“As a classic “campaigning backbencher”, Jeremy Corbyn holds radical views on a range of issues that sit outside the comfort zone of mainstream politics…
Likewise, his unflinching support of Irish republicans’ aspiration for a united Ireland, is another association routinely thrown at him. So in recent weeks he has refused to condemn the Provisional IRA in a BBC interview and even been criticised for sharing a coffee with Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams.
Two factors are pertinent here. First, was Corbyn’s support for Sinn Fein and engagement with Irish issues legitimate or not and, secondly, did it serve any useful purpose?
…it was entirely legitimate for Corbyn and others, take an interest in the pressing affairs of Northern Ireland, especially as we now know that Margaret Thatcher’s government was engaged in secret talks with the IRA from the time of the Hunger Strikes.
The problem is that Westminster has traditionally paid scant regard to events in Northern Ireland. It was, for too long, the British state’s dirty little secret.
It was legitimate, too, for Corbyn and others to have a point of view about events there. Northern Ireland is a zero-sum issue. When it boils down to it, you are either in favour of the maintenance of the union with Northern Ireland, or you favour Irish unity. It really is as straightforward as that. Indeed, Corbyn’s position was, and perhaps still is, common enough around the party and in line with Labour’s official policy at the time of “unity by consent”.
Turning to the second question: has Corbyn’s interest in Northern Irish affairs done any good? With the benefit of historical perspective, the answer is, yes, it probably has. Back in 1981, following the Hunger Strikes when ten republican prisoners starved to death over their contention that there were political prisoners, not ordinary criminals, Sinn Fein tentatively embarked on a strategy which would eventually bloom into the peace process.
Engagement of the kind offered by Corbyn and many others on Labour’s left during the 1980s spurred on those in Sinn Fein who wanted to go down the political route.
Like many on the left, Corbyn saw Ireland as a classic struggle for national self-determination against colonial rule. But he was by no means alone. Nelson Mandela may be the safest of safe options for any politician responding to the question “who do you most admire in politics,” but he was also a strong supporter of Irish republicanism.
It was an association that weathered his transformation into international statesman. Indeed, Gerry Adams was part of the honour guard for Mandela’s funeral. No British politicians or anti-apartheid activists were granted similar status.”
Indeed the close ties between Sinn Féin and the ANC, and more pertinently between the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and Umkhonto we Sizwe, date back to the era when the UK’s views on apartheid and White minority rule were ambiguous at best, disingenuous at worse. If the Irish and South African insurgents saw parallels between their anti-colonial conflicts – and acted upon them – so too did the governments in London and Pretoria. After all, only Britain’s chattering classes could dismiss Nelson Mandela as a “Black Provo“, while Margaret Thatcher and her “Hang Mandela” Conservative Party seemed at times to be the principle apologists for apartheid in the capitals of Europe and beyond. Though in fairness, one supposes that a bit of political quid pro quo was the least the British could offer when they were using the services of the Whites-only government in South Africa to arm their terror factions in Ireland.
Quis separabit?
Specially invited by the ANC the president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams TD, is greeted with applause as he joins the Guard of Honour at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, the late president of South Africa, 2013
One of the great, populist myths on the right and far right of German politics during the 1920s and ’30s was the claim that the country had been “stabbed in the back” during the closing months of World War I by a minority cabal of left-wing agitators and Jewish financiers. Without that betrayal at home and the conspiracy abroad the empire would surely have overcome its enemies to emerge victorious from the battlefields of Europe. Certainly the humiliating defeat coupled with post-war reparations and territorial losses would never have happened. Or so the legend goes. A similar myth exists among the apologists for British rule on the island of Ireland, who claim that the nation’s peaceful development within the United Kingdom towards some sort of local autonomy or even independence was thwarted by a tiny, unrepresentative group of radical republicans and nationalists working against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Irish people. This tale has been taken up by the academic and journalistic ideologues of the so-called revisionist movement in recent decades with all the pernicious effects on a contemporary understanding of Irish history that we might expect. Indeed no single event has been more subject to counterfactual speculation than the foundational Easter Rising of 1916.
“Neo-Redmondites, nostalgic for an Ireland that never really existed suggest that the majority of nationalists were content to wait for the conclusion of the war and self-government; that it was only the Rising and the British reaction to it that produced support for republicanism.
I think the story is more complicated. Was it the case that nationalist Ireland was content with Home Rule? And what did Home Rule mean to ordinary people? What was the Home Rule party promising?
…by 1916, with Home Rule looking increasingly distant, the context of the war was crucial. Well before that conflict was over, most Irish people regretted that John Redmond had promised nationalist support for the war effort.
It was support for the war that fatally wounded Redmondism, not just the reaction to Easter 1916.
Anti-war sentiment was growing in Ireland well before then.”
While Hanley’s overall arguments in relation to the era of 1916 are far more complex and nuanced than the short excerpts above, they do indicate the importance of historical denialism amongst certain classes in modern Irish (and British) society, one that was being expressed by supporters of the redundant Irish Parliamentary Party as early as the 1920s. Whether it is a condemnation of the establishment of a Provisional Government of the Irish Republic in 1916 (a terrorist coup d’état) or a refusal to recognise the Sinn Féin electoral victories in the general and local elections of 1918, 1920 and 1921 (rigged or lacking plurality), the conspiracy theories grow with every telling.
One of these tall-tales, and one nearer our own time, is the belief that the celebrations around the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966 were the spark that lit the north-eastern conflagration. No matter that the only militarist violence witnessed that year came from the British terror groupings, notably the murders of two Roman Catholic men and a Protestant woman by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). No, it was the staging of official parades in Dublin and the broadcasting of TV dramas on RTÉ that brought the radical republicans and nationalists to the fore once again (albeit a factually inconvenient four or five years later). Brian Hanley opens his speech by criticising the fears of those I have labelled the “1969 Truthers“:
“It is fairly certain that when those charged with developing a programme of commemoration for the ‘Decade of Centenaries’ first met it was how to remember Easter 1916 which above all else caused the most angst. It is unlikely, to say the least, that anyone thought that commemorating the Dublin Lockout would lead to a surge in trade union membership or a wave of sympathetic strikes. But in the build-up to 2016 there is a real sense, among some commentators at least, that in one historian’s words, we are ‘entering dangerous territory.’ Much of the discussion about how the events should be remembered seems predicated on the idea that too much commemoration, let alone (God forbid) celebration, could lead directly to a popular revival of militant armed republicanism.
Journalists such as Stephen Collins of the Irish Times for example, have warned about the centenary being used ‘as a cover for those still wedded to violence’ and claimed that previous commemorations (especially 1966) were a ‘simplistic glorification of violence.’ Partly this is a result of a misreading of how the 1966 50th anniversary events resonated north of the border. It also reflects a curious pessimism about the ability of post-Agreement Northern Ireland to withstand debates about an event that took place 100 years ago. This sense of fear seems to have inspired the at times vaguely ridiculous attempts at ‘branding’ Easter 2016 as some sort of tourist marketing opportunity. The fearful approach encourages the bland, as the assumption seems to be that too much politics will frighten people off.
The issues that deeply divided Irish people a century ago are simplified or glossed over and the role of Britain virtually ignored. That Ireland and Britain share a history is a historical fact but they did not share an equal history: only one was conquered by the other and only one became a global empire. Ultimately, and allowing for all the complexities and nuances that British rule in Ireland involved, in the last resort the Crown depended on force to hold this country. Attempting to commemorate 1916 and avoiding mentioning this lest it give offence will ultimately satisfy nobody.”
Hanley has plenty of strong words for Irish republicans and their own cherished myths of 1916 that deserve greater prominence. Unfortunately the negative reaction to the myth-peddling, academic censorship and outright lies of the revisionist school has had a detrimental effect on the critical faculties of some republican-leaning authors. Meeting British apologisms with a form of super-republicanism is not the answer, at least not in the long-term.
Related to the above is this interesting study of Michael Collins by the historian John M. Regan. It’s likely to raise a certain amount of ire amongst the Collinites and Neo-Redmondites who both fetishize the questionable politico-military “legacy” of the Chairman and Commander-in-Chief of the Provisional Government. In the case of the latter faction their grudging admiration principally focuses on his role as the Irish “strongman” who usurped an all-Ireland republic with a southern free state, thus securing partition and the UK’s continued stranglehold of the north-east (whatever his future plans may actually have been). That these actions involved, at least latterly, the initiation of a wholly self-destructive civil war seems to weigh in his favour on the scales of revisionist judgement rather than against. When all is said and done, the slaying of revolutionary republicans is the one form of killing most British apologists continue to greet with perfect equanimity.
Of the many, many tens of thousands of Irish people who have suffered hardship at the hands of the UK state in recent decades Robert Storey probably has more reason than most to feel bitterness or hate. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, starting at the age of just seventeen, he spent most of his adult life in British cells or prisons, substantial parts of it without trial, repeatedly released and rearrested in a farce of counter-insurgency law. Leading an existence which at times had more than a touch of the Hollywood thriller about it, he rose through the ranks of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in the 1980s and ’90s to become the organisation’s much-valued Director of Intelligence on the GHQ Staff. As one of the confidants of the Adams-McGuinness leadership he was to play a substantial role in moving the (Provisional) Republican movement, and (P)IRA in particular, towards a strategy of non-military struggle against the British occupation, culminating in the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the eventual cessation of hostilities ordered by the Army Council in 2005. Since then he has remained committed to the Irish-British peace process, in particular the demobilisation of (P)IRA and the political development of Sinn Féin, something recognised in his selection as the chairperson of the party’s northern branch. So when he comments upon the calamitous events of recent weeks and months, as reported by the Irish Times, his words should be treated with the seriousness they deserve (though the opinions of one of his colleagues are a different matter).
“Senior republican Bobby Storey who was arrested in connection with the murder of Kevin McGuigan and then released unconditionally has stated that the Provisional IRA is stood down and gone away.
“There is no role for the IRA, the IRA is gone,” said Mr Storey, when speaking about the PSNI chief constable’s assessment that the IRA still exists, and that some of its members were involved in the murder of Belfast republican Mr McGuigan, although acting without the authority of the IRA leadership.
“I think the chief constable and other perspectives out there see this in terms of the IRA being the caterpillar that is still there. What I think is that it’s moved on, it’s become a butterfly, it’s flew away, it’s gone, it’s disappeared,” added Mr Storey.
At another stage of the press conference he said, “The IRA is gone. The IRA is stood down, they have put their arms beyond use, they have left the stage, they’re away and they are not coming back. So there is no current status of the IRA. There are no IRA members. The IRA has gone.”
Mr Storey and two other senior republicans, Brian Gillen and Eddie Copeland, were arrested last week in connection with Mr McGuigan’s murder and then released “unconditionally”.
Of his arrest and release last week Mr Storey said he has instructed his solicitor John Finucane to take legal proceedings against the chief constable.
“At no time during my detention did the police present a shred of evidence or intelligence, which in either my opinion or the opinion of my solicitor, warranted my arrest,” he said.
However when Bobby Storey claims that there is currently “…no IRA members. The IRA has gone“, most informed observers know this to be only partially true. Certainly the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army is no longer on a war footing. It has become, in all senses of the term, a peace-time army, and one set upon a long-term policy that will eventually lead to its own institutional demise. Yet it remains an army, however skeletal, however deliberately reduced in numbers, organisation and equipment. While some see this as a problem, an impediment to future political progress in the north-east, others see it as a guarantor of peace. By retaining some structure, even a nominal one, former volunteers, their families, friends and communities know that the guerilla movement remains as an option of last defence.
Talking of the press conference by Bobby Storey, the Sinn Féin northern chairperson, here are the words of the deputy first minister in the regional administration at Stormont, Martin McGuinness, from the same event:
“The more I consider and the more I think about how all this began … you’d need to be stupid not to be asking the question, whose agenda is best served by those murders. It certainly was not our agenda, it wasn’t the Sinn Féin agenda, it was not the Sinn Féin peace process strategy agenda and in my opinion it was not Peter Robinson’s agenda either.
This is something has caused huge problems for us.
…agents were involved, people who are hostile to the peace process, who are hostile to Sinn Féin’s involvement in the political institutions
The people who are responsible for those murders are criminals, agents, dissidents; they are certainly not supporters of ours.
There is a very real prospect that the people who murdered Jock Davison and Kevin McGuigan had their own agenda, and it was an anti-Sinn Féin agenda, it was an anti-institutions agenda, and it was clearly something that has at least put some within unionism at a huge disadvantage.”
While I’m as suspicious of perfidious Albion as the next man, and cannot deny that some in the ranks of militant unionism and the republican resistance share not dissimilar views on the need to bring down the north-eastern assembly, even I would have to say that McGuinness is clutching at straws with this one. Is there anyone, even in the SF heartland, who genuinely believes paranoid, scattershot claims like this? It reeks of desperation, and of old school Provisional thinking: you’re either with us, or against us!
The underground army may have emerged into the open but it’s thinking is still that of the beleaguered insurgent.
A British Army Mark V tank rams a sealed premises on Capel Street, Dublin, January 18th 1921, during destructive house-searches by the UK Occupation Forces in Ireland
On the 13th of January 1921 a number of British soldiers manning a vehicle-checkpoint on O’Connell Bridge, the main river-crossing in Dublin city, opened fire on a crowd of men, women and children protesting their presence, killing two civilians and wounding five others. Exploiting subsequent unrest in the capital’s northside districts on the 15th of January the British Occupation Forces (BOF) sealed off a zone bounded by Capel Street, Church Street, North King Street and the Quays to carry out searches for arms and equipment belonging to the urban battalions of the Dublin Brigade, Irish Republican Army (IRA). Up to eight hundred troops and paramilitary police conducted destructive house-raids and arrests in the area, supported by armoured cars and tanks. On the 18th a second cordon was placed around the nearby Mountjoy Square district, confining its inhabitants within another zone. In both cases the results for the BOF were negligible, beyond further alienating an already hostile resident population.
The image above was taken at the time of the searches by a correspondent with Het Leven, a Dutch news magazine, at the junction of Capel Street with Abbey Street Upper (left) and Mary’s Abbey (right), facing south-east towards the River Liffey. Captured on January 18th it shows a British Mark V tank, fitted with an improvised ram, smashing open the doors of No. 148 Capel Street, the licensed premises of J. Behan (the Mark Vs were produced in two versions. The “Male”, which was armed with 57 mm guns and machine guns, and the “Female”, armed solely with machine guns. This vehicle is almost certainly the heavier Male class). The use of tanks or armoured vehicles to access sealed buildings was relatively common in the country’s major cities, Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Derry, though the practice was rarer elsewhere due to a scarcity of equipment. Dozens of British soldiers can be seen preparing to enter the premises, while at least two men (civilians or more likely plainclothes detectives from the infamous G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police) loiter in nearby doorways. The visible shop names are H. Williams & Co. at No. 25 Capel Street, a tea merchants and grocers, and Skeffington & Co. at No. 24, a confectioners; the latter is sharing the address with M. Egan. Next door to that, and possibly holding Nos. 23-21, is a premises signposted as Miller. The row of buildings at No.21-25 Capel Street are now a Spar Supermarket while the address opposite, No. 148, has become the Boar’s Head public house.
The junction of Capel Street with Abbey Street Upper and Mary’s Abbey21-24 Capel Street, near the junction with Abbey Street Upper and Mary’s AbbeyNo. 148 Capel Street, the Boar’s Head public houseAh here, leave it out…!
The unexpected election of a progressive candidate to the leadership of the UK Labour Party, along with several like-minded colleagues, has sent a number of British unionist politicians and commentators in the north-east of Ireland into something of a mini-meltdown. After two decades of pandering to Britain’s conservative-leaning electorate the Labour movement is now under the (somewhat befuddled) control of the party’s socialist wing, at least in the higher echelons. For unionist parties like the DUP, UUP and TUV this is an alarming state of affairs. Traditionally British unionism has always regarded the political Left in Europe as its ideological foe, convinced that it was unduly sympathetic to the cause of Irish nationalism and republicanism (or more accurately to the cause of democracy and anti-colonialism). With Jeremy Corbyn as the new Labour leader and John McDonnell as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, unionist party bosses in this country suspect they will receive a colder reception from the Labour opposition in the UK than was heretofore the case.
While that paranoia may prove correct, it is worth remembering that previous DUP and UUP leaders, notably Ian Paisley and David Trimble, also railed against the pro-republican sentiment they claimed to detect in Labour’s dealing with Sinn Féin during the 1990s and early 2000s. Then prime minister Tony Blair, and Mo Mowlam, the secretary of state for northern Ireland, were frequently accused of “…cosying up to Sinn Féin-IRA” by their critics. Yet it didn’t stop the unionist parties from signing up to deal after deal in the complex jigsaw that was the Irish-British peace process.
This time around the unionists may be able to gain some collateral sympathy from the right-wing UK press, a fair-sized chunk of which, equally hostile to a progressive Labour Party, have seized upon any ammunition they can find to hurl at Corbyn and co. This of course also aids the Conservative Party government under David Cameron, which is reputedly delighted with Labour’s swing to the left (Britain remains an innately right-wing nation and the common wisdom believes that a Corbyn-led party is unelectable). From yesterday’s London Independent newspaper:
“David Cameron has told Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell that he should be “ashamed” of himself after praising IRA members for their role in the armed struggle.
The Prime Minister left out personal attacks from his first head-to-head with the new Labour leader, saving it for his right-hand man Mr McDonnell – a controversial choice to shadow George Osborne.
Referring to Mr McDonnell’s remarks in 2003, when he said it was “about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle” in Northern Ireland and praised the “bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands”, the DUP’s Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, asked whether Mr Cameron would “join with all of us… in denouncing that sentiment”
The Prime Minister replied: “I have a simple view, which is the terrorism we faced was wrong, it was unjustifiable…people who seek to justify it should be ashamed of themselves.””
“John McDonnell, MP for Hayes & Harlington since 1997, has been appointed shadow chancellor in Jeremy Corbyn’s new shadow cabinet.
McDonnell, a socialist Labour MP who works closely with the unions, was a serial rebel during the New Labour years. He opposed student top-up fees, anti-terror measures and the Iraq war.
He has also made some dodgy remarks in the past, which are coming back to haunt him now he’s been launched into a top front bench post. These mainly include his remarks about the IRA.
In 2003, at a gathering in London to commemorate the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, he said IRA terrorists should be “honoured”:
“It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA.”
He later told The Sun:
“The deaths of innocent civilians in IRA attacks is a real tragedy, but it was as a result of British occupation in Ireland.
“Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands we now have a peace process.”
Defending his comments in the Guardian, he wrote:
“Talking in terms republicans would understand, I told the harsh truth that the negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland would not be taking place if it had not been for the military action of the IRA. Let me be clear, I abhor the killing of innocent human beings. My argument was that republicans had the right to honour those who had brought about this process of negotiation which had led to peace. Having achieved this central objective now it was time to move on. The future for achieving the nationalists’ goals is through the political process and in particular through the Northern Ireland assembly elections.”
“…his unflinching support of Irish republicans’ aspiration for a united Ireland, is another association routinely thrown at him. So in recent weeks he has refused to condemn the Provisional IRA in a BBC interview and even been criticised for sharing a coffee with Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams.
Two factors are pertinent here. First, was Corbyn’s support for Sinn Fein and engagement with Irish issues legitimate or not and, secondly, did it serve any useful purpose?
It was certainly the road less travelled during the 1980s, when the Provisional IRA’s British bombing campaign was at its height, but it was entirely legitimate for Corbyn and others, take an interest in the pressing affairs of Northern Ireland, especially as we now know that Margaret Thatcher’s government was engaged in secret talks with the IRA from the time of the Hunger Strikes.
It was legitimate, too, for Corbyn and others to have a point of view about events there. Northern Ireland is a zero-sum issue. When it boils down to it, you are either in favour of the maintenance of the union with Northern Ireland, or you favour Irish unity. It really is as straightforward as that.
Turning to the second question: has Corbyn’s interest in Northern Irish affairs done any good? With the benefit of historical perspective, the answer is, yes, it probably has.
Like many on the left, Corbyn saw Ireland as a classic struggle for national self-determination against colonial rule. But he was by no means alone. Nelson Mandela may be the safest of safe options for any politician responding to the question “who do you most admire in politics,” but he was also a strong supporter of Irish republicanism.
It was an association that weathered his transformation into international statesman. Indeed, Gerry Adams was part of the honour guard for Mandela’s funeral. No British politicians or anti-apartheid activists were granted similar status.”
“Britain’s next general election is still some five years off – an eternity in political life – and the number of plots to depose Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition will likely grow exponentially between now and then.
What is already clear is that however long his tenure lasts, Corbyn’s foreign policy beliefs will be front and centre. Indeed, it is difficult to envisage any MP – let alone a backbencher – assuming such a position with as much political baggage as the far-left 66-year-old representative from Islington North.
It is also difficult to imagine the election of a Labour leader generating such hysteria within parts of the media, where collective hyperventilation seems to have stopped just short of predicting the return of the seven plagues.
But more often than not, Corbyn has found himself on the right side of history. He was an early proponent of political engagement with Sinn Fein in the 1980s during the Northern Ireland troubles, at a time when such a position was considered politically taboo. Not only was his stance vindicated by the Good Friday Agreements in 1998, it turns out Margaret Thatcher – hardly a left-wing peacenik – also saw the utility of negotiating with the IRA as far back as the 1981 hunger strikes.
Looking back over the past 30 years, Corbyn has proved to be remarkably prescient. He was a staunch supporter of the ANC’s struggle in South Africa at a time when the British government was still largely supportive of the apartheid government.”
It may alarm pro-UK politicians and their communities in Ireland, and their media apologists in London, Belfast and Dublin, but in the age of the internet and mass communications the popular understanding of the Long War is very much up for grabs. All has changed, changed utterly.
On a day that has witnessed a state-funeral for the disinterred remains of Thomas Kent, a fifty-year-old commandant of the Irish Volunteers executed by a military firing squad in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916, it is worth noting the reactions of the political leaders of the British unionist minority in the north-east of our country. From the Belfast Telegraph, the words of the former head of the UUP:
“Ulster Unionist MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone Tom Elliott criticised the state funeral for Kent who was arrested at his home after a Royal Irish Constabulary officer was killed.
He said: “While there are many controversial anniversaries being remembered throughout this decade I think a state funeral for a terrorist after 100 years is a bit much for many decent people to accept.”
The British-apologists who populate the worlds of Irish journalism and academia seek to create a false equivalency between the history of those who fought to regain their freedom and those who fought to deny it. There is none. The demagogues of British unionism in Ireland remain in 2015 what they were in 1915, or 1916: fascists, bigots and colonial supremacists.
“I was very interested in your comments on Fr. Lorcán Ó Ciaráin whom you described as a pro-treaty Sinn Féiner. This would have been at odds with what my father told me. My father was a taxi driver during the later years of Fr. Ó Ciaráin’s time in Belleek and he told a different story. He drove Fr. Ó Ciaráin to mass in Mulleek and Pettigo regularly and was very friendly with him. He told me and actually recorded on tape a few years before he died that Fr. Ó Ciaráin maintained he was against the Treaty and was not on good terms with Michael Collins and the government but after the June battles the British army and Specials gave him a very hard time and the curfew in the area made it impossible to do his duty. He made contact with Michael Collins to see what could be done to lift the curfew or allow him to carry out his duty to his parishioners. He arranged to meet Michael Collins at a priest house in County Cork on the day he (Michael Collins) was shot. The meeting didn’t take place but Michael Collins went to the house and apparently was shot later that evening.
Fr. Lorcán Ó Ciaráin told my father on his deathbed that he had to live with the belief that he was partly responsible for Collins death. Fr. Ó Ciaráin fell out with de Valera over the use of the Donegal corridor in WW2 with the allies stationed on Lough Erne.
Regarding Belleek Fort my father bought it in 1961 and demolished most of it with gelignite that he bought from Donegal County Council [early 1962/63] and brought from Lifford in the boot of an Austin Farina. I sold the site in 2001.
…there was an unholy row about the demolition of the Fort, Donegal County Council bought the stones from my father and used them as filling on the then new road in Ballyshannon which by-passed the Port road in the town.”
Thanks very much to Jim for that alternative interpretation of Lorcán Ó Ciaráin’s views during the latter part of the revolutionary period. Con O’Neill has also pointed me to this mention of the Monaghan-born priest and republican activist in bishop Edward Daly’s biography “Mister, Are You a Priest?“, published in 2000:
“My father’s work as undertaker took him to two parishes and four different churches. As a result, I was in frequent contact with many priests whom I came to know and respect. As an altar server, I was in regular contact with the priest based in Belleek, but as a result of attending funerals with my father I frequently met priests attached to other churches and parishes. They were all very kind to me. Some of these priests would have called in the shop also. One priest who particularly fascinated me was Father Lorcan Ó Ciaráin. He lived in a castle at Magheramena, about two or three miles outside Belleek. It had formerly been the dwelling of local gentry. I don’t quite know the story of how it came to be parish property or how a priest came to be living in such an edifice. It was strange that such a building should be the parochial house. It was an impressive, if somewhat dilapidated building with large draughty rooms. It was the biggest house that I was ever in as a child. In the autumn every year, coming up to Halloween, Father Ó Ciaráin invited people out to the castle where, in a large room, the floor was covered with apples which had been picked from the adjoining apple orchard and he encouraged them to help themselves which they did. He was given to telling tall and fascinating stories. He specialised in ghost stories. During our Halloween visit for apples, he always had a new ghost story. He was very elderly when I first came to know him. Not surprisingly, Magheramena Castle was disposed of after Father Ó Ciaráin died in 1945.”
Daly, indelibly associated in Irish minds with the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1972, was the son of Susan Flood, the cousin of Patrick Flood, a young volunteer killed on Drumhariff Hill during the latter part of the battle for the village of Pettigo, possibly by British artillery fire. His partially buried body was recovered from a trench on the hill and taken to a nearby cemetery by a young priest, despite the hostility of enemy soldiers and unionist crowds in the area.
If anyone else has more information on the events in south-west Ulster during May and June of 1922 please contact me via the form here.
In response to the very selective quoting of the British government’s “independent” assessment of the current status of various paramilitary formations in the north-east of Ireland I thought some ASF readers might appreciate some rather more detailed extracts from the original report (which can be read in full at the UK government website. Please exercise reasonable security cautions when accessing or downloading the PDF file if using a personal computing device).
This is Britain’s evaluation of where the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army now stands in 2015, if one can ignore the partisan terminology and historical misinterpretations used in the analysis:
“Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)
The Provisional IRA was the largest and most active terrorist organisation operating in NI during the Troubles. It was responsible for 1771 murders between 1969 and 1998.
12. Structure: The structures of PIRA remain in existence in a much reduced form. This includes a senior leadership, the ‘Provisional Army Council’ (PAC), and some departments with specific responsibilities. At a lower level, there are some regional command structures. At this lower level, some activity takes place without the knowledge or direction of the leadership. We do not believe the group is actively recruiting. The group took part in decommissioning between 2001 and 2005 but continues to have access to some weapons. We judge PIRA has not conducted organised procurement of new weaponry in the period since the last IMC report of 2011.
13. Role: PIRA members believe that the PAC oversees both PIRA and Sinn Fein with an overarching strategy. We judge this strategy has a wholly political focus. PIRA members have been directed to actively support Sinn Fein within the community including activity like electioneering and leafleting. Some PIRA members are involved in gathering information of interest to the group including details of DR activities and the attempted identification of covert human intelligence sources (CHIS). A small number are involved in the storage of remaining weaponry in order to prevent its loss to DRs. Individual PIRA members remain involved in criminal activity, such as large scale smuggling, and there have been isolated incidents of violence, including murders. The investigation into the murder of Kevin McGuigan is still ongoing; however, we judge that the assessment put forward by the Chief Constable in his public statement on 22 August remains accurate.
14. Purpose: The PIRA of the Troubles era is well beyond recall. It is our firm assessment that PIRA’s leadership remains committed to the peace process and its aim of achieving a united Ireland by political means. The group is not involved in targeting or conducting terrorist attacks against the state or its representatives. There have only been very limited indications of dissent to date and we judge that this has been addressed effectively by the leadership.”
“The idea that (P)IRA continues to exist as a military organisation, however skeletal its nature, seems to have taken a lot of journalists, politicians and other commentators by surprise, which I suppose highlights the levels of wilful ignorance or feigned naivety that exists amongst the chattering classes. Of course the Executive, Army Council, GHQ Staff and various directorships and departments still exist, if only in nominal form. It doesn’t mean that (P)IRA has several hundred volunteers ready and willing to be placed on active service should the need arise, or units capable of being mobilised across the length and breadth of the country with the issuing of a communiqué from Dublin. Did it ever?”
“Certainly the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army is no longer on a war footing. It has become, in all senses of the term, a peace-time army, and one set upon a long-term policy that will eventually lead to its own institutional demise. Yet it remains an army, however skeletal, however deliberately reduced in numbers, organisation and equipment. While some see this as a problem, an impediment to future political progress in the north-east, others see it as a guarantor of peace. By retaining some structure, even a nominal one, former volunteers, their families, friends and communities know that the guerilla movement remains as an option of last defence.”
With all the political and media focus on (P)IRA very little attention has been devoted to the former counter-insurgency proxies of the United Kingdom, namely the British terror factions (which is no surprise given the present orgy of hypocritical sentiment in certain self-interested quarters). Yet here is this description of the UVF and the origins of the thirty-year Irish-British conflict contained in the body of the report:
“Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Red Hand Commando (RHC)
The UVF was responsible for the first three murders of the Troubles in 1966. The organisation, and the closely linked Red Hand Commando, were responsible for 544 further murders during the period between 1966 and 1999.”
“It was [Gusty] Spence, a former British soldier, who helped re-establish the Ulster Volunteer Force or UVF in 1965, at the request of senior members of the Ulster Unionist Party, almost certainly including the UUP MP for West Belfast, Sir James Kilfedder. The next year, following a campaign of unrest on the streets that benefited several unionist politicians, the UVF murdered seventy-seven year old Matilda Gould in an arson attack on a “Catholic” pub (ironically she was a Protestant grandmother.) A couple of weeks later twenty-eight year old John Scullion was gunned down in a drive-by shooting, while another young man, eighteen year old Peter Ward, was shot dead and two others wounded not long after that.
These dreadful events all took place in the latter half of 1965 and the first seven months of 1966. The (Provisional) Irish Republican Army was not to come into formal existence until December of 1969, and its first attacks did not occur until 1970, four years after the UVF and Spence went on their rampage in Belfast. The modern Troubles began with British terror, just as it did with all those which preceded it. That is the one fact of history that no amount of historical excuses or falsehoods can hide.”
Incongruously I now find myself in a situation where the representatives of the UK state agree with my contemporary and historical analysis of Ireland’s British troubles. Good lord…
Meanwhile:
“4. Structure: The structures of the UVF remain in existence and there are some indications of recruitment. A top leadership sets strategy for the group but there are lower levels of leadership who have some independence in decision making. The group took part in decommissioning in June 2009 but continues to have access to some weapons. The RHC is a separate group but has been closely aligned to the UVF throughout its history. It is considered by some to be an extension of the UVF’s structures.
However, a larger number of members, including some senior figures, are extensively involved in organised crime including drug dealing, extortion and smuggling. Members of the UVF are involved in conducting paramilitary-style assaults on those they accuse of anti-social behaviour. These activities have a significant impact on the local community. The leadership has sought to limit involvement in street disorder or violent protest; however, individual members of the UVF have continued to engage in such activity and, in some cases, to orchestrate it.
6. Purpose: It is our firm assessment that the leadership of the UVF is committed to transforming the purpose of the group from violent crime to community focused initiatives but have only limited control over the activities of its membership. In some cases UVF members are heavily involved in violence and crime.
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF)
The UDA was responsible for 408 murders between 1970 and 1999. It was a legal organisation for much of this period and conducted attacks under the name of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF).
7. Structure: The structures of the UDA remain in existence but have become increasingly fragmented. There are some indications of recruitment. The UDA is currently split into a number of discrete geographic areas, each with its own structures, which act almost completely autonomously. The UFF, previously used as a front for the UDA, no longer exists. The UDA took part in decommissioning in January 2010 but continues to have access to some weapons.
8. Role: With the support of some leadership figures, there are UDA members who have continued attempts to steer the group into positive community-based activism. A very small number of members have taken active roles highlighting loyalist issues through the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG). However, others have been resistant to change and have remained active in criminality and violence. Individual members and some senior figures within many UDA areas are involved in organised crime including drug dealing, robbery, extortion and the distribution of counterfeit and contraband goods. There has been an increase in paramilitary-style assaults in recent years and, in the north Antrim area, one resulted in a fatality for which a murder investigation is ongoing. These activities have a significant impact on the local community. The leadership has sought to limit involvement in street disorder or violent protest; however, individual members of the UDA have continued to engage in such activity.
9. Purpose: It is our firm assessment that parts of the UDA leadership are committed to transforming the purpose of the group from violent crime to community focused initiatives but have only limited control over the activities of its membership. In some cases UDA members are heavily involved in violence and crime.
South East Antrim UDA (SEA UDA)
The South East Antrim (SEA) group of the UDA split from the mainstream UDA in 2006. During the period of the Troubles, this group was one of the largest and most active within the UDA.
10. The SEA UDA remains a separate entity from the mainstream UDA. It retains structures similar to those within the mainstream UDA and its membership is engaged in the same types of criminal and violent activity. During the Union flag protests in 2012 individual members of SEA UDA were believed to have been involved in serious disorder in the Carrickfergus area.
Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF)
The LVF formed following a split in the UVF in 1996. It was responsible for 12 murders between 1997 and 1999.
11. The LVF exists only as a criminal group in Antrim and mid-Ulster.”
Billy Hutchinson, Mike Nesbitt and Peter Robinson. The leaders of the UUP and DUP step side-by-side with the leaders of the British terrorist-linked PUPBritish unionist politicians and militants sit together. Isaac Andrews of the terrorist-linked UPRG, Jim Allister of the TUV, Billy Hutchinson of the UVF-linked PUP, Nelson McCausland of the DUP, Tom Elliott of the UUP, Rev Mervyn Gibson of the Orange Order, Jim Wilson of the militant-linked Red Hand ComradesTUV boss Jim Allister, DUP mayor George Duddy and UUP councillor Darryl Wilson attending a parade featuring UVF terrorist banners and UVF-supporting bands
In the early hours of the 24th of October 1990 several volunteers of the Derry Brigade of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army entered the home of Patrick “Patsy” Gillespie in the Lenamore Gardens district of the city. The forty-two year old man, along with his wife Kathleen and their three children, were placed under armed guard while preparations were laid for one of the most inhumane acts of violence to be perpetrated by Irish guerrillas during the three decade era of armed resistance to the continued British Occupation of the north-east of Ireland. Gillespie was employed as a civilian cook in the nearby UK Army base of Fort George and had been repeatedly warned by (P)IRA to end his “collaboration” with the British, warnings that had resulted in a previous traumatic incident at his house. However the Derry man had refused to quit his job, a stubbornness that owed more to the region’s endemic levels of unemployment and poverty than any real political sentiment. With his family held hostage the cook was forced to drive in his car to County Donegal, just across the “border”, where he was transferred by more volunteers to a van containing 450 kg of high explosives and given instructions to proceed back to the heavily fortified Coshquin military checkpoint, on the western outskirts of the city.
Approximately four minutes from the British installation (P)IRA volunteers following the van in a second vehicle armed the bomb by remote control, stopping some distance away. When Gillespie came to a halt at the road-checkpoint, permanently manned by a large number of troops, he tried to exit the van, either to warn the soldiers or to make an escape, or both. This drew a panicked response from the military personnel, witnesses in the area hearing shouted commands followed by shots and then a massive explosion that was audible to people several kilometres away.
Unknown to Patrick Gillespie the vehicle’s interior light had been wired to the bomb-detonator, thus serving as a back-up trigger to the timing mechanism, the opening of the van door initiating the device. In the resulting explosion Gillespie and six soldiers were killed, many more were wounded, while the checkpoint was virtually demolished, along with several armoured personnel carriers. Troops elsewhere in the fortification survived the detonation due to the blast-proof bunker they were sleeping in. Around the vicinity of the checkpoint twenty-five homes were damaged, the result of the UK policy of establishing military installations in or near civilian property with the aim of detering insurgent attacks for fear of inflicting casualties on local “human shields”.
On this day no such fear or concern inhibited the guerrillas as two other strikes were carried out using the same dreadful tactic. The second incident took place in County Armagh where sixty-five year old James McAvoy, also labelled a “collaborator“, was forced to drive a bomb-laden vehicle to the tactically important Cloghoge military checkpoint, near Newry, an operation involving units of (P)IRA’s Down and South Armagh Brigades. However he was warned to exit the van through the window by the volunteer commanding the unit that oversaw the vehicle transfer, rather than using the door, and survived the subsequent blast which killed one British soldier and injured thirteen more. Meanwhile a third attack on Lisanelly British Army base in Omagh, involving a unit of the East Tyrone Brigade, was mercifully unsuccessful when the bomb mysteriously failed to explode, the hostage-turned-driver escaping physical if not psychological harm.
The Irish and British press quickly dubbed the victims of the operations “human proxy bombs”, a not inaccurate description. Utterly barbaric in nature, and undoubtedly war crimes by even the broadest definitions of international law, the attacks have remained the subject of controversy and debate to the present day. Despite all the conspiracy theories, and the claims that they were launched specifically in order to undermine the “militarists” within the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army at a time of tentative, covert negotiations with the UK government, or alternatively to test the limits of those negotiations and what the British were willing to ignore in order to pursue them, there seems little doubt that the “proxies” were hugely counter-productive in terms of popular support for the Provisional’s armed struggle. Certainly the Derry Brigade of (P)IRA, already compromised in many ways, never recovered from the wave of revulsion within its own community following Gillespie’s death, accelerating its downward spiral towards inactivity. There seems little doubt that the coordinated nature of the operations stemmed from planning at a senior level of the insurgency’s Northern Command, and probably far higher than that. Though rumours of internal dissension and reproaches circulated in the months after the atrocities (P)IRA – and those who led it – cannot escape responsibility for one of the most shocking war-crimes of the 1966-2005 period.
On the afternoon of Sunday the 30th of January 1972 soldiers from the British Parachute Regiment, one of the more fearsome UK military units fighting the insurgency in the north-east of Ireland, attacked a civil rights march in the city of Derry, killing or fatally wounding fourteen civilians and injuring two dozen more in an event the international press quickly dubbed the “Bloody Sunday Massacre”. That same group of paratroopers had carried out a similar murder-spree just months earlier in the city of Belfast, shooting dead eleven people, including a local priest, in a two day reign of terror known as the “Ballymurphy Massacre” of August 1971. Praised by their officers – and British politicians – for their work in the previous slaughter much the same was expected of them in the western city of Derry and sure enough they delivered on those expectations. However, as in Belfast, the war crimes of the Parachute Regiment simply served to increase local support for armed resistance to Britain’s continued presence, in particular for the still nascent (Provisional) Irish Republican Army, contributing to making a temporary conflict all but permanent.
Following a 1998-2010 British government enquiry into the 1972 massacre, which exonerated the dead and wounded, the PSNI, the regional paramilitary police in the north-east of Ireland, launched a murder investigation which has now culminated in the arrest of a former paratrooper present on the day of the mass-killing. This has led to extraordinary outrage in the right-wing British press, with editorial demands that the members of the UK Occupation Forces who served in Ireland during the 1966-2005 “Troubles” be granted full immunity from prosecution. This has been echoed by numerous newspaper columnists and commentators on television and radio, as well as by some Conservative and Labour MPs. What these protests have revealed is the extraordinary lack of knowledge about Irish-British relations in the United Kingdom, including contemporary affairs in “Northern Ireland”. Such things, it seems, continue to be filtered through a prism of prejudice and ignorance that time and technology have done nothing to abate. A wilful disregard for history, for facts, characterises British attitudes to Ireland. Take this error-laden nonsense in the Daily Telegraph from ex-UK military bigwig, Tim Collins, now a “security” hireling, and someone who should know better.
“The events of January 30 1972, now known as Bloody Sunday, proved a watershed in many respects. That day marked the beginning of the long war with the IRA – the point at which the British government was seen to be on the wrong side of the divide in the minds of the vast majority of Northern Irish Roman Catholics. And yet this shouldn’t have been the case: the UK always backed peace and justice.”
Which is a bizarre claim to make given that the civil rights march in Derry was protesting the imprisonment of hundreds of men and boys without charge or trial in concentration camps like Long Kesh (the infamous H-Blocks) or on converted ocean-going hulks like HMS Maidstone, where detainees were locked below-decks like feral animals. Justice certainly had little to do with the mass internment of civilian populations or the use of torture-centres such as the one hidden away in the sprawling grounds of the Ballykelly military base, County Derry, where “special techniques” of interrogation were practised on selected victims (and later copied by the United States for use in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and various “black sites” around the world).
Of course one could also mention that a majority of people on the island of Ireland had democratically voted for independence, free of partition, in 1918, 1920 and 1921, three plebiscite-elections that the UK responded to with violence, bloodshed and the imposition of an unwanted border. Though given that British memories apparently struggle to go as far back as the 1970s, significant events from the 1920s might be a bit of a stretch for most.
“…the Saville inquiry found that the IRA fired the first shots on the day – and the soldiers reacted as they were trained. The result was a disaster. A disaster founded on the IRA hijacking a peaceful rally to murder soldiers. Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein and their military wing, the IRA, could not have imagined in their wildest, most murderous, dreams the result they were handed. Nor the rewards they are still reaping”
No, the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army did not fire the first shots of Bloody Sunday. The Saville report stated, explicitly, that the first shots fired on the day were by the troops of the Parachute Regiment, and that the (Official) Irish Republican Army fired a handful of shots in response to the actions of the British. Collins’ claims are bald-faced lies.
“For the arrest of this soldier, with the promise of more to come, isn’t about peace and justice. It’s about politics – and the fragile state of accord in Northern Ireland. It’s a bone thrown to a petulant Sinn Fein to tempt them back into the Northern Ireland Assembly with some credibility intact, and a way to silence the Unionists as they see former British soldiers arrested. Essentially, it is an attempt to keep the power-sharing agreement on track, using the soldiers as pawns.”
Sinn Féin is already in the regional “Northern Ireland Assembly”. It never left it. Why would unionist politicians be silenced by the sight of former British soldiers being arrested? The detention has had the exact opposite reaction, as anyone with half-a-brain could predict. I’m sure the right-wing and ultra-nationalist readers of the Daily Telegraph may lap up this poison like a rabid dog with a bowl of water but it doesn’t mean the rest of need partake of the Medicine Show concoction that Tim Collins is selling. In the British war upon the Irish it is truth that is always the first casualty.
And if you’re wondering to yourself how the hell has the left-wing and utterly parochial RIRA/NIRA become an ally with the likes of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the pursuit of a global Caliphate, read on:
“The RIRA has long been thought a supporter of al-Qaeda, involving itself in the jihadist organization’s drug trade and allegedly providing them with locations of important British officials in Northern Ireland. They are also believed to launder money for al-Qaeda.
According to some sources, including a retired Real IRA soldier, the RIRA has developed links with the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah, which includes material support and training. Hezbollah has taught the RIRA new ways of communication after revealing the ease of call tracing. They have also collaborated to perform attacks in both Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Representatives from both groups have reportedly met in southern Ireland to plan attacks.
The RIRA also has had strong ties to the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, a Basque revolutionary group in Spain, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The RIRA and PFLP have had a long history of cooperation, as they have had with a great majority of Palestinian groups. They have expressed their support for Hamas, the leading party in the Gaza Strip of Palestine. The groups are strong in their links of anti-Semitism and desires for a free Palestine. RIRA leaders have reportedly met with Hamas officials. Also, the RIRA is believed to have links with the Afghan Taliban, which includes training on making IEDs. The Real IRA may also have links with the Caucasus Emirate and other Chechen rebel groups…”
“TheTrumpet.com is the official website of the Philadelphia Trumpet newsmagazine…
…which began in February 1990, is published 10 times a year by the Philadelphia Church of God.
The Trumpet seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description of the prevailing state of affairs just before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.”
Which of course makes the whole RIRA/NIRA entry on Wikipedia suspect from beginning to end. Though it’s certainly not the only one. For similar questionable content on the internet’s most cited source of information check out the website Wikipediocracy.
A British soldier of the First Gloucestershire Regiment pictured inside the Divis Flats, Belfast 1972, with a walkie-talkie radio. This was the home of Jean McConville
The New Yorker magazine has a long, if occasionally flawed, investigation into the 1972 detention and execution – which one can alternatively read as kidnapping and murder – by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army of the suspected British Army informer Jean McConville, during one of the worse years of the 1966-2005 “Troubles”. The thirty-eight year old recently widowed mother of ten children was taken at gun-point from her home in the battle-scarred Divis Flats complex of West Belfast in December of 1972 by female Volunteers of (P)IRA acting under the orders of the city’s Brigade Intelligence, driven across the “border” to County Louth and, following a brief and perhaps brutal interrogation, executed with a single gunshot to the back of the head. Her body was buried in a secret beach-side grave and her family were never formally informed of her death.
Jean McConville’s fate had been determined some days earlier at a meeting of the Headquarters Staff of the Belfast Brigade following the revelation that she had been supplied with a “walkie-talkie” style radio transmitter by intelligence officers of the notoriously “gung-ho” First Gloucestershire Regiment of the British Army which was then on a tour of duty in the area. This was in fact the second such incident involving McConville. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1972 she had been under surveillance by (P)IRA after a previous search of her home had revealed a similar military transmitter. Under questioning the widow – who had lost her husband in January to cancer, leaving her impoverished and with a developing drinking problem – admitted spying for the British Forces in return for money. This was considered particularly shocking because her son, Robert “Robbie” McConville, was a Volunteer of the rival (Official) Irish Republican Army, and had been recently imprisoned by the British in the infamous Long Kesh concentration camp, just outside the city (by 1974 he was a member of the Irish National Liberation Army or INLA, a guerilla grouping which grew out of (O)IRA divisions)
Reluctant to kill a clearly desperate woman – not least because of the adverse publicity it would engender – the Brigade HQ Staff allowed McConville to live, albeit with a warning of fatal consequences should she be caught spying again. By December their patience was ended and after a short discussion over “banishment” versus “execution” her death was ordered through a majority vote. Among those supporting the latter option was the brigade OC or officer commanding, Gerry Adams. However the manner of her killing was hotly debated. There were continuing fears that the acknowledged detention and killing by (P)IRA of a widowed mother of ten children (including a young political prisoner) would have a disastrous effect on support for the movement; that it would be exploited by Britain’s well-oiled propaganda-machine, as well as Republican rivals in (O)IRA; and that the slaying could reduce moral among local Volunteers. In the end those favouring a “public execution” were out-voted by those supporting a secret death sentence and “disappearance”, a solution which would have the added benefit of sowing confusion amongst their adversaries in the British intelligence groupings. This was a practice that was already beginning to take root – albeit intermittently and with a great deal of controversy – in the conflict-cockpit of Belfast. In this decision it seems that Gerry Adams was again in the majority camp.
A terrified Irish boy is interrogated by soldiers of the British Army’s Gloucestershire Regiment, West Belfast, Ireland, March 1972
Following Jean McConville’s disappearance chaos reigned amongst her family. A long-delayed investigation by the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the feared British paramilitary police force in the north-east of Ireland, uncovered virtually nothing, meeting a wall of communal silence in the Irish Nationalist community of West Belfast. Though some officers suspected her kidnap and murder by (P)IRA a campaign of misinformation by British Army intelligence to cover up their role in the whole affair, spreading rumours that the widowed mother had abandoned her children for a new lover, added to the confusion that hung over the case. Within months the half-hearted RUC investigation was closed down and it would take another three decades and a peace process for the McConville family to uncover some of the the truth and recover their mother’s hidden remains.
1) Jean McConvile was not killed by (P)IRA because she supposedly rendered aid to a British soldier who had been wounded or injured outside her flat in Divis. Several different – and in places widely variant – versions of this story exist none of which have been verified, despite a significant number of investigations by journalists, politicians and notably Baroness Nuala O’Loan, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland from 1999 to 2007. In fact the weight of evidence makes it clear that no such incident occurred involving Jean McConville.
2) (P)IRA has claimed for many years that before her death Jean McConville was discovered to be in the possession of two radio transmitters supplied to her by intelligence officers attached to the Gloucestershire Regiment of the British Army. These were described as “walkie-talkie” radios, possibly Stornophone models, which she had secreted in her home. Despite counter-claims that such devices were not in use by the British military in Belfast during this period recently uncovered photographic evidence shows soldiers serving with the “Glosters” using these radios in the Divis Flats in 1972. The very year McConville was killed.
3) Though a 2006 report by Baroness O’Loan, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, concluded that there was no record of Jean McConville acting as a paid informer for the British Forces, this did not exonerate her. It is clear that there was a considerable effort by the British to cover up their part in contributing to her murder, spreading false stories about her whereabouts, hampering RUC investigations, and dissuading her family from pursuing their case. In part this seems to have been driven by the need to deny (P)IRA any formal confirmation of its “successes” in thwarting British intelligence operations in Belfast during a period of escalating espionage and counter-espionage. Just three months before McConville’s death (P)IRA had created panic in the covert elements of the British Forces in Belfast through a series of deadly attacks on undercover troops in the city. These included members of the notorious Military Reaction Force or MRF. Subsequently the gathering of intelligence by field agents or from local sources had effectively dried up making “human assets” like McConville all the more important. This perhaps explains the British insistence that she kept spying even when her role was known to the Republican Army.
4) The revelation that the “war diaries” of the First Gloucestershire Regiment, the combat records of the British unit when it was garrisoned in West Belfast during the early to mid-1970s, have been placed under a sealed embargo for an unprecedented eighty-four years has led many to conclude that they must contain some references to Jean McConville. Among those demanding that the British government open them up as part of a new investigation are Baroness Nuala O’Loan and members of the McConville family.
5) The two journalists and writers most associated in the public mind with charting the history of the “disappeared” and Jean McConville in particular, Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre, have both stated that they have an open-mind on the allegations that the middle-aged woman was a paid informer for the British Forces. [Update 11.03.2015: The writer Anthony McIntyre, who carried out much of the research that formed the basis for the book “Voices From The Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland”, has been in touch to state that he does indeed believe that Jean McConville was a paid informer for the British Forces at the time of her death in 1972]
6) While Jean McConville is claimed to have acknowledged during two interrogations that she received payments from the British Army to spy on her local community in the Divis Flats area we cannot know for sure what other pressures were placed on her to act as an informer. She was a recent, grieving widow with several young children in a district known for its endemic poverty, apparently lacking any financial resources of her own. Her son, Robert, was a captured insurgent in the feared Long Kesh prison-camp, a place synonymous with the torture and ill-treatment of inmates. It may well be that McConville was initially persuaded to co-operate with the British in order to ameliorate the conditions of her son’s incarceration, or perhaps achieve his early release, as well as seeking support for her other children. Once trapped inside the intelligence war she was not permitted to escape, even when her activities were uncovered. One can only imagine what threats or inducements were used to force her to continue in her role of paid informer.
7) There are very few people indeed in Ireland who believe that Gerry Adams was not a Volunteer of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army from the 1970s to late 1990s or early 2000s. It is generally accepted that he was a senior member and strategist of the organisation, rising up through the ranks from the Belfast Brigade to the GHQ Staff and Army Council by the end of his military career. He almost certainly was amongst the group of officers who ordered the secret execution and burial of Jean McConville in December of 1972. However the truth about the events of that year, and Adams’ role in it, can only become clear under the aegis of a general amnesty in relation to all actions during the course of the Long War, whether the participants were British or Irish.
The president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams TD, is greeted with applause as he joins the Guard of Honour at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, the late president of South Africa, 2013. Mandela of course had the decency to spend most of the ANC/MK armed struggle locked up in prison. So he could legitimately say “I was never in MK” (between 1962 and 1990).
A different take on the post-conflict career of Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, guerilla-turned-politician, from the journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty writing in The Week:
“If only more militant Irish nationalists had the decency to die. Get shot in the back by a Paddy more extreme, like Michael Collins did, and someday Liam Neeson could be playing you. Get executed by the Brits like James Connolly, and your aphorisms will be in Irish graffiti forever. Starve yourself to death like Bobby Sands did in the H-Block, and history will talk about how your vote totals for MP compare favourably to Thatcher’s. Legends all.
Gerry Adams still lives, and no one will forgive him for it. Adams commanded killers, like Collins. He invokes the stern, almost utopian principles of 1916, which Connelly helped invent. And like Sands, he was tortured for his political aspirations by Northern Irish authorities.
We know what to do with killers who die: judge them on the merits of their cause. We know what to do with killers who win outright: celebrate them as national heroes. But people who put down the gun and muddle on in the ambiguous world of politics? We’re not sure what to do with them.”
The conclusion?
“When Ryan Turbidy, the host of Ireland’s premier late night talk show, tried to gain the moral high ground on Adams in 2010, informing Adams that people think he’s terrible and that the bloodshed was avoidable, something odd happened. Adams switched out of his careful, passive voice. Instead of referring broadly to what “the Republican movement” did, he adopted the personal pronoun: “I was born into a state that didn’t want me.”
That state didn’t allow his parents to vote. Their generation endured bombs thrown into their houses. Popular politicians, including men of the cloth, compared Adams and his kind to vermin, systematically denied them jobs, and let rioters burn down their houses without consequence. It was a state that arrested men and watched them starve themselves, for merely exercising what we would consider basic rights in America. When I think of that, the remarkable thing about Gerry Adams isn’t that he did unjustifiable, evil things, or that he evades telling the truth about it now. It’s that he ever stopped at all.
Adams has to answer to God and to everyone for Jean McConville. But his partners in the peace process haven’t disclosed everything either, while Adams stands in front of the cameras and take the abuse for his history and his evasions. Perhaps others should do the same.”
Three Volunteers of an Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s
The Irish have made peace but have the British? That is the question asked by veteran journalist and author Ed Moloney in light of ongoing efforts by Britain to pursue legal vengeance against former insurgents of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and those who represented or supported them. Moloney argues that these actions:
“…amount to a British default both from the spirit of the peace process and the commitments given during good faith negotiations with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
That the British intention to continue to pursue IRA suspects, try them in the courts and then imprison them amounts to an act of war against the IRA is undeniable in the context of the conflict since 1969.
Whereas the IRA’s campaign was characterised in the main by the shooting and bombing of British targets, the British response in the main took the form of trying to put as many IRA members as they could behind bars, using the police and the courts to do so (while the British also shot and killed many IRA members the greater part of their energies was spent trying to imprison them).
…the British now trumpet their resolve to keep putting former IRA activists behind bars whenever they can, highlights an unspoken and unacknowledged reality: the IRA has ended its war against the British but the British have not ended their war against the IRA.”
This is something that many (Provisional) Republicans who had supported the peace accords of the late 1990s and early 2000s are now coming to acknowledge, albeit with evident reluctance. Indeed it seems that the central tenet of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, that through negotiations there would be neither winners nor losers to the conflict, has been all but abandoned by Britain.
“This latter commitment was the defining principle of the peace process, the oil that greased the wheels: no-one came out and said ‘We Won!’ and by not doing so this enabled the already difficult process of making and demanding concessions to happen.
Implicitly and in an unspoken way, at least in public, the Troubles ended in a draw with every participant agreeing on ways of enabling each other to withdraw from the field of battle. It wasn’t easy and it took a long time to happen but without that agreement it probably never would have.”
Instead the British are now pursuing a form of retroactive victory over a foe that they had previously proved incapable of defeating, either militarily or politically. In doing so the UK is risking everything on a foolish, tribal grudge against Irish Republicans that risks undoing all the progress of the last two decades. Some long-time observers have suggested that the inherent flaws and contradictions of the Belfast Agreement, coupled with the iniquitous nature of the continued British occupation of Ireland, whatever its rump nature, means that we are simply in a “pre-conflict period”. A second (or third) round of “Troubles” is likely (quite possibly leading to a British humiliation equal to that of the Irish-British Treaty of 1921). It is apparent that the Tories and “establishment Britain”, from the Labour Party opposition to the metropolitan press pack, are intent on making at least part of that suggestion a reality.
A so-called “coffee-jar-bomb”; an improvised grenade developed and deployed by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in the north-east of Ireland during the course of the Long War
Couple of things brought to my attention. The first is the case of Christy Walsh, a citizen of this republic, who in 1991 was stopped on a street in his hometown of Belfast by members of the British Army’s infamous Parachute Regiment and accused of carrying a “coffee-jar-bomb”; a hand-thrown improvised grenade deployed by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army against the UK Forces. Despite the obvious lack of forensic evidence and clear inconsistencies in the case, a British no-jury counter-insurgency court convicted Walsh of possessing an explosive device and sentenced him in 1992 to a fourteen year prison sentence. Released in 1998 he went on to appeal his conviction several times, uncovering evidence that the British soldiers had falsified their accounts of his detention and search, eventually gaining success in 2010 when the Court of Appeal had no choice but to overturn his original 1992 sentence. The Pensive Quill, the website of the former republican activist and author Anthony McIntyre, has charted Christy’s decision to engage in a hunger-strike to publicise and protest his original arrest, trial and imprisonment. So far he has received scant recognition from either the British or northern regional authorities for what he endured and certainly no compensation.
The second case is that of sixty-seven year old Michael Burns from North Belfast, a former Volunteer of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army, who is gravely ill with a terminal condition called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or COPD). Burns, who was resident in this part of the country from 1977 to 2003, was in receipt of a letter from the British government stating that he was free to return to the city of his birth and would face no legal action for his activities during the 1966-2005 conflict. This letter was one of hundreds issued to Republican activists by the UK authorities as part of bilateral confidence-building measures during the peace process of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Now the British are reneging on the carefully negotiated understandings that formed the basis of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, the multiparty documents that brought some three decades of war in the north-eastern corner of Ireland to an end. Instead they have launched a campaign of retrospective vengeance on former guerilla opponents, men and women who are now in their 50s, 60s and 70s, attempting to do through British counter-insurgency courts what they were incapable of doing on the battlefield during the conflict itself. The very real danger that such actions risk destroying the political progress of the last two decades seems to matter not a whit in the corridors of power, either in Belfast or London. Imprisoning pensioners and the terminally ill is more important. Veteran journalist and author Ed Moloney has more over on the Broken Elbow.
I’ve stated before on ASF that the vast majority of “Western” career journalists don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to writing about the minutiae of politics and history in nations or regions far away from their own (and as we know, the devil is in the detail). As a general rule of thumb, the further a reporter strays from his or her home territory the greater the gulf of misunderstanding grows. For instance, if you think that your TV news shows or local press are giving you fair and accurate descriptions of the events in the conflict-cauldron of Syria and Iraq, well think again. They give half-stories, or more frequently stories wrapped in crude and easily digestible stereotypes that supposedly make it clearer for the general audience or readership to understand what is happening – but which just as often leads them completely astray, leaving false, and in some cases, dangerously misleading impressions (Gulf War II, anybody?). Lest you think this phenomenon is confined to the more exotic climes of the world, even modern European nation-states can be subject to the indignities – or stupidities – of lazy (or politically partisan) reporting. For instance, take this preview from CBS’s flagship news and current affairs show, 60 Minutes, on an upcoming documentary on Gerry Adams TD, the Sinn Féin leader and former Irish republican insurgent. Let’s just say if the synopsis is anything to go by it may well make for cringe-inducing viewing for anyone in Ireland. My comments in the square brackets.
“Many believe Adams could be the Republic of Ireland’s prime minister someday [ASF: It’s Ireland not the “Republic of”, and no they don’t; they really, really don’t]. He is careful in his answers to questions about his affiliation with the IRA, for whom many Catholic Irish voters sympathize. [ASF: And who would they be? Some 85% of the electorate in Ireland, if one were to go by the last census? And of course, on this island nation, we all vote according to our religious identity or that of our parents or grandparents… Sigh]
…[Jean McConville] was believed to have betrayed the Catholic IRA by informing on them to the British – the group’s enemy, along with Protestants who supported British rule in Northern Ireland. [ASF: The “Catholic IRA”? Seriously? This is like a British news report from 1971!]
In 1984, Adams was shot three times in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in an attack that a Protestant militant group said was retribution on Adams for orchestrating attacks on Protestants. [ASF: Protestants, Catholics, sectarian, tribal, tit-for-tat, blah, blah, blah…]
Northern Ireland is still very much divided. Despite a “Good Friday” agreement for shared power in the country between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority reached with Adams’ help in 1998, walls separate neighborhoods and Catholics will only call a Catholic cab, Protestants patronize their own livery services. [ASF: Irish Nationalists? British Unionists? Has anyone in CBS heard of these commonplace and politically accurate terms? And what in the name of Christ is a Protestant livery service?!]”
Like I said, don’t bother with getting to know the minutiae of the subject or using recognisable descriptions of groups or communities; just chuck out some old propagandist labels and stereotypes from the middle of the 20th century. It really is easier than doing some up-to-date, 21st century journalism. As for the issue of Jean McConville’s murder and Gerry Adams’ likely involvement as a former senior member of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army’s Belfast Brigade HQ Staff in 1972, the truth is out there. Unfortunately it’s a little bit more complicated than the news media can handle (or would wish). So, you know, they’ll stick to reporting the more melodramatic, fact-averse versions that they always have. Especially with two general elections looming on the horizon…
A British soldier on foot patrol in Belfast, Ireland, using two young Irish boys for cover
As feared the short piece on the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams by 60 Minutes, the primetime current affairs show for the CBS television network in the United States, largely met the low expectations set by most seasoned observers of American international journalism. Frankly it was like watching a British TV news broadcast from the 1970s or ’80s, one informing the viewers back in Britain about the conflict in “Northern Ireland” while adhering to the propaganda-line crafted by the government, intelligence services and armed forces. Thus through the eyes of the 60 Minutes’ correspondent Scott Pelley – and the US news media in general – a complex post-colonial conflict about nationality and politics was reduced to hackneyed nonsense about warring religious tribes of Catholics and Protestants in Ireland still loyal to ancient historical grudges. I don’t think I can go any better than the dire summation of Ed Moloney, an Irish writer and journalist who knows more about these matters than most:
“The CBS Sixty Minutes item on Gerry Adams and Jean McConville last night was utterly predictable, utterly simplistic, utterly superficial and in so many ways utterly wrong. The contrast between this so-called television journalism and the sort of work and research that Patrick Keefe put into his New Yorker piece published last month couldn’t have been greater.
The Troubles were, in the Sixty Minutes version, a civil war between Catholics and Protestants with the British accorded, implicitly, their preferred position as ‘piggy in the middle’, trying valiantly to keep these irrational and violence-addicted Irish tribes from slaughtering each other. The truth, that the British, historically and during the last forty years, share in full, responsibility for the state of affairs that caused the violence – and Jean McConville’s sad end – is not even acknowledged.
This was the journalism inspired by the British Information Office on Third Avenue circa 1972, recycled ad nauseum in The New York Times for the following two decades and picked up in 2015 by CBS: the valiant cousins trying to keep peace amongst warring clans just like the US Marines in Tikrit in 2003.
We were served platefuls of cliched journalism: fifteen foot peace walls and the lack of integrated education. Not a single nod in the direction of the facts and the possibility that the British Army might have been exploiting a widowed mother-of-ten for the pathetic morsels of intelligence she could provide; not a mention of the possibility that the IRA might have been telling the truth about Jean McConville.
Not a mention of what Brendan Hughes had to say, that Jean McConville confessed to him that she was an informer, that a radio transmitter found in her apartment had been used to communicate with her British Army handlers and not a word that he had let her go because of her family circumstances; not a word about the assertion that she then returned to her trade despite the damage this would do to her children; not a question directed at the British about their alleged role in the affair, that through malice or incompetence they kept on their books an informer whose life was in danger and by so doing contributed to her death.”
60 Minutes and CBS News have proven yet again that when it comes to our island nation American journalism achieves the same factual and analytical level as an average episode of the Sons of Anarchy. And we all know what racist crap that is. So here’s the question. If the US news media can get reporting on present or past events in a modern, Western, largely English-speaking, largely secular nation-state so spectacularly wrong what on earth do you think they are doing with their reporting of events in the rest of the world?
Google Books Ngram search results for use of the phrase Irish Republican Army between 1800-2008Google Books Ngram search results for use of the phrases Fenian, Fenians between 1800-2008
Judging by the positive reactions it seems that many of you have enjoyed my occasional posts highlighting the earliest occurrences of the term “Irish Republican Army” in the vast repositories of digitised and increasingly digital publications known as Google News and Google Books, so I thought I’d introduce you to another one of the online tools provided by the internet giant for would-be researchers. Using the Ngram Viewer one can now roughly chart the historical frequency of a word or term in any of the books, magazines or newspapers published over the last two centuries or so that have been archived by Google, rating its earliest appearances and popularity. This provides some fascinating insights as this Atlantic article points out. So above are two graphs, both encompassing a two century search period from 1800 to 2008, examining the use of the terms “Irish Republican Army”, “Fenian” and “Fenians”. There are some very interesting data spikes in there, though no doubt quite a few incorrect matches too (Fenian before the mid-19th century had a very different meaning to the later revolutionary association).
During the latter half of the Irish Revolution two Volunteers-of the Irish Republican Army train with Thompson submachine guns during extensive manoeuvres in the Dublin mountains, Ireland
I thought these military-related articles would interest quite a few ASF readers (those of you who haven’t discovered the pieces for yourself, of course). First up is the always excellent Irish Story, an online history site that you should certainly add to your bookmarks or RSS feeds. It feature a two-part overview by the prolific John Dorney on the weapons of the Irish Revolution, starting with the Easter Rising and working its way through to the War of Independence. The initial post partially draws upon the examination of the 1916 insurrection by Kenneth Smith-Christmas and published on the American Rifleman magazine. Meanwhile Jonathan Ferguson for the Firearm Blog charts the 1921 purchase and importation into Ireland of the quintessential weapon of the Irish Revolution, at least in myth if not reality, the Thompson submachine gun. The magazine History Ireland has two related posts on the understandably secrecy-bound matter here and here. The Irish Volunteers website also looks at this most dramatic of weapons, and of course there is the well-established Thompson Gun In Ireland, the definitive online source for all your “Tommy Gun” questions.
Finally Brenda Malone at the Cricket Bat that Died for Ireland (yes, really) has a post on the now largely forgotten attempts by the Irish Republican Army to develop their own mortars for use against fortified British barracks and other positions during the War of Independence. In essence it would have been a less powerful early 20th century version of the far more powerful late 20th century mortars deployed by the (Provisional) IRA from the 1970s to mid-1990s (notably the so-called “barrack buster”). Had such weapons been successfully used back in the 1920s they would likely have been more psychologically damaging than physically destructive of the enemy, sapping the will of already isolated troops and police in stations around the country. Just as (P)IRA successfully discouraged the maintenance of local British garrisons in a number of rural areas in the “Occupied North” through a process of attrition, creating an amalgamation or clustering-effect of “security force” installations, so the “Old IRA” could have intensified the withdrawal of Britain’s visible presence from across the west and south-west of the country during the period of 1919-21. However that, like the hoped for impact of some 600 Thompson submachine guns from the United States or the would-be arms’ imports from Germany and Italy, will remain one of the great “what ifs” of the revolutionary period.
Two Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army, their faces masked, train with a Lewis light machine gun during IRA manoeuvres in the Dublin mountains, late revolutionary period in Ireland
On a non-military matter can I recommend this study by Pat Walsh on a frequently ignored point relating to the Easter Rising of 1916, one that played its part in shaping the thinking of those who participated in the proclamation of the republic. Namely that the then government of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” was in reality an unelected administration, the 1915 British general election having being suspended in May of that year with the formation of a “national government” (supported by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, though not including them). So by April of 1916 Ireland, like Britain, was under the authority of a “parliamentary dictatorship” not an elected government; and certainly not one that the vast majority of Irish men (and disenfranchised women) had voted for or had any say in.
