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Showing posts with label Danny Morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Danny Morrison. Show all posts
John Ware ✍ rejects both the form and content of a recent faux characterisation of his journalistic standards. 

I don't know Niall Meehan, but I read that he is the former "Head of the Journalism and Media Faculty" at a private college in Dublin.

So he will know that scepticism, curiosity, and an open mind are key to fair minded, ethical journalism for which I dare say he sees himself as one of Ireland's custodians.

Unfortunately, these qualities were absent in a series of ad hominem attacks he recently posted about me.

First, by buying incuriously into a classic example of moral confusion in The Phoenix with the inference that I was a Very Bad person for giving evidence in court recently against Gerry Adams who spent two days in the witness box denying he'd ever been in the IRA.

I have no difficulty justifying breaking my off-the-record undertaking of 43 years ago to his right-hand man, Danny Morrison. While, of course, I maintained it for the purposes of my programme about Adams and Morrison in 1983, it was rather more conscience-testing in the face of Adams' latest chutzpah attempt to rewrite history on oath. Since I was in possession of a relevant piece of evidence contradicting his outlandish denial of IRA membership (so insulting to IRA victims), when I was asked to provide it, I took the view that there was a much greater obligation to the victims, the general public and the historical record, than to Danny Boy. The war has, after all, been over for almost three decades! Furthermore, all political parties including Sinn Fein always insist that legacy victims are the priority when this is so obviously untrue. Finally, let's remember that collusion by silence cuts both ways - whether covering up awful crimes by the State or by the IRA, although not, it seems, to Messrs Meehan and The Phoenix.

Second, my reported comments to Ian "Butch" Studdard in 1983 have been taken right out of context. Studdard was in thrall to Adams, and didn't mind who knew it. If I said what he says I said, it will have been a deliberately provocative satirical riposte to his face for his fawning over Adams. I certainly recall being told that Studdard had warned Adams in advance that I was investigating his claims never to have been a member of the IRA which was a grossly unprofessional and uncollegiate thing to do.

Third, Meehan references a 39 year old article which I wrote as a contribution to an investigation by the much respected Ireland correspondent of The Independent David McKittrick in which we suggested Colin Wallace - an army press officer and part time UDR solider who alleged there was an intelligence services smear campaign against certain MPs - was also something of a Walter Mitty. And, that one way of testing his credibility was to examine the derring-do claims he made about his exploits as a display parachutist at public events with two army teams called The Phantoms - whom he said he commanded - and the Black Knights. 

Wallace complained to the Press Council who ticked me off for preferring the evidence which suggested Wallace had bragged about his parachuting achievements, whilst simultaneously accepting there was "clearly room for rival versions...".  It was a bizzare verdict but in any case, readers can judge for themselves which version they prefer based on the research that I conducted.

In raising the Wallace business, The Phoenix makes the smeary suggestion that I was part and parcel of an establishment attempt to discredit evidence that "state forces (had) promoted illegal (sic) loyalist violence." This was a silly thing to do because a couple of google clicks would have demonstrated the opposite. My work for the BBC on collusion between agents working for military intelligence and special branch led to the Stevens 2 and Stevens 3 inquiries, as recognised by Sir John Stevens himself and by the Irish government at the time. Also, in the government commissioned report that found extensive State collusion in the assassination of Patrick Finucane, the late Sir Desmond de Silva QC said:

I should also record that retired senior intelligence officers, and the former BBC journalist John Ware, also engaged extensively with the work of my Review and provided me with important evidence and insights. Their assistance was provided voluntarily and was extremely valuable in enabling me to produce this Report.

I mention this only to demonstrate the puerility of The Phoenix's journalism and Meehan's apparent respect for it. Incidentally, if it's ethical values they're in search of, they will find an exploration of them over 18 chapters in my book (Neither Conform Nor Deny) due to be published next month. It's a forensic analysis of the moral maze into which the British State ventured by always prioritising the protection of agents over the criminal justice system and sometimes over life itself during the NI conflict.

Finally, Meehan draws attention to claims made about me and the BBC by an Al Jazeera journalist called Richard Sanders and a barrister, Martin Forde KC.

As with his other posts, Niall Meehan's incuriosity prevented him from seeking my side for each of the stories he cites. But he's in good company with Messrs Sanders and Forde whose allegation that I and my Panorama colleagues misleadingly edited an email in a programme about Jeremy Corbyn, is completely untrue and objectively so. The real mischief is in the way Al Jazeera reported the edit. Both Sanders and Forde ignored a courteous letter drafted by the BBC legal department to Forde which he refused to discuss followed by repeated attempts by me to patiently demonstrate how he and Al Jazeera had got the detail round their necks - not to put too fine a point on it. It may come as no surprise that a journalist failed to grapple with the detail wherein lies the devil, but one expects better from a KC. KCs are not infallible, after all. In my opinion, and in the opinion of the BBC, Forde and Sanders' conduct over this was intolerably high-handed.
 
For those still interested, the detail is laid out here - with some unsettling reflections on Messrs Sanders and Forde's approach to reasoned, evidence-based argument . . .  and the ethical standards of Al Jazeera's journalism, at least in this case here.

John Ware, a veteran investigative journalist, is author of
the upcoming book Neither Confirm Nor Deny.

Incurious Journey

Dixie Elliot ✊I remember it well.

Why Sinn Fein should hang its head in shame over Scappaticci silence

Adams, McGuinness, and Gerry Kelly - all faces which would demand respect among those still stupid enough to believe that they were solid Republicans.

And there was also Danny 'The Rat in a Hat' Morrison who is a bigger liar than even Gerry himself.
I remember McGuinness using the term, 'Dissident Journalists' at some point and thought, 'ah f*ck off, you're ripping the arse out of it now!'

But it was Morrison who went on to contradict their 2003 defence of Scappaticci in an 2016 interview with the Irish News in which he said that he, Scappaticci, had been stood down in 1990, under a cloud of suspicion, after 'the Sandy Lynch affair.'

If he had been stood down back in 1990 under a 'cloud of suspicion' why were they so forceful in their defence of him in 2003?

It's not that they had taken Scappaticci away to some remote cottage and given him the same treatment as his own victims before him.

This was, after all 1990, and the war was still four years away from the ceasefire. They had no problem doing it to Caroline Mooreland a few weeks before that ceasefire - in the full knowledge it was coming - and dumped her body at the side of the road.

In regards to Scappaticci the so called leadership of Adams, McGuinness, Gerry Kelly and their faithful lackey Danny Morrison have as many questions to answer as British Intelligence do.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Many Questions

Irish News ✏ Written by John Manley.

Danny Morrison on Freddie Scappaticci and how the north has transformed but unionism hasn’t changed

Danny Morrison has witnessed dramatic changes in his 72 years.

A teenager at the beginning of the conflict, he has lived to enjoy the fruits of the electoral seeds he and others sowed in the 1980s, with Sinn Féin now topping the polls in Westminster, Stormont and council elections.

But electoral success doesn’t automatically deliver political solutions.

“The objective is to improve people’s lives, to move resources from the rich towards the poor, but obviously they (the Sinn Féin-led Stormont executive) are constrained by being connected to Westminster and the British exchequer,” he says.

“But I have never viewed Stormont as a permanent institution. To me, this is an experiment and it’s an experiment that unionists continually undermine.”

He argues that rather than “quote unquote making Northern Ireland work, unionists do the exact opposite”.

He accuses unionist politicians of a failure to reciprocate gestures by republicans, such as Michelle O’Neill laying a wreath at the Belfast cenotaph or attending King Charles‘s coronation.

But despite intransigence, Morrison says he has seen northern society transform.

Continue @ Irish News.

Morrison On Informers & Unionism

Irish News ✏ Written by John Manley.

Rebel, writer and occasional reconciler: Former Sinn Féin publicity director Danny Morrison on his decades of activism, the search for peace and unionism’s decline

The coining of the now infamous phrase “ballot box in one hand... Armalite in the other” wasn’t rehearsed, according to its author Danny Morrison. It came to him just as he reached the podium to speak at Sinn Féin‘s 1981 ard fheis.

Those words came to represent a key juncture in the republican movement’s history. The policy of abstentionism was jettisoned soon after by Sinn Féin – then widely described as the political wing of the IRA – as it sought to emulate the electoral successes witnessed during the Hunger Strike.

For Morrison, then aged 28 and Sinn Féin’s director of publicity, his imprisoned comrades’ campaign for political status, which saw 10 young men die over a two-and-a-half month period in 1981, including three INLA inmates, was “pivotal” and “the most astonishing event of the conflict”.

What he doesn’t countenance, however, is that the end of abstentionism was part of a premeditated strategy, led by Gerry Adams, that aimed to supersede armed struggle with politics.

Continue @ Irish News.

Morrison On Activism

Dixie Elliot ✍ with his thoughts on the appropriation of the Bobby Sands Trust.


In other words Adams is going to rake in more cash from a brave man whom he betrayed in ways we could never have imagined back then. 

Proof of how much Adams and Morrison cared so little about Bobby was that they totally ignored his final wishes regarding his funeral. In fact one of those requests, that he not be buried in a shroud nor a humiliating suit but wrapped in a blanket, was very easily done. Bobby was a realist and knew that the screws would never hand over a blanket from the protest so he meant a similar one which would have been symbolic of the blanket protest.

Adams, Morrison and the rest of that inner circle were trusted with his funeral arrangements and they buried him in a shroud.

So much for 'The Bobby Sands Trust'.

The same people use Bobby's name to sell the betrayal of everything he believed in and died for.

Put it like this, if Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes had died on hunger strike back then Adams and his cronies would also be free to use his name to sell the betrayal of everything he believed in. Free to claim that his death on hunger strike paved the way for electorism and the GFA.

Thankfully The Dark lived and stayed true to his principles. He was able to expose Adams and the Sinn Féiners for what they became.

He referred to the GFA as Got F*ck All.

Because of that the Sinn Féiners unleashed the 'Flying Monkeys' and sent them out to try and blacken his name.

They of course failed miserably which came as no surprise.

You only have to post Brendans photo or even his name on social media and it always gets a fanastic response.

As for this latest collection of writings by Bobby and indeed all of his work. As far as I'm concerned if you buy them you are effectively buying stolen property.

From Ed Moloney in The Broken Elbow...

... The Bobby Sands Trust was set up after his death in 1981 with the aim of raising money for the dependants of IRA prisoners through the sale of books, photographs and memorabilia about the dead IRA protester. The Sands family is claiming that a recent decision by the Trust to make “republican writings” the main beneficiary instead was illegal and taken without their permission.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Cash Cow

Anthony McIntyre ☠  For a bit of craic, readers - if they have a few minutes to spare, or waste - might be interested in taking a look at what the rat in a hat dragged in.


Timothy O"Grady's review of Disney's Say Nothing could as easily have been titled Say Nothingness because in terms of intellectual enlightenment the reader is pulled into a void of what is best described as bottomless vacuity. Something like being anaesthetized during a surgical procedure. Upon reading it, the thought struck me:


When reading or listening to people having a go at me, I invariably find it productive if I learn something from their critique. It allows me to probe weaknesses and reflect on my own perspective, adjusting accordingly. From O'Grady's review I didn't even learn that for him I am a bit of a hate figure. That was something I had already known from an earlier foray by the same author when he reviewed the book Say Nothing. That review featured on the website of Freddie Scappaticci's Carrigart colleague Daniel Dudley Morrison, acquaintance of King Charles, I say, old bean - who described O'Grady as 'my friend.' Worryingly for O'Grady, even more than the friendship of Morrison being as pleasant as scabies - and if he is equipped with any powers of discernment - is Morrison's documented history of betraying those who believed him their friend. 

Morrison relies on a worn out trick of the trade. As a well known whisper weasel and therefore lacking the credibility to make his own smears stick, he resorts to the ventriloquist tactic of having another speak smearwa for him. The next move is to cite the other as a credible source. As transparent as it is fraudulent.


I am not in the slightest angry towards O'Grady. If I was to get enraged at all my critics my days would be consumed by fury, there are so many of the fuckers. Like Jude Collins who has had many a go, he at least does not hide behind the shield of anonymity from the cover of which he can shoot his poison arrow. It is a trait I admire in my detractors. Still, anyone willing to openly proclaim that they know nothing of Gerry Adams’ involvement in the IRA is not to be taken as a serious observer of IRA affairs. On a par with claiming not to know God is in the Bible then wanting to be regarded as an earnest religious commentator. 

Still, I am left wondering why people with a substantial reputation in the literary world risk jeopardising it by shilling for Dodgy Danny. While I haven't read the responses to O'Grady's piece on the Facebook page of the Andersonstown News - where his recent missive appeared - someone who did has told me that it has very much been unalloyed and uninterrupted ridicule. Even the bots, apparently, have failed to turn up to defend this one. 

Ridiculous writing is a magnet for ridicule, but Morrison seems to have withheld that from O'Grady for the likely reason that he provided his 'friend' with the ridiculous smearing points. All reminiscent of a ballot box in one hand and an Armalite in somebody else’s. This becomes pretty evident when O'Grady, functioning as a Pennies proxy, accuses Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price of having become police informers. Being labelled an informer by Morrison carries all the plausibility of being labelled a paedophile by Jimmy Savile. Morrison, however, ever eager to deflect scrutiny away from himself and knowing the ridicule his allegations against people of such standing bring his way, no longer makes them, or at least not in public. When confronted at the funeral of Gerry Conlon and asked to stand over his Boston College tout allegations, he lied that he ever made any, much like he lied that he had never claimed his colleague Scappaticci had been mischievously hung out to dry by the British. Morrison understands that as ten out of nine people don't believe him about anything, best to push somebody else under the bus. O'Grady stepped up to the plate and was duly served up as convenient road kill. That is a Tim problem, not a Tony one: his, not mine, to solve.

Prompting the cultic animus against Say Nothing has been the rattling effect that first the book and then the Disney series seems to have had on the Sinn Fein establishment. The faithful will remain unmoved but the power of both to leach outside the reach of Sinn Fein thought traffic control and seep into the consciousness of those inclined to think a bit more about what they digest, causes untold problems for the Sinn Fein narrative. How to depict Sawney Bean in a sympathetic light beyond the cannibalistic cult who fed upon his victims against the backdrop of revelations in the book and drama, becomes a Herculean challenge. Not easy to flash human rights credentials or swan the stage as a statesman in the wake of that. 

Best for that tenebrous world to deflect light away from itself and onto the perceived source of its problem and smear them as touts. I confess to deriving immense enjoyment any time I or the Boston College archive are accused of being a touting project by Danny Morrison, even if he uses a proxy to deliver the slur. 


What else is there to do but laugh? It's great for the craic as everybody gets to publicly blow raspberries at the accuser. Moreover, because Morrison has forfeited any right to the normal rules of engagement whereby even in acrimonious debate people don’t accuse each other of being informers - courtesy of his own breaching of the same rules for the purposes of smearing - I have found myself free to openly express long held deep misgivings about him. 


So strong is the whiff of suspicion that clings to Morrison - and not only because of ‘the secret annexe’ provided to the Belfast Court of Appeal, leading to his acquittal, or his collaboration with his colleague Scappaticci in a bid to suppress the Stakeknife story and cover up for the crimes of Britain's Dirty War - the only way for him to persuade people that he is not a tout is to openly admit that he is one. The response of most would be that it couldn't possibly be true, instinctively feeling, there he goes, lying again just like the rest of us breathe. 

Therein lies Pennies' Paradox. It will prove as difficult to overcome as Schrodinger's Cat, and with no guarantee that from the box in which Schrodinger placed his imaginary cat, a rat will not emerge. Hence, the possibility that flashing across our news screens at some future point will be a certain collegial image:

Colleagues:
Stakeknife & Snakeknife

Whether an agent of influence or not, for Morrison there is a demonstrable record of loyalty to Scappaticci and disloyalty to the hunger strikers, the first he spared, the second he spurned. What a legacy for the Wrong Man to leave, with little time left to change it.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Colleagues

Anthony McIntyre 📺 40 years ago today as the H Blocks were unlocking for the day's routine, we rolled out of the cells and up to the canteen.

BBC @  Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher
Our appetite that morning was less for breakfast, and more for the television - there were none in the cells - so that we could follow the news reports from Brighton where the IRA in the early hours of the morning had literally sent shock waves through the British establishment with its audacious bombing of the Tory Party at its annual conference.

The shine of jubilation was dulled somewhat because while the operation had hit the Tories hard Margaret Thatcher, the main target, had survived. Amongst INLA and IRA prisoners Thatcher was a hate figure because of her key role in the deaths of ten republican hunger strikers. The very same wings where each of the ten had been held across the H Blocks were on October-12-1984 sympathy-free zones.

Forty years later were someone to have asked me for something of significance in relation to October-12, I would have been flummoxed. It is not a date that stands out in my mind like May-5. I guess it is human nature to remember those we lost more than those we killed.

When my wife told me that she had recorded Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher, I thought I'd watch it but there was no urgency to it. Sitting down in front of the television on Thursday evening, in the hope of finding something watchable from Scandinavian or French crime drama, she suggested tuning in to the BBC production. The choice was made.

Settling into it there was a surreal moment when a cartoonish-type character appeared on screen. My first thought Humpty Dumpty WTF. It was in fact Danny Morrison whose presence immediately prompted the comment what is he gonna lie about? I hadn't long to wait. As a young person Morrison had been struck down by a bad dose of Liarette syndrome, from which he never recovered, subsequent to which he has been lying ever since. Big black hats off to him for at least finding a novel way to dissimulate and dissemble: lying by crying. With tears as false as the love of a burn again Christian, Morrison stated that there is not a day that passes where he doesn't think of the hunger strikers. That was the point when my mood shifted from ridicule to anger. Given that he bears substantial culpability for six of their deaths, the words I most associate with Morrison and the hunger strikers are those of Jorge Luis Borges: I betrayed those who believed me their friend.

That blemish on my appreciation aside, I found the documentary riveting. It was a far cry from the days when republican activists were gagged by both the London and Dublin governments. Pat Magee, the IRA volunteer who planted the bomb, was afforded a large amount of speaking time. Of more interest than the operation itself was the evolution of Magee's perspective on war and the taking of life. It seems clear that today he shares none of the jubilation that was so prevalent on the H Block wings or the pub in Cork where he sat watching news of the attack. A deep thinking man, he is philosophical rather than triumphalist. Without turning his back on the operation that propelled him to a public profile at odds with the quietude of his character, he brings nuance to an understanding of the consequences of his actions.  In Pat Magee it is easy to detect the paradox presented by Albert Camus on war that Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

While Pat Magee has come a long way in his arduous political odyssey, an even more remarkable distance covered is that made by Jo Berry, daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, the Conservative MP killed by the bomb Pat Magee placed in the Grand Hotel. While both lives were upended by the attack, it had to be much harder for Jo Berry to embrace Pat Magee than it was for him to embrace her. 

Forty years on those who looked to us as monsters then look much more human today. John Gummer who was with Thatcher at the time the IRA device detonated, would most likely have died had the attack succeeded. His contribution to the documentary was of service to recreating the mood in the Grand Hotel leading up to the bomb and the shock it produced. While he still professes a lack of comprehension as to why it happened, he was rancour free. In contrast to the fake tears of Danny Morrison, Gummer's wife Penelope shed tears that bore all the traits of authenticity as she recalled the events of the night and spoke with a large measure of understanding of what motivated the man who came very close to killing her. 

I very much doubt that the grief leading from the violence of war will ever lead to either widespread forgiveness or forgetting. To expect that it will, is to have an unjustified belief in the capacity of humans to become unhuman by jettisoning the sentiments, instincts and feelings that make them human. What Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher did achieve was to discursively reinforce placing the concept of understanding, that is so necessary to preventing war and political violence, at the centre of the narrative generated by war and violence.  

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Bombing Brighton: The Plot To Kill Thatcher

Dixie Elliot ✍ I recently became aware of a video which was posted on YouTube during the week by Sinn Fein titled, ‘Hunger Striker Sean McKenna remembered by his comrade Danny Morrison.’ 


Danny Morrison, Sinn Fein’s Director of Revisionism, walked among the graves of the Republican dead in Milltown Cemetery and once again lied in regards to the ending of the first hunger strike back in December 1980, laying the blame for it’s failure on Brendan Hughes.

If that was sickening enough, seeing him using the name of the late Sean McKenna to sell this lie added to my anger. The grave robbers Burke and Hare had more respect for the dead.

According to Morrison:

. . . The following night the British government were due, through an emissary, to deliver a document to the hunger strikers. Before the document arrived, the hunger strike was called off by Brendan Hughes. The document arrived and Bobby Sands was sent for. All the promises of a progressive prison liberal regime were now, that the British government knew that the hunger strike was over and all those people who said they would intervene and support the prisoners and would support reforms, they all disappeared . . . 

The thing about the truth is that you cannot get caught out telling it, something Morrison can’t seem to get his head around as he’s a habitual liar and the above statement is full of holes, big holes.

I stated many times, given my huge respect for Brendan Hughes, a leader who always led from the front, that any attempt to smear his name regarding how that hunger strike came to an end would be met with the truth and the only ones to blame for this are the liars like Morrison.

However, the one very important person who exposes Morrison’s lie regarding how that hunger strike ended was Bobby Sands himself. I will get to that soon.

Take for example Morrison’s claim, ‘the document arrived and Bobby Sands was sent for…’

No thought whatsoever has gone into that particular lie. Father Meagher received the document at Belfast airport from ‘The Mountain Climber.’  He then took it to Adams and others who were waiting in Clonard Monastery. As they were looking over it Tom Hartley entered the room and told them that the hunger strike was over.

The document contained nothing, it merely indicated that prisoners could wear ‘civilian-type’ clothing during the working week. That was another form of prison uniform.

Bobby had been sent for when the hunger strike ended and he had no document because it was still in the hands of Gerry Adams in Clonard Monastery. The source for this is Adams himself in his book, A Farther Shore.

Why would Bobby return to our wing that night and tell desperate men in Irish that, “ní fhuaireamar feic.” (we got nothing) if there was even the slightest of chances that some British offer gave us some hope of ending the blanket protest? Why did Bobby then sit down on his mattress and start writing a comm to Gerry Adams informing him that he would be leading another hunger strike which would begin on January 1st instead of waiting to see if the Brits kept to their promises? Because they had made none. That hunger strike ended because, as Sean McKenna was nearing death, some men told Brendan they were coming of it, leaving The Dark with no other choice but to end it before Sean died needlessly.

In fact, Bobby told Adams exactly that in the comm he was writing to him. (see screenshots taken from page 305, Chapter 21; Nothing But An Unfinished Song, below).

. . . I don’t believe we can achieve our our aims or recoup our losses in the light of what has occurred. Sooner, rather than later, our defeat will be exposed. When I say, in the light of what has occurred, I mean not only the boys breaking but perhaps our desperate attempts to salvage something . . . 

Adams, Morrison and the others knew how it ended from the time they read that comm from Bobby, yet they persist in the lie that Brendan Hughes had ended it and was therefore responsible for the second hunger strike which claimed the lives of ten brave men. They do this because The Dark died with his principles intact and he never betrayed his dead comrades for political or financial gain and he didn’t hold back, while he lived, in telling the truth.

Given that he also knew the truth, yet was only too willing to promote this lie at his master’s behest, I have no problem in naming Raymond McCartney as being one of those men who told Brendan they were coming off that hunger strike.

Near the end of the video Morrison tells anyone foolish enough to believe him that Bobby’s election victory paved the way for Sinn Féin’s move towards electoral politics. He would have you believe that the hunger strikes were part of a long term strategy to bring Sinn Féin into government in the Stormont it was determined to ‘smash’ back then, and to take their seats with the Free Staters, who had sided with the British against their own people in the North.

According to Morrison:

…The election of Bobby Sands, on the 9th April 1981, provided the springboard for Sinn Féin to adopt it’s electoral strategy, the fruits of which we see today… 

Bobby only stood in that election in the hope that victory would mean that Thatcher couldn’t possibly let a sitting MP die on hunger strike. This of course proved not to be the case, as she was a vindicative evil bitch.

However, even while the hunger strike was still ongoing, Adams and his inner-circle, which of course included Morrison, began to furtively lay the path which would take an unwitting Republican Movement onto the road of electoral politics. Three days after the death of Michael Devine, on the same day that Owen Carron won the bye-election for Bobby’s vacant seat in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, Sinn Féin announced that in future it would contest all ‘Northern Ireland’ elections. 

The hunger strike was still ongoing and this decision had not been to put to the Movement as a whole because that year’s Ard Fheis would not be until late October. Michael Devine had barely been lowered into his grave as they ‘seized the opportunity’ to set their ‘electoral strategy’ in motion. It comes as no surprise that it was Morrison who would ask the delegates at that Ard Fheis if anyone there would object if they took power in Ireland with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other.

We all know what eventually happened to the Armalite. They decommissioned it, as did they the right to call themselves Republicans by attending the coronation of the British king, Charles.

Thanks to the family of Bobby Sands, who had only recently found out themselves by uncovering one of his prison comms in the National Archives, we now know he had requested that he be buried in Ballina beside Frank Stagg and Michael Gaughan, because he didn’t like Milltown Cemetery. Bobby also requested that he ‘wanted wrapped in a blanket cause I don’t want humiliated in a stinkin’ suit or shroud.’

Danny Morrison tried to claim that Bobby had later changed his mind about Ballina by coming up with a few lines which he claimed were contained in a comm from Bobby, but the comm he referred to did not in fact include those lines in both the books it was included in, Ten Men Dead and Nothing But An Unfinished Song.

What he could not lie about was that Bobby’s simple request, that he be wrapped in a blanket because he didn’t want humiliated in a stinkin’ suit or shroud, was denied him. Bobby Sands was highly intelligent and he would have fully realised that the screws would not have handed over a prison blanket for him to be laid to rest in. He was obviously referring to a similar type of blanket which would be symbolic of the protest which took up the final years of his life.

Bobby Sands was buried in a shroud and his family weren’t made aware of his final request.

Excerpt from Bury Me In My Blanket by Bobby Sands:

I've thought about that too,” I said, “and it's hard to say to oneself that one is prepared to go to such an extreme, but then we are special prisoners and we are struggling for a special cause, so if I should die here, tell “Mr Mason” to bury me in my blanket . . . ” 

 

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

More Lies Morrison

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