The life of an IRA gunrunner: ‘I was in a corner in a dark basement with Whitey Bulger’.

http://seachranaidhe-irishandproud.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-life-of-ira-gunrunner-i-was-in.html

Michael Collins diaries

https://www.irishhumanities.com/blog/reading-the-michael-collins-diaries/

Watch: PSNI probing west Belfast video showing masked man firing volley of shots over coffin – BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/watch-psni-probing-west-belfast-video-showing-masked-man-firing-volley-of-shots-over-coffin-41768156.html

#OTD in 1979 – A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British retired admiral Lord Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday off the coast in Co Sligo.

 

Lord Mountbatton

https://stairnaheireann.net/2020/08/27/otd-in-1979-a-provisional-irish-republican-army-bomb-kills-british-retired-admiral-lord-mountbatten-and-three-others-while-they-are-boating-on-holiday-off-the-coast-in-co-sligo-4/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

13 dead and not forgotten (Bloody Sunday) we got 18 and Mountbatton. Irish Republican Army (IRA)

Watch “A Former IRA Child Bomber Tells His Story” on YouTube

Only man jailed over £26m Northern raid sues bank – BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/only-man-jailed-over-26m-northern-raid-sues-bank-39358414.html?fbclid=IwAR3tXZKhTJFrue9YKCDH_xXb4_N3MmDmORGcyjloiGVgdZF-81pZMsZmlMU

Watch “The Cook Report 1987 Worse Than The Mafia (IRA Northern Ireland)” on YouTube

With many thanks to Billy Nolan for the original artwork

 

For all his ferocity, Bobby’s struggle for Irish Unity was in vain

ÓGLACH BOBBY STORY R.I.P.

Martin McGuinness (left) and Bobby Storey (3rd left) address Sinn Fein supporters, joined by Martina Anderson (right) attending the unveiling of Gerry Adams in the Falls Road, Belfast

BOBBY STOREY, hero or villain. These are the two conflicting narratives played out since the death of one of the most prominent IRA leaders of the conflict.

But often there is no simplicity or consistency in history or life. The man who once waged war on the British State later became an instrumental peeler for the peace.

The mural painted that was painted in 2014, of Gerry Adams on the Falls Road. When he was being questioned on the 1972 murder of Jean McConville

And even that was a messy business – reliant if not on violence, then at least on the unspoken threat of it. Those republicans who transgressed from the peace process, or were thinking about it, knew that big Bobby calling to the door was a whole different ball game to a chat with Mary Lou, or whoever was her late 1990s equivalent. The complicated nature of Storey’s role in post-ceasefire North of Ireland is conveyed by two incidents. It’s May 2014, just after the arrest of then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. He’s being questioned by the RUC/PSNI about the 1972 murder-of-10 Jean McConville. A mural is painted of Adams on the Falls Road within less than 48 hours of his arrest. It’s located, with incredibly insensitivity, just a few hundred yards from where McConville was abducted. A protest rally was held beside it.

Bank notes and war stories can’t hide the IRA’s failure

Martin McGuinness delivers the main address, but it’s Storey’s short speech which is the most eye-catching. “We have a message for the British government, the Irish government, the cabal that’s out there,” he roared. “We ain’t gone away, you know!” It brought back memories of Gerry Adams’ quip about the IRA outside Belfast City Hall in 1995. “They haven’t gone away, you know,” he told the crowd. So, the phrase Storey used was no accident. He warned of the “anger, the annoyance that they would dare touch our party leader, the leadership of Irish republicanism”. His voice went up many decibels to emphasise the word ‘dare’. The message from the IRA to the RUC/PSNI that Storey conveyed was clear: Gerry Adams was untouchable. And yet just a year later, Storey helped provide one of the Kodak moments for the peace process on the Falls Road.

Continuity Irish Republican Army (CIRA) General Head Quarters (GHQ)

Chief Constable Sir George Hamilton was invited to share a platform with Martin McGuinness at St Mary’s College during the West Belfast Festival. It was a symbol to help encourage nationalist communities relationship with the RUC/PSNI. Storey sat just a few feet away in the audience, his presence signifying IRA approval, while outside anti-agreement republican protesters blasted rebel songs. He was a staunch opponent of dissidents. He set-up and led a Provo investigation the Real IRA murder of two British soldiers at Massereene in 2009. A republican source revealed last week that Shame Féin members were “arrested” and quizzed about who was involved.

Abortion is Murder – Shame Féin

Is it beyond the realms of possibility to speculate that whatever information was gained overall during this investigation made its way to the RUC/PSNI informally? Regardless, Storey’s support for the Peace Processs was vital in the early years. Had someone of his stature thrown his weight behind dissidents, or even sat on the fence, the Adams leadership would have been significantly weakened.

 

Yet two of the most famous operations that Storey ran as IRA director of intelligence – the 2002 Castlereagh break-in and the 2004 Northern Bank robbery – caused massive embarrassment for the authorities. They were impeccably put together and coolly executed. Storey’s sheer audacity and tactical nous drew grudging admiration even from security sources. And yet when all is done, and those who loved him and those who loathed him have had their say, what was it all about? None of it brought a United Ireland one inch closer. Any progress that has been made in recent years is down to demographic changes, Brexit, and the foolishness of the DUP. Bobby Storey spent 20 years in prison, and he certainly wasn’t defeated by that. Under his tutelage, the IRA scored many tactical wins. But the big strategic, ideological goal – Irish Unity – has remained has remained as elusive as ever for the Provisional movement. And that’s a narrative that all the bank notes, security files or war stories just can’t hide.

https://youtu.be/Hwm2wl65mk

With many thanks to the: Sunday Life and Suzanne Breen for the original story – suzybreen@hotmail.com

Suzanne Breen

 

Bobby Storey both led us and misled us in equal measure… for that I will neither gloat nor grieve

 

Divisive figure: Bobby Storey

Was a determined IRA volunteer who would later turn his back on armed struggle and those whom he had served alongside.

 

RIP Bobby. It was one of the first things I posted online shortly after former blanketmen from Derry and Belfast contacted me within minutes of each other last Sunday with the news that the senior IRA volunteer Bobby Storey had died.

Rest In Peace, in spite of my many differences with him, was a simple, but direct, disavowal of the gloating that would surely emerge from some republican quarters following his death.

People are free to remember him in whatever way they wish. Already, there are enough bidding him devil-speed to the fires of some non-existent hell.

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With many thanks to the: Belfast Telegraph and Anthony McIntyre for the original story 

 

 

 

Are we reaching the endgame on a United Ireland?

Faith almost always baffles those who do not share it. The self-belief of those who killed and died ‘for the cause’ is amazing, as well as horrifying 

Former Deputy First Minister Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness (centre) at the funeral of lieutenant IRA explosives expert Colm Keenan in 1972

ARE we into the endgame now? No, not the coronaviris betokening the End of the World. This is about a United Ireland, to be or not to be, up ahead after a border poll or nothing of the sort.

Ruairi Ó Brádaigh and then Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams at the ard fhéis before the IRA split in 1986

There are people with a seemingly bottomless appetite for weighing up the pros and cons. Only a comparative few are in the polls business, which produces dramatically diverse odds. Although in the aftermath of every single poll, someone manages to weigh it without noting whether the hypothetical poll was to be right now, soon, in five years or farther away. And oh how events influence the results. We may still not know how Brexit will play out but it is plain that so far the effect is pro-unification. A sub-section of the populace is more invested in this game than others. They have been hanging on the prophecies of those they regard as leaders for at least 40 years now, maybe longer. These are republicans, of the Sinn Féin variety, whose most respected figures have been telling them since the 1980s that the big day is on its way.

Did the late Martin McGuinness believe his own words, when he addressed himself in particular to Ruairi Ó Brádaigh and those clustering round him ready to leave the hall and their comrades at the ard fhéis of 1986 with ‘Don’t go, my friends. We will lead you to the Republic’? Of course McGuinness believed himself. How else could he have gone on ordering those who followed him to keep on killing and dying? But then faith always baffles those who do not share it. The self-belief of those who killed and died ‘for the cause’ is amazing, as well as horrifying. As far as can be gathered from outside the circle, it has rarely had to do with assessment of armaments, tactics, the state of ‘the enemy’, much less informed judgment on opinion in the other part of the island, which would have to welcome turning its own state upside down.

Martin Meehan (centre) with Gerry Adams (behind wearing glasses) doing Guard of Honour at an IRA funeral

Through those awful years when the IRA seemed not to have on Off button the authorised prophets were McGuinness and Gerry Adams. They re-jigged the forecast from time to time, depending on how well or badly they supposed they were doing, but until recent years the faith was rarely presented as anything other than total, unconditional. Except perhaps in the first years of the Troubles the promise was never ‘next year in Jerusalem’. As British governments scrambled to fathom what they were dealing with they made judgments on the hoof, for example admitting to themselves early on that they would not confront armed loyalist Paramilitaries in anything like the way they would tackle republicans. Not out of loyalty to kith and kin, but because the generals, as state papers confirmed much later, were adamant they could not fight on two fronts.  

Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald

In the early 1970s, when London’s panic and disarray was evident, leading republicans (and some unionists) thought ‘the Brits’ were close to leaving. In 2000 Adams told supporters in New York ‘there is no reason why we cannot celebrate the 1916 Rising in the year 2016, in a free and United Ireland.’ In the Guardian seven years on, when an interviewer put it to him that he had said a United Ireland could be achievable by 2016 he replied: ‘Well I didn’t quite say that. A colleague of mine said that and then when I was asked the question I said: But if we don’t get it, don’t blame us’. In 2017 one of Sinn Féin’s sharpest critics noted that ‘a United Ireland by 2016 has now become a border poll by 2020’. Now that 2020 is two months old Mary Lou McDonald predicts a poll inside five years. But then who believes that official Britain under Boris Johnson is committed to maintain the Union? What republicans tell themselves may be neither here nor there.

With many thanks to: The Irish News and Fionnuala O’Connor for the original story