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Showing posts with label Unquiet Graves. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unquiet Graves. Show all posts
Dublin Review Of Books delves into a documentary on Britain's Dirty War in Ireland. 

Farrel Corcoran

Clandestine communications have long played an important role in politically unstable societies, where power is contested to the point of insurgency and where the prevailing media culture is steeped in censorship and misinformation. In the pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and fear in the period of the samizdat press in the USSR, forbidden texts were reproduced by hand and often concealed by the craft of the bookbinder inside ideologically approved books, to be shared with friends under the noses of Soviet censors. When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to move to Paris from his first exile in Iraq, good French telephone and postal services gave him the opportunity to swamp his home country with recordings that preached revolutionary ideas inside mosques and private homes in Iran, despite the vigilance of the shah’s secret police.

During the conflict in Northern Ireland, a small number of documentary films were made which debunked many of the media stereotypes of the Troubles and challenged the dominant state narrative of the conflict by focusing on its causes and its victims. Pirated copies of films banned by the British government were circulated between families ...

Continue reading @ Dublin Review Of Books.

Hear No Evil

Anthony McIntyre shares his thoughts on a film about British state terrorism. 

I watched Unquiet Graves the night after it broadcast on RTE.  Having been too weary to view it live, I opted to record it. In the interim period I fortuitously picked up on some observations made by the journalist Malachi O’Doherty who was sceptical towards its objectivity. I approached the film with that in mind. 

I ultimately disagreed with O’Doherty’s take although his critique was considerably more measured than much of the online unionist reaction which basically amounted to little more than the film being the work of a republican propagandist: the evidence seemingly that the director Sean Murray’s father had a long association with the senior echelons of the Provisional IRA and had served a number of stretches in prison. The “mutant” gene must therefore have found its way into the grey matter of the son. Like father, like son, Sean Jnr was rendered genetically incapable of producing anything other than “Provo propaganda.” Sean Murray’s mother ran a café business at one time and I suppose it could as plausibly be said that because of that he sought to serve up some seriously overcooked republican cuisine just to annoy the taste buds of unionists and give them indigestion.  Just, that you would need to have the critical faculties of a bible basher to buy that sort of bull.

Murray explained his reasons for making the film. There was nothing untoward about them. He could of course be making it all up, just that there is nothing to suggest he is; and a lot of substance in the film to allow the inference to be drawn that he has made a compelling case for the Prosecution. The case for the Defence, if there is one, lies in the files that the British have been refusing to make public. The current Garda Commissioner while serving with the PSNI:

has been accused of fighting attempts to get information about the perpetrators of atrocities like the Miami Showband murders and of blocking access to files about the many murders carried out by the Mid-Ulster, UVF ‘Brigadier’ Robin Jackson.

In 2017 Brian Feeney referred to:

a lengthy self-serving epistle from the chief constable explaining why he is going to appeal a High Court order commanding him and his force ‘to expeditiously honour its enforceable public commitment to provide an overarching report into the Glenanne group of cases’.

It is hardly Murray who needs to explain himself.

UUP politician and former member of the British military Doug Beattie insisted that the film looked “like a work of fiction.” He is correct if the fiction he has in mind is something crafted by Stephen King. This was nothing short of a horror movie where the monsters were real. The one former RUC officer who ventured outside the fold in order to speak to the families was one of the few good apples in a rotten barrel.

As much as political unionism and state terrorism deniers might wax outraged, this film cannot be swept aside as conspiracy theory such as happened to an early work in the field of collusion, A Very British Jihad. Although in fairness to the author of that particular book, people should revisit it armed with the knowledge that now exists about the long history of British state terrorism in Ireland, around which there is a burgeoning and compelling narrative. The phenomenon has only this week led to the Irish President urging the British to face up to their terror role in the country.

Eamonn McCann concisely summed up the essence of Unquiet Graves:

It details how members of the RUC, UDR and MI5 colluded with loyalist killers resulting in the murder of over 120 innocent civilians.
These sectarian murderers assassinated workers, farmers, shopkeepers, publicans and other civilians in a campaign of terror.
Now known as the Glenanne Gang, they rampaged through Counties Tyrone, Armagh and into the South in a sectarian campaign that lasted from July 1972 to the end of 1978. 

 

This loudly echoes an earlier BBC characterisation in respect of the British running the agent Stakeknife: murder on an industrial scale. 

Much of the criticism of Murray's film has focused on the claim that at one point the Glenanne Gang had discussed killing all the infants and teachers in a Catholic primary school. This is not the first time the allegation has been made. What seemed new in Unquiet Graves was the suggestion that the idea was proposed by people in the Security Services. It was speculation on the part of former RUC member, John Weir,  and Sean Murray did not make it out to be anything else. Many of the people in the Glenanne Gang were Christian fundamentalists and biblical literalists. Former urban UVF prisoners have commented on the religious fundamentalism of some of their rural membership. Driven by Hate Theology, a quick rummage through the Old Testament would easily have convinced them that "Happy the one who takes and dashes Your little ones against the rock." It might well turn out that nobody in the British security services suggested any such thing. But they were running as agents those who thought it a good idea.

Perhaps, most disappointing has been the general silence of the media in the South towards the film. If the horrific killing of Paul Quinn can produce such intense media hostility towards Sinn Fein, its quietude towards Unquiet Graves makes the Quinn furore seem contrived, impelled by political considerations rather than investigative ones. That the media has not camped outside the Phoenix Park residence of Drew Harris in the wake of the film is a serious indictment. They clamped themselves to Mary Lou McDonald for less.  

The reason for the media reticence might be simple. The media has said much about the Provisional IRA campaign. What it does not want to say is that the Provisional IRA - despite all is faults and failings, its injustices and atrocities - was at war with British state terrorism. And that is a truth that must be given no quarter. Better that the graves stay quiet than allow something like that to emerge from them. 

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

Unquiet Graves

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