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.

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.

You can follow his campaign at the Christy Walsh website or on the Pensive Quill.

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…

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.

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.

The Battle of Pettigo and Belleek in the summer of 1922 was the largest military engagement between the Irish Republican Army and the British Occupation Forces in Ireland since the Easter Rising of 1916, and arguably the last significant action in the island nation’s War of Independence. Taking place from the 27th of May to the 8th of June the confrontation symbolised a final effort by revolutionary period republicans – already divided over opposition to a compromise peace deal with Britain – to contest the United Kingdom’s continued suzerainty over the north-east of the country. Within weeks of the encounter many Irish participants in the battle would find themselves on rival sides in the intra-nationalist Civil War of 1922-23.

The National Overview

Tuesday the 21st of January 1919 is often cited as the date on which Ireland’s four year War of Independence began. On that day nine volunteers (soldiers) of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade of the Irish Republican Army confronted two armed officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the UK’s locally-recruited paramilitary police force, on a rain-swept road near Soloheadbeg quarry, County Tipperary. The early afternoon ambush, in pursuit of arms and explosives, quickly turned violent when the constables failed to surrender, both men dying in a hail of gunfire. Though the fatalities were unusual the encounter itself was not, clashes between the “rebels” and the “Crown forces” occurring intermittently since March of the previous year. In truth what gave the event retrospective importance was its timing. On the same day as the rural attack representatives of Sinn Féin, the republican-nationalist party which had swept to an island-wide victory in the general election of December 1918, established Dáil Éireann or a republican parliament in the future capital city of Dublin. The Dáil gave form and substance to a revolutionary republic proclaimed three years earlier in the Easter Rising of 1916 and to the Irish people’s desire to regain their freedom from the colonial rule of the United Kingdom. This was the foundation-stone which convinced later generations to regard the incident at Soloheadbeg as the opening salvo of a democratically mandated armed struggle against the British empire.

For the next two-and-a-half years insurgent and counter-insurgent warfare between the several thousand volunteers of the IRA and the UK “garrison” on the island – the 57,000 members of the Imperial Armed Forces, the 4,400 officers of the regular Royal Irish Constabulary, the 9,800 temporary constables of the RIC Reserve Force (the infamous RICRF or “Black and Tans“), the 2,100 cadets of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC (the feared ADRIC or “Auxies“), some 1,100 men in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the two dozen officers with the Belfast Harbour Police, the 32,000 militiamen of the Ulster Special Constabulary, and numerous individuals in various quasi-military groupings – shaped nearly all facets of contemporary Irish life. The insurrectionist republic, ratified by two further plebiscite-elections in 1920 and 1921, gained an Aireacht or government under the presidency of Éamon de Valera, complete with ministerial departments, a civil service, police, courts, diplomats and, of course, an underground defence force. Meanwhile centuries of foreign authority, haphazardly erected through historic layers of law and officialdom, collapsed in the face of a popular revolt, withdrawing to the main urban centres, as well as to the unionist north-east of the country: a geographically transplanted facsimile of the medieval English Pale. In time, domestic and international pressure, coupled with a general war weariness, would lead to a bilateral ceasefire, the Irish-British Truce of July 11th 1921.

Nearly six months later, and in circumstances that remain controversial to the present day, prolonged negotiations between the representatives of the Dublin and London administrations culminated in the signing of a peace deal in the cabinet room of No. 10 Downing Street. Under the “Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland” of December 6th the partition of the island into two separate jurisdictions, imposed by the British in 1920, would be formally recognised by the independence movement. A new, largely sovereign polity, the Irish Free State, would be established in the twenty-six counties of “Southern Ireland” while in the remaining six counties of “Northern Ireland” – the unionist-dominated north – there would be a semi-autonomous zone of the UK. This would result in one fifth of the territory of the island being left in British hands. The principle signees on behalf of the government of the Republic were Arthur Griffith, vice-president and secretary of state for foreign affairs, and Michael Collins, secretary of state for finance (who also served as the adjutant general and director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army). Their opposite numbers in the government of the United Kingdom were David Lloyd George, prime minister, and Winston Churchill, the secretary of state for the colonies.

The legitimacy of the treaty and the concessions it required split the independence movement and the country as a whole. Many critics argued that the negotiators had gone beyond the instructions given to them by their cabinet colleagues and president de Valera. Others pointed out that their actions violated the articles and spirit of Bunreacht Dála Éireann or the Dáil Constitution (adopted in January 1919) and the subsequent oath taken by all members of the government and defence forces to preserve it.

“I … do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I do not and shall not yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government, Authority, or Power within Ireland hostile and inimical thereto; and I do further swear (or affirm) that to the best of my knowledge and ability I will support and defend the Irish Republic, which is Dáil Éireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God.”

Though the proposed accords gained parliamentary approval in the Dáil on January 7th 1922, with a voting majority of just seven TDanna or deputies out of 121, irreconcilable camps quickly emerged on both sides. The so-called “anti-treaty” group were led by Éamon de Valera, now resigned from the presidency, while the breakaway “pro-treaty” faction were led by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith.

On January 14th the “treatyite” members of Sinn Féin and the IRA, in line with the settlement reached in London, began to form a transitional “Provisional Government of Ireland” under the chairpersonship of Collins (meaning Southern Ireland rather than the Irish Free State which would not come into formal existence until December of 1922). However many of those in the interim body retained their membership of the Aireacht. Collins was now the head of the Provisional Government and the minister of finance in the Republican Government while Griffith later served as the minister for external affairs in Provisional Government while holding the office of the President of the Republic. Though some people were clearly in one administration or the other, a majority found themselves with a foot in both camps as the rival authorities remained entangled well into the summer.

Meanwhile Dáil Éireann continued to function as the legislature of the Republic even as plans were laid for it to be subsumed into a treaty-required “Provisional Parliament” (the latter destined to become the assembly of the Free State). This process was made more complex by Britain’s insistence that the largely theoretical “House of Commons of Southern Ireland“, the UK-enacted home rule parliament for the twenty-six counties, was the only lawful legislature in the south until the Provisional Parliament took its place. In British eyes the Dáil remained an illegal entity, the chief cause of an armed rebellion against the authority of the crown. Yet for most of 1921 and 1922 they found it necessary to deal with its political and military representatives on an almost daily basis across Ireland and in Britain.

In some ways the chaos created through the competing claims of legitimacy on the island suited the needs of the pro-agreement Irish and British sides, aptly reflecting the creative ambiguities and outright deceptions both groups found necessary to deploy in order to bring about a compromise settlement that neither truly favoured. Given a constitutional black hole where anything seemed permissible the “Provisionals” readily exploited their lack of democratic or legal oversight during the early months of their existence to silence or push aside their critics.

Unsurprisingly the confusion of allegiances created by the Downing Street accords were also reflected in the Republic’s defence forces, the Irish Republican Army, which had been on a general ceasefire in the greater part of the country since July 1921. In the first quarter of 1922 the treaty was put to individual votes across the army and an overwhelming majority expressed opposition to what they saw as the unconstitutional “usurpation” of the 1916 republic with a self-ruling “vassal” of the British Empire. Ironically, given future events, aside from the isolated Dublin Brigade and a few other units, the greatest support for the proposed deal came from the war-weary volunteers of the army’s five divisions in Ulster where the 1921 truce had failed to take hold. Promises from the leadership of the pro-agreement camp, particularly Michael Collins, had convinced many of these men and women that the settlement was simply a ploy which would lead in time to the liberation of the north-east. What they demanded in the meantime was not debates but weapons to defend their embattled communities. As a result of the split the Irish and UK press began to describe the units loyal to the Dáil Constitution as the “Anti-Treaty IRA” while the minority favouring the accords with Britain were characterized as the “Pro-Treaty IRA“. (A third, loosely organised body also existed: the “Neutral IRA“. This grouping eventually took the republican position or simply quit the revolution altogether).

In January of 1922 the Provisional Government sought the loyalty of pro-agreement units by reorganising them as the Irish National Army (INA) with its chairperson, Michael Collins, as their new commander-in-chief. The core of this new force was the IRA’s elite Dublin Guard, a May 1921 amalgamation of the Special Service Unit or “Squad” attached to Collins’ Intelligence Department in the capital and the Dublin Brigade’s Active Service Unit. It was to be joined by the seventy-strong Belfast City Guard, also made up of pro-treaty volunteers, in February. While this controversial policy gifted the political and military leadership of the Provisionals to one man, supported by Griffith and his metropolitan colleagues, it also facilitated the supply of munitions and equipment from the UK to a force directly under the control of Sinn Féin’s breakaway faction (the British expected this force to suppress domestic opposition in Ireland to the treaty should it be required). One of the first signs of this new relationship was the adoption of British infantry uniforms, dyed a dark green, by the former guerillas.

However these changes were unpopular with many pro-deal volunteers, some older veterans refusing to describe themselves as anything but the “IRA” (later clarified as the “official IRA” or the “regular IRA“). For a few of these revolutionary fighters the new military title was rather too close to that of the old Irish National Volunteers, the armed wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party, former nationalist rivals of the independence movement. Furthermore since the Provisionals claimed authority over all parts of the defence forces the INA continued to refer to itself as the IRA in most of its official pronouncements and statements. It wasn’t until the autumn of 1922 that the Provisionals’ military bulletin, An tÓglach, ceased to be published in the name of the Irish Republican Army; from mid-September onwards it was issued simply by “the Army“.

In reality, putting aside all the grandiose titles, the INA began as a minor Dublin affair, with volunteers outside the capital acting as a near-unified force for several months after the signing of the Downing Street agreement. This ensured that the two competing chains of command, commonly known as the “Army Executive” (Anti-Treaty) and the “Army GHQ” (Pro-Treaty), would be very public in their support for the optimistically conceived “Army Re-unification Committee“. Indeed the GHQ Staff informally classed units as “regular” (or “the Regulars” and nominally pro-agreement) and “irregular” (or “the Irregulars” and nominally anti-agreement or neutral) until 1923. It was not until the outbreak of open warfare between the rival factions, and the mass recruitment of Irish-born, former British army soldiers and RIC officers into the ranks of the Provisionals, that the ties of comradeship were to be severed beyond all hope of recovery.

The North-East

Well away from the splits created in the independence movement by the 1921 Treaty, the governments in London and Stormont – the seat of the one-party unionist regime just outside Belfast – were busy securing the survival of the historic British colony on the island of Ireland; albeit now reduced to the six north-eastern counties of Derry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh, Down and Antrim: in other words, “Northern Ireland”. By the spring of 1922 the maintenance of this separatist zone and the disputed border around it required the deployment of some 50,000 soldiers, police officers and militiamen, the latter in the form of the locally recruited Ulster Special Constabulary. This organisation, known as the USC or more colloquially “the Specials“, was established by the UK authorities in 1920 using elements of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a pre-WWI pro-British terrorist grouping, to supplement the work of the RIC in the north of the island, eventually becoming an auxiliary police militia. However the USC had little regard for the views of Downing Street or Westminster, answering instead to local unionist leaders, its sectarian and racist nature quickly exacerbating the effects of the war across the province of Ulster and beyond. Within two years of its creation a despairing Lloyd George, who had initially agreed with unionist demands for its establishment, was comparing the force to the fascist gangs of Benito Mussolini in Italy. The aptness of that analogy was to become more apparent in the months and years ahead.

Under Sir James Craig, the first “prime minster” in June of 1921 (a former British army officer, Orangeman and co-founder of the UVF in 1913), the Stormont administration instigated or at least facilitated a campaign of violence known to history as the “Northern Pogroms“: that is the ethnic cleansing of several classes of perceived undesirables – Roman Catholics, Jews, atheists, socialists, and even trade unionists – from what was to become a deeply conservative, quasi-theocratic state. Or as Craig would later put it:

“All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.”

The prime culprits for the mayhem were the Specials, and by March of 1922 the rival Dublin authorities were struggling to respond to the orgy of blood-letting which had engulfed the “North“, and which had worsened in the wake of the previous year’s truce. Nationalist enclaves across the region were under siege, leaving hundreds of people dead and wounded, while thousands more were fleeing southwards to refugee camps around the capital. The city of Belfast alone would witness the expulsion of 22,000 Roman Catholics and “disloyal” Protestants by the year’s end (the latter excoriated by unionist politicians and journalists as “rotten Prods“). To make matters worse many members of the ruling establishment in Britain privately defended the “Orange Terror” as a necessary evil to safeguard the future of the United Kingdom. This was certainly the opinion of men like Sir Henry Wilson, a former field marshal in the British army and Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1918 to 1922. Born into the Anglo-Irish or Protestant “Ascendancy“, the colonial aristocracy in Ireland, Wilson had led the mutiny amongst the locally garrisoned UK armed forces against home rule for the island several years earlier in 1914, and by February of 1922 he was acting as a unionist MP and military adviser to the dictatorship in Stormont. His malign twenty-year influence upon Irish-British relations was to make him a high-profile target for retaliation, something that was to soon lead to catastrophic consequences for the whole country.

In the first half of 1922, then, the northern divisions of the Irish defence forces were mounting a fierce resistance to the carnage in the Six Counties but were loosing volunteers and equipment in crippling amounts. Consequently one of the few things most opponents or advocates of the treaty could agree upon was the need to support their desperately depleted units in “North-East Ulster“, regardless of their position on the London settlement.

Before this, in January and February, the British Occupation Forces had begun their gradual retreat from the Twenty-Six Counties by concentrating the majority of their troops in Dublin, Cork and Kildare (a number of specialist units, such as the cavalry, armour and artillery, were ordered to withdraw from the region immediately, either to the north-east of the country or to elsewhere within the empire). The disbandment of the RIC, already denuded of personnel, began soon thereafter, many officers seeking a transfer to the Six Counties or the further colonies. As the UK installations were evacuated rival units of the Irish Republican Army took up residence in the barracks and camps, the former authorities surrendering them to whichever faction arrived first  (the exceptions to this were high-profile places like the capital’s Beggars Bush Barracks – which became the INA HQ on January 31st – or the sprawling Curragh Camp in Kildare, handed over to the pro-treaty forces on May 16th). As a part of the process of retreat the British began to donate several tonnes of war materials to the regular INA, almost all of it from the vast stockpiles of weapons and equipment belonging to their withdrawing forces.

In a daring scheme senior Pro-Treaty commanders arranged with their Anti-Treaty counterparts for a portion of these munitions, principally rifles and handguns, to be covertly transferred to anti-agreement units of the army in Munster and Connacht. These units in turn dispatched their existing weapons, in some cases dating back to 1913, to the beleaguered divisions of the defence forces in the north (where a narrow majority of volunteers were aligned with the INA). Ironically of course this meant that the British Empire was unknowingly rearming the very insurgents who were most opposed to its presence in Ireland.

For those wishing to foster unity in the IRA this covert co-operation offered a potential solution to the growing split: renewing the war of independence in two-thirds of Ulster to forestall internecine conflict nationally. Downplaying the growing incidences of violence between opposing units of the army, in the early summer of 1922 many optimists believed that enmity to the UK’s continued presence in the country would supersede any disagreements over the nation’s constitutional future. Even in the Twenty-Six Counties the breakdown in military discipline caused by the emergence of the Collins-Griffith faction had largely manifested itself through attacks on the remaining enemy forces, and not just by anti-treaty volunteers. As recently as April the 28th four British intelligence agents had been arrested by the IRA in Macroom, County Cork, and executed at nearby Kilgobnet (three of the men, lieutenants Ronald A Hendy, George R A Dove and Kenneth R Henderson, were notorious war criminals associated with the British practice of torturing or killing prisoners by dragging them behind moving vehicles until their bodies were mutilated or dismembered. Two were also suspected of involvement in the fatal injuring of an elderly local woman during a house-raid the previous year. At the time of their deaths all three were under the orders of the brutally incompetent boss of the operations and intelligence section of the British 17th Infantry Brigade in the province of Munster, Major Bernard Law Montgomery. He, of course, later gained fame as Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein).

Eventually concrete plans were laid between Michael Collins and General Liam Lynch, chief-of-staff with the Army Executive wing of the defence forces and one of the ablest field commanders of the entire period, to launch an operation known variously as the “Northern Offensive” or the “May Rising“. Intended to collapse the Stormont dictatorship and harry the UK into renegotiating the more objectionable aspects of the treaty the first attacks by northern-based units against the British Occupation Forces began on the night of Friday the 19th of May, 1922. Unfortunately a lack of coordination, confused orders, and contrary actions by volunteers serving with three army divisions under the influence of the Provisionals meant that the campaign quickly faltered. In time events across the rest of Ireland were to take a far different and more tragic course than those hoped for by the architects of the joint-offensive.

The Triangle

Contemporary press reports referred to the triangular patch of land between the administrative counties of Donegal and Fermanagh as the “Pettigo and Belleek salient”, something of an exaggeration though one reflecting the language of the recent Great War and Britain’s view of the new “border” in Ireland as both an international boundary and the frontline in an ongoing struggle. In reality it was a sparsely populated area of wooded fields, small lakes, bogs and rugged terrain running along the northern shore of Lower Lough Erne, a forty-two kilometre elongated lake studded with dozens of islands, with the townlands of Pettigo to the north-east and Belleek some twenty-four kilometres to the south-west. Few serviceable roads existed in the region, limiting movement to a handful of well-known routes and a branch-line of the Great Northern Railway company which ran through the salient from the eastern Bundoran Junction pass the villages of Irvinestown, Kesh, Pettigo, Castle Caldwell, and Belleek before going westward to Ballyshannon and the seaside resort of Bundoran in County Donegal.

The predominantly unionist village of Pettigo sat astride the Termon River, a narrow watercourse dividing the town in two before running south into Lough Erne. The majority of the population lived on the west bank, in Donegal, which also included the “diamond” or town square, the RIC barracks and the all-important train station. Steep hills dotted with woods and several small lakes dominated the countryside to the west and north, where much of the land was uncultivated. A short stone bridge connected the village to its eastern half in Fermanagh, a scatter of houses following the main road up a small slope until the countryside opened up into hedgerowed fields and copses. Before 1922 the village’s only real claim to fame stemmed from the regular cattle-markets held in the diamond and its association with the annual Lough Derg pilgrimages.

In contrast the mainly nationalist market-town of Belleek was built almost entirely on the eastern or Fermanagh side of the wide River Erne, the latter following a cascading course south-east into the northern waters of the lake. This is where most residences, retail outlets, a hotel, a pub and the famed pottery factory were to be found. A bridge of several arches crossed the river at an odd angle giving access to the west bank and Donegal, though the only notable feature here was the elevated Belleek Fort, an 18th century building covering the river-crossing from atop a embankment and thick stone walls. It enjoyed surprisingly good views over the neighbouring countryside and was to be the focus of much of the action in the forthcoming clashes.

At any other time in the history of Ireland these demographic characteristics would have been of little significance, crude indicators of colonial settlement and native displacement. However with the determination of the Stormont and London governments to impose a border around a separatist, pro-UK region of the island, suddenly such quirks of history and geography became the stuff of immediate war and terror.

In light of the planned offensive in the north-east the Pettigo-Belleek salient became a relatively secure forward-base for over one hundred volunteers from both sections of the divided defence forces, principally units attached to the anti-treaty 2nd Northern Division under Commandant-General Charles Daly (up to late April forces in the triangle had carried out a number of attacks on the British, including ambushing a USC patrol at Garrison in Fermanagh, though this was technically within the operational area of the treaty-split 3rd Western Division led by Commandant Liam Pilkington). In the aftermath of wide-scale arrests of republican activists in the north the salient also served as a safe haven for those being pursued by the UK authorities, including a large body of fatigued volunteers from Tyrone who were put to patrolling the countryside around Pettigo. The strategic importance of this otherwise rural backwater was reflected in the decision by Free State government to place “official” INA garrisons in the “southern” halves of the two divided villages in April of 1922, following the withdrawal of the RIC from the local barracks. Meanwhile IRA units, regardless of their official chain of command, were coordinating their activities in the area.

Unfortunately the Irish forces in the contested region were lightly armed at best, with a mixed variety of rifles, carbines and assorted handguns (not to mention some shotguns). The handful of available submachine guns and light machine guns were of limited use due to ammunition shortages. Hand grenades and landmines – whether conventional or improvised – remained scarce while artillery or mortars were non-existent. For transport civilian cars or captured military vehicles were employed, though even these were rare. In contrast the BOF were awash with standardised weapons and equipment, from armoured personnel carriers to aircraft. These differences were to be crucial in the coming days.

The First Assault on Belleek

Inevitably the presence of Irish forces in significant numbers along the “border” drew the ire of the unionist administration and community at large, leading the USC militias to launch a series of local pogroms against the nationalist populations in the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Even Donegal and Cavan, part of Ulster but technically in the “South“, were subject to shootings and house-burnings. This was a reminder that the boundary-line between the two “states” was a political construct that had yet to be given concrete form. Resident populations ignored it and rival formations criss-crossed it at will. Indeed many RIC and USC men were from counties which were now in “Southern Ireland” and they had no intention of abandoning those ties. Consequently the British press was full of stories charting the clashes between the opposing camps:

“LONDON, 31st May

NORTH AND SOUTH CLASH.

Troop Concentrations Continue.

WARSHIPS LEAVE FOR IRELAND.

A sudden volley rang out on the Ulster frontier, westward of Fermanagh, on Sunday evening. A motor driver fell dead from his seat and long lines of Ulstermen and Southerners immediately blazed with fierce rifle fire. A serious battle developed wherein five Southerners were killed and several injured. One Ulsterman was killed. The motor driver was one of the Northern force carrying supplies to beleaguered garrisons whom the Southerners endeavoured to isolate. So far the police have kept the communicating lines intact.

Fierce fighting is in progress on the Fermanagh border and Pettigo a strong Orange centre, was occupied this morning the Republicans, who joined the Free Staters, drove out the Protestants and occupied the houses. The rebels crossed the border and occupied the houses of leading Unionists. Refugees arriving, at Enniskillen report that a fight is progressing between Unionist forces and the rebels. Belleek was occupied by the Republicans this morning.

Bloodshed and outrage continue elsewhere. Isolated county houses and castles have been the scene of attacks by marauding armed men, and in many instances a heroic defence has been put up by the occupants and servants, who protracted the sieges and have beaten off the raiders.

There has been further fighting on the border at Clady, County Tyrone. The I.R.A. troops are concentrating in County Donegal.”

After weeks of similar incidences the racketing tension culminated in an alleged occurrence at Pettigo, an event reported in dramatic terms by the local newspapers and repeated in the House of Commons by unionist MPs:

“LONDON, 31st May

LOYALISTS KIDNAPPED

Sinn Feiners kidnapped a number of loyalists at Pettigo Market on the Fermanagh border, whence the loyalists are fleeing, leaving everything behind.”

The victims were later claimed to be four USC officers, though no names were ever presented and no relatives came forth to seek their whereabouts. Whatever the truth about the “kidnapping”, it provided the Stormont authorities with the casus belli they required to prepare a full-scale assault upon the salient, though significantly against the more vulnerable town of Belleek rather than Pettigo. On Saturday the 27th of May a large group of USC men assembled just outside the disputed enclave under the leadership of Sir Basil Brooke, a former infantry captain, Orangeman and founder of a notorious paramilitary gang know as the “Fermanagh Vigilance“. Twenty-one years later Brooke would become a “prime minster of Northern Ireland” and the author of an infamous speech to the Orange Order where he declared:

“Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster… If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster… I would appeal to loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ good Protestant lads and lassies…”

However in 1922 he was merely a ruthlessly sectarian leader of unionism in south-west Ulster determined to suppress any dissent from the “minority” community. Crossing westward over Lower Lough Erne from Roscor in county Fermanagh, with a flotilla of small boats towed by a hastily-armed pleasure-steamer known as “The Lady of the Lake”, Brooke landed near the townland of Leggs before marching his colleagues a short distance to the grounds of Magheramenagh (Magherameena) Castle, seven kilometres east of Belleek. Magheramenagh was a 19th century stately home built in the Tudor-Gothic style by the influential Johnston family, members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in County Fermanagh. With the death in 1915 of the dynasty’s only son, Captain James Cecil Johnston, literally blown to pieces by a Turkish shell during the Allies’ disastrous Gallipoli campaign, the family emigrated to Britain (including Johnston’s widow and young daughter, the future novelist Myrtle Johnston).

By 1922 the sprawling house had become the dilapidated residence of Lorcán Ó Ciaráin, the recently appointed Roman Catholic parish priest in the district. Ó Ciaráin was an early member of Sinn Féin (indeed, he was credited with the naming of the party in 1905) and a pro-treaty confidant of Michael Collins, believing the promises from the Provisionals that the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone would be included within the future Free State. His strategically placed home – with a train-stop inherited from its former aristocratic owners – was well suited to his role as a conduit for information between the independence movement in western Ulster and the entangled governments in Dublin. It also housed sessions of the local Dáil Court, which included the participation of the noted republican journalist Cahir Healy (despite being imprisoned without trial by the Stormont regime in May he was elected as a nationalist MP for Fermanagh and Tyrone that November). Unsurprisingly Ó Ciaráin was a unionist hate-figure and he was ejected from his dwelling at gunpoint, Brooke’s expedition proceeding to shoot at anyone who approached their encampment, including inquisitive neighbours. The militants were now holding a position that commanded the road and rail routes between Belleek and Pettigo.

Fearing a larger British invasion a small IRA force commandeered the strategically-sited Cliff House in Donegal, just to the north-west of Belleek, an impressive mansion on the banks of the River Erne owned by a major in the USC who was also a grand master of the Orange Order (this residence was destroyed in the construction of the Cliff Hydroelectric Power Station in 1946). Further coordination saw the withdrawal of the regular INA garrison from the Belleek Fort – known informally as the “Battery” –  and its replacement with an Anti-Treaty contingent (in total there were no more than seventy volunteers on active service in the townland, the majority anti-agreement).

Shortly thereafter up to thirty IRA volunteers, following the railway line towards Pettigo, were intercepted by the Special Constables on the grounds of Magheramenagh demesne, a fierce fire-fight forcing the militiamen’s withdrawal. Pursued by the volunteers the USC abandoned the castle and conducted a chaotic boat-borne evacuation to Buck Island, a nearby islet with little in the way of natural cover at the mouth of Rossmore Bay. There they were reinforced by another one hundred paramilitary police, plus local doctors and nurses to attend their wounded colleagues. One unlikely figure to emerge from this rout was a Mrs. Laverton, owner and pilot of the steam-yacht “The Lady of the Lake” (renamed “HMS Pandora“), which was pressed into service during the rescue operations. She was hailed by the newspapers in Britain as the pistol-wearing “Ulster Admiral“:

“LONDON, June 3rd

RELIEF OPERATIONS.

HEROIC LADY.

The most romantic figure in the Irish border struggle is ‘Admiral’ Mrs. Lavorlon, of  ‘H.M.S. Pandora,’ the little steamer on Lough Erne,which, under fire, rescued the garrison of Ballynameena [i.e. Magheramenagh] Castle. Her achievement is the sensation of the North.

Smartly dressed in serge, she looks trim and business-like, with a revolver strapped to her waist, contrasting strangely with a becoming soft hat with a modest ‘Beatty’ tilt. She calmly related to an interviewer the story of the relief.

‘I ran in towards the castle,’ she said, ‘hove the ship to. The Specials aboard engaged the large bodies of Republicans whom we drove off with heavy losses. Then I noticed that, they opened the sluice-gates and there was danger of the Pandora stranding. I jumped into a row boat weighed the anchor, and pulled out into deep water.

‘I was constantly sniped at, but I had a rifle and I naturally fired back. I think I got several too.'”

In fact Laverton was forty-two year old Hazel Valerie West, the formidable daughter of a well-connected Ascendancy family from Wexford and the ex-wife of a former lieutenant-colonel in the British army, Herbert Curling Laverton OBE. Her paternal grandfather, Dublin-born William James West, had served as a Church of Ireland minister in Fermanagh and Tyrone for some time, and she and her husband of three years had moved to the relative solitude of Magheramenagh Castle as guests of the Johnston family in 1911 to aid his recovery from persistent ill-health. While the Lough Erne region was a popular hideaway for the wealthier scions of the settler nobility it seems that premature retirement from the imperial military did not suit Laverton and the outbreak of the Great War was his opportunity to abandon an itinerant, childless marriage at home for adventures overseas. By 1922 Hazel West was sojourning at the rather déclassé Imperial Hotel in Enniskillen, a year after her bitter divorce in London, where she owned the yacht that was to gain so much infamy in the coming weeks. Like most representatives of the colonial ruling class the middle-aged West had been unable to reconcile herself to the dramatic changes stemming from Sinn Féin’s victories in the elections of 1918, 1920 and 1921. However one cannot help but wonder if there were more personal reasons behind her desire to see the seizure of Magheramenagh than mere politics.

The Opening Attack on Pettigo and a Second Attack on Belleek

Early the next morning, Sunday the 29th, attention turned to the relatively quiet village of Pettigo, where the Irish forces numbered around sixty INA/Pro-Treaty volunteers and some thirty Anti-Treaty. The latter included Vice-Commandant Nicholas Smyth of the Fintona Battalion in the 2nd Northern Division. Alerted by night-time messengers from Belleek the Tyrone-born Smyth recounted that:

“Our officers decided to cut a trench across the road at Pettigo Bridge to prevent a rush through by enemy cars or tanks. While this work was in progress large numbers of enemy forces began to appear on the Fermanagh side of the border. As our working party was in grave danger should the enemy open fire, I was ordered to take a covering party of about 12 or 14 men to protect them. These men were armed with rifles. We took up positions overlooking the bridge. The enemy forces doubled and took up positions behind a hedge across from us. As the men making the trench were now in grave danger, being right in the line of fire from both sides, it was decided to withdraw the working party.

We didn’t wish to be the aggressors and I warned the men to withhold their fire and await orders. We must have been in that position for a couple of hours. The tension was great. The whole town had become very quiet and you could hear a pin drop when suddenly a shot ran out somewhere up the street. This was followed by three or four more single ones. This seemed to be a signal, because the whole place became alive with sound in a few minutes. Bullets were hitting the wall just over our heads and large lumps of lead were dropping on top of us. Our rifles were soon too hot to hold and the air was filled with the smoke and the smell of cordite. We had 100 rounds of ammunition each and most of it was gone before the enemy withdrew.”

After several hours of gunfire the USC men retreated eastward through the fields leaving wounded on both sides.

Meanwhile back in Belleek Commandant-General Joe Sweeney, head of the 1st Northern Division of the Pro-Treaty IRA/INA in west Ulster, who had been sent to report on the situation, narrowly escaped death when USC snipers targeted him in the village, curtailing his visit. Shortly thereafter a body of militiamen which had been dispatched to the enclave from the nearby town of Enniskillen in county Fermanagh, approached the area from the south-east in a convoy of three Crossley 20/25 Tenders (a type of unarmoured or lightly armoured military car) and two heavier Lancia Triota 1921 Armoured Trucks. Just outside Belleek, and actually inside Donegal, the convoy was ambushed by Irish units on a particularly narrow stretch of the road, the driver of the lead car dying in the initial volley, crashing into a ditch. Their way forward blocked, and subject to close fire from both flanks, the USC expedition panicked. Unable to turn their vehicles around on the confined route they resorted to driving in reverse for nearly two kilometres eastward along the Lough Shore Road, abandoning further vehicles on the way, dismounted men speeding on foot towards Lough Erne, where they came under further fire from the IRA sections now holding Magheramenagh Castle. The discarded equipment seized that day by the ambushers was to see service with the Anti-Treaty IRA in the coming months while the Pro-Treaty troops drove a captured Lancia Triota in triumph some fifty kilometres north to the INA’s Donegal HQ in Drumboe Castle, near Stranorlar.

Further Attacks on the Pettigo Defenders

Later on Sunday evening a second convoy of USC men arrived in Pettigo, speeding eastward from their base at Clonelly House, Fermanagh, to secure a land-route via the townland of Lowery to the vulnerable militiamen on Buck Island in Lough Erne, who were under intermittent sniping from the Irish forces in Magheramenagh and Leggs. This sparked a further two-hour battle in and around the village as the British attempted to pass through it, eventually forcing the Special Constables to seek an alternative route to their trapped compatriots via a narrow sliver of marshland in the area of Toome, south-west of Pettigo, where the Waterfoot River and the Termon River entered Lough Erne. Unfortunately for the USC men by late Monday morning, the 29th of May, the IRA under Jim Scallon had successfully fortified themselves in this position – known locally as the Waterfoot – with a line of slit trenches and felled trees. The militia column proceeding on foot found its way blocked, leading to a quick fire-fight and even quicker retreat.

Sporadic clashes took place across the enclave throughout the following days, notably on Tuesday morning when another dawn-assault on Pettigo was thwarted. Commandant Smyth again witnessed some of the fighting at first-hand:

“…at daybreak a battle royal broke out around the village. From our positions we couldn’t see what was going on and I moved the men out along the railway line in order to be in position to cover the main road leading to the town. Some of the enemy were retreating down this road and our men opened fire on them. One of our men had a rifle fitted for firing grenades and he tried to get a few across the road. As far as I remember, they failed to hit the target. I found this experiment most interesting as I had never seen a rifle grenade fired before and I saw that at short range they could be very effective.”

The Deepening Crisis

By Monday evening the unionist dictatorship at Stormont was in a state of panic, believing the events in the south-west salient to be the herald of a full-scale “invasion” to retake the counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry. These fears were further stoked by regional newspapers which carried lurid reports of “Protestant” and “loyalist” families fleeing the fighting to seek safety in the eastern garrison-towns of Castlederg, Omagh and Enniskillen. Frantic telegrams and appeals to London were met with stalling from Downing Street, as Dublin prevaricated over its own involvement in the affair. Initial denials of INA troops operating in the area were soon switched to acceptance of their presence, though it was argued that they were acting purely defensively. In fact secrecy over the cooperation between Pro- and Anti-Treaty forces at the highest levels of the Provisional Government, particularly with the launch of the Northern Offensive, meant that no one in authority was exactly sure about the situation on the ground. Including the Provisionals’ leader, Michael Collins.

Meanwhile the UK prime minister, Lloyd George, was dismayed at the thoughts of being dragged into another war in Ireland, now that the last one had barely ended. He was also suspicious of unionist claims and the motivations of his own atavistic cabinet members over what he regarded as little more than a minor skirmish in the “swamps” of Fermanagh. In contrast to the relatively friendly relations he enjoyed with the Irish he found the unionists an embarrassment to the empire and its standing in the world. However the pressure to act, particularly from a bellicose Winston Churchill as the secretary of state for the colonies, forced his hand.

On Thursday the 1st of June, and under personal orders from Churchill who had staked his political reputation on the operation, a combined military and paramilitary force of regular British troops from the 18th Infantry Brigade, supported by drafted-in units of the RIC/RUC and Special Constabulary, approached the liberated townlands from the east in a long convoy of Crossley tenders, Lancia Triota trucks, Rolls-Royce armoured cars, and Medium Mark A Whippet tanks. Air-cover was provided by a newly dispatched squadron of Bristol F.2 Fighters from the Royal Air Force, based at the hastily upgraded Aldergrove aerodrome just outside Belfast, which were to carry out reconnaissance and artillery-spotting duties for the next two weeks.

The Final Assaults On Pettigo

Spreading out into the countryside the BOF troops took up positions around the village of Pettigo while smaller groups marched or drove north- and south-west. After a period of quiet a vanguard of twelve Crossleys were sent ahead, unaware that forward-posts in the vicinity had been ordered to hold their fire, leaving the initial defence to positions nearer the town. A devastating first volley seems to have caught the British attackers off-guard though they eventually replied with a hail of bullets from machine guns and rifles, concentrating on the IRA sections at Drumhariff Hill, immediately south-west of the village, and at the railway station. However the demoralising impact of the first contact and sustained casualties over the course of thirty minutes forced a chaotic withdrawal, cars and people colliding as they attempted to turn around on the narrow country road leading down to the river-crossing. Both sides were soon greeted with the sight of a police officer springing from a hiding place in the fields, flinging his weapon to one side, and chasing after his comrades, apparently generating much cheering from the defenders of Pettigo. That night and into Friday sniping between both sets of combatants took place in several flashpoint locations, the more experienced British Army marksmen often creeping to within 200 meters of the IRA lines before opening up.

By the morning of Saturday, June 3rd, the British had commandeered all the craft on Lower Lough Erne and assembled them at Portonode, just outside the eastern village of Kesh, where they were used to transport part of an infantry battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment westward across the lake to the nearest tip of the elongated Boa Island. From there 200 soldiers marched north-west, carrying their boats to a point on the isle opposite the townland of Letter, just over three kilometres to the south-west of Pettigo, and west of the IRA strong-point of the Waterfoot. Under fire the British force crossed from Boa Island to the mainland in a battle that gave Hazel Valerie West an opportunity to make a reappearance:

“LONDON, June 7th

FIGHTING IN ULSTER.

REBELS OUTWITTED BY A WOMAN THEIR BOATS COMMANDEERED.

SUCCESSFUL REAR ATTACK.

The newspapers are giving prominence to Mrs. Laverton, the so-called “Woman Admiral” of the Lougherne [i.e. Lough Erne], who, aboard her yacht Pandora, commandeered a fleet of small boats for the transport of soldiers, who were thus able to take the Sinn Feiners in the rear. Some boats commandeered were in Sinn ‘Fein waters. The Sinn Feiners were chagrined, never believing that a woman would venture in bullet-swept waters. The “woman Admiral” wore a dainty pistol in her belt and on one occasion stalled off a Sinn Fein raid by mounting a brass telescope in the bow of her yacht and pretending it was a machine gun.”

In the meantime the rest of the battalion advanced from the village of Kesh to Lowery, immediately east of the Waterfoot, planning to link-up with the troops at Letter. However this required them to pass over the Irish-held isthmus. Throughout Saturday night the infantry battalion attacked less than thirty IRA men in the Waterfoot outposts on two fronts, in some of the most intense fighting seen in the confrontation. However the volunteers held their positions, relying on reinforcements from Pettigo who crept between the enemy lines to reach their isolated comrades. Nicholas Smyth led one of the sorties:

“When I arrived at Waterfoot we had to crawl for about 300 yards to get to the position held by Scallon and his men. He was under heavy cross fire from two sections of the enemy. I suggested to Scallon that we should try to move into a position directly between the enemy positions in order to get them to fire at each other in their efforts to reply to our fire. We did this and it worked out as we had anticipated. When we got them properly engaged in the darkness, we returned to the safety of our trench. Their fire at each other continued for some time and eventually both parties of the enemy evacuated their positions and retreated.”

Eventually most of the British forces in Letter were withdrawn by boat to the relative safety of Boa Island.

At the same time as the Pettigo attacks up to 200 USC militiamen crossed from Tyrone into Donegal at the isolated townland of Lettercran, about fifteen kilometres north-east of Pettigo, terrorising the local population along the way (two girls, Bridget McGrath and Susan McNeil, were wounded by marauding members of the same band earlier in the day, alerting local people to their presence). However the USC’s movements, delayed by their destructive forays, had been anticipated and the group was intercepted in an IRA ambush dispatched from Pettigo under the command of John Travers. After a ferocious encounter it beat a hasty retreat with heavy losses into Tyrone, weapons and ammunition strewn behind it. Meanwhile in Pettigo town itself an infantry battalion from the Lincolnshire Regiment, supported by two companies of the South Staffordshire Regiment, made a frontal – and ultimately futile – night-assault on the village in scenes of near chaos.

On the morning of June 4th, a Sunday, several armoured cars led a surprise British infantry attack on Pettigo, hoping to breach the barricaded road and bridge crossing the Termon River into the village. However the driver of the lead vehicle, a USC man, was almost immediately shot dead, causing his car to flip over and partially block the way. Despite desperate attempts to clear the road the troops behind were unable to advance until artillery was brought up from the 4th Howitzer Battery, Royal Field Artillery. Under a heavy barrage the IRA units were forced to abandon their improvised defences of railway sleepers, carts and barrels, a massed bayonet charge quickly overrunning their positions. Meanwhile another two columns of British troops struggled to encircle the town, but suppressive fire from Irish outposts slowed their advance in the open fields, allowing the main body of Pro- and Anti-Treaty volunteers to stage a fighting withdrawal westward under further bombardment to the wooded hills, while smaller groups were transported by friendly locals across Lough Derg several kilometres to the north-west. During the retreat two volunteers, twenty-three year old Bernard McCanny and twenty-four year old William Kearney, boyhood friends from the same small village of Drumquin in Co. Tyrone, were killed by artillery fire directed at their posts on Billhary Hill, immediately to the west of the village (their bodies were later recovered by the INA and reburied in the Church of St. Agatha, Clar, just outside Donegal Town).

However the small section of IRA volunteers in the machine gun post at Drumhariff Hill, Donegal, just south of the village, continued to resist until they ran out of ammunition, leading to their capture by bloodied and angry soldiers. One of their number, Patrick Flood, a local lad, was shot dead during the fighting while several more were wounded (the next day Flood’s partially buried body was recovered from one of the defenders’ trenches on the hill by a local priest who faced down hostile unionist crowds, reburying the young man in the parish cemetery). A similar dire military situation faced the units defending the Waterfoot which were overrun after two hours of close quarters combat in the marshes. Eventually most of those who fought free of the encirclement at Pettigo and deeper into the “south” were rescued by local residents or INA units in cars and horse-traps, and brought to safety in Donegal Town, some 26 kilometres away. There, up to fifty wounded and exhausted men were temporarily sheltered in the old workhouse, attended to by doctors and nurses.

After four years of repeated military humiliations in Ireland the newspapers in the UK reflected the sense of triumphalism felt by many in the imperial corridors of power:

“LONDON, June 6th

LIKE RATS IN A TRAP

MILITARY CATCHES THE REBELS

HIGH EXPLOSIVES IN PETTIGO SALIENT

Gunners Fight Till Wiped Out

The latest Irish telegrams confirm the seriousness of the fighting in the Pettigo Salient, where high explosive shells, machine guns, and bayonets played their part in a battle lasting five hours, which ended in the rout of the Republicans.

A military communique issued at Enniskillen says:—

In consequence of the aggression of the so-called Free State troops in the Pettigo salient it was decided that Imperial troops should occupy the same.

The operations, continued on Saturday and Sunday by land and water, resulted in the military occupying the salient for about a mile from the frontier in order to secure the high ground.

The military lost one man killed. The other side is known to have lost seven killed and eleven prisoners.

In order to dislodge the snipers in the hills it was necessary to fire six rounds of high explosive shells.

Later in the same report it was claimed that:

“…Pettigo was taken at bayonet point.

At least thirty Republican troops were killed.

As the British entered the village the Republicans machine gunned them and the British replied with artillery. After the first heavy shell some of the Republicans fled, but the machine gunners continued until wiped out. Four shells fell behind the village amid a party of fleeing Republicans inflicting heavy losses.

British troops secretly landed at Boa Island, and transferred to the mainland in the night time, caught the retreating Republicans in the rear like rats in a trap. After the more timid Republicans had fled to the hills, only a hundred remained to defend the village from a barricade at the end or the bridge. The British rushed the barricade with the bayonet, and captured the snipers. The artillery then joined in.

The countryside is swarming with British soldiers accompanied by Whippet tanks.

While the Republicans showed no violence towards the residents or Pettigo, they looted extensively. Female sympathisers with the rebels entered the local drapers, helped themselves, and paraded the streets in stolen finery.

When the British took possession of the salient every farmhouse displayed the Union Jack. Aeroplanes are now patrolling…”

The Taking of Belleek

Over the next four days – and despite frequent sniping – the British set about securing their positions at Pettigo, carrying out reconnaissance and intelligence gathering operations in the locality. Prisoners were interrogated, often brutally, while the better-informed USC and RIC took revenge on the resident nationalist population through looting and arson. The squadron of Bristol F.2 Fighters were used to scout south-westward and reinforcements brought by rail to Enniskillen. The Irish, UK and international press, expecting a major confrontation to take place within the salient by the end of the week, dispatched a flock of correspondents to the region.

“LONDON, June 6th

SINN FEINERS ON THE BORDER.

SUCCESS OF MILITARY

HEAVY FIRING IN BELFAST

Enniskillen reports that many thousands of Sinn Feiners with armoured cars are massing on the border to reinforce the garrison at Belleek. The military now hold Free State territory to a depth of a mile north of Pettigo. It is ascertained that upwards of forty Republicans were killed by shellfire during Sunday’s battle.

Mr. Collins takes a most serious view of the aggression of the British troops. He is demanding a full inquiry, and is not going to London unless specially asked.”

On the morning of Thursday the 8th of June columns of troops from the Lincolnshire and Manchester Regiments, several hundred strong, moved on foot and by vehicle towards Belleek in two flanking movements, one from the north-east along the Pettigo Road and one from the south-east along the Enniskillen Road, with Lough Erne dividing them. Heliographs and signal flags were used to keep in contact across the waters of the lake, while a flotilla of commandeered boats moved back and forth. Hazel Valerie West, having joined the patrolling of Lough Erne to prevent aid reaching the isolated defenders, was again in the action, this time from a militia HQ on another island in the lake, just south-east of Magheramenagh:

“The famous woman “admiral,” Mrs. Laverton, assisted aboard Ulster’s “flagship” Pandora (her private yacht), with a base near Rough Island, and with a flotilla of motor launches in her wake, packed with armed men ready to land on the beach in front of Magherameena [Magheramenagh] Castle, the stronghold in Ulster territory, recently seized by the rebels.”

In the event the castle and its environs were taken without incident, the garrison having been withdrawn the previous evening, though it did not prevent some reporters claiming it’s storming as a great act of valour. Around noon a British armoured car entered Belleek itself and was almost immediately fired upon by units dug-in near the local schoolhouse, thus providing the excuse the expeditionary leaders required to launch a full-scale assault.

As the British soldiers advanced westward they came under rifle and machine gun fire from IRA volunteers stationed in the vicinity, particularly the depleted garrison at Belleek Fort, across the River Erne. Flares fired by the leading parties singled the artillery to open up, several 18-pounder shells hitting the fortified hillock, while more landed in the surrounding fields. After less than an hour of fighting the Irish forces withdrew to a defensive line nearly two kilometres to the west while their former positions continued to be bombarded for a further sixty minutes. By the late afternoon both sides of the townland were under the control of the UK forces, the Tricolour above the smoking fort replaced with a Union Jack, while troops posed for the press cameras.

Afterward

Though isolated exchanges of gunfire between the Irish and British forces continued for several more days the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek was over. In all it had taken nearly fifteen hundred British troops, paramilitary police and militiamen up to a fortnight to overwhelm less than 150 volunteers of the Irish Republican Army/Irish National Army, a combined body of Anti- and Pro-Treaty IRA units. It was, in many ways, the last great battle of Ireland’s early 20th century War of Independence. In the immediate aftermath of the confrontation the local nationalist community was subject to a campaign of terror by elements of the British Occupation Forces, residents abandoning their homes and farms to join the swelling numbers of families fleeing “southward” (following the fall of Pettigo over a 1000 “Roman Catholic” refugees had been evacuated to the city of Glasgow from Belfast where unionists had gone on a celebratory rampage).

Meanwhile the international press reported dozens of deaths and injuries resulting from the thirteen-day battle, though there were in fact only four acknowledged fatalities on the Irish side, including William Deasley from Dromore, Co. Tyrone, who died from gunshot wounds despite reaching the workhouse at Donegal Town (he was buried alongside his two INA comrades in nearby Clar). British casualties were never officially acknowledged – unsurprisingly given the political and military sensitivity of the subject during a low-point in Dublin-London relations – though they were generally believed to be higher. At the same time nearly fifty captured men, Pro- and Anti-Treaty IRA as well as officially INA, were dispatched as prisoners to the city of Derry and elsewhere. Some of these were not to see their freedom until 1924.

For most civilian members of the Provisional Government – unaware of the joint-offensive against the “Orange junta” in Belfast – the clashes in Fermanagh-Donegal were an embarrassment, and a sign of things spiralling out of control. For the military members of the administration, notably Michael Collins as the chairman and commander-in-chief, the losses in men and territory represented a failure in a supposedly more assertive and unifying northern policy.

In UK circles the unionist leaders saw the two weeks of violence as a justification for their ethno-religious paranoia, while Winston Churchill used his “victory” on the “Irish frontier” to persuade his sympathetic cabinet colleagues to demand more action of the Provisionals against the authority of the republican government (ignoring Lloyd George’s dismissal of the whole affair as a “great bloodless battle“). Indeed the colonial secretary saw the events at Pettigo and Belleek as the military template that Michael Collins and his administration needed to follow in order to liquidate domestic opposition to the treaty, particularly after the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson, one of the architects of the “Orange terror“, outside his London home on the 22nd of June 1922. While the authorities and newspapers in Britain and Ireland blamed the shooting on the anti-treaty IRA Collins knew better. The two captured assassins were almost certainly serving volunteers of the pro-agreement section of the London Brigade of the Irish Republican Army and were under his orders. The INA commander-in-chief had decided to execute the former field marshal when it was discovered that Wilson was urging unionist leaders to emulate the “successes” in Fermanagh and launch a major offensive against nationalists across the north of Ireland. Collins was to spend the next several weeks trying to organise the rescue of his men –  vice-commandant Reginald Dunne and volunteer Joseph O’Sullivan, both aged twenty-four – from captivity in Britain. However events leading up to the internecine blood-letting that was the Battle of Dublin in June and July of 1922 quickly overshadowed his efforts.

Consumed with the need to prosecute a war against former comrades the Provisionals hurriedly – and with little publicity – agreed to the creation of a “neutral zone” in the disputed salient. However this neutrality rested solely on the withdrawal of all Irish troops, the USC and the RIC/RUC from the area, surrendering the territory to the control of the regular British army. As a result the Free State parts of Pettigo were not freed from occupation until January 1923, while Belleek Fort and its environs were not liberated until August of 1924. Contemporary civilian accounts complained bitterly of the violence and intimidation they suffered from the UK garrisons – notably the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Corps of Royal Engineers – but little action was taken by Dublin beyond some token intergovernmental protests. The “northern” halves of the villages of Pettigo and Belleek, of course, remained under British occupation.

During the autumn of 1922 the belligerent record of Hazel Valerie West very nearly caught up with her, just like Sir Henry Wilson. Having benefited socially and materially from the violence that year her high-handed reputation in Fermanagh made her a prime target for reprisal.

“LONDON, Sept. 18

ULSTER LADY “ADMIRAL.”

ESCAPE FROM KIDNAPPERS.

An attempt to kidnap Mrs. Laverton, who on June 2 rescued from Irish rebels a police garrison on Lough Erne in her yacht Pandora during the fighting at Pettigo, was frustrated by the lady’s promptness in covering the enemy while she ran the gauntlet in a motor-car. Mrs. Laverton has been a marked woman since her Pettigo exploit. Latterly two men have persistently shadowed her. Before the attempt they were seen near the yacht Pandora on Lough Erne. Mrs. Laverton was walking to Lenaghan when she saw an empty motor-car in the middle of the road. The engine was running and Mrs. Laverton was going to investigate when a policeman drove up in a motor-car and warned her that men were lying behind the hedge. Mrs. Laverton drew an automatic revolver, entered the police motor-car, and escaped. The men pursued her.”

In June of 1926 she became the second wife of Augustus William West, a distant relative within the close-knit Ascendancy, and the step-mother to his two children from a previous marriage. They lived in the West’s palatial family residence, Leixlip House, County Kildare, until her death on the 3rd of September 1954. To the end she was unreconciled to the existence of a “free” Ireland and like many of her background simply chose to ignore it.

Note: It is very likely that some of the British artillery and personnel deployed in the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek were used some twenty-one days later by the Provisional Government to bombard the rival republican garrison in the Four Courts complex, beginning on the 28th of June. This of course initiated the Battle of Dublin and the subsequent civil war of 1922-23. This will be examined in a future article.

The town of Belleek filmed by the UK Pathé News following the withdrawal of the British Occupation Forces, 1924. Features shots of the Battery (flying a tricolour) and the bridge across the River Erne that served as the “border”.

Some Sources:

“BUREAU OF MILITARY HISTORY, 1913-21. STATEMENT BY WITNESS DOCUMENT NO. W.S. 711 Witness John Travers, Detective Branch, Garda Síochána, Dublin Castle. and four others.”

“BUREAU OF MILITARY HISTORY, 1913-21. STATEMENT BY WITNESS DOCUMENT NO. W.S. 721
Witness. Nicholas Smyth, 4 Dollymount Ave., Dublin.”

“BUREAU OF MILITARY HISTORY, 1913-21. STATEMENT BY WITNESS. DOCUMENT NO. W.S. 879 Witness Brian Monaghan, Drumkeelan, Mounteharles, Co. Donegal.”

“BUREAU OF MILITARY HISTORY, 1913-21. STATEMENT BY WITNESS. DOCUMENT NO. W.S. 1741 Parr II Pages 186-377 Witness Michael V. O’Donoghue, Lismore, Co. Waterford.”

Maps:

A detailed, contemporary map of County Fermanagh from “The Atlas and Cyclopedia of Ireland“, published 1900.

A detailed, contemporary railway map from the “Rail Ireland Viceregal Commission”, published 1906.

Irish Townlands

Open Street Maps

New York Times Newspaper Archive:

IRISH REBELS PLAN TO BILLET REFUGEES; They Intend to Force Dublin Protestants to Feed Victims of Belfast Pogrom. SEIZE MORE BARRACKS Free State Commander is Killed at Broadford–Duffy Is Taken From Platform.

SIX KILLED IN BATTLE ON FERMANAGH BORDER; Four More Are Killed When Car Carrying 10 Policemen Is Attacked in Belfast.

IRISH REPUBLICANS SEIZE ULSTER STRIP; BORDER WAR RAGES; Belfast Surrenders Fermanagh Salient and Southern Troops Take It Over. FIRST CLASH OF MILITARY Fighting on the Donegal-Tyrone Line Where 1,000 Sinn Fein ers Are Concentrated. LONDON REACHES DEADLOCK Cabinet Decides Not to Force a Crisis After Premier’s Conference with Irish Leaders.

GRIFFITH’S REPLIES SATISFY THE BRITISH; Responses to Six Questions Put by Cabinet Avert Break in Conferences. PREMIER GOES TO CRICCIETH Sir James Craig Asks for Control of Troops in Ulster if He Should Need Them.

BRITAIN IS RUSHING TROOPS TO ULSTER; Infantry, Artillery and Air Squadron Arrive and Some Leave for Border. LONDON FEARS AN INVASION Free State Leaders Meet and Announce They Don’t Expect a Break on the Treaty.

BRITISH SOLDIERS RETAKE PETTIGOE FROM IRISH REBELS; Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry and Tanks Storm Village on the Ulster Border. MEET LITTLE RESISTANCE Republican Commandant and Staff Are Captured and Heavy Casualties Are Reported. BRITISH LOSE ONE DEAD More Troops Land in Belfast– Catholic Magistrate Killed at Newry.

COLLINS PROTESTS BRITISH ARMY MOVE; Asserts Troops at Pettigoe Were Free State Regulars and Demands an Inquiry. BELLECK BEING EVACUATED Ship From New York Seized Off the Irish Coast With Contraband Arms.

BRITISH GUNS DRIVE IRISH FROM BELLEEK; Artillery Bombards Fort and Infantry With Armored Cars Takes Border Village. ONE SOLDIER IS WOUNDED Conferences on Constitution Continue Satisfactorily in London– Dail Eireann

FIX NEUTRAL ZONE ON BORDER.; British, Ulster and Free State Forces Make Policing Arrangement.

Other Newspaper Archives:

National Library of Australia, Trove, “Pettigo Belleek”

National Library of New Zealand, Papers Past, “Pettigo Belleek”

• This Article is a Finalist In the Best Blog Post category, the Blog Awards Ireland, 2015 *

Over on the Broken Elbow blog the veteran Irish journalist Ed Moloney has a detailed examination of the British Army’s so-called “Tuzo Plan“, named after its originator General Sir Harry Craufurd Tuzo. If the strategy had been implemented in 1972 it would have seen the UK Forces in Ireland and their counterparts in the British terror factions co-operating together in a military drive against the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in the north-east of the country. While Tuzo and those around him clearly thought that the destruction of the Irish insurgency would be the outcome of the planned offensive, with hindsight we can see that a more likely outcome would have been an intensified and more wide-spread conflict. One that would still have required a political solution through concessions on all sides to bring it to an end.

“Prior to his posting as General Officer Commanding (GoC) of British troops in Northern Ireland (where he took over from someone rejoicing in the name of Vernon Erskine-Crum, an Indian Army veteran and aide to Lord Mountbatten when he was Viceroy to India), Harry Tuzo commanded a Gurkha Brigade in Borneo during an insurgency in the late 1960’s, which the British claimed had been inspired by an Indonesian regime suspected of being under Communist influence.

Born in Bangalore, India in 1917, Tuzo was a child of the British Raj, the colonial class which ruled the sub-continent from the days of the East India Company in the late 18th century onwards. His father was a British officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment and civil engineer who also saw service in East Africa. His mother, a memsahib, was the daughter of the Raj, her father an official in the Indian civil service. As a child, Harry Tuzo was sent home to England to prepare for a life of imperial service and was schooled at Wellington College and Oriel College, Oxford.

As things turned out Tuzo reached the apex of his miltary service in the twilight of empire. Like so many of his contemporaries, Northern Ireland was to be the last hurrah of a generation whose like would never be seen again: Tuzo, Kitson, Ford, Freeland, King, Wilsey and Creasey. Such names to conjure with!

Sliding effortlessly after Oxford into a military career that was guaranteed to bring rank and honours, and, in the aftermath of World  War II, moving from one post-colonial skirmish to another, Tuzo was, in the summer of 1972, charged with devising a plan to combat and annihilate the Provisional IRA, in much the same way as his Gurkhas disposed of Indonesian rebels in Borneo, with maximum force and minimum fuss.”

As we know the “Tuzo Plan” was never implemented but aspects of it were to shape Britain’s counter-insurgency war on this island nation for the next four decades. Including the use of British terrorist gangs as the proxy-forces of the UK state.

Irish journalist and author Ed Moloney, now resident in New York, has an interesting article over on his Broken Elbow blog examining possible evidence of the reorganisation of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army into a “cellular” command and control structure primarily based upon Active Service Units (ASUs) at a date much earlier than previously thought.

“Way back in January 2013, myself and James Kinchin-White researched and wrote a lengthy article, based on British Army publications and a website, about the death of James Bryson, a famous IRA activist from Ballymurphy who was shot dead in a disputed incident in August 1973 along with Patrick Mulvenna, brother-in-law of Gerry Adams.

Local legend had it that the pair were killed by the Official IRA but this account makes it clear that the killers were undercover soldiers from the Royal Green Jackets regiment hidden in the roof space of a house overlooking the Bullring in Ballymurphy.

Bryson and Mulvenna were, before their deaths, slated to be key members in a new IRA cell in Ballymurphy set up by then Belfast commander, Ivor Bell, to replace the heavily compromised and infiltrated company structure. Bell had succeeded Gerry Adams as Belfast Brigade leader after Adams’ arrest along with Brendan Hughes the previous month.

The importance of the incident lies not just in the deaths of two of the IRA’s most valuable activists but in the challenge it presents to the official narrative behind the creation of the IRA cell structure. The conventional view is that cells were introduced largely in response to the setbacks suffered by the IRA as a result of Castlereagh-style interrogations which followed changes in British security policy which, so the internal critics had it, were facilitated by the misguided ceasefire of 1975-1976.

But this account challenges that version and shows that considerable infiltration of the Belfast Brigade by British intelligence forced an experiment with cells on the organisation in the city long before the 1975 ceasefire was thought of.”

Read it here.

Just a quick heads-up for those who have access to the series “Twentieth Century British History” from the Oxford Journals. A recent edition features an article titled “The Influence of Informers and Agents on Provisional Irish Republican Army Military Strategy and British Counter-Insurgency Strategy, 1976–94” by Thomas Leahy of King’s College, London. In it the researcher pretty much demolishes the myth of the British “super spies” in the ranks of (Provisional) Irish Republican Army. From the introductory abstract:

“This article investigates the impact of British informers and agents on Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) military strategy and British counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland between 1976 and 1994. The importance of this topic was highlighted by revelations in 2003 and 2005 concerning two senior republicans who had both been working for British intelligence for decades. While acknowledging other important factors, various authors believe that these intelligence successes were vital in containing the IRA, and significantly influenced that organization to end its military campaign in the 1990s.

Yet after cross-referencing new interview material primarily with memoirs from various participants in the Northern Ireland conflict, this article reveals that the nature of many rural IRA units, its cellular structure in Belfast, and the isolation of the IRA leadership from the rest of the movement, prevented it from being damaged to any considerable extent by informers and agents.

In fact, by the 1990s the resilience of the IRA was a crucial factor encouraging the British government to include Provisional Republicans in a political settlement. The IRA’s military strength by the 1990s also points towards the prominence of political factors in persuading the IRA to call a ceasefire by 1994. The role of spies in Northern Ireland and the circumstances in which the state permitted negotiations with paramilitaries such as the IRA, are key considerations for those interested in other recent and current conflicts.”

This of course is an argument that I have been making myself since 2011, and can be found in such ASF posts as:

Playing Fantasy Troubles

Fantasy Troubles Part III – Britain’s Superspies!

More Cloak And Dagger Shenanigans In Fantasy Troubles

Fantasy Troubles Part 4

Tolerating The Armed Struggle

A belated happy Lá Lúghnasa to one and all as we celebrate the traditional harvest festival marking the commencement of the third quarter of the year in the indigenous calendars of Ireland and the Gaelic world. Unfortunately my day has as been consumed with rather more contemporary work, leaving me little time for festivities. However it’s pleasing to note that this date also marks the one hundredth commemoration of the funeral of the influential Irish revolutionary leader Diarmaid Ó Donnabháin Rossa (Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa). The last of the original generation of Irish-born Fenians he died in the city of New York on June 29 1915, at the ripe age of 83, and was buried with republican honours at Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, on August the 1st 1915. His highly publicised funeral is regarded by most historians as heralding the revolution that would follow nine months later (that “nine” being another symbolically pleasing Irish and Gaelic characteristic) and today the capital saw official ceremonies attended by the Uachtarán, Taoiseach and the great and the good of politics, the military, the arts and the media. Ó Donnabháin Rossa has made a long journey from being Victorian Britain’s “number one terrorist” to modern Ireland’s icon of patriotism.

You can read more on the truest of our Fenian dead here.

Kurt Eichenwald is a veteran American journalist of some thirty years standing who has specialised in everything from corporate malfeasance to defence issues for publications as diverse as the New York Times and Vanity Fair. For the last year he has been authoring a series of investigatory or analytical pieces for the current affairs magazine Newsweek, some of which have drawn much praise. In a recent article headlined “How Uninformed U.S. Politicians Help ISIS“, he laments the ignorance of the American political class in relation to militant political Islam and its habit of engaging in lazy stereotyping that misleads more than it illuminates, offering up this rhetorical equivalent from another conflict:

“…the greatest financial support for the radical Catholic terrorists in the Irish Republican Army came from American Christians. Despite the IRA’s murder of 1,800 people, American politicians proved they were soft on terrorism. Representative Peter King of New York even went to Ireland and hung out with the group’s sympathizers. Fortunately, the British were tough and used enhanced interrogation techniques—including waterboarding—on these radicals.”

Which is a fair enough analogy if Eichenwald was to go on and explain the falseness of such claims as they relate to the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and the misleading nature of, for instance, British government propaganda in times past (particularly in the United States, where the “two warring tribes” misinformation campaign by the UK’s embassy in Washington and the consulates in New York and L.A. was hugely successful until thrown into disarray by the interventionist policies of the Clinton administration in the 1990s). There is a strong critique to be made here, with the obvious comparisons to the shallowness of understanding concerning the various inter- and intra-communal power struggles in the Middle East and beyond. However that is not what happens. Instead we are given this.

“Offended by what you’ve just read? Good. You’re supposed to be. That diatribe, while all true, is horrific. Sadistic lunatics, whether as individuals or groups, have nothing to do with Christianity. They have just appropriated a peaceful religion to justify their murderous impulses.”

Except the diatribe is not true, and that surely is the point? (P)IRA was not a “radical Catholic” guerilla force, the vast majority of its funding did not come from the US, and it never used religious sentiment to justify its actions. The organisation was a secular, left-leaning armed resistance, its beliefs very much reflected in the early quasi-Marxist policies of its political wing, Sinn Féin. Its military budget from the 1970s to late ’90s was largely funded through a process of domestic “revolutionary appropriation” here in Ireland; that is the voluntary or more usually intimidatory “taxing” of criminals and businesses, as well as the profits derived from smuggling, counterfeiting, etc. Nor for that matter was (P)IRA responsible for the deaths of 1,800 people, a throwaway statistic much favoured by sections of the right-wing press in Britain (who like their American counter-parts blithely ignore the casualties inflicted by the British military and paramilitary forces, both official and unofficial).

The great irony of Kurt Eichenwald’s analogy from the Long War, the insurgency and counter-insurgency conflict in Ireland, is the seeming ignorance or imprecision that shapes it, the same lack of insight that he accuses others of professing in relation to the global Muslim community and the perverse ideology of the Islamic State. Perhaps the article is simply poorly phrased? Remove the words “while all true“, and the Irish section of the article has a different meaning. However in its presence form it is simply another example of an opinion piece in the US public domain that further obfuscates and confuses the record of a faraway war that most Americans have – and had – little to no comprehension of. Including much of the news media.

It seems in this at least very little has changed indeed.

Just after midnight on the 15th of August 1915 several armed and masked men forced their way into the London and North Western Railway Depot in the North Wall district of Dublin and proceeded to load four large crates from one of the warehouses onto a number of motor vehicles before disappearing into the early morning darkness. Press reports over the following days claimed that the stolen boxes contained up to one hundred rifles purchased by the Irish National Volunteers (INV), the paramilitary wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) headed by John Redmond MP, which had been delayed in the depot for administrative reasons following delivery from Britain. The history-focused East Wall Project has published a recent examination of the raid and the likely individuals behind it, noting that:

“The weapons were Martini–Enfield .303 rifles and were intended for John Redmond’s National Volunteers. Since the now famous landing of rifles at Howth on the 26th July 1914 the Irish National Volunteers had legally imported regular consignments of rifles through the North Wall. Most notable was a consignment of 3,600 acquired from the Birmingham company H. Trulock Harris & Co, with bayonets and 50,000 rounds of ammunition in August that year. Those had been confiscated and the London and North Western Railway had refused to carry further weapons for the National Volunteers and it took a combination of John Redmond’s close friendship with Henry Givens Burgess, the LNWR’s manager, and political intervention at the highest level to get the railway company to transport further consignments.

Throughout 1915 regular cargoes of up to 100 rifles were imported from Charles Riggs, a London-based arms dealer without any problems other than the somewhat ham-fisted approach by the National Volunteers to obtaining import licenses.

…Laurence Kettle (a founding member of the Irish Volunteers) had a permit issued for 350 rifles which he hadn’t used, yet in order to import a consignment of 100 rifles they [the INV] had involved the Prime Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for War, the Master General of the Ordinance, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland.

…(Kettle’s rifles were a special consignment of Martini- Metford.303 rifles then being made up for the National Volunteers by Webley & Richards, and Hollis, Bentley & Playfair).

However it seems the paperwork continued to be a problem with rifles often sitting for long periods of time in storage until cleared by the authorities.”

Redmond, the patrician son of former Anglo-Irish gentry in the Wexford region, was furious at the loss of the weapons from the North Wall railway complex, where the IPP suspected many employees of holding left-wing and republican views, accusing the British authorities of facilitating the robbery through bureaucratic delay. Others within the ranks of the INV saw motives even more sinister than that. This paranoia reached fever-pitch when a similar raid was staged a few weeks later, denying the National Volunteers a further consignment of rifles.

The publication of new research into the 1915 arms’ raids in Dublin is a timely reminder of the military muscle that the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party had assembled in the years leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916. As well as using the pre-WWI campaign for so-called “home rule” to tighten links with the organisation’s traditional parish enforcers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians or AOH (led by his pugnacious IPP acolyte Joe Devlin MP), by the end of 1914 Redmond had successfully co-opted and then split the nationalist-republican alliance that was the original Irish Volunteers (IV) in favour of his party, leading to the formation of the breakaway Irish National Volunteers. With a private army at his disposal the “…half-emancipated slave”, to use Michael Davitt’s description, was determined that the INV would have the capacity to confront its enemies or rivals – both foreign or domestic. Indeed, far from being content with the quasi-legal purchase of weapons in Britain the duplicitous head of the IPP had personally overseen the smuggling from Europe of twenty tons of illegal weapons in July and August of 1914, all of them destined for Redmondite loyalists. Ironically the majority of these consignments were to be stored within the North Wall area of the capital.

Of course the Irish National Volunteers did go on to play some role in the revolutionary fervour of 1916. Though this was primarily as collaborators with the British Forces during the Rising when INV units in the counties of Wexford, Waterford, Limerick, Clare and elsewhere offered their services to help quash the insurrection or any signs of popular support for it. One could also add to the history of the period the violent attacks on the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence by the remnants of the Devlin-led National Volunteers and AOH in cities like Belfast and Derry. Though these are historical embarrassments that no one on our island nation has any desire to discuss, even several decades later.

Finally the words of the “pacifist” Redmond recounting his jamboree visit to the war-torn Western Front in the autumn of 1915.

“…we walked to a battery of two 9.2 British naval guns, enormous monsters, which were trained on a building just behind the German lines, about three miles distant. These guns have a range of over 10 miles.

I was given the privilege of firing one of these huge guns at its object. The experience was rather a trying one, and I only hope my shot went home.”

John Redmond MP, German-killer!

From 1995 to 2001 an organisation calling itself Direct Action Against Drugs, or DAAD, was involved in a series of “vigilante-style” attacks on a number of criminals and underworld gangs in the north-east of Ireland. The various assaults, involving the use of guns, bombs and so-called “punishment beatings”, took place against the background of the Irish-British peace process of the 1990s and early 2000s, and two negotiated ceasefires by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and the British Occupation Forces – the latter without formal acknowledgement by the UK authorities. Indeed it was widely accepted that DAAD was simply a flag of convenience for (P)IRA as the organisation dealt with anti-social elements amongst the northern nationalist communities in a more covert manner than was common during the decades-long period of open conflict. Moreover many of those involved in its activities were newly recruited volunteers rather than military veterans of the insurgency, and no small number gained deeply unsavoury reputations of their own. Unsurprisingly in the pursuit of “peace” and an end to the Long War (or “Troubles”) the governments in Dublin and London frequently turned a blind eye to the policy of “self-policing” by the (Provisional) Republican Movement until the early 2000s when the DAAD-strategy was largely abandoned by (P)IRA.

Unfortunately the violent genie once let loose from the bottle was never going to be returned and the same period witnessed increasing social and interpersonal conflict amongst some communities in the north-east as they eased their way out of a near half-century of military occupation and a communal resistance to that occupation. While hundreds of (P)IRA volunteers were happy to seek some form of normality in their lives after decades of clandestine activity others proved unable to let go of the past, joining those who sought new opportunities to assert their social standing or influence in a time of (relative) peace. One illustration of this post-war turbulence is the 2005 killing of Robert McCartney, a petty criminal who – along with a compatriot – was beaten and stabbed in a violent, drink-fuelled altercation with local republicans in Belfast. Following a lengthy internal investigation that some allege covered up as much as it revealed Sinn Féin suspended, expelled or forced into resignation several activists while (P)IRA court-martialled and dismissed three volunteers, including Gerard Davison, a senior brigade officer in Belfast, an SF member and the probable directer of DAAD’s anti-criminal operations in the city. Several other (P)IRA figures suspected of being involved in the murder were cleared of any responsibility, although to a great deal of public scepticism.

Fast-forward to May 2015 and Gerard Davison, still firmly within the Sinn Féin fold – despite his divisive reputation – and linked to anti-criminal campaigning in his neighbourhood, was shot dead by an assassin in the Markets area of Belfast while on his way to a community centre where he worked. Forensic evidence soon pointed to a notorious Lithuanian gang based in Dublin as the supplier of the Russian-made handgun used in the murder. Within weeks local witnesses and republican activists had identified one Kevin McGuigan, a former (P)IRA volunteer-turned-criminal, as the suspected gunman. Some three months later McGuigan also met a violent end, shot to death at his home in the Short Strand district of the city by two masked men armed with semi-automatic weapons. Remarkably both victims were former comrades in (P)IRA’s Belfast Brigade and McGuigan had served under Davison in the DAAD structure. Suspected corruption and personal animosity had led to McGuigan’s violent dismissal from (P)IRA, seemingly pushing him into closer association with criminal elements in Belfast and elsewhere.

Now the British paramilitary police in the north-east of the country, the PSNI, are briefing the news media that an existing vigilante organisation which claimed responsibility for Kevin McGuigan’s revenge killing, Action Against Drugs or AAD, is composed of former (P)IRA volunteers and activists from one or more of the republican Resistance groupings (the so-called “Dissidents”). Furthermore it seems that current volunteers within the stood-down (Provisional) Irish Republican Army may have co-operated, probably in a personal capacity, with AAD in planning the murder of McGuigan. 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?

We exist not in a period of peace but in a period marked by an absence of war. This is the fíorpholaitíocht of the peace process between Ireland and Britain, this is the defining characteristic of the British Occupied North of Ireland and it will remain so until the occupation itself ends. The (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and the British Army have not gone away, nor have their allies and proxies. The Long War may be over but the Cold War is not.

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?

Did someone mention, “general election“? With April the 8th serving as the legal cut-off point for the holding of the next Dáil vote things are beginning to get a wee bit tense, almost excitable, in Irish politics. Perhaps not entirely unrelated to this is the decision by An Garda Síochána to stage a presentation of arms and equipment seized from “Dissident” or “Resistance Republicans” over the last two years, an event which made something of a splash with sections of the Irish and British press. From a report in Wednesday’s Irish Times:

“Weaponry seized from dissident republicans has been growing steadily more sophisticated over the past five years, according to gardaí.

Assistant commissioner John O’Mahony, who leads the force’s crime and security division, told reporters there was also evidence of increased sophistication in the activities of dissident republicans.

During the briefing, members of the Garda ballistics unit showcased a range of weapons seized from dissident republicans.

They included a beer keg bomb recovered from Kilcurry in May 2014, mortars, sniper rifles, AK47 rifles, associated ammunition, a phone trigger circuit, timer power units, rockets and a sample of explosives.

Mr O’Mahony said the three main dissident groups operating in the Republic were the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, and Óglaigh na hÉireann.

He said that while the number of dissident republicans is small, they are “very focused and very clear” in their objectives. “As a result of that, we spend a significant amount of time and resources combating their activities,” he said.

Mr O’Mahony said that “idealism and peer pressure” were the most common mechanisms used by dissidents to recruit followers.

“We’ve seen in the history of this country that there will be somebody there to replace others,” he said.

“We are finding that as we disrupt one area, there are people ready to take over. I can tell you that in just the last two years, we have over 30 firearms seized, over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, a number of mortars and rocket-launchers. One very significant find in the last few years was in Co Dublin where we had a significant seizure of semtex explosive.”

To be clear, the “range of weapons” put on display covered the years 2014-15 and came from the counties of Cork, Mayo, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Kildare and Dublin. Aside from one interesting development, which will be discussed below, the mixed bag of thirty firearms, some one thousand rounds of assorted and heavily corroded ammunition, several kilos of rotted explosives and various projectile parts or devices featured nothing particularly new or startling. Quite literally. Though described in most newspaper reports as “machine guns” what was actually shown in the conference were two Kalashnikov AK47 automatic assault rifles and three AKM rifles, a superior Czech-produced variant of the Russian AK47 and the default squad-level weapon of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army in the 1980s and ’90s. Indeed these guns, in relatively poor shape judging by the photographic and video evidence, were almost certainly taken from previous (P)IRA stocks at the end of the 20th century and are nearly three decades old (most of which they will have spent sitting in damp underground containers). Added to these were an ancient Sten submachine gun, a UK-made weapon dating to the 1950s or ’60s, and a bolt-action hunting rifle.

The rusty mortar parts put on display belonged to a model-type dubbed the “Mark 17” by the British, which was developed by the technicians of (P)IRA’s engineering department in the mid-to-late 1990s. Indeed, many of these sections may be old, original parts rather than recently milled ones. Likewise the several kilos of badly degraded Semtex-H explosives, presented in large red cases helpfully printed “SEMTEX-H”, also date back to the 1980s. With an expected shelf-life in that era of ten to twenty years under optimal conditions (i.e. not in a hole in the ground) their viability must be highly questionable.

Just about the only firearms on display that may have post-dated the (P)IRA ceasefire of 1997 were the semi-automatic Zastava M76 sniper’s rife, a Yugoslavian-made weapon from the 1970s partially based on the Russian AK47, and a single Glock pistol, an American semi-automatic handgun. However the Zastava M76 may well have been imported by (P)IRA’s quartermaster general’s department in the 1990s from the Balkans or elsewhere in the former communist eastern Europe while the Glock pistol could have been one of several dozen smuggled into Ireland from the United States by (P)IRA activists in Florida during the same period. This again highlights a point that I have made repeatedly over the last four years. The vast majority of the weapons, explosives and equipment in the hands of the “Dissident Republicans”, a would-be Irish insurgency, derive from the former munition stocks of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army. Without the popular, if minority, support that (P)IRA enjoyed during the course of the 1969-2005 Long War no campaign of armed resistance to the continued British occupation of the north-east could have been initiated, let alone sustained. It was sympathy or passive acceptance of the necessity for armed struggle that contributed to a well-armed, technically-proficient, regionally embedded guerilla army. Something the so-called Dissidents cannot emulate. Hence their reliance on firearms and explosives taken, stolen or otherwise acquired from old (P)IRA sources, mainly predating the cessation announcement of 2005.

A more interesting feature of the Garda briefing to the press was the presence of four, small and medium sized rocket-style weapons or missiles. In typical fashion the Irish Independent newspaper turned the rhetoric-factor up to number eleven, making a not entirely convincing propaganda-association with the “Kassam” rockets deployed by the Palestinian armed resistance in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

“Dissident republicans are developing deadly rockets, similar to those fired by the military arm of Hamas into southern Israel, gardaí have revealed.

A raid by Garda anti-terrorist units resulted in the seizure of a prototype model of the Kassam rocket, capable of being fired over a distance of six kilometres.

The seizure is regarded by senior garda officers as evidence of the increasing sophistication of dissident “engineers” as they develop the technology of their terrorist organisations. After the weapons trawl was revealed, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said he was willing to enter talks with dissident groups in an attempt to bring an end to their activities.

Garda technical experts said this was the first time they had come across the self-propelled Kassam rocket prototype in a dissident “factory”. Four rockets were seized in total.”

The Irish Examiner offers a similar report:

“Detectives from the Garda national security units seized four rockets last year, including two large ones, modelled on the Kassam rockets used by Hamas in attacks on Israel — the first seizures of their kind here.

Gardaí said the large rockets were “prototypes” and that dissidents were developing them to use on major targets, such as PSNI and British army stations.

Experts said the rockets have a maximum range of 6km and could store a couple of kilograms of Semtex, enough to create a “50ft blast zone” on impact.

The weapons are crude and can only be directed by changing the degree of their trajectory. Gardaí believe dissidents are working on designing guidance systems and are conducting tests in remote locations.”

The term, “Qassam” (rather than, “Kassam”) originally refers to a range of artillery rockets developed by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, since 2001, though it has now become a generic term in the Israeli and sympathetic foreign media for any type of “home-made” missile used by the Palestinian resistance. At its most basic the low-cost weapon is made from a single steel tube with a rectangular block of a sugar and potassium nitrate mix propellant at the base, and a conical warhead containing improvised or commercial explosives at the top. Though fitted with fins for basic stability in flight the Qassams are notoriously inaccurate, making them more of a “terror” or “counter-terror” weapon than a strictly military one. The rockets seized in the Garda searches, despite the claims above and elsewhere in the press, were all dummy prototypes, that is proof-of-concept models or even – as some have suggested – propaganda tools for photographic and video use. None of the four were fitted with propellant, explosives or electronics. Two of them, if they were intended for testing and development, seem better suited to the role of a fixed weapon for use against vehicles or fortifications, similar to (P)IRA’s horizontal-launch anti-armour mortars of the 1990s (an example of their use against a stationary target can be seen below in a video recording of an attack by the South Armagh Brigade of (P)IRA in 1989). Indeed the two smaller rockets bear a marked resemblance to some models of anti-tank missile.

The methods by which unnamed “experts” can claim that untested, empty tubes have a range of “6 kms” and a blast radius of “50 feet” is beyond me. How are they calculating the propellant-to-warhead weight ratio, the composition of the explosives, the angle of trajectory which increases or decreases the force of impact, and so on and so forth? Taking these as yet unknowable facts with the mixing of metric and imperial measures in the report, I think one can treat all of the above with a pinch of salt (as with previous nonsense stories of a Taliban-equipped New IRA). In any case, if some republican resistance grouping is insane enough to fire a Qassam-style rocket at a British military or paramilitary installation, given the UK forces deliberate use of Irish civilian properties as “human shields”, the consequences would be disastrous, unless they can improve on technology that even the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades struggle with.

It is worth remembering at this point the occasion in early 2015 when the recovery of another cache of weapons by the Garda Síochána was made public, but this time from one of Ireland’s sub-terrorist nacro-gangs, a greater threat – in reality – to the safety and well-being of the Irish people as a whole than any number of ill-armed guerillas waging war in the north-east. No rusty, thirty year old, former Warsaw Pact AKMs or AK47s here. Instead we have brand new firearms, including an Austrian AUG Para submachine gun (a 9mm version of the standard 5.56×45mm rifle of the Defence Forces Ireland), a German Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun and a German Sport Guns GSG-5, a semi-automatic rimfire rifle.

That’s some contrast, is it not? Though it is small fry compared to the arrest of a well-known criminal in 2008 who was transporting a haul of weapons including a modern AK74 assault rifle, a rechambered and upgraded model of the venerable AK47, an M8-type grenade launcher and a Russian-made RPG-22 Netto one-shot disposable anti-tank rocket launcher. Yes, a drugs gang with a primed anti-tank rocket.

All sorts of explanations could be offered for the timing of the Garda conference, and people have not been slow in coming forward with their own. One of the more conspiratorial offerings is the suggestion by veteran Irish journalist, Ed Moloney, arguing that the event was little more than a stunt to drum up support for Sinn Féin in the forthcoming general election. Which takes logic and deductive reasoning to a whole new level.

An Garda Síochana as vote-getting cheerleaders for SF? I think not.

A more likely explanation is one focused on deterring support for Sinn Féin by reminding right-wing and conservative voters of the bad old, good old days of the northern conflict. The only beneficiaries of that would be Fine Gael and the desperate kleptocrats of the Labour Party. Of course there is always this, as pointed out by Newstalk:

“Gardaí say they fear that the centenary of the 1916 Rising will be used by dissident republicans as a recruitment tool for new members.”

Technically An Garda Síochána is the institutional descendant of the Irish Republican Police (IRP), the law enforcement arm of Dáil Éireann during the late revolutionary period. However there are some in the organisation who look to the old, British colonial police, the Royal Irish Constabulary, as their predecessors. One wonders if their concern is less the rising tide of Sinn Féin and more the celebration of an insurrection which led to the eventual destruction of the UK’s paramilitary police force in Ireland? Or perhaps both?

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…

Reinforce the Ring of Steel! Deploy the SAS on the streets! Wrap Big Ben in cotton wool! The breakaway factions of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army have “…more than a tonne of Semtex explosive“. At least that’s according to a terribly anxious report in the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper once regarded as the voice of the English establishment. The furious “Torygraph” notes that:

“Dissident republican terrorists are boasting they have more than a tonne of Semtex plastic explosive that escaped the decommissioning process…

Provisional IRA veterans who disagreed with the peace process, and who have expertise in handling Semtex, are among those who have access to the secret weapons dumps.

They claim to have tested it and confirmed it is still viable, even though it was smuggled to Ireland via Libya in the 1980s.

Recent raids by police in Northern Ireland have turned up small quantities of Semtex, but a source has told the Telegraph that purpose-built bunkers dotted across the island contain up to 1.5 tonnes of it.”

Hmmm… Would that be part of the substantial quantities of Czech-made Semtex-H explosive purchased by Libya between 1975 and 1981? Some 2.5 tonnes of it was sold to the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and smuggled into Ireland from 1985 to ’86. After sustained use in various improvised weapons and “booster-packs” for larger fertilizer-based bombs nearly two tonnes of it was left in IRA stockpiles when the insurgent movement declared its final ceasefire in 1997. In 2005 the remaining quantities of Semtex-H were withdrawn from bunkers around the country by the IRA’s Quartermaster General and “decommissioned” between July and September of that year, in co-operation with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD). The IICD’s observers agreed that the quantity of Semtex-H put “beyond use” in their presence was the expected two tonnes.

Which makes one wonder where on earth did the Semtex-H explosives supposedly in the hands of some unidentified “Dissident” grouping come from? Because there is widespread agreement that the Irish Republican Army honoured its commitments in the final stages of the peace process and rendered inaccessible all of the plastic explosives in its possession. Does anyone really believe that 75% of the IRA’s Semtex stores magically “escaped” decommissioning in 2005 and that the IICD, and the governments in Dublin, London and Washington, not to mention the movement’s own Army Council and GHQ Staff, never noticed? Are we to accept anonymous claims that one of the three organisations making up the would-be Irish resistance of the 2000s, whose activists number in the dozens, has explosive munitions equal to that of the several hundred strong (Provisional) Irish Republican Army at the height of its military campaign against the British Occupation Forces?

Of course one could also point out that the effective shelf-life of Semtex-H manufatured in the 1970s is ten to twenty years; if the packages were stored under optimal conditions. Thereafter it rapidly losses its effectiveness. Any Semtex received from Libya in 1986 is now thirty years old. In fact since most of the explosives were purchased by the Libyans from the Czechs long before they reached Ireland any former IRA quantities would now be as much as four decades old. For most of that time they would have been hidden in sealed, plastic drums buried in the more rain-swept parts of the Irish countryside. Good luck with detonating those damp squibs!

The whole report is clearly a nonsense, as are the words of an alleged “republican” source:

“There will be ops on the mainland, specific targets, the aim will be to make the Brits rethink their whole position as to what Sinn Fein is actually in a position to deliver, namely they can’t deliver peace.”

Yes, because the people of this island nation, especially Irish republicans, normally refer to the island nation to our east as the “mainland”.

What a crock of spurious shit we leave when first we practice to squeeze-squeeze-squeeze!

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…

On the evening of Friday the 29th of July the minor Republican Resistance grouping, Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓnaÉ), staged a “show of strength” in the small Irish village of Park, County Derry. Three ÓnaE volunteers, wearing military clothing, improvised masks and gloves, posed for a photographer, one of the trio firing a volley of shots into the air from a single handgun. A quick statement threatening local drug dealers and criminals was issued before the men disappeared into the darkness. The relatively muted reaction of the press to the event highlights the unimpressive nature of the demonstration which did more to illustrate the weakness and old fashioned thinking of the would-be insurgency than its power.

As for the trio of guerrillas, the men were dressed in Flecktarn-style camouflaged field-jackets and trousers acquired from the surpluses of the Bundeswehr in Germany and sold cheap on the civilian market. The distinctive hooded parkas are popular among some of the anarchist movement in continental Europe (an ÓnaÉ representative has appeared in similar attire at a previous propaganda event). The handgun was a Smith & Wesson Model 15 or similar, a six-round revolver favoured as a reliable close-quarters weapon by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army during the 1969-2005 conflict in the UK-administered north-east of Ireland. From the venerable appearance of the gun it was almost certainly sourced from former (P)IRA stocks, and may have spent years in a concealed underground dump or bunker.

As I have pointed out before, aside perhaps from the relatively uncommon ex-German Army uniforms,  the insurgency remains almost entirely reliant on the munitions and equipment formerly belonging to the Provisional movement.

As expected the Easter weekend witnessed the usual display of overweight men and women marching in ill-fitting, quasi-military uniforms while professing loyalty to the revolutionary republic declared 101 years ago and those armed guerrilla movements still claiming its legacy. The annual commemoration of the 1916 insurrection is of course important, both at a State and a community level. Republican activists and organisations should be marking this key event in our nation’s history by laying wreathes and making speeches. But do we have to have the ridiculous playacting soldiers stomping through the streets with the Starry Plough and An Gal Gréine fluttering, desperately trying to keep their booted feet in rhythm to the flute bands? Whether the marchers wear camouflage jackets or bomber jackets (no pun intended), black berets or mirror-shades the general impression is less than edifying.

Even the historical reenactors with their fake World War I era Mausers and Lee Enfields, many of them just teenagers, look badly out of place in the company of modern political parties like Sinn Féin or its contemporary off-shoots (Republican Sinn Féin, the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, the Republican Network for Unity, Saoradh and so on). The Six Counties may be an Occupied Territory but West Belfast is not the Gaza Strip. Do these events actually draw in young men and women or do most world-weary millennials and hipsters just sneer and throw their eyes to heaven? Appearing as respectable and concerned members of society is more likely to get votes in this day and age than posing as would-be Che Guevaras. Or Kevin Barrys, even in the Fenian heartlands of Belfast, Derry and Armagh (let alone Dublin, Cork and Limerick). The white shirts, grey shirts and god-knows-what-colour shirts are uncomfortably close to Blueshirt apparel, circa 1933. We live in a consumerist age, an era of attractively packaged goods, including politics, and doing a Kim Jong-un up the Falls Road or through the Bogside is plain fucking stupid.

All that said, and putting Sinn Féin’s annual Easter Rising celebrations to one side, the weekend witnessed some interesting displays of support for the non-mainstream Republican tradition (I dislike the word “Dissident”, though it’s difficult to find another widely accepted term). Saoradh, the new party launched last September, staged a large gathering in County Derry, with over five thousand people in attendance from across the country and the United Kingdom. Of course, the drum-beating bands and the silly walks’ contest was on show but in fairness it was an impressive affair in terms of numbers and well-known faces. Coded messages were expressed to and from the Real/New IRA and so on but that was to be expected. Eamon McCann might be right when he suggests in the Irish Times that, “Anger still seethes on the streets of Derry“. The war may be over but the primary cause of the war – the reduced UK legacy colony in the north-east of this island nation – has yet to be fully removed.

Republican Sinn Féin, the Scientologists of Irish Republicanism, were also out, though Christ knows why. They haven’t said anything fresh or innovative since 1986. Actually, they didn’t say that much new or original even back then. Readers sometimes complain that I’m too hard on the RSF folk but by god do they make it easy. Am I the only one to notice that Des Dalton is slowly morphing into Ruairí Ó Brádaigh? Not only do they speak the same but they are starting to look the same, right down to the standard brown and beige suits Des, give it up. You’re better than this. To the individuals in the handful of families who keep the Second Dáil torch lighting, who are indeed pretty much RSF in its entirety, move on and fight the good fight elsewhere. The “26 County State” is the only state of Ireland we have, however imperfect. The Civil War is over and sustaining it into the 21st century, which essentially is what you are doing, is a sign of madness not integrity. Speaking of which, pussyfooting with Putin’s Russia? For a movement so obsessed with history and “tradition” you obviously have yet to learn the lesson of poor Seán Russel, forever besmirched by unfair association with Hitler’s Germany.

The Republican Network For Unity (RNU) held one of the more interesting gatherings at the weekend. The grouping seemed to be holding out the possibility that Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓnaÉ), the small ad hoc insurgent grouping established by former volunteers of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army, will announce a ceasefire or full cessation in the coming weeks or months. It’s an interesting possibility though the press may be making rather more of it yet than is there. From a thoughtful speech by ex- POW Gary McNally at the RNU’s annual Fianna Éireann commemoration:

Republicans of this generation must take inspiration from the past. We must learn the lessons of history – looking back at mistakes and successes. But we must also carve our own identity and design our own contribution to the republican struggle. This must contain substance and be meaningful. Rhetoric and clichés will not sustain us. Longheld slogans will not drive political development in the face of a changing political arena. Previous generations of republican activists did not shirk their responsibility. They did not shirk the responsibility of bringing the republican struggle in line with their time. They did not shirk their responsibility to make their own print on Irish republicanism.

The centenary has passed – we commemorated it as best we could, with the little resources we have. A huge acknowledgement must be extended to all those who played a part. Easter is a time for reflection, and we must reflect on our gains and also on missed opportunities. The chance for unity of purpose among all republicans to commemorate the rising wasn’t taken and we must begin to rectify that glaring mistake. We must reflect on the latest happenings at Stormont and effectively communicate to the Irish people why the system continues to stumble from crisis to crisis.

The denial of rights – cultural rights, social rights and human rights remains the political hallmark of Stormont. 19 years since the Good Friday Agreement and 11 years since the St. Andrews agreement our people are still denied their rights, as the political administration in the 6 Counties attempts to reduce them to bargaining chips and shallow vote-grabbers. Irish language activists have fought long and hard for the recognition of our native tongue. They have maintained the promotion of the Irish language with distinction. In recent times, they lobbied for an Irish Language Act to ensure every person can access their language rights. This has been denied time and again by an administration that believes cultural suppression will kill the demand for national self-determination.

The LGBT movement has lobbied for marriage rights to ensure all citizens can access matrimony. This has been denied time and again by an administration that wishes to maintain archaic practices upheld by an undemocratic veto.

Republicans have lobbied for political and human rights to ensure that political activists can live free from police harassment, barbaric strip-searching, controlled movement and forced isolation. These have been denied time and again because the administration wants to marginalise and isolate any opposition to the status quo. Here we state clearly; Rights are not bargaining chips; they are not vote-grabbers to be wheeled out during elections and they are not tools for repression. They are real concepts and must be delivered post-haste, however, like all great political initiatives, they will be delivered from below.

There are various sections of our communities attempting to attain their rights and improve their lives through struggle. Republicans must be found amongst them. Remaining in an isolated bubble detached from the real world and everyday struggles serves no purpose and advances no cause. The Stormont project has been a failure from its inception. All it has to offer is a bulwark between the Irish people and Ireland’s reunification. While the turnout at recent elections may be higher than previous years, the result will inevitably be the same – Stormont cannot work. However, in the wake of these results Irish republicans must give serious thought to the future and begin to ask how we can really challenge the status quo.

We have few opportunities throughout the year to engage in reflection. To question where we have come from, where we are and where we are going in the struggle to end partition and bring about a United Ireland. Easter is one of those opportunities. The republican movement has been involved in a process of serious revaluation. We have looked at the struggle holistically and examined closely it’s trajectory over recent decades. We have deduced that a strategic rethink is required from both the individual republican activist and organisational republicanism.

For a protracted period, the republican movement has been engaged in a process of debate, discussion and deliberation about the future of the republican struggle, and in particular, the future of our movement. We have assessed our strengths and weaknesses, we have taken stock of our capabilities and our inabilities, we have looked at what we do well and what we do poorly, we have measured this against the current political climate, the will of the average person in our community and recent local and global changes in the political arena.

We recognise that we must move forward WITH our people, not without them and not ahead of them or eventually they will move forward without us. For too long Irish republicans have remained on their knees, constrained by an inability to modernise and accept the situation on the ground.

Not bartering our ideological principles, we must act in a mature and realistic manner and act in accordance with the will of the people, the base from which republicanism draws its support.

We need to take heed of the wants and desires of the Irish people. There is no merit in attempting to represent them while continuing to ignore them. This should be the antithesis of republicanism.

Republicanism historically has offered the people of this island a vision of self-determination, free from the benign influences of foreign power holders, a democratic ideology which seeks not only a constitutional change but offers ownership of the Ireland to the entire people of Ireland. The proponents of this vision have offered the only viable alternative to imperialism in the past three centuries, degrading that status to that of a political quagmire or a bit part attempt to remove the British connection would be a denigration of past struggles and regressive to the objectives of Irish separatism. This cannot happen, we will not allow it to happen – for both ourselves and for the future generations who deserve our efforts to be directed into building a credible, cohesive and capable vehicle. One that can deliver an end to partition and secure Irish sovereignty.

The integrity of the republican position must be maintained by those who espouse it. This can only be done through avant garde thinking, future orientated strategies and sincere attempts to advance that position. Sticking to handed down narratives and continuing to pursue failed or failing ventures in the hope of remaining relevant is accelerating irrelevancy. Wallowing in mediocrity created by this irrelevancy is sapping the integrity of the republican position. Irish republicans must make innovative, creative and bold decisions to uphold this integrity.

Republicans recognise that we not only need to get our house in order, but we must begin its construction. Therefore, the republican movement is moving forward with a 21st century agenda. We are refining our message and strategising our own unique way of articulating political dissent. We are reshaping our public outreach and appearance. This change will be too much for some people. Some people will lose their seat at the table, many already have. We are not republican elitists, but we won’t allow anybody to undermine the integrity or forward trajectory of a rejuvenated republican base. Republicans have demonstrated this in recent times.

Irish republicans must provide a coherent vision of the future, what a United Ireland will look like, how it will benefit the Irish people as a whole and how we can achieve this. The window of opportunity has been made smaller by the latest election results. Republicans must begin the change this and widen the window. An opportunity, albeit small, exists for republicans to forge together and ensure our vision of the future enters national debate.

I appeal to each of you here today, to go from here and think about our message. Think about the republican position in the local and global context. Think about how best to advance that position in line with current political realities.

Easter is a time for reflection and opportunities are for those who seize them.

Beir bua.

In the second decade of the 21st century there are better ways to resist the continued British Occupation of our island nation than through force of arms. An unarmed struggle is not just rhetoric and its is not just about politics. Language, culture, education, technology and so on are all platforms for the advancement of republican goals and objectives. Each is a distinct battlefield in its own right and victories on each one when taken collectively can win the whole damn war.