Two days have passed since I criticised the risible scaremongering amongst sections of the domestic and UK press, as well as various opportunist politicians, following contradictory statements by PSNI officers investigating the related murders of Gerard Davison in May and Kevin McGuigan this August, both in the city of Belfast. In particular confused claims over the alleged involvement of former or current volunteers of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in the shooting dead of McGuigan led to some knowingly untrue or distorted reports in the national news media in Dublin, as well as by some further afield. While a healthy dose of scepticism in relation to Sinn Féin and the movement it represents is perfectly reasonable, for obvious reasons, it is clear that the rush to judgement in this case was motivated by the political fears of SF-hating journalists and politicians rather than genuine concerns over the sanctity of life or the rule of law (the reaction three months ago to the slaying of Kevin McGuigan, a former senior brigade officer in (P)IRA, was notably gloating in the newspaper columns and online comments of some well-known Irish media figures).

Yesterday the chief constable of the British paramilitary police force in the north-east of Ireland, the PSNI’s George Hamilton, issued a clarifying statement which I have published in full below:

“Chief Constable’s statement – PSNI’s assessment of the current status of the Provisional IRA.

22 Aug 2015

I want to respond to the requests from various quarters for me to bring some clarification regarding my assessment of the current status and activities of the Provisional IRA.

We should all remember at the outset that the stimulus for this public debate has been the tragic murder of Kevin McGuigan following the equally tragic murder of Gerard ‘Jock’ Davison. At the outset we would do well to remember that there are grieving families today and there are ongoing murder investigations that I will not compromise or jeopardise by unnecessary public commentary or speculation.

At this stage we assess that some Provisional IRA organisational infrastructure continues to exist but has undergone significant change since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. Some, primarily operational level structures were changed and some elements have been dissolved completely since 2005.

We assess that in the organisational sense the Provisional IRA does not exist for paramilitary purposes. Nevertheless, we assess that in common with the majority of Northern Ireland paramilitary groups from the period of the conflict, some of the PIRA structure from the 1990s remains broadly in place, although its purpose has radically changed since this period. Our assessment indicates that a primary focus of the Provisional IRA is now promoting a peaceful, political Republican agenda. It is our assessment that the Provisional IRA is committed to following a political path and is no longer engaged in terrorism. I accept the bona fides of the Sinn Fein leadership regarding their rejection of violence and pursuit of the peace process and I accept their assurance that they want to support police in bringing those responsible to justice. We have no information to suggest that violence, as seen in the murder of Kevin McGuigan, was sanctioned or directed at a senior level in the Republican movement.

Although still a proscribed organisation, and therefore illegal, we assess that the continuing existence and cohesion of the Provisional IRA hierarchy has enabled the leadership to move the organisation forward within the peace process. Some current Provisional IRA and former members continue to engage in a range of criminal activity and occasional violence in the interest of personal gain or personal agendas.

I want to comment on the connection, or lack of connection between the PIRA and the group calling itself ‘Action Against Drugs’. Action Against Drugs has emerged from within the Republican community from a range of backgrounds. Some are former members of the Provisional IRA, but others have links to Violent Dissident Republican groups and others are from a pure organised crime background. This group is intent on taking action against what it perceives as anti-social elements in Belfast but this is done in pursuit of their own criminal agenda. They are little more than an organised crime group in my view and we assess that Action Against Drugs is an independent group that is not part of, or a cover name for the Provisional IRA.

That said, in the McGuigan murder enquiry the SIO is appropriately following a line of enquiry that has shown connections and cooperation between Action Against Drugs as a group and a number of individuals who are members of the Provisional IRA. As I have just said, we are currently not in possession of information that indicates that Provisional IRA involvement was sanctioned or directed at a senior or organisational level within the Provisional IRA or the broader Republican movement.

In conclusion, I want families and communities to have confidence in the murder investigations that we are conducting. These investigations will be conducted with integrity, professionalism, in a thorough manner and without fear or favour.

I will not sacrifice my operational independence, or allow the investigation to be influenced by political commentary or even political consequences. We will go where the evidence takes us. I would again appeal for information from the community in assisting us on bringing those responsible to justice.

Thank you.”

In an even more explicit comment Hamilton remarked in a media briefing that (P)IRA was “…not on a war footing“, nor was it seeking to be so. Yet again, this is the reality of a cold peace rather than a hot war in the British Occupied North of Ireland. The problem is that some on the political right of Irish politics, unionist-sympathisers and colonist-deniers, are still fighting a counter-insurgency campaign on behalf of Britain that the British accepted was lost long ago.

Kevin Meagher’s article in the left-leaning New Statesman on the anti-establishment contender for the leadership of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and his decades old support for the reunification of Ireland presents some uncomfortable home-truths for a British audience. Particularly in relation to Sinn Féin:

“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?

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.

The historian Brian Hanley touches upon these matters in a recent speech republished by the Cedar Lounge Revolution:

“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 branches. 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.

Crudely put, if the conflict were to reignite, if the militant edge of the British unionist minority or the British forces were to unleash violence and mayhem on the streets once again (as as we came close to witnessing in late 2012 to early 2013), then only one group would be in a position to organise the barricades – if not yet man them. That would not be Óglaigh na hÉireann, the Defence Forces Ireland, nor those under the authority of the national government in Dublin. They would no more protect, or seek to actively protect, the lives and property of Irish citizens under the mandate of the UK in 2018 or 2028 than they did in 1968 or 1978. Something that the northern nationalist community knows to its considerable cost. If criticism or condemnation need be laid at anyone’s door for the continued existence of a demobilised (P)IRA it is perhaps to be found closer to home, in the British apologisms of the Dublin news media, and in the past moral cowardice of governments from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Labour.

Some may object to the pike being under the northern thatch, but no one has yet to come up with a convincing reason why it shouldn’t be.

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.

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.

Note: This image is also found in the digital collection of the South Dublin County Libraries where it is mislabelled “British Army manoeuvre a tank across Capel Street near the junction with Mary Street, Dublin” and incorrectly dated to 1920.

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.””

The liberal News Statesman magazine, which has been openly sceptical of the “Corbynmaia” gripping the Labour base, has detailed the “Pro-IRA” opinions of the new shadow chancellor:

“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.”

However McDonnell’s opinions on this issue can be easily defended using the same logic that the magazine previously offered in relation to Jeremy Corbyn’s:

“…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.”

This is a theme taken up in the IB Times:

“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.

On the morning of Monday the 24th of April 1916 a number of republican and nationalist organisations in Ireland, directed by the covert leadership of the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood, took to the streets of Dublin city in the first stage of a planned national insurrection across the island against the colonial rule of the United Kingdom. A “Provisional Government of the Irish Republic” was proclaimed in the capital and an “Army of the Irish Republic” was founded through the amalgamation of several pre-existing militant groups, notably the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizens Army (this unified force was also known as the Irish Republican Army or IRA). By the 27th of April the military and paramilitary units of the British Occupation Forces in the country had effectively isolated the “rebellion” in the city and a handful of other areas, confused orders and instructions restricting the would-be revolution to the counties of Dublin, Meath, Wexford and Galway. On the 28th of April the Provisional Government, led by its president and commander-in-chief, Patrick Pearse, agreed a general ceasefire with the representatives of the UK forces followed by the surrender of all units under its control. Bar some scattered clashes the revolution was over and within days the British authorities would begin executing the republican leaders by military firing squads.

Despite the presence of a significant domestic press in Ireland, plus some foreign correspondents from overseas, relatively few photographs were taken during the fighting of 1916, the vast majority of published images dating from its ruinous aftermath. One of the very few photos to have emerged from the conflict was produced by an anonymous employee of the “Daily Sketch”, a bellicose British tabloid newspaper based in Manchester (many years later it would merge with the UK’s notorious “Daily Mail”). Almost certainly photographed on the night of April 28th 1916, probably from an elevated position in or near the modern Rotunda Hospital, it shows Upper O’Connell Street (or “Sackville Street” before its post-independence renaming) in flames, the buildings on both sides of the thoroughfare towards the GPO – the headquarters of the republican government – burning after days of British artillery and machine gun bombardment, the night-sky lit up with the intensity of the conflagration engulfing the capital. To the fore of the image is the then recently erected Parnell Monument while in the distance the towering Nelson’s Pillar is awash with fire.

The image was reproduced later that year in a series of commemorative postcards published by the Daily Sketch for Eason’s & Son, the well-known Irish book- and newspaper-sellers, with the caption, “Irish Rebellion, May, 1916, Sackville Street in flames: a photograph taken by a “Daily Sketch” photographer under fire” (note the slightly incorrect date, typical of the period). This has been reprinted in a number of publications since then, though most copies exist in relatively poor quality, the newspaper’s original film and negatives almost certainly lost. The first two images above are from UCD’s digital postcards of 1916 archive and a similar online collection with South Dublin Libraries. Both show obvious signs of age, as well as poor digitisation. The third image is a cleaned up composite of the previous two, having been lightly edited in Photoshop, with the more glaring examples of wear and tear removed or toned down. Any changes are purely cosmetic and the original photographic or granular feel of the cards has been retained.

Other examples of the Daily Sketch postcard can be seen at the online archive of the National Library of Ireland.

Following up on my article examining the last great battle of the War of Independence, the confrontation between a combined force of pro- and anti-treaty units of the Irish Republican Army and the British Occupation Forces in the “Pettigo and Belleek salient“ of counties Fermanagh and Donegal during the summer of 1922, Jim Greenan has provided some additional information about one of the eye-witnesses to the clashes, in two emails outlined below:

“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 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.

From the legendary investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell,  a series of articles written for the New Statesman magazine in May 1984, describing the testimony of the former UK military intelligence officer, Captain Fred Holroyd, who was one of the first “insiders” to lift the lid on Britain’s “Dirty War” in Ireland. The three pieces from the publication’s archives cover a range of increasingly shocking subjects, including drive-by shootings, kidnappings, paid informers in the (Provisional) IRA and the Garda Síochána, bank robberies, train derailments, state-sponsored terror gangs, cross-border raids and murderous acts of sabotage. Several well-known characters from the earliest period of the conflict in the north-east of the country appear, notably Captain Robert Nairac, the infamous British death squad commander with a penchant for photographing the bullet-ridden corpses of his victims, and the UK’s notorious spy within the Gardaí, the ostentatiously affluent “Badger”.

(Note: Please be patient while the PDF documents load in the windows below. The browsers on some mobile devices cannot view Cloudup urls in which case please use a desktop browser or follow the provided links.)

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A few quick links to articles and posts that I have enjoyed over the last week or so. First up is this piece from the excellent historical website, The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland, featuring a series of photos taken in a British concentration camp in Ireland during the most important period of the Irish Revolution:

“In December 1920, at the height of the War of Independence, the British authorities established the first internment camp on Irish soil at Ballykinlar, Co. Down. The British policy of interning any man in any way suspected of being involved in the republican movement led to many hundreds of men being detained without trial, and soon a series of internment camps were built around the country, though Ballykinlar remained the largest and probably the most famous. [ASF: Infamous, surely?]

One such centre was the Rath Camp at the Curragh, Co. Kildare, where I.R.A. member and internee Joseph Lawless took this series of unique photographs illustrating life in the camp. He donated them to the National Museum of Ireland in 1950.”

Another of my regular reads is the blog, The History of Na Fianna Éireann, which this week features a story on the newspaper of the Irish Republican scouting organisation in the year leading up to the Easter Rising:

“This ‘unofficial’ monthly newspaper ran for about a year and cost one penny per edition.

It featured many articles about Ireland, and Irish history, including a series of stories from Patrick Pearse. Many of these articles were in Irish. It also contained instructions on camping, drilling, signalling etc, and adverts for scouting supplies shops. From time to time it featured adverts for the ‘Irish Volunteer’ and ‘The Worker’ newspapers. It also published details of Fianna meetings, events and parades held throughout Ireland.”

The Fianna Éireann, along with the Cumann na mBan, was in some ways the backbone of the revolutionary movement in the country, wielding far greater influence than has been heretofore acknowledged. Certainly the organised defence of the Irish Republic during the counter-revolutionary struggle with the Irish Free State would have been far more sporadic without the presence of both. The two organisations provided what one might term “revolution in depth” to the broader forces of Sinn Féin and Óglaigh na hÉireann (the Irish Republican Army) from 1916 to ’23.

A more sobering article comes from the Irish Story focusing on the capture of a unit of the Irish Republican Army by the Irish Free State Army during the Civil War and the “execution” of five Anti-Treaty Volunteers by the FS regime:

“Following their capture, the members of the column were taken to Wellington Barracks and interrogated. Three of the column had been captured wearing National Army uniforms and very soon another two were identified as army deserters.

On 11th December 1922, Corporal Leo Dowling (18 years old), Corporal Sylvester Heaney (19 years), Privates Terrence Brady (18 years), Laurence Sheehy (21 years), and Anthony O’Reilly (age unknown) were tried in a military court for treason. They were found guilty and sentenced to death and on 8th January 1923 they were executed by firing squad at Portobello Barracks.

This was the first time National Army troops had been executed for either treachery, desertion or any other reason. It is possible the soldiers were executed to send a warning to any remaining Republican sympathisers within the ranks of the National Army.

January 1923 saw the largest number of executions of the Civil War, a total of 34 with the largest single judicial execution carried out at the Curragh on 19th December, 1922. On the night of 13th December, eight members of the anti-treaty Rathbride column were captured in a dug out at Mooresbridge, right on the edge of the Curragh. One of their number, Tom Behan was killed during the capture of the column, beaten to death with a rifle butt. The remaining seven were tried, sentenced to death and executed on 19th December.”

The Irish Story has done more to chart the internecine blood-letting on our island nation in the early 1920s than any other publication, bringing those terrible events to the attention of a 21st century audience that has long been denied ready knowledge of them. It is to be highly commended for doing so.

On a less controversial note is this interesting review of the biography of Richard Talbot, a somewhat forgotten figure who once loomed large in our history. Finally thanks to Derek for the link to this report in the Irish Independent exploring plans to restore part of the Néifinn and Néifinn Bheag mountain range (pointlessly anglicised as Nephin Beg) in Mayo to something resembling its pre-modern state:

“It will become a wilderness of 28,000 acres almost unrivalled in Northern Europe where nature lovers will be able to roam for weeks without seeing another human being.

But first all signs of the human hand will have to be erased from the wild lands of the Nephin Beg area of Co. Mayo in a project that may take half a century to fully complete.

It is already a desolate and wonderful landscape once described by the Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger as the “loneliest place in Ireland…not depressing, but inspiring”.

But hardy Mayo souls drained the bogs over millennia to harvest turf and one of the first jobs is to block those ancient and not so ancient drains so the boglands can rejuvenate.

The idea is to bring the water table back up to within 10cms of the surface. That will allow the bogs to grow with sphagnum mosses sucking up ground water like a sponge.

Wild Nephin will encompass lands controlled by both Coillte and the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Bill Murphy of Coillte, which has some 4,600 hectares of Nephin forest, said the agency has begun a 15-year conversion plan to return “forestry to forest”.

Forest regeneration will aim to encourage natural forest types.

Some forest roads will be re-engineered to create more authentic trails and provide a safe sanctuary for plants and animals.”

Now there is something to appeal to any Green Republican.

Today’s Irish Times newspaper carries a deeply offensive article examining the period of 1939-45 in France and what the author of the piece characterizes as the “armed rebellion” of the French Resistance against the mandated administration of the country by Nazi Germany and it’s collaborationist partners during World War II. In particular the journalist questions the continued veneration of the militant movement by the modern French state and its celebration by political parties of all hues:

“The French Resistance was indeed the catalyst for the recreation of an independent French State, as Ronan Fanning wrote in the concluding article of The Irish Times series on 1939-45, but does that mean we should be proud of it?

The resistance itself was an act of armed rebellion by an extremist group outside the mainstream of nationalist politics, and with no electoral mandate. It came at a time when the state – Vichy France – was a neutral ally with Germany. That alliance had the overwhelming support of France’s democratically elected representatives to the French national assembly. The leaders of the rebellion had sought and received aid from the Allies.

The rebels no doubt showed bravery in openly, and in uniform, confronting the authority of the state and its armed forces. Even before the executions there were signs of some public sympathy, even admiration, for their courageous stand in the face of inevitable defeat. But they were still ideologues with no electoral support, prepared to kill and destroy in pursuit of their political aims at a time when unprecedented progress, albeit stalled by the ongoing war, had been made towards the goal of a fully self-governing France.

Should, 100 years on, a modern parliamentary democracy, committed to the rule of law and peaceful settlement of all disputes, celebrate as the seminal event in its history an armed insurrection by a small minority with no mandate?

Should a state with a long history of sporadic armed challenge to its authority be celebrating such an event? Should it do so when there are still organisations and individuals who believe their political aspirations are such that they entitle them to kill and destroy in pursuit of them?

Would it not be more appropriate to honour de Brinon, Alibert, Laval and Pétain, who worked peacefully through the democratic means open to them, and enlisted massive public support for nationalist goals, than to worship, as nationalist France has done for most of a century, at the shrine of violence cloaked in the veil of heroic sacrifice?

Most praise of the Resistance in the Irish Times series is based on its undeniable role in the rapid achievement of liberation for most of the country. Thus the desirable end justifies the illegal and undemocratic means?

The Resistance ensured liberation was secured by violent struggle, in which most of those killed were French. That violent legacy was evidenced even more tragically in the fratricidal post-occupation conflict, when once again the ideologues believed the virtue of their ideals counted for more than the will of the majority. The long shadow of the gunmen of 1939 has helped inspire political campaigns in practically every decade since 1945, and still does so today.

Much is written of the failure of post-liberation politicians to live up to the ideals of the men of 1939-45, but those politicians were themselves “men of 1939”. Some were veterans of the event, almost all, in both major parties, claimed its mantle. They still do.

The centenary is surely a time for reflection, not celebration.”

Note: the article was not really about France, the French Resistance or the 1939-45 period. More on this here. As for Ireland’s very own Marshal Pétain…

For those of you interested in the performance of the United States Armed Forces over the last two decades, especially combating the invasion-born insurgent movements of Afghanistan and Iraq (and the many-headed hydra of militant political Islam that US and Coalition operations accelerated in growth and influence) the journalist James Fallows has a provocative opinion piece in the Atlantic magazine that makes for essential reading. Just as relevant is the varied responses of Fallows’ supporters and critics which can be found here. Meanwhile closer to home we discover through a Freedom of Information request in Britain that one of the highest ranking British officers to be killed in the war in the north-east of Ireland, the South African-reared Lieutenant Colonel Ian Douglas Corden-Lloyd OBE MC (commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Green Jackets regiment and at one stage a rumoured member of the much-despised SAS special forces unit), died when an Aérospatiale Gazelle helicopter-gunship he was travelling in crashed while under fire from an Active Service Unit of the South Armagh Brigade of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in February of 1978. What makes this story interesting is the denial by the British military and civil authorities for the last thirty years that the aircraft had been lost to enemy action while providing air cover with a Westland Scout light chopper to British soldiers pinned down near the village of Jonesborough. As with most aspects of any war it is time that reveals all.

Due to the baleful influence of the Neo-Unionist lobby in the Dublin press corps since the 1970s popular culture in Ireland has tended to overlook the truly national character of the War of Independence. The volunteer-soldiers of the Irish Republican Army who sought to liberate our island nation in the first half of the 20th century did so by waging an insurrection not just on the streets of Dublin, Cork and Limerick but on the thoroughfares of Belfast, Derry and Armagh too. In the penultimate contest for Irish freedom and democracy there was no border, no demarcation line between north and south (or east and west). It was one country and one struggle. The July Truce of 1921 may have ended official hostilities between the forces of the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom in four-fifths of the nation but in the remaining fifth the war continued unabated for another two years. Unfortunately the conflict worsened as the military, paramilitary and terror components of the British Occupation Forces exploited divisions in the ranks of their Irish opponents to press home a diplomacy-gifted advantage. The worse days of the Northern Pogrom took place during this period as thousands of Irish men, women and children fled their homes for southern refugee camps and exile with family and friends in what was to become the so-called Free State. Arguably it was not until May of 1923 that Ireland’s War of Independence came to an end as the Republican Army declared a ceasefire in its struggle with the “Stater” regime in Dublin (though in reality most operations against the British Occupation Forces in the north-east of the country had petered out by the winter of 1922). This makes studies and articles examining the history of the Irish Revolution through the experiences of those who lived and fought in the “Ulster cauldron” very welcome indeed. So here is John O’Neill with a short account of the Fianna Éireann, the remarkable revolutionary scouting movement, in Belfast from 1917 to 1924. Without the youthful and committed enthusiasm of the Fianna Éireann branches or sluaite across Ireland the struggle to reassert Irish independence would have been very different indeed.

Following on from my brief post criticising the agenda-loaded commentary by certain media-friendly “experts” on matters military and intelligence-related, in particular the claim by the right-wing British security journalist Paul Beaver that in “20 years of fighting PIRA… and Real IRA operatives, not one to my recollection, ever said they had been radicalized as an Irish nationalist terrorist through the activities of the security services“, comes this supporting piece from Ben Hayes at Open Democracy:

“In “Suspect Community: People’s Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain”, professor Paddy Hillyard produced what remains the world’s most detailed ethnographic study of the impact of repressive laws and state policies on what we now call “radicalisation”. That was 1993. Hillyard, a former chair of the National Council of Civil Liberties (now Liberty), had interviewed more than 100 people of Irish catholic descent and provided unequivocal evidence that their everyday treatment at the hands of the British state had boosted support for Irish republicanism, acted as a recruiting sergeant for the IRA and fuelled “the Troubles”. Of course it wasn’t the only “radicalising” factor: Bloody Sunday, a shoot-to-kill policy and state collusion with Loyalist paramilitaries also played their part. As of course did the violence, propaganda and popularity of organisations like the IRA.”

More here.

Do you remember the days when editors or producers working in the newsrooms of New York, Washington or Los Angeles would contact their London-based “European correspondent” and ask him – or more rarely, her – to cover a high-profile story connected to the conflict in “Northern Ireland”? Throughout the late 1960s to early 1990s most American reporting in relation to the Long War consisted of items recycled from the British press, the journalistic neutrality of the transcribed pieces dependant on how long the recycler had been resident in Britain (the opinions and terminology usually revealed the ones who had “gone native” in the UK bureaux). For TV correspondents a simple head-and-shoulders report to camera filmed outside a well-known London landmark, with a few cut-away shots from Irish media or the archives, usually appeased the requirements of the network folks back home. However every now and again some hotshot, up-and-coming editor or producer in the States would take it into his or her head to uncover the “real facts” about the conflict in the north of Ireland, and with a heavy heart the veteran journalist would be forced to make the arrangements to leave his comfy Islington home and fly over to Belfast.

Such trips rarely yielded anything notable since most US journalists coordinated their visits with resident British officials in the “last colony” beforehand (and if they didn’t the British intelligence services soon warned their beleaguered colleagues across the Irish Sea of potentially unwelcome foreign guests). In a majority of cases the press officers of the so-called “Northern Ireland Office” (NIO), in co-operation with the British military and paramilitary PR people, had touring reporters wrapped in bubblewrap from the moment they stepped off their planes at the joint military-civil airport at Aldergrove (now Belfast International Airport). The journos would be whisked off to the once dilapidated Europa Hotel (“the most bombed hotel in the world!”, they would be informed just to add a further air of excitement to the whole occasion) where, if it was the 1970s or early ‘80s, they would be plied with copious amounts of food and drink (and drugs and prostitutes, should their inclinations run that way) over the course of two or three days; and all at the UK tax-payers expense.

Inevitably there would be the mandatory tour of a nearby fortified police or military base coupled with a ride in the back of an armoured-jeep around the slightly safer streets of North Belfast, and if the reporter was lucky perhaps a flight by helicopter-gunship over what the British termed “bandit country”, a propaganda-savvy description for those rural regions controlled by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army (in reality most of the flights were a quick hop around counties Antrim or Down, well away from the “front”). Occasionally, when the visiting American press correspondents got too inebriated and hungover to produce any copy of their own, the NIO officials would be helpful enough to supply some ready-written materials which could be faxed on to their Stateside bosses, before the reporters returned to the placidity of London dinner-parties and shopping on Oxford Street. So worked US  journalism during the first two decades of the “Troubles” (at least for the hackier end of the market; those with airs and graces were sometimes given the red carpet treatment at Stormont Castle).

I was reminded of all this following reports of the possible (if unlikely) downfall of the American conservative media demagogue Bill O’Reilly. Amidst a swirl of allegations and counter-allegations in relation to his journalistic career comes this from the Washington Post:

“In his 2013 book, “Keep It Pithy,” the Fox News host recounted, “I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

But in light of a week-long controversy surrounding other comments that O’Reilly has made about his career, those statements bear closer examination.

O’Reilly traveled to Northern Ireland in 1984 to research a book about the Troubles, according to Fox News. The book was never finished, and it’s not clear whether he covered the conflict for any news organization. At the time, he was working for a Boston TV station, WCVB, but his then-boss, Philip S. Balboni, said that O’Reilly covered only local news and did commentary for the station.

O’Reilly didn’t mention seeing any terrorist bombings in Northern Ireland during a radio interview with syndicated host Hugh Hewitt last week. Instead, he told a milder story: “We went on a raid in Divis Flats with the police. And it was a pretty intense situation. There was stuff being thrown, arrests being made, all of that.”

Were you in fear of physical harm?” Hewitt asked.

No, O’Reilly replied.

The long-since-demolished Divis Flats were infamous in western Belfast, occupied primarily by poor Catholic residents. The housing complex was considered a stronghold of the separatist Irish Republican Army and was the scene of many police raids during the decades of the Troubles.

Asked about O’Reilly’s statements Friday, a Fox News spokesman said that O’Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers.”

Which, given what we know about how US journalists reported on the “Troubles”, is far more believable. Those who sought to report outside the British propaganda machine were few and far between.

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.

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.

In reading the New Yorker article some points should be born in mind:

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.

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.”

Whatever your view of Adams, especially given recent events, read the whole thing.