Cartlanna Clibe: British State Terrorism

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Playing Fantasy Troubles

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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Lies, Damned Lies And The War In Ireland

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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Fine Gael: The Terrorists We Embrace And The Ones We Don’t

Fine Gael minister Phil Hogan has declared that there is no place for terrorists in Áras an Uachtaráin. According to the Irish Independent:

“Environment Minister Phil Hogan has said that US multinational companies would be “appalled” if Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein was President and that Ireland’s competitors for foreign direct investment would “not be slow to whisper about a terrorist in the Park”.

Mr Hogan has told the Sunday Independent: “Putting Mr McGuinness in charge of this State would leave us looking like a Banana Republic… (which) could denude Ireland of serious levels of corporate investment within 24 months.”

In a trenchant attack, the Fine Gael minister has also expressed concern that a “constitutional crisis” could arise, should further information in relation to the “murky” past of Mr McGuinness emerge while the former Provisional IRA leader was President.

He said: “The absence of an impeachment process within the Irish Constitution means that we could be heading for an unprecedented stand-off — where both Houses of the Oireachtas would vote ‘no confidence’ in Mr McGuinness but he would refuse to resign.”

The spotlight will now turn to the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, and to the Fine Gael candidate, Gay Mitchell, to establish whether they support the views of the Environment Minister.”

Wow. Some intervention there, Phil (even if one detects a note of panic in it). No terrorists in the Áras, hey?

So here is a picture of President McAleese, President of Ireland, whose official residence is Áras an Uachtaráin, with the British terrorist leader Jackie McDonald. McDonald is senior member of the UDA (aka UFF), a British Unionist terrorist organisation in Ireland which killed or wounded up to a thousand Irish men, women and children between 1971 and 2007. Of this number at least 80% were non-combatant civilians.

And here is another picture, this time it’s President McAleese’s husband, Martin, also with McDonald. Boy, he does get around.

Hmm. Maybe when career politician Phil Hogan (close friend of disgraced former FG TD Michael Lowry) said no terrorists in Áras an Uachtaráin he meant no Irish terrorists? The British ones presumably being not so bad?

Ah, Fine Gorm. You old incorrigibles. Still hankering back for the old days of forelock pulling inside the Big House. “Paddy” works in the kitchens as his master’s servant, not like them rebellious natives out in the bogs.

So here, out of interest, is Jackie McDonald’s recently expressed view on Martin McGuinness’ candidacy for president, via the BBC:

“Jackie McDonald has forged a relationship with the current president Mary McAleese and her husband Martin.

He said that unionists who accept Mr McGuinness as deputy first minister would be wrong to oppose him being a candidate.

He said he thought that Mr McGuinness had “massaged the truth” about his IRA past but was now “a man of peace”.

Mr McDonald is the leader of an organisation which murdered hundreds of people during the Northern Ireland Troubles.

However during the peace process, he has been a regular visitor to Áras an Uachtaráin, the home of the president and her husband.

Speaking to the Good Morning Ulster programme, Mr McDonald said that, while he understood well the concerns of victims, such demands were misguided and it would be impractical for Mr McGuinness to “tell the truth” in isolation.

He added: “If they are talking about telling the truth, will the British government tell the truth? Will everybody tell the truth?””

Will Fine Gael tell the truth? The truth surrounding the cover-up of the 1974 mass murder by British state-sponsored terrorist of Irish citizens on the streets of Dublin and Monaghan? Or is that one truth too far, Phil?

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The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament

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.

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

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

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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Black Provos – The ANC And The IRA

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

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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One Step At A Time – The Belfast Agreement And Beyond

Now that the dust has settled an examination of the news reports issued over the last three days reveals just how widespread the violence in the North of Ireland was, in reaction to marches by the Orange Order (the Protestant fundamentalist organisation based in the British Unionist community in Ireland). Street clashes between protestors and the PSNI (the British paramilitary police force in the North) occurred in Belfast, Derry, Strabane, Newry, Ballymena and Armagh. While some were fairly brief affairs others were more prolonged, involving up to two hundred people over two or three nights of rioting, in some cases well organised and sustained.

This has led to accusations of ‘orchestration’ being thrown at Dissident Republican organisations but as yet the PSNI has neither confirmed or denied such accusations. Though both elements of Sinn Féin and Unionism are pushing this line no concrete proof has emerged and the matter is far less dry-cut as was the case with the organised assaults on the isolated Irish civilian enclave of the Short Strand, with mobs being led by the British terrorist group the UVF.

Some have linked the Dissidents’ supposed machinations to the manipulation of disaffected youth in Nationalist areas, who are either portrayed as innocent teens led astray by older more sinister elements or straightforward hooligans and vandals led by thugs.

According to UTV the Sinn Féin representative in Derry, Martina Anderson, stated that:

‘…the violence was “orchestrated” and described it as “an orgy of destruction”.

“Let’s be clear the vandalism and wanton destruction in the Bogside last night was just that,” she said.

“They are vandals pure and simple, they are an embarrassment to the nationalist people, there is no political motivation for these activities.

“While the orchestration of the trouble in the Bogside is encouraged by a small number of people opposed to the peace process and anti-community elements coming together no political progress can be made by burning a number of vehicles and holding the community they come from hostage”, she added.’

This has been echoed by other SF spokespeople, as well as the SDLP’s Alban Maginness in Belfast who claimed that:

‘…he didn’t think any public representatives could have had much effect on the rioters.

“There was no actual reason for the riot, beyond the fact that a small number of people wanted a riot, planned a riot and got a riot,” he said.’

So, while some have attempted to blame various factors for the eruptions in the Nationalist areas of the North (Dissidents, unemployment, poverty, ant-social youth criminals or gangs) a more realistic and for most Peace Process politicians unpalatable factor is an ideological one. The possibility that a younger generation of Irish citizens living in the North of Ireland under the aegis of the Belfast Agreement no longer find it an acceptable political or constitutional arrangement, and wish for more, seems to be gaining ground.

Henry McDonald touches upon this in the Guardian:

‘The official explanation for why there has been an upsurge in street violence in Northern Ireland this marching season is that it is the product of a socioeconomic underclass, nihlistic “recreational” rioting or apolitical thuggery.

However, this is to ignore two important factors as to why hundreds have come on to the streets to confront a heavily armed and protected PSNI.

The first of these is ideology: many of those young republicans taking part in street violence across the city and beyond have little or no investment in the current political settlement at Stormont. Unemployed and with little prospect of long-term, fulfilling jobs, this social group is alienated from the political process. They see all politicians and especially those from “their side” as part of the establishment, aloof and indifferent to them.

Sprinkle on top the influence of ideologically-fired republican dissident organisations from the Real IRA to the Continuity IRA and you have an explosive mix ready to detonate at any time but in particular during the marching season.

The conclusion to the younger disgruntled republicans already spoiling for a fight was that the most powerful message you could transmit to the state was via violence. This is why there has been such an upsurge during the 2011 marching season and why the possible winners in the current battle of territory in Northern Ireland may be the republican dissident organisations, who will soon have another slew of recruits from among the streetfighters battling the security forces across Belfast and beyond.’

While McDonald goes some way in his analysis he does not go far enough. This is not simply a question of a depressed economy, or out-of-work youth, or disaffected youth, though these things do contribute towards unrest and radicalisation. It is rather a generation of Irish men and women, those in their teens and early twenties, for whom the ‘Long War’ is a memory, the subject of history and folklore as much as personal experience and reality. Men and women who are now aged 20 were 7 when the Belfast Agreement of 1998 was signed. They were 5 when the second IRA ceasefire of 1996 took place.

They are not the ‘children of the Troubles’ the way their older siblings or their parents are. Nor do they have they ingrained patience or tolerance for political change those generations had. They are progressive, nationalist and Irish in a way even their parents couldn’t emulate. For them the ‘Border’ is meaningless, ‘Northern Ireland’ is meaningless, British rule is meaningless. They see themselves as wholly Irish and view the present arrangements as more of an infringement than an enhancement of that. It is not that they don’t want the Belfast Agreement. They do. Rather it is that they want the Belfast Agreement Plus. They want more. And they demand more.

Far from the end of all violence (and for some parties to the agreement by implication all political movement) the Belfast Agreement of 1998 is merely another stepping stone on a journey with one destination and one end.

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Ireland Unfree Shall Never Be At Peace?

Well, apologies to all those who’ve contacted me over the last few days in relation to the street clashes in and around the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ marches staged by the Orange Order, the British Protestant fundamentalist organisation in Ireland, ‘celebrating’  British colonial power in Ireland. Thanks to everyone for all the updates but as you can imagine it has been quiet busy, but will post your stories here as and when I can.

Each July 12th we witness the British ethnic minority in Ireland, mainly in the northern part of the country, marching in quasi-military parades (frequently involving British paramilitary-based bands) marking the presence and ascendancy of British rule in the north-east of the island (though originally over all of the island). This year we have witnessed exceptionally bad violence in what has always been a violence-prone part of the political calendar. So what have the press reported? In the Guardian it is ‘militant Republicans’ blamed for the violence:

‘North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds has blamed “militant republicans” opposed to the peace process for organising a sustained riot in the Ardoyne area’

This echoes the recent claims made in the BBC’s prime news and current affairs show, Newsnight, which implied that the series of assaults by British terrorist gangs on Irish civilian enclaves in Belfast and elsewhere, were the fault of ‘Dissident Republicans’ whose attacks on the British Forces and other targets had created a ‘reaction’ in Unionist militant circles. Which more or less repeats what happened in the earliest days of the Long War of 1969-1996 when British journalists blamed all violence on Irish Republicans, excusing or explaining way the murder and mayhem carried out by Unionist gangs as ‘reactionary’. So nothing’s changed then and nothing has been learned. The British media will always side with the British minority in Ireland, and with a few honourable exceptions, justify the violence of the latter – when they deem it worthy of reporting at all.

But the Guardian goes on:

‘Police officers came under attack for the second night running, with petrol bombs and missiles thrown by youths from Ardoyne. There were also pockets of trouble elsewhere, with two cars hijacked and burned in the nationalist Market area of central Belfast. A riot in Derry’s Bogside led to seven arrests, including that of a 14-year-old boy.

…Several police officers were injured, as well as a press photographer who was hit with a plastic baton round.

Police fired dozens of plastic bullets at rioters and repeatedly deployed water cannon after coming under attack from a crowd of up to 200 people.

The rioters also set fire to water cannon with petrol bombs.

The attackers kept up a constant barrage of stones, bottles and other missiles for several hours once a controversial Orange Order parade had passed the Ardoyne shops shortly after 7pm on Tuesday night.’

Notably while the collateral shooting of a photographer by a suspected Dissident Republican member in the attacks on the Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand received much British media attention (the intended target was nearby police officers) the shooting of photographer with a ‘plastic baton round’ (or bullet to you and me) by the PSNI paramilitary police has hardly been reported. Again, the British media siding with the British forces – regular or irregular.

So what to make of it all, this renewed communal conflict in a time of ‘peace’? Despite the promise of the Belfast Agreement, with its power-sharing regional assembly and authority in the North of Ireland between the Irish and British communities and cross-border bodies between Ireland north and south, the basic cause of the conflict never went away – the British presence in Ireland. That presence can be taken at its widest meaning, Britain’s continued colonial claim of sovereignty over part of the island of Ireland, or at its narrowest, the presence of a significant British ethnic minority on the island who form a local majority in the area the British claim as their own: the North of Ireland.

As the 12th of July parades aptly display that British minority is still unable to reconcile itself both to its historic and geographic positions: a small ethno-national minority, in the main descended from British colonial settlers, in a country that is not Britain or British. The British Unionist population continues to behave as if this was still pre-independence Ireland, a colonial possession within the so-called United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, where they were the holders of all power and privilege – as befits a colonial elite – surrounded by a sea of hostile ‘natives’.

There are of course some who try to present the conflict in the North of Ireland as a non-colonial paradigm, but rather as some sort of aberrant religious-based quarrel, a hangover of medieval politics, but this is to display a complete (and probably wilful) ignorance of the situation. The struggle in Ireland in terms of politics and communal conflict is no different from that in any other colonial or post-colonial nation or region around the globe. Just because it is Europe and the ‘natives’ have white skin does not make it any less a clash of colonist versus colonised, albeit one three centuries in the making.

It is only by addressing the fundamentals of the conflict that a permanent end can be brought to that conflict. And that can only occur when Britain withdraws its active political, economic and military support for the British settler minority in Ireland and places their future within the context of the nation of Ireland: where it inevitably, and rightly, belongs.

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The C-Word Is… Collusion

Incredible news today that an official investigation into the Loughinisland Massacre has concluded that there was no collusion or co-operation between Unionist terrorists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the disbanded former paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland. The 1994 attack on a local, rural pub in County Down resulted in the murder of six Irish civilians, including an 87 year old man, by gunmen from the British terrorist group the UVF. Since the killings speculation has been rife that RUC officers in the area covered up for and protected the terrorists. It has also been suggested the some members of the RUC were aware of the imminent attack before hand and allowed it to go ahead.

The report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland has concluded that, though vital physical evidence related to the crime was mishandled or destroyed and that no proper investigation was made into related Unionist terrorist activities in the region, there was no act of ‘collusion’ between the RUC and the UVF.

From RTÉ:

‘A report by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman into the RUC’s handling of the Loughinisland atrocity 17 years ago has found there were failings in the police investigation into the murders.

Failures include the unauthorised destruction of the killers’ get-away car and the failure to investigate properly the link between the Loughinisland shootings and other terrorist attacks.

Al Hutchinson’s report says the original police inquiry lacked ‘effective leadership and investigative diligence’.

However, it said there is ‘insufficient’ evidence of collusion between the group behind the attack and the security forces.’

The Irish Times points out some of the failures in the original RUC investigation highlighted in the report including:

‘Records were missing.

The car used by the UVF was improperly destroyed 10 months after the attack after lying outside a police station exposed to the elements.

Police failed to investigate properly the link between the Loughinisland shootings and other terrorist attacks.

Failures in the management of the murder incident room in the early stages and in the management of the computer system used by the investigation may also have resulted in the loss of evidential opportunities.’

That the Ombudsman’s can claim, in the context of the conflict in the North of Ireland and the notorious record of the RUC, that there was no collusion between the official and unofficial arms of Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland is beyond belief.

British paramilitary police in Ireland co-operating with British paramilitary terrorists in Ireland? Same old story, same old conflict.

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Loyalty Versus Counter-Insurgency – Or What To Do When The British No Longer Need You?

Jason Walsh Reporting In The CSM

Excellent reporting from Jason Walsh in the CS Monitor on yesterday’s UVF-led rioting in Belfast, asking the questions you’re unlikely to hear asked by most Irish and British journalists.

‘”For some weeks, there has been sporadic instances of antisocial stone-throwing across the interface in this area,” said Belfast’s Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile, who is a member of the republican party Sinn Féin and a resident of the area. “Local community representatives and politicians have been trying to deal with it with some success. It is important that this good work continues.

“However, what happened last night was not antisocial behavior or a sectarian riot,” he stated. “What happened was a well planned and orchestrated attack on the Catholic community in the Short Strand by the UVF.”

He says that the UVF’s activities in East Belfast have been a cause for concern for some time. “There has been a marked increase in UVF flag-flying, the painting of new paramilitary murals, and significant agitation around Loyal Order parades,” Mr. Ó Donnghaile says.

The UVF, founded in 1966 – three years before the Northern Irish conflict started in earnest – was one of the two pro-British paramilitary organizations involved in the conflict. A total of 481 killings have been attributed to the group. A leading member, Bobby Moffet, was shot dead by members of his own organization in 2009. Earlier in 2009, the group declared it has decommissioned its weapons.

The Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, led by retired Canadian General John de Chastelain, oversaw the decommissioning process. Despite this, fears have arisen that a new generation is attempting to seize power within the organization – and is willing to return to sectarian violence in order to achieve it.

A community activist working in Protestant east Belfast, who did not wish to be identified, told the Monitor the attacks were a result of a power struggle within loyalist paramilitarism.

“You have to look at what’s happening within the UVF: the loss of leadership and loss of control,” he says. “The east Belfast [brigade of the] UVF is flexing its muscles.”‘

It is claimed that another factor destabilizing the leadership of the UVF (as with other British Unionist terrorist groupings) is the activities of the Historical Enquiries Team, or HET, a unit of the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), which is investigating a number of ‘cold case crimes’ from throughout the history of the conflict. Though the HET has been examining murders and other incidences by all sides involved in the ’Long War’ some Unionists have claimed that the unit is primarily focused on the activities of Unionist paramilitaries. This has been dismissed by others as a smokescreen for militant Unionist factions now lacking a direction or focus, and who have in recent years turned on their own communities with an increased involvement in criminal activities, including drug dealing, racketeering, loansharking and prostitution.

Ironically the removal of much of their previous quasi-official status as a counter-insurgency arm of the British state in its decades-long war with armed Irish Republicans movements, has left Unionist paramilitaries ’out in the cold’, lacking real political representatives, power or influence. In previous times links with the British Intelligence agencies (primarily MI5 or the Security Service), the paramilitary police (the now disbanded Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC – forerunner of the PSNI), the British Army and various mainstream Unionist political parties, guaranteed the Unionist terrorists a substantive say in the politics of the North.

The Belfast Agreement has largely negated that influence and some Unionist paramilitaries feel ‘used and abused’ by the British state. Other Unionist terrorist leaders, however, have been seen to have garnered considerable personal wealth in the aftermath of the conflict and to have distanced themselves from their former comrades and communities. Some, especially amongst the younger generation of militant Unionists, are also increasingly questioning the claims of the older leaderships that the position of ‘Northern Ireland’ under British rule is secure and feel that the Nationalist community is increasingly in the ascendant.

A number of recent rows in the political arena, at Stormont, Belfast City Hall and elsewhere have illustrated mainstream Unionist unease which is finding a ready expression amongst the militant hard edge of Unionism. The North of Ireland’s dysfunctional, schizophrenic nature seems set to continue even as the sticking plaster of the Belfast Agreement looks increasingly frayed around the edges.

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UVF Organised Attacks On Nationalist Enclave

Confirmation today that the East Belfast wing of the British Unionist terrorist group, the UVF, organised the sustained assault on the Irish Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand last night, in the east of the city. Up to 500 Unionists, many in paramilitary clothing, took part in the attacks, with the Nationalist community of the Strand coming under fire from stones, bottles, petrol bombs, blast bombs and gun shoots. Amongst numerous injuries is reported the wounding of three men in an exchange of gun fire, as well as major damage to homes and other property, with a number of families being forced to flee their houses.

From UTV:

‘Two people received gunshot wounds to the leg when a total of 11 shots were fired during the violence in the lower Newtownards Road area, which erupted at around 9pm on Monday and lasted for more than four hours.

A number of petrol bombs were also thrown during the disturbance close to the Short Stand interface, which involved around 500 loyalist and nationalist rioters, including men wearing balaclavas and camouflage.

Bricks, bottles, fireworks and smoke bombs were also thrown and homes damaged in what police called a “high-level, life-threatening, organised, serious and sustained” attack by people “hell-bent on disorder”.

Police said members of the Ulster Volunteer Force were initially behind the violence, but the gun shots were fired from both sides of the community.’

The Guardian reports:

‘Sinn Féin blamed scores of masked men, who a party representative said were wearing camouflage clothing and surgical gloves, for launching co-ordinated attacks on the Catholic Short Strand area.

The Belfast mayor, Niall Ó Donnghaile, a councillor based in the Short Strand area, said a number of residents had been injured, including one man knocked unconscious when he was hit with a brick.

Ó Donnghaile said: “There is no doubt that this was unprovoked and was a carefully orchestrated and planned attack on the area. Homes have been attacked with petrol bombs and paint bombs, bricks, golf balls. I saw what happened.”‘

It is reported that a number of shots were fired from the direction of St. Matthews Church towards Unionist rioters in an eerie echo of the very earliest years of the conflict in the North of Ireland, when members of the Irish Republican Army defended the local Nationalist enclave from attacks by Unionist mobs in the Battle of St. Matthews, one of the major contributions towards the growth of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. However the BBC reports:

‘The PSNI said there was nothing to suggest that members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) had fired shots and it was too early to say if dissident republicans were involved as their investigations were continuing.’

In recent months the UVF has been attempting to reassert its authority in Unionist areas of Belfast, following a period of relative inactivity. The terrorist grouping is thought to be undergoing considerable tensions over the direction and control of the organisation with dissension in its leadership. The UVF has a notorious record for its terrorist campaign in Ireland, much of it under the direction of the British state, with the British Intelligence services, Army and paramilitary police exercising considerable control over the group in previous decades, as well as helping to arm and fund it.

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Playing The Red Card – British Unionists, A Free Scotland And The United States

We’ve all heard and read about British Unionists Nationalists playing the Orange Card to protect the ‘Union’ as Ireland reached its penultimate struggle for independence in the early 1900s but now the Conservative Party is playing a Red Card to defend the ‘Union’ – and to an American audience. The failed Scottish Tory-leader Annabel Goldie has claimed to the American news media that an independent Scotland would be,

…a left-of-centre, socialist administration with already well articulated views on issues like nuclear — Trident (nuclear missiles) or nuclear energy — and very strong views on social issues … all sorts of views which are somewhat alien to the American ethos.

There is much more of this in a lengthy, mixed MSNBC report entitled, Scotland to split from UK and ‘be a nation again’?

How long, I wonder, before the desperation of the British nationalist parties, Tory, Labour and Lib-Dem, makes them take up the Orange Card as a way of stoking communal strife in Scotland to forestall independence. Unlikely in this era? People thought the same in the ‘civilized’ political ethos of early 20th century Britain but the likes of the Churchills and other Tory grandees were only too happy to see anarchy and bloodshed on the streets if it meant the continued integrity of their United Kingdom. 

Let the Scots take warning. The referendum for independence is only the first step in a long and difficult process (and even that basic expression of democracy, a referendum, is being threatened by the qualifying diktats of London politicians and civil servants). Hopefully any future Scottish Revolution will be an entirely bloodless one. But if it means ‘saving’ the United Kingdom from a fatal fissure, there are many in the British establishment who will do to Scotland in the early part of the 21st century what they did to Ireland in the early part of the 20th century. 

If that happens what 1916 will save Scottish nationhood and democracy? Or will it simply fade into the past, subsumed again under the Greater England that hides behind the façade of the United Kingdom? 

On a slightly more optimistic note, if there is a Scottish Revolution, perhaps this will be one of its voices?

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The Irish Republican Army Way – And The Taliban Way

Volunteers of an Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army preparing for a foot-patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

Volunteers of an Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army preparing for a foot-patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

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

Several claims are clearly open to question:

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

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

An Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army receiving arms training at a mountain camp in Co. Donegal, Ireland, c.1980s

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

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

Others mix truth with an unintended comedy of ignorance:

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

An Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army sets up a vehicle-checkpoint, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

An Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army sets up a vehicle-checkpoint, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

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

An Active Service Unit (ASU) of the Irish Republican Army armed with vehicle-mounted heavy and general-purpose machine guns, British Occupied North of Ireland, c.1980s

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

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

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an AKM assault rifle on patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

A Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army armed with an AKM assault rifle on patrol, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994

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British Terrorists To Visit Dublin – This Time Minus The Bombs And Guns!

Unbelievable news today from journalist Eamonn Mallie:

‘The UDA’s five brigadiers and 4/5 representatives of their respective districts have been extended invitations to a wreath laying ceremony by Queen Elizabeth at Islandbridge in honour of the war dead. President Mary McAleese’s husband Martin has been involved with UDA leaders in community work for several years. South Belfast brigadier Jackie McDonald regularly visits Aras an Uachtarain.

Confirming the invitations on Wednesday to the Islandbridge leg of the Queen’s visit Mr McDonald said “this represents progress and is a reward for work being done. Others could learn from this.’

Yes, that’s right. On the anniversary of the British state-sponsored terrorist attacks in Dublin and Monaghan on 17 May 1974, that killed 33 civilians and wounded nearly 300 others, the leaders of the largest British terrorist movement in the North of Ireland (the Ulster Defence Association or UDA) will be attending the official ceremony by the British head of state at Islandbridge to commemorate those Irishmen who died on British military service in WWI (before Ireland gained it’s independence).

As news stories go this is one of the more extraordinary that I’ve seen. As a PR exercise it is about as sensitive as inviting unrepentant Nazis to visit Auschwitz.

The simultaneous bombings in the city of Dublin and the town of Monaghan were carried out by British Unionist terrorists in the so-called Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) under the control of the British Intelligence services (British Military Intelligence and the British Security Service or MI5) and the then British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland (the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC). Suspicions remain that elements of the British civil government were also culpable in giving the incentive for the attacks by the UVF to take place.

The UDA remains an illegal or banned (proscribed) organisation in the North of Ireland because of its status as a terrorist movement (a ban the British resisted for many years until International pressure forced their hand). It was responsible for the murder and wounding of hundreds of civilians during the war in the North – many at the behest of  the British Forces in a campaign of selective terror and assassination.

If the Irish people are prepared to welcome the British head of state, how do they feel about the leaders of the British terror gangs her forces harboured and directed for decades? A ‘gesture’ too far for even the most hardened stomach to accept?

More information here: