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Showing posts with label Danny Morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Danny Morrison. Show all posts
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

Anthony McIntyre ☠ It has been an uncomfortable week for former members of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit, both those who worked for the British and those who didn’t. 

Such is the feeding frenzy that anything in the water looking remotely like one of the headhunters is regarded as food to be dissected and devoured, their own heads hunted.

Last week in the space of a few days, allegations emerged against two people reported in the media as having previously plied their counterintelligence trade in the ISU. One, Paddy Monaghan, is deceased. The allegations against him appeared in Sunday Life which claimed he had been outed. Yet the content of the article does not substantiate the outing. It was a string of suspicions expressed by people who either were, or claimed to be, former colleagues of Monaghan. Oddly, there was nobody from the British intelligence services cited in support of the supposed outing.

The other was said by the Irish News to have fled his home in West Belfast. This was later disputed by the man’s solicitor. The journalist Allison Morris also reported that he had been seen drinking with friends in West Belfast.

Unfortunately for the person alleged to have upped sticks, Danny Morrison weighed in to cast doubt on the claims made in the Irish News, accusing the paper of inventing the story. To the man at the centre of the allegations this was as helpful as the kiss of death, immediately giving rise to a surge of suspicion in the already active whisper world. Morrison had previously covered up for Scappaticci’s role in the British state’s Dirty War when he was first outed so, to many, it prompted the thought of here we go again, same old, same old.

The accused man, by now, must be sitting in his abode terrified in case Adam O’Toole of An Phoblacht wades in to back him. O’Toole’s cover-up for Scappaticci was described by the journalist Suzanne Breen as holding “pride of place in all the tripe trundled out … it’s unbelievable that anybody took the garbage it printed seriously.”

Morrison and his ilk, because they were “willing participants” in Britain’s dirty war, using their influence to deflect people away from what it actually was, have diminished the likelihood of a queue forming this time around to buy anything that even smells like cover-up. Their dissembling has fueled an equal and opposite reaction whereby people will be inclined to believe the opposite of whatever Danny Morrison tells them. 

Moreover, we might wonder why Morrison would challenge the Irish News story no matter how correct he might have been in his assertions that the 'well known West Belfast republican' had not fled his home.  He had to know that his contribution, given his role in the Scappaticci cover-up, rather than exonerate the individual in the eye of the storm, would have made him a person of interest to many observers. 

Ahead of the Kenova Report being published the rumour mill will be indulging in foreplay in anticipation of the climax many either expect or hope for. There will be no shortage of people willing to believe anything so long as it is whispered to them. For that very reason, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, the bar should be high. Sinn Fein lowered it considerably by its cover-up for Scappaticci, making it easy for critics to hurl accusations around, and difficult for the accused to defend against particularly if Danny Morrison is in their corner.

Those culpable of working for the British in their Dirty War have no right to see their role buried along with their victims. Whether through choice or coercion, their decision was heinous. Those not working for the British, no matter how much of the Sinn Fein Kool-Aid they have either doled out or consumed, have every right not to be wrongly accused.

If there is a substantive belief that certain people were agents of the British, then the allegation should only ever be openly levelled because it is rooted in an authentic perspective and grounded in evidence. It is not a charge to be contrived merely to smear an opponent.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

World Of Whispers

Des Dalton doesn't think much of recent commentary on an award winning book on the Northern conflict. 

Danny Morrison recently used his blog to platform a review by his “friend” Irish - American writer Timothy O’Grady of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing. The book review was merely a front to launch yet another attack on Dr Anthony McIntyre.

The perverse obsession that senior and former senior members of Provisional Sinn Féin have with Anthony McIntyre is almost inexplicable. Inexplicable when one considers that since at least 1986 there have been a raft of former senior members of the Provisional Movement who have been willing to put their head above the parapet and challenge the various political somersaults performed by what, for the sake of convenience, I will call the Gerry Adams leadership.

Many of these people were serious players within the Republican Movement at both political and military level, in some cases both. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, Richard O’Rawe, Tommy McKearney etc. Consequently, what they had to say carried considerable weight. While to a greater or lesser extent many of these people faced a backlash from the Adams camp – one has only to read Richard O’Rawe’s book Afterlives to get a glimpse of the high personal price he paid for exposing the truth of the 1981 hunger strikes – none have faced the same level of sustained attack, physical threat, and character assassination as that endured by Anthony McIntyre over the course of two decades. 

I say it is almost inexplicable because there is an obvious reason that McIntyre has been the primary target of their malevolent spleen for so long. It is that he has consistently challenged Provisional Sinn Féin’s historical narrative of the 1969 to 1997 war. A narrative carefully constructed over many years by Adams and his close acolytes. Not only did he challenge that narrative but crucially he set out to ensure that the voices of those republican activists who had fought the war would have their narrative preserved and placed on the historical record through his work on the Boston College Project.

The story of the conflict as told by the veterans interviewed by Anthony McIntyre challenged the narrative advanced by Gerry Adams and those close to him. For Provisional Sinn Féin this was the ultimate heresy. And Anthony McIntyre’s punishment for committing this mortal sin was to have calumny cast on his good name, his professional integrity impugned, to be cast into the outer darkness. Thus, all who took it upon themselves to question the historical orthodoxy handed down by the “Great Leader” would be duly warned as to the fate that awaited them.

Danny Morrison introduces the book review by launching a disingenuous attack on the integrity of Anthony McIntyre and the other researchers involved in the Boston College Project. Danny Morrison knows only too well that nobody was “encouraged to incriminate themselves” by taking part in the collection of what was a legitimate and academically sound attempt to gather an oral history of the 1969-97 conflict. If the architects and researchers of the Boston College interviews are guilty of anything it is that they accepted in good faith the narrative peddled by Danny Morrison’s erstwhile political masters that “the war was over” and there was now a new political dispensation for all, including former combatants.

Unfortunately, the British Government had other ideas. Their war certainly was not over as they have shown with their relentless pursuit of veteran republican activists over the intervening years. The much-lauded release of prisoners was of course under licence, licences which could be revoked at the pleasure of the British “Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.” For those serving life sentences their release remains on permanent license. The message to the troops was clear:

Stick to the political programme of Adams and his “Kitchen Cabinet” and you will not be touched, we may even get you a job. Step outside and deign to question the “tablets of stone” or “Good Friday Agreement”, to stick with the biblical and religious imagery so beloved of the “peace processors”, then you would find yourself out in the cold. Or in some cases back behind bars. 

Unlike the release of prisoners following previous IRA campaigns since 1921, this one had strings attached. All with the connivance of those who claimed to be the leaders of republicanism. Unlike other theatres of conflict such as South Africa where similar projects have been launched to collect the testimony of former combatants, here the fundamental causes of the conflict have not been resolved.

Timothy O’Grady for whatever reason takes it upon himself, under the guise of a book review, to launch what is but the latest in a long line of such attacks on Anthony McIntyre and the Boston College Project. Not for the first time the basis of this latest attack is both spurious and laced with a particularly nasty and snide attempt to smear Anthony McIntyre. He has two primary criticisms of the project, the first of which is that the interviewees were chosen solely because of their opposition to the so-called ‘Peace Process.’

Unlike Timothy O’Grady I will not attempt to second guess the criteria used to select either Republican or Loyalist interviewees. What I will say is that as a criticism it does not stack up. If indeed Anthony McIntyre and the other researchers did select Republican interviewees on that basis it does not delegitimise the integrity of the project. In the Post-Civil War period, the nascent Free State were determined to not only remove Republicans from all aspects of public life, but also to erase their narrative from any account of the 1916-23 period. In the 1930s and ‘40s Ernie O’Malley sought to counter this by conducting interviews with IRA veterans from across Ireland, the vast majority of whom opposed the 1921 Treaty. Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 Belfast Agreement the voices of those republicans opposed to it were marginalised. The likelihood is that their narrative would be similarly ignored or at best given token representation when it came to the recording of the post-1969 conflict. 

The winners after all get to write the history. If like Ernie O’Malley, Anthony McIntyre and his colleagues sought to ensure that these veterans, who represented an authentic traditional Irish Republican viewpoint, would have their voices preserved on the historical record, then that was a perfectly legitimate criteria to use in the selection of interviewees. Rather than being subjects of attack and misrepresentation, he and his colleagues should be lauded for their efforts.

Such conflicts over historical narrative and whose story gets told are not unique to Ireland. In The aftermath of the World War II the French Government established two committees, later merged in 1952 to form The Committee on the History of the Second Word War (Comité d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale; CH2GM), which between 1945 and 1947 collected over 2,000 testimonies of French Resistance veterans. Even in a context where the common enemy had been decisively defeated and French sovereignty fully restored there was still conflict about contesting narratives of the resistance. Veterans of the Communist Resistance protested that their accounts were being marginalised and only given token recognition in the official Gaullist account of the war.

Timothy O’Grady’s second main criticism turns on the fact that no British soldiers or members of the RUC were interviewed. From this he deduces that the entire project presents the conflict as one motivated by sectarianism rather than a war of national liberation. He presents no evidence to back up such a sweeping judgement. Not content with smearing the project and the content of the interviews with the taint of sectarianism he makes a snide attempt to lay the same charge at Anthony McIntyre’s door. Character assassination and smear is a long-standing weapon of choice for Provisional Sinn Féin when dealing with people who challenge them. Frankly, it is sad to see Timothy O’Grady, whose previous work, notably Curious Journey (a series of interviews with veterans of the 1916-23) I would have admired, tarnish his reputation by employing such base methods rather than engaging in robust and honest critical analysis.

Provisional Sinn Féin is grappling with its own contradictions, which gives the battle over memory and whose story gets to be told an added potency. On the one hand it wants to hold on to its traditional Republican base as well as denying legitimacy to those Republicans who do not support them. This involves paying lip service to their Republican past, doing the rounds of commemorations with the customary speeches to the faithful. But here is the crux. These events can often cause offence to other constituencies that they are trying to cultivate, including actual and potential partners in government, such as the DUP in the Six Counties and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the 26 Counties. As they attempt to walk this tightrope a pattern has emerged. Firstly, a relatively low profile PSF public representative issues a seemingly hard-line Republican statement or tweet linking their party with a historical revolutionary event such as the Kilmichael ambush. This pleases the base but also invites a backlash from the mainstream media and the wider political establishment on both sides of the border. There then follows a torrent of condemnation of the said statement. Soon after a grovelling apology and retraction of the offending statement is made by the suitably chastised PSF representative.

Speaking out of both sides of their mouths is of course a skill they long ago perfected but it is becoming an increasingly more difficult trick for them to pull off. Their strength has always been that they have managed to fool enough people into believing that they are anti-establishment when in fact they are an integral part of the establishment north and south. An example of this sleight of hand was seen in the fallout from the PSNI attack on those gathered to remember victims of the 1992 loyalist attack on Sean Graham’s Book makers on the Ormeau Road. Provisional Sinn Féin rushed to the media to voice their protestations about the actions of the PSNI. They behaved as if they were a party of protest representing the oppressed minority when in fact they sit on the policing boards and are part of the Stormont Executive which sets policing policy.

History may not repeat itself but can often rhyme. Just prior to coming to power in the Free State in 1932 Fianna Fáil faced a similar dilemma. How to retain a republican base while preparing themselves for government. This too involved control of the narrative and ownership of the revolutionary 1916-23 period. Like Provisional Sinn Féin today, this was to confirm their republican credentials while also denying legitimacy to any challengers. Fianna Fáil kept an iron like grip on the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966. Expect Provisional Sinn Féin to do likewise with this year’s 40th Anniversary of the 1981 Hunger Strikes, as seminal an event in their carefully crafted historical narrative as 1916 was to Fianna Fáil’s foundation myth.

Those who know Anthony McIntyre know that the recurring sniping and attacks do not worry him in the slightest and nor should they. He is somebody who is highly regarded by leading academics and journalists, evidenced by the fact so many of them were willing to sign a public letter in his defence at the height of the whole Boston College Tapes debacle. Indeed, Dr Anthony McIntyre could by now have easily occupied a lucrative academic post if he had so chosen. Instead, he turned his back on academia such was his anger at Boston College’s failure to honour its promise to secure the tapes.

Anthony McIntyre’s crime is that he declared that the Emperor has no clothes and sought to give a voice to those who refused to swallow the big lie.  

⏭Des Dalton is a long time republican activist.

Nailing The Big Lie ➖ The Fight For Republican Memory

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