a safe place for two weeks of intensive training. I believe the expertise the MK cadres obtained was duly imparted to others in the ANC camps in Angola.”

Asmal says he was later approached again by the MK high command who wanted two people to conduct a reconnaissance operation on the feasibility of attacking Sasol, South Africa’s major oil refinery, vital to the maintenance of the apartheid state.

“Once again, I arranged the task with Adams of Sinn Féin, through the mediation of O’Riordan. Though I no longer recall the names of the persons who volunteered, if indeed I ever knew them, they laid the ground for one of the most dramatic operations carried out by MK personnel.”

Recalling the 1980 attack as one the most daring acts of military insurgency in the struggle against apartheid, he writes: “. . . while the damage to the refinery was, according to the apartheid regime, relatively superficial, the propaganda value and its effect on the morale of the liberation movement were inestimable. Yet only Louise (my wife) and I knew the attack on Sasolburg was the result of reconnaissance carried out by members of the IRA.”

He added: “The attack on Sasolburg had nothing to do with the IAAM, and nobody knew about the story behind it except Louise and me.

“When the plant blew up, we were so excited I suppose some of the other IAAM people must have wondered if we had any connection or involvement.”’

The British Unionist minority in Ireland displays the banners of racist regimes from across history, including British Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa and the Confederate States

Many years later the ANC played a crucial role supporting Sinn Féin in the Peace Process of the 1990s and early 2000s between the belligerent parties in Ireland and Britain , some of which was revealed by the Observer newspaper:

‘One of the last ANC militants to lay down arms after the war against apartheid played a leading role in convincing the IRA to move to its historic compromise over arms decommissioning last weekend, The Observer has learnt.

Sathyandranath ‘Mac’ Maharaj held a secret meeting with IRA leaders, including the hardline Marxist Brian Keenan, in Belfast in February, shortly after the British Government suspended the short-lived power-sharing executive. The one-time Communist ANC activist told Keenan and three other members of the IRA’s Army Council to ‘be creative’ over the arms issue.

According to republican sources, Maharaj’s advice helped propel the organisation towards its unprecedented offer to put arms beyond use and allow independent observers to monitor its weapons dumps. Maharaj was accompanied on the trip by Leon Wessels, a white member of the Cabinet who ran Pretoria’s security apparatus, but the former held the talks with the IRA leadership.

Maharaj is understood to have reported back to his ANC colleague and former trade union leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, that a breakthrough in the Northern Ireland deadlock could be achieved. Ramaphosa has since been appointed as one of the two observers to verify IRA arms dumps are sealed and guns have been put beyond use.

It is suggested Sinn Fein MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness asked the ANC leadership to help them convince IRA sceptics to launch an initiative to break the deadlock.

Maharaj, like Keenan in Ireland, was initially sceptical about the politics of compromise at the end of apartheid. He was number three in the ANC’s military wing and laid down his arms only after Nelson Mandela had convinced him attacks on the security forces would damage reconciliation with the white community.

The IRA looks upon the ANC as ‘brothers’ in the struggle for national liberation and for more than two decades has maintained political links with the South African movement. However, there were never any formal military ties.’

Of course we can now see that there were very formal ties between Umkhonto we Sizwe or MK and the Irish Republican Army or the IRA. In fact the struggle between Irish Republicans and Apartheid South Africa went much further, for it involved Boer-ruled South Africa directly engaging in state-sponsored terrorism in Ireland through the supply of weapons, explosives and money to the British Unionist separatist minority in Ireland in the 1980s and ’90s. As the report above continues:

‘In the Eighties it was other South Africans who helped fuel the Ulster conflict. Apartheid agents indirectly armed both the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force 13 years ago, enabling the two loyalist organisations to intensify their violence up until the 1994 ceasefires.

Douglas Berndhart, an American-born agent for Boss, apartheid’s secret intelligence agency, put loyalists in touch with a Lebanese gunrunner, Joe Fawzi, in 1987. The UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance paid Fawzi around £300,000 (stolen in a bank robbery in Portadown) for a large consignment of weapons, including hundreds of AK47s that had fallen into the hands of Lebanese Christian militias. These weapons had been captured from the retreating PLO, which was expelled from south Lebanon in 1982.

Ulster loyalists made two further attempts to gain arms directly from the apartheid regime. The UDA sent Brian Nelson to Johannesburg in the same year to make contact with Ulster expatriates living in South Africa who supported the loyalist cause. The trip came to nothing, probably because Nelson was an agent working inside the UDA.

A more serious bid to procure weapons took place a year later when Ulster Resistance, founded but later disowned by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, tried to sell surface-to-air missile systems to apartheid agents in Paris. French intelligence arrested three Ulster men, Samuel Quinn, James King and Noel Lyttle, at the Hilton hotel as they were about to make contact with South African diplomat Daniel Storm.

Storm had offered Ulster Resistance weapons in return for stolen missile systems manufactured at Shorts aircraft factory in east Belfast. The apartheid government wanted the missiles to shoot down MiG aircraft flown by Cuban pilots in battles between Angolan Marxist forces and the South African Defence Forces. Ulster Resistance’s botched attempt to buy weapons from the Pretoria regime resulted in France and Britain expelling six South African embassy staff, including Storm, from their Paris and London missions.

The political leaders of the loyalist organisations that smuggled those Lebanese armaments into Northern Ireland have so far refused to follow the IRA’s lead and offer up a similar arms inspection deal. John White, a former UDA prisoner and now chief spokesman for the Ulster Democratic Party, said he would have preferred all paramilitary organisations voluntarily to destroy their arsenals.’

Peter Robinson caught on camera in late 1984 during a visit to the Israel-Lebanon border with an automatic assault rifle

The obituary of the notorious British Intelligence agent Brian Nelson provides even more details on those who connived in facilitating the support of Apartheid South Africa for the British ethnic minority in Ireland, the close involvement of the British military and intelligence services, and the years of separatist terrorism that stemmed from that:

‘Brian Nelson, who has died of a brain haemorrhage aged 55, features in today’s report by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens. In the early 1990s, Stevens, then a relatively lowly deputy chief constable in Cambridgeshire, was asked to conduct an inquiry into the relationship between the British army and Protestant paramilitaries, notably the Ulster Defence Association.

He soon came across Nelson, a fanatical and sectarian Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road, who was recruited in 1985 by British military intelligence to act as an army agent in the UDA, which he had joined a decade earlier. Nelson, a former soldier, had served with the Black Watch, and later took a building job in Germany

He performed his delicate and dangerous new task with great enthusiasm. His house and car, plus £200 a week expenses, were paid for by the British army (the British taxpayer). In 1987, soon after his recruitment, Nelson went to South Africa to shop for arms for the UDA and supervised the shipment of two huge batches of arms, at least one of which ended up in the hands of the paramilitaries.

Throughout his time in the UDA, Nelson worked closely with army intelligence, whose policy at the time was shamelessly to take sides: for the Protestant paramilitaries, who were seen as pro-British; and against the IRA, who were seen as the enemy. This policy drew British military intelligence into a gang war. Drawing on his sources in British intelligence, Nelson would pass on the names and addresses of known IRA activists to the UDA, whose gunmen would promptly go out and “execute” thesuspects.

The success of Nelson’s work commended him to the UDA hierarchy, who appointed him “head of intelligence”. But his system did not always work. In May 1988, Terry McDaid, a bricklayer, was at home watching television when masked gunmen smashed into his home and shot him dead. It was a mistake. The gunmen were looking for Terry’s brother Declan, whose name had been supplied by Nelson.

The policy of consistent collusion between British army special forces and Orange assassins was bitterly opposed in the 1970s by Colin Wallace, an army information officer at Lisburn with strong connections to intelligence, and Fred Holroyd, a British military intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. Both men were denounced and sacked.

Wallace was framed, and jailed for killing his best friend. In 1996, 10 years after his release, his conviction was quashed by the court of appeal. When Stevens discovered the role of Nelson in paramilitary sectarian murders, he insisted on Nelson’s prosecution, and he was arrested.

This caused dismay in the British army and its undercover organisation, the Force Research Unit (FRU). Stevens was adamant that he could not condone Nelson’s behaviour, and frantic negotiations followed. For nearly two years, Nelson was held in the relatively comfortable police “supergrass suite” in Belfast.

A deal was finally clinched in January 1992. Nelson agreed to plead guilty to five conspiracies to murder, and at least four sectarian murder charges against him were dropped. In a bizarre court case lasting less than a day, Nelson’s real role was effectively covered up. After a moving tribute to his sterling work for the British army from a then anonymous colonel, Nelson got 10 years.

Speaking from behind a security screen, and brushing aside Nelson’s record as an accomplice to murder, the colonel stressed the lives Nelson had allegedly “saved”. Nelson was released after serving less than half his sentence, and spent the rest of his life under a false identity.

Stevens, however, was reluctant to leave the matter there. Assisted by Hugh Orde, now chief constable in Northern Ireland, he continued his inquiries into the complicity of army intelligence and the FRU with sectarian murder gangs. Nelson was always at the centre of his inquiries.

The Stevens/Orde report is likely to deal in detail with many sectarian murders of the time, including the appalling murder in his home in 1989 of solicitor Pat Finucane. Nelson’s premature death saves him from further embarrassment. The anonymous “Colonel J” has since been identified as Brigadier Gordon Kerr, now military attaché to the British embassy in Beijing.’

Hundreds of Irish men, women and children, citizens of Ireland, lost their lives or were injured as a result of the steady supply of arms from Apartheid South Africa to the British colonial minority in Ireland, a supply chain overseen by the highest echelons of the British state in what was, and is, Britain’s Iran-Contra Scandal. However, no one in Britain, be it politicians or journalists, have ever expressed any real interest in examining this campaign of state-sponsored terrorism waged on their behalf in Ireland. On the contrary some have been implicit in covering it up, as with much else that happened in Britain’s 30 year Dirty War.

Recent photo of Ulster Resistance terrorists, one armed with a British Army issued SA80 Rifle (the recent ‘A2′ variant only available to British Troops)

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The Labour Party And The Official IRA – They Haven’t Gone Away, You Know

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Proinsias de Rossa – He Give You Happy Ending!

The hijacking of the leadership of the Irish Labour Party by Official Sinn Féin / Official IRA Sinn Féin the Workers Party / Official IRA the Workers Party / Official IRA / Group B Democratic Left in the 1990s is one of the great putsches of Irish political history. The sequence of events is clear enough. In the late 1960s the higher echelons of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army had come under the influence of would-be communist revolutionaries more concerned with liberating the global working classes than the Irish population of the North of Ireland. The fact that the working classes of the world weren’t all that sanguine about the glories of communist liberation and that Irish citizens living in the north-east of the country were rather more concerned about being murdered in their beds by rampaging mobs from the British ethnic minority than Marx or Lenin never really bothered these newbie Reds. The proletariat would follow where the revolutionary leadership led them (for the leadership knew better).

In no time at all the Irish Republican movement was split, Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army into Official (‘communist’) and Provisional (‘nationalist’) wings. Official Sinn Féin (OSF) gradually dumped all pretence of being an Irish Republican or Nationalist party and became just another bunch of pretentious Western European Marxist-Leninist beardies, albeit a bunch of pseudos with a rather handy military wing in the form of the Official IRA (OIRA). By the late-1970s the OIRA were on ceasefire while OSF played at holier-than-thou working class politics, decrying all forms of (Irish) nationalism, while making some rather odd friends across the barricades amongst the British separatist minority in Ireland – much to the approval of their fellow communists in Britain, who kindly gave their imprimatur to the whole exercise at which their Irish puppies happily wagged their tails (and some still do). They also managed to infiltrate several key areas in Ireland’s news media establishment, particularly the News and Current Affairs Department of RTÉ, where they openly displayed a Stalinist iron-fist control, deliberately setting news agendas and self-censoring reports from the North of Ireland.

Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit, Run, Run, Run, Here Comes The Farmer With His Gu- Oooops!

By the 1980s OSF had gone through several transformations to become the Workers Party, a straightforward Irish communist party in all but name, anti-democratic authoritarian tendencies an’ all. Wedded to its pure ideology and intolerant of any dissent or disagreement the organisation in the north-east of the country became a by-word for petty street thuggery and intimidation hidden behind the genuine and principled few. The Official IRA was now known internally as Group B and became the party’s enforcers, the breakers of legs and shooters of kneecaps. They also provided much of the party’s funding through an organised web of criminality: robberies, kidnapping, drug-dealing, extortion, prostitution, smuggling and many other ‘special activities’. However the old enmities derived from the original split with the Provisionals never went away and many in the WP / OIRA developed what are best described as ‘mutually beneficial relationships’ with the British authorities in the North of Ireland, military and political, which resulted in the movement becoming, however incongruously, a part of Britain’s counter-insurgency war machine against the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin.

The closeness of these relationships were such that it led to a few members of the Workers Party into becoming spies and informers for the British Forces in the Irish communities of the North (with the approval and connivance of some of the organisation’s leadership), allowing the WP to target political or community rivals as well as bringing in yet more ‘special revenues’, this time from British government coffers. The fact that this ‘collaboration’ resulted in the imprisonment or deaths of Irish citizens seemed not to bother the Workers Party apparatchiks one whit in their single-minded aim of bringing about about a class revolution in Ireland. Yet this dual game of playing at both politics and militarism, while claiming to be unarmed peace-loving democrats and decriers of all forms of violence, could not continue indefinitely and in the early 1990s the Workers Party experienced its most serious split with the formation of Democratic Left (DL).

The Workers Party – Brought To You In Association With Our Overseas Partners!

This short-lived Irish political party eventually merged with Ireland’s Labour Party in 1999 and here is where the real story begins for in a few short years the former DL members who joined Labour had risen to the top of the party and eventually took control of its leadership in a political takeover so ruthless and audacious that it left many traditional Labour activists and members utterly stunned. The new leading lights of the Labour Party were now the likes of Proinsias de Rossa (former IRA, Sinn Féin, Workers Party, Democratic Left), Pat Rabbitte (Sinn Féin, Workers Party, Democratic Left, Labour Party leader), Éamon Gilmore (Sinn Féin, Workers Party, Democratic Left, Labour Party leader) and Kathleen Lynch (Workers Party, Democratic Left). And it is to the latter that we now turn, in this report from the Mail Online:

‘The brother-in-law of Ireland’s Minister of State Kathleen Lynch is a fugitive from justice who is wanted for questioning by police over an elaborate counterfeiting operation.

Just weeks ago, Mrs Lynch was embroiled in controversy for hiring her husband, Bernard, who spent a year in prison for murdering a man in a machine-gun attack before being acquitted on appeal.

Bernard’s brother Brian, 58, was suspected of being the brains behind a massive counterfeiting scam uncovered by gardaí in a raid at Repsol Ltd, which was on the ground floor of the Workers’ Party Dublin headquarters in 1983.

The Workers Party, the political wing of the Official IRA, became Democratic Left in 1992 and merged into the Labour Party in 1999.

Brian Lynch was one of a number of men wanted for questioning by gardaí in relation to the operation.

Another being sought was Seán Garland, who is currently fighting extradition for his alleged involvement in an international forgery conspiracy involving the KGB and North Korea in a plot to undermine the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. has been seeking Mr Garland’s extradition since May 2005 when he was indicted for alleged trading in forged $100 bills as part of the so-called ‘superdollar’ conspiracy that began in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and expanded to involve North Korea – a place Mr Garland visited several times during the period in his capacity as a Workers’ Party officer and as a director of GKG Communications, an international business consultancy.

The U.S. alleges that Mr Garland and six co-conspirators, a Russian, a South African and four Englishmen, used couriers to transport supernotes around the world.

The indictment also refers to Garland as ‘the man in the hat’ and identified specific dates when he had transported forged currency from North Korean embassies.

However, the whole ‘superdollar’ affair has its genesis in a Garda raid on a warehouse on Hanover Quay in November 1983 that uncovered a stack of near-perfect Irish £5 notes worth £1.7m.

This raid led to the gardaí searching Repsol. a printing firm where Brian Lynch was an employee and which was run by Mr Garland.

Mr Lynch had previously worked in his father’s printing business in Cork and was known among the Official IRA as the ‘master printer’.

His sister-in-law, the well respected politician Kathleen Lynch, is the Minister of State with responsibility for disability, equality and mental health. He is also the brother of Ciarán Lynch, the Labour TD for Cork.’

The Workers Party – More Than Meets The Eye!

I previously highlighted the case of Seán Garland (as well as some of the shady history of the Workers Party in Ireland and the baleful influence it has had upon our political and journalistic establishments) but the controversy around Bernard Lynch and Larry White, a Republican activist murdered by the OIRA in highly controversial circumstances in the mid-1970 was largely forgotten, except by his family and friends, until Kathleen Lynch appointed her husband Bernard as a ‘special advisor’, a cushy role paid for by the Irish tax-payer (thank God the Labour Party aren’t like Fianna Fáil, hey? No family-ties, nepotism and cronyism here). As the Irish Times reported:

‘THE FAMILY of a Cork republican murdered more than 35 years ago has called on the Taoiseach to seek the removal of a Minister of State’s personal assistant who was acquitted of the killing in the 1970s.

The family of Larry White are angered that Labour TD Kathleen Lynch, Minister of State at the Departments of Justice and Health, has appointed her husband Bernard as her personal assistant. Mr Lynch, who was then a member of Official Sinn Féin, was acquitted on appeal after being convicted, along with three other men, of the murder of Mr White in the mid-1970s.

The Lynches declined to comment on the matter yesterday. Neither the Taoiseach nor Labour leader Eamon Gilmore were available for comment.

In November 1976, the Court of Criminal Appeal set aside the conviction of Mr Lynch and another man for the murder of Mr White. Two other convictions were upheld. Mr White had been a member of the republican splinter group Saor Éire, which had fallen out with Official Sinn Féin. The 25-year-old was walking from the pub to his home in Cork on June 10th, 1975, when he was killed in a machine-gun attack.

Gardaí arrested and charged four men: Mr Lynch and David O’Donnell (then 21), of Rosewood Estate, Ballincollig, Co Cork and Leeson Street, Belfast; Cornelius Finbar Doyle (25), Nun’s Walk, Co Cork; and Bartholomew Madden (34), Owenacurra Court, Togher, Co Cork. Mr Lynch was at the time a leading member of Cork (Official) Sinn Féin, according to The Lost Revolution, a history of the party by Scott Millar and Brian Hanley published in 2009.

The trial, which lasted 32 days, was one of the longest seen in the Special Criminal Court. The four men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. There were allegations of Garda brutality and of confessions being given under duress.

In setting aside Mr Lynch’s conviction, chief justice Tom O’Higgins said the Court of Criminal Appeal was satisfied there were grounds for suspecting Mr Lynch was aware of the intention to use a stolen white Cortina car for the purpose of some crime, possibly a serious crime of violence. There was, however, no admissible evidence against him of any activity in the preparation or commission of a crime of violence, or the murder of Larry White.

Proof of knowledge that such a crime was about to be committed, even if it had been well established against him, would, in the absence of proof of some active participation, not support the conviction of murder, according to the chief justice. The conviction was set aside.’

Ah, well that’s okay then, isn’t it?

Except, of course, its not.

As the Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis pointed out there are an awful lot of skeletons in the cupboards of the former members of Official Sinn Féin that are now found in the Labour Party that have yet to come out:

‘Dessie insists that there are prominent members of Labour today — politicians who had previously been members of Democratic Left, the Workers’ Party and Official Sinn Féin before joining Labour — who were also members of the IRA. ‘There are quite a few hypocrites there. I’m well aware of that. I know some of them from my past. So, I know the positions that they held. Some of them are still there.’

Indeed, for a start one wonders what happened to the arsenal of weapons and explosives retained by the Official IRA that have yet to be ‘decommissioned’ (contrary to public myth the OIRA has not given up or ‘put beyond use’ its stores of weaponry nor does this now seem likely to ever occur). What happened to all those monies raised by the OIRA through criminal activities, and ‘foreign’ donations? Just exactly whose pockets, and whose bank accounts, did all those pounds and dollars and roubles go into?

The Workers Party – The Answer To A Question Nobody Asked

And what about justice? Justice for those people who lost their lives or freedom as the result of actions carried out by OIRA or WP activists?

The next time you see senior members of the Labour Party, and now ministers of the Government of Ireland, spouting on about the necessity for politics only, and their rejection of violence and ‘paramilitarism’, just remember where they came from, what paths they followed, and what utter hypocrisy they cloak their political histories in.

The Official IRA Discusses Education Policy With The BBC, 1975 (No, This Is Not A Joke!)

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