Interview with Dixie Elliott

Peace Processing the Memory of the Conflict

No Choice But to Take It

Radio Free Éireann Interview with Richard O'Rawe

Take It Down From the Mast

A bit of Stick had at the recent Anti-Internment March in Belfast

Wiki-Dump

All correspondence in relation to Allison Morris' and Ciaran Barnes' complaints and the NUJ's handling of the issue.

True to Their Words

Disproportionate Coverage of NUJ case in the Irish News

What Price Justice?

For Irish News reporter Allison Morris, Celtic v Cliftonville in Glasgow

The Weird World

Journalists and Online Shenanigans: Double Standards Exposed

Dolours Price Archive

"I look forward to the freedom to lay bare my experiences unfettered by codes now redundant."

Irish Republican Movement Collection

Annoucing the Irish Republican Movement Collection online archive at IUPUI

The Belfast Project and Boston College

The Belfast Project and the Boston College Subpoena Case: The following paper was given at the Oral History Network of Ireland (OHNI) Second Annual Conference in Ennis, Co Clare on Saturday the 29th September 2012

Challenge and Change

Former hunger striker Gerard Hodgkins delivered the 2013 annual Brendan Hughes Memorial Lecture

Brendan Hughes: A Life in Themes

There is little to be gained in going from an A to Z chronological tour of the life of Brendan Hughes. The knowledge is out there. Instead a number of themes will covey to those who are interested what was the essence of the man.

55 HOURS

Day-by-day account of events of the 1981 Hunger Strike. A series in four parts:
July 5July 6July 7July 8

The Bell and the Blanket

Journals of Irish Republican Dissent: A study of the Bell and Blanket magazines by writers Niall Carson and Paddy Hoey

Friday, August 28, 2009

Pushing Back Regressive Policing

Fourthwrite Summer 2009
It quickly became Kafkaesque. At the first hearing the public, press, myself and my lawyers were cleared from the court so that the PSNI could present their arguments in camera. How could we mount a defence when we didn’t even know what police were saying? We were fighting a case from a massively disadvantaged position – Suzanne Breen

The recent judicial attempt to clip the wings of Ian Paisley Jnr is to be seen in the context of an instinctual urge by the state to erode the ground underpinning the logic of protecting sources which allow vital information to enter the public arena. It should simultaneously remind people of the importance of the victory achieved by Suzanne Breen in a Belfast court and warn them of the temptation to rest on the laurels of the Breen achievement. Although it was the first time since the Terrorism Act of 2000 that the protection of sources has been judicially approved and enshrined, nothing should be taken for granted. When Suzanne Breen wrote after the verdict in her own case, declaring it a triumph for press freedom across Europe, it can hardly be said she was exaggerating. However, while she forced the PSNI to pull its horns in and desist from goring a vital principle of journalism, the state has clearly not thrown in the towel, referring instead to use it as a gag to suffocate Ian Paisley Jnr.

Suzanne Breen was up against it from the get go. As she reported ‘the police were said to be absolutely confident they’d win.’ They had good reason to. The precedent favouring journalists on the issue of protecting sources was set almost a decade earlier in the case of Ed Moloney who, like Breen, was also Northern editor of the Sunday Tribune. The state felt less assured and steady on its feet then. It was walking on eggshells and was vulnerable to exposure. A murder its own people had been involved in through collusion with loyalist militias had not been solved and the one person facing prison in relation to it was the journalist who had brought to light many of the unsavoury aspects of the case. At the time there still existed a serious swathe of opinion willing to challenge the British policing regime.

Breen by contrast was protecting a source in the deeply unpopular Real IRA, and in the eyes of many people would be unable to elicit little in the way of popular support for her stand. As in the days when the Provisional IRA was at war with the British state there remains a deep hostility within the ranks of officialdom toward any voices from within armed bodies opposed to the state. The Real IRA unlike the Provisionals is a body with little support in the nationalist community and the PSNI must have felt they were pushing a door being opened in advance of their arrival by those previously most critical of the force.

In some areas the PSNI had been involved in more serious violations of human rights than had been when operating under its old RUC name; the detention of people in custody for up to 28 days a case in point. Yet there was little in the way of opposition from the political parties to the force’s behaviour. It hardly expected a serious challenge to its latest encroachment and could even claim to have been given the green light for the move by the comments of the Deputy First Minister who lambasted ‘dissident journalists.’

However propitious the conditions as viewed by the police their reading was one neither shared nor acquiesced in by Breen’s colleagues in the journalistic profession, nor by those in the wider anti censorship community. Despite the green light they were determined to hold up a very large ‘stop’ sign; so large that it was visible to more people than the PSNI imagined existed.

A vigorous campaign in defence of the targeted journalist was launched. It cut right across the political divide, drawing the support of many people, some of whom are more used to signing bits of paper against each other rather than signing the same bit in unity against the PSNI accumulation of powers. Commenting on the sense of purpose within the journalistic community and the strength of its opposition to the PSNI assault on media freedom the beleaguered Sunday Tribune journalist explained: ‘for the first time in a source protection case, a range of eminent journalists would be called to give evidence and defend our profession’s principles and practices.’ More than 5000 signatures were gathered for a ‘We’re Backing Suzanne’ petition which was carried in the paper of which she is Northern editor.

From a human rights perspective the ruling against the PSNI by Judge Tom Burgess was heartening in that it underpinned the claim by Breen that the police should not be allowed to display a wanton disregard for the lives of its citizens by putting them at risk from armed militias. When the moment the case was initiated it was felt by many that if Breen were to win it would be on these grounds. However, Judge Burgess went much further and acknowledged the journalistic issues at the heart of the case. The court not only ruled in favour of Breen’s human rights but also in favour of her as a journalist who unflinchingly insisted on the profession’s need to protect sources if a function as vital to society as policing itself was not to be rendered dysfunctional.

John Ware a prominent journalist with Panorama said ‘there is meant to be progressive policing in Northern Ireland. If this is progressive policing I’d hate to see what regressive policing would be like.’ The state of political affairs in the North today is such that citizens there must rely on the journalistic profession and anti-censorship community to push back the encroaching boundaries of regressive policing and not the politicians.



Monday, August 24, 2009

Tilting at Giants with a Brush Shaft

Today The Pensive Quill carries an article by guest writer, Mark McGregor

Tilting at Giants with a Brush Shaft by Mark McGregor

The annual SF Hunger Strike commemoration is becoming the set piece event in the constitutional ‘republican’ calendar. It consistently throws up the most controversy and, given the silly season it falls in and dearth of much true news, it generates masses of media and internet comment from even the laziest commentator.

A friend had remarked that controversy around the use of a GAA ground, involvement of an ‘independent’ member of the DPP, military dress and re-enactments, including an armed ASU, meant it had gone down badly for SF. I absolutely disagree, I think it went how they planned.

This event and associated elements seem deliberately designed to demonstrate a sense of militarism in a movement completely stripped of any radicalism and provide a comfort blanket to those unable to recognise how fully constitutional and establishment what they support truly is.

Dressing up the young people of OSF as Na Fianna Eireann and having them lead by a ‘republican movement’ colour party while others ‘re-enact’ being part of an ASU is certainly going to raise a response from the MSM and SF’s partners in government. However, it isn’t a real subversive activity, it is just bad theatre.

This movable feast of commemoration in recent years seems to be held where dissent against the SF line is growing most. Last year Derry, this year Tyrone — places even the most fervent SF member will accept they have been facing problems with resignations, apathy and defections to other groupings. Increasingly the Hunger Strike events seem designed to create a media storm and sense of radicalism for SF in areas where they face problems with being perceived as part of the establishment — and a neutered ineffectual part at that.

So people are bussed in from around Ireland, a monster rally is held, militarism is draped all over proceedings, controversy is created and all from a state party of law and order fighting hard to be part of supporting institutionalised ‘justice‘ in the north. But the troops are reinvigorated and go away feeling like they are still part of something radical and not just supporters of yet another establishment political party.

The deaths that are meant to be commemorated get lost in a vast pantomime of ridiculous inappropriate ‘street theatre’ and political slanging matches. No consciousness is raised and the memories of the dead are part of yet more party political jousting.

So the ‘party’ is enriched by building a false sense of militarism in areas that are increasingly recognising the complete defeat experienced and the militarists being remembered are a footnote for most in the charade that develops.

Seemingly attached to this event comes the Ogra SF weekend away (camping without cordite), where yet again they engage in another distasteful aspect of remembrance, in their case celebrating the killing of the enemy. After their trip to the site of the Warrenpoint bombs they haven’t learnt that touring sites of your enemies’ death is inappropriate and ghoulish. So this year they made part of their tour incorporate a visit to the site of Ballygawley Bus Bombing.

This kind of commemoration would cause uproar if the ‘other’ side considered it; if loyalist band members took a tour of Loughgall for example imagine the SF outrage.
It looks like SF want to have links to militarism — commemorate it, re-enact it, visit the sites where it was at its most devastating and encourage youth to see it as a noble and legitimate aspect of republican struggle — but at the same time utterly condemning those that would become part of an armed republican group today. Condemning, without any sense of irony or shame, those that seek to advance republican aims by actually being part of, not re-enacting, an ASU in Meigh.

SF increasingly place themselves in situations that threaten to make them look ridiculous — celebrating a military heritage, engaging in militarist displays, commemorating militarism (one member recently went as far as to declare the IRA the only legitimate army in South Armagh) and condemning real armed republicanism. It increasingly seems either a schizophrenic or deliberately deluded organisation that presents and celebrates armed struggle in areas they face problems but condemns true militarism, never giving a mention to the fact their true commitment is to constitutionalism willingly controlled within a British state.

Time for the pantomimes to stop.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

No Faggot Baggott

The North, in a peculiar demonstration of its Irish identity, is in the process of bringing in yet another British chief constable to police it. There is a consistency there but not in terms of anything Irish; a British chief constable to lead a British police force. That’s as much as it amounts to. The one difference on this occasion is that Northern nationalists were able to put their hands up and ask some questions about the British police officer who would be sent over from England to police them politically and otherwise. This, even in reformist terms, constitutes the smallest of changes and amounts to little in the overall scheme of things.

Matt Baggott, the new man at the helm, is president of the Christian Police Association. The BBC played a recording of the greeting that any caller hears when phoning through to the association; something about Jesus Christ walking the earth being a more important event than the first man walking the moon. Might be for those who believe old JC invented water skiing before skis came into existence and could do it all with his feet; or that in his spare time he raised a stiff or two from their graves. But to the rest of us it all sounds a bit quaint.

Baggott’s preference for the Old Testament over the New coupled with his Christian Police Association’s view that ‘the Bible is the inspired Word of God without error and is the only complete authority on matters of faith and doctrine’ should ensure his status as a big hitter in Ballymena. Whether Ballymurphy can be duped into welcoming him with open arms remains to be seen.

The Christian Police Association, a Protestant evangelical body, is said to have been embroiled in a long conflict with the Gay Police Association. For the Christians the gays are just bent coppers who merit only disdain. If they develop a willingness to repent and denounce the devil in their loins, they may eventually obtain forgiveness for their sins. If their name is not in the book of the damned, written from before time began, that is. A gay cop who supposedly tried to join the Christian Police Association was turned down. Gays in that pious world can’t be Christians. That they would ever want to be is a matter for another day.

What are we to make of the Baggott appointment? One more religious fanatic to be heaped on top of the theocratic dung heap that is home to the many theological oddities scavenging there in search of lost souls who can then be injected with a love transfusion straight from the blood of the lamb.

The Brits are just taking the piss, they have to be. At times it is so easy to succumb to the notion that the men in suits in Whitehall, having winded up the conflict in their favour, are now having a good chuckle about it while sketching a caricature of it all. Because in all seriousness, apart from a bunch of Free Presbyterian idiots in the DUP who thought they were waging the Lord’s war in defence of Christendom against the devil, no one really entertained the notion that there was a religious conflict in any theological sense. The terms Catholic and Protestant communities are more readily understood in a non religious context which easily conjures up an imagery of a conflict that is sectarian but secular. It is an imagery that has been greatly reinforced since the emergence of the Good Friday Agreement, itself having been intellectually parented and patented by the internal conflict model of the North. That was the type of outcome that would flow not from a war of national liberation but from a sectarian clash between two communities.

It is also an outcome that is like play dough to a political cartoonist or a mischievous mandarin. The Brits twisting and tweaking, seemingly for the sheer hell of it, are now ridiculing the Northern conflict. By having dismissed as myth the notion of any war of national liberation they are now into the business of depicting the secular communal conflict as a religious one fought pew by pew, altar by altar. By giving the North a religious cop to literally sing from the same hymn sheet as the religious crazies already populating the micro ministries at Stormont the British would appear to be putting on a comedy show for secular Europe to amuse itself. Unfolding in front of European eyes is something truly Pythonesque where a religious conflict is fittingly policed by a religious cop. Already up at Stormont there are those who think gays need psychiatric treatment, that civil partnership is an abomination, feel the world was created in a week by an invisible man - many years after the Giants Causeway was formed - who want Sunday observed as the Lord’s day and the kids banned from swings in the park as a mark of respectful observation, and seek the bible taught as science at schools.

Not that the Unionists have the ministries for silly ideas to themselves. Competing with them are some, although secular in orientation, who have beliefs as ridiculous as the religious maniacs; theirs is that somehow Matt Baggott, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness will all involve themselves in an alliance to deliver a Irish socialist Republic against the best efforts of the republican traitors determined to stop them. And it will all be in place by 2016.

The North has a history of police officers coming over from England to lead the armed police force there. The best was Hugh Orde, the worst Ken Newman. Although both had the necessary ability they were in the end political appointees put in place at particular junctures to ensure that policing primarily reflected the needs of the British government. The loudest howls that could be thrown the way of Orde by his detractors were that he fathered a child out of wedlock. Apparently, not a very Christian thing to do. Newman became a laughing stock when he claimed that detainees tortured in his force’s interrogation centres were beating themselves up just to discredit his detectives.

Matt Baggott, if he manages to stop talking to god for a hour or two, might demonstrate some good intent by talking to the residents of Drumarg Estate in Armagh city and listen to their complaints about the sectarian attacks on their community by members of the force he is about to lead. I suspect however he will call on them to repent and seek a solution to their woes by falling to their knees – ‘our prayers, attitudes and actions will bring many to the reality and hope of the cross.’

He’ll be some cross to bear.


Sunday, August 16, 2009

Watch The Beetles Scuttle

History Ireland, Volume 17 No. 4, July/August 2009

Brathadóirí
Thursdays, 10pm, 21 May—25 June 2009, TG4

Irish revolutionary history has been replete with the informer type. The degree to which they shaped it may have been exaggerated by their handlers, victims and journalists alike but it is indisputable that their role has earned them no small amount of contempt and hostility. The tout assumes the persona of the bogeyman, to be kept both figuratively and literally at arms length. The scene from The Informer when the blood money he received for setting up his IRA colleague, Frankie McPhilip, was pushed with a cane across the table to Gypo Nolan by his British Army paymaster, conveys the depth and pervasiveness of the distancing and the contempt.

Often ‘Brussels sprouts’ ended their days in a field or alleyway courtesy of a bullet summarily despatched without compunction into the region of their brains; the coup de grace on occasion administered by fellow touts. The Provisional Movement is said to have killed around 70 informers, only a minority of those who functioned as agents and continue to do so today within its ranks. Their funerals were sparsely attended gatherings poignantly underlined in the TG4 six part documentary series Brathadóirí with footage of mourners shuffling along behind the coffin of Eamon Collins.

Yet for something so reviled there, a la pederasts, seems to have been enough of them. While it might be inflated to claim that the Provisional IRA was brought to it knees, weighed down by the burden of informers, the organisation’s defeat cannot be fully understood outside the part played by such people. They undermined military activities to such an extent that suing for peace looked an increasingly viable option for the Sinn Fein leadership to pursue, tasked as it was with the strategic management of the IRA. Then they helped sideline opponents of the peace process in favour of others more favourably disposed towards the Adams leadership. That sidelining was the role attributed to Denis Donaldson by Davy Hyland and Martin Cunningham in their contributions to Brathadóirí.

Brathadóirí, as its title suggests, set out to examine the role of the informer in the political violence that beset the country for much of the last four decades. Whereas the role of the informer is inseparable from the Northern conflict the series illustrated just how insidious the phenomenon had become in the Republic as well. Irony is added when it is considered that the programme is launched at a time when the former US State Department diplomat Kendall Myers, who had some involvement in Northern Irish politics, finds his lumbering frame in a US jail on warrant of allegations that he was an informer for the Cuban government. The seeming ubiquity of the phenomenon is enhanced.

The programme makers certainly tried to avoid being superficial. They interviewed a wide range of people including some who were serious figures and authorities either in or on the world of international espionage. This was accompanied by a serious degree of psychological profiling which weaved its way through the narrative. Being analytical rather than sensationalist, it had none of the drama that goes with an informer scandal in the making.

The series despite starting strong never dropped pace. It opened up thematically and then focussed on case studies as the narrative joined the dots between theme and evidence. For the average viewer the human story may have overshadowed the thematic. It was no less interesting for that.

Old favourites featured such as Denis Donaldson and Freddie Scappaticci, with Donaldson getting a full programme when in fact a greater delving into Scappaticci may have proved more revealing. Less well known, but hardly inconsequential, informers were documented also. Pat Daly’s role in burrowing into the INLA was explored in a way that raised serious questions about the British state intelligence services. The first episode clearly showed their role in supplying the weapons and car to allow Daly to commission a grave act of illegality so that other INLA members could be arrested in a Bristol sting operation.

Much of the working assumption that guided the viewer through the six episodes was the less than salutary role of the authorities, both British and Irish. Officialdom turned two blind eyes to what agents were doing and undermined investigations into atrocities that might have exposed their cynicism and complicity. There was something particularly loathsome about the role of the Dublin government in that it always put the interests of the British state before those of its own citizens. This drew particular critical attention in Brathadóirí through its scrutiny of ‘the Badger’, a member of the Garda Siochana who had spent much of his Garda career in the pay of the British as one of their agents.

Motivation was another theme and Colin Wallace, a former British Army Black Operations specialist turned whistleblower, said that there were three motives for informing: duress, money and revenge. What Brathadóirí did not tell us was that IRA internal security people routinely found from those they interrogated that duress was the strongest of the three. The determining motivation was the fear of jail, particularly heightened amongst those who had been there before and who had long since become disabused of any romantic illusions about doing time for the cause.

The RUC, no stranger to dirty tricks, had its perspective articulated by former head Assistant Chief Constable, Raymond White. Although White claimed the use of informers is the only real alternative to retrospective investigation the programme forces us to conclude that in some cases there would be nothing to retrospectively investigate were it not for informers having carried out the actions that later become the object of investigation. White’s demeanour betrayed a latent hostility toward human rights groups and others who may ask questions of those in the British state’s security services who he claims had to get their hands dirty.

Paradoxically, the most useful role an informer could play is in the post-conflict situation. Public understanding of the conflict would be enhanced immeasurably if current and former members of the Irish and British security services were to come forward and cast some light under the stones the legitimacy of the respective states rest upon. Then watch the beetles scuttle.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

A Decadent Police

Recently a new residents group sprang into existence, its mission statement being to ‘give support to a community who have suffered ongoing abuse from the police, and to give a voice to local people.’ If it sounds like a throwback to the ‘bad old days’ that is solely by dint of manipulation of perceptions whereby nationalists have been cajoled and beguiled into accepting that the good new days are now upon them.

The group is based in Armagh City’s Drumarg Estate and goes under the name ‘The Association Against PSNI Harassment.’ It hopes to highlight and challenge ‘heavy-handed PSNI tactics & intimidation of residents, including children.’ It aims by peaceful means to oppose any future assaults on the Drumarg community by the PSNI. One of its key demands is that ‘the main nationalist parties withdraw from Armagh & District policing board until this community receives a meaningful guarantee that harassment of Armagh residents will end.’

According to the association, on the 12th of July a large and aggressive force of paramilitary PSNI invaded Drumarg and began raiding the homes of a number of local people. Charges laid against the force by the association include:
  • Local people were provoked by police who addressed residents as “scum”.
  • Two people tried to take photographs of police harassing residents but were stopped and forced to delete the pictures.
  • Police prevented the mother of a young child from entering her home to get nappies for her child.
  • Police continually drove past openly taking photographs of residents.
  • The searches were initially carried out using only verbal warrants.

Not content with celebrating the 12th in the traditional police manner the PSNI decided to stretch ‘festivities’ into the following day when according to the new association:

  • Approximately 30 officers charged through the estate and residents' gardens
  • They aggressively pushed mothers and children out of their way and shoved a pregnant woman against a fence as they passed.
  • A 14 year old youth had just left a nearby house and was violently grabbed by the throat and dragged over a fence by police.
  • Police continued to taunt residents with sectarian abuse such as “fenian scum”.

Articulating the complaints listed by the association one resident described to the Pensive Quill her take on the events of the day:

There was a high police presence … and a general feeling of tension due to the police aggression during the raids. Around lunchtime, landrovers returned to the estate. Police jumped out of landrovers; approximately 30 officers charged through the estate and residents' gardens adjacent to the Athletic Grounds. They aggressively pushed mothers and children out of their way and pushed a pregnant woman against a fence as they passed. A 14 year old youth had just left a nearby house and was aggressively grabbed by the throat and dragged over a fence by police. At this point a few of the residents intervened. Within the next few minutes another youth who had just walked out of his aunt’s house was charged at by a number of officers and trailed into the back of a landrover … One policeman raised a baton and threatened a female. When this happened a large group of residents stood together and faced the police who then backed off slightly but continued to verbally abuse people.
In spite of all this nothing was seized during the raids which would lend justification to their having been launched in the first place. No weapons or anything incriminating were discovered during the course of two days of police raiding in the area. Local residents placed the PSNI activity in the context of downright provocation, the backdrop to which was the orange triumphalism which runs rampant mid July every year.

Keeping faith with its persistent assault on journalism, in Drumarg the PSNI extended its hostility to citizen journalism. People trying to photograph the police law breakers were physically thwarted by the PSNI. ‘Two people tried to take photographs of police harassing residents but were stopped and forced to delete the pictures.’ The police in turn, having denied residents the right to photograph their violent activity, ‘continually drove past openly taking photographs of residents.’

For the residents of Drumarg the good new days are a long time in coming. As for the bad old days ‘they haven’t gone away, you know.’ The resident cited above claimed that PSNI harassment of people living on the estate had been ongoing over a number of years.

Many nationalists in Drumarg feel that they have been abandoned by political representatives eager to ingratiate themselves with the PSNI. Their decision to form an association committed to the protection of those whose rights are being trampled under foot by a rampant British police force is evidence that healthy political opposition exists in a political ensemble which institutionally frowns on the concept of opposition. The PSNI, confident that the peace process will impose a regime of silence on those critical of its abusive behaviour is finding that it is not all plain sailing. The residents of Drumarg with every right to expect more show no intention of settling for less.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

9th of August

It was a bright Monday morning. I awoke to the news that internment had been introduced while I was sound asleep. It was on the cards. As a paper delivery boy I could not fail to notice the headlines as I did my rounds about its imminence. The background was the daily sound of explosions rattling their way throughout Belfast often followed by plumes of smoke, allowing a stab to me made as to the general location of the bomb.

The previous day, a Sunday, was spent in the Lower Falls rioting around Leeson Street and the Falls Road. The thrill of the chase which saw a mad rush through houses to escape British Army snatch squads, the occupants of which we had never known or met, was electrifying but exhilarating. While we rioted the thunderous sounds of nail bombs exploding told us that another had been lobbed while our hearts paused through the shock of it.

I was with a friend from the Lower Ormeau Road, who later would make it into custody before I did, serving a 1-3 year term in St Patrick’s in West Belfast from where young people routinely escaped as quickly as they were brought in. I would later abscond twice; the first time while held on remand for rioting, a natural progression. They never officially termed it ‘escape’, declining I suspect to dignify the ease with which departure was enacted.

During an ebb in the rioting a brace of cars pulled up at Varna Gap. Men with weapons but no woolly faces alighted and began peering up the street towards the snatch squads of British soldiers. We perched on a window sill facing them as spectators to the event. Someone urged us all to move, this was no show but the real thing. Whether as a result of the firing distance being too great or the riotous assembly milling about the street, the armed men refrained from opening up. We left disappointed.

As darkness fell we began the journey on foot back to South Belfast, stopping at a sweet shop on the Grosvenor Road near the corner of Malt Street for something in the way of refreshments. Near the shop was a butcher’s premises where we stood either counting our coins or eating our sweets, I no longer remember. The blast that occurred terrified us. The place shook followed by the sound of glass breaking. Years later Nick Lowe recorded ‘I love the sound of breaking glass.’ I always associated it with rioting and nail bombs. In my mind I still have this image of hunching down, shuddering while the windows of the butcher shop shattered. Another memory suggests that the windows remained intact. Who knows so many years after the event when memory has a way of rearranging detail?

On internment morning in the company of another friend from the Lower Ormeau Road we crossed the city, again on foot, to Albert Street where we were quickly swallowed up by the crowd of protestors enraged at British incursion. It seemed that everyone was rioting. A lorry was thrown across the top of the street in which we found ourselves. We battled with each other to get on it, a commanding height from which to stone and bottle British troops. We showered them with rubble, they blasted us with rubber bullets, although it would be a month before I fell victim to one while rioting on the Andersonstown Road. At one point, forced off the lorry by the sheer volume of rioters scrambling for position, we tried throwing our missiles from behind the lorry. Our aim apparently short, we seem to have posed a greater threat to fellow rioters than foreign troops. We were ordered to desist. There was a simple solution, we moved to McDonnell Street where my grandfather lived and began throwing from there at any Brit on Albert Street.

Around midday a British officer announced through a loud hailer that if we were still rioting after 60 seconds he would hit us with lead rather than rubber rounds. The crowd forced open the gates of a yard where beer bottles were stored in abundance. The hail of bottles was our response to the sixty seconds warning.

Late in the evening tiredness drove us home. A good day’s work as far as we were concerned. Many nationalists were not so fortunate, failing to make it home, having been gunned down by British murder squads. Paddy McAdorey died that morning fighting the British in Ardoyne. His would be the first IRA funeral I attended.

Facts on the ground, rather than footnotes, a sure guide to understanding why people join guerrilla bodies like the IRA.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence

Democracy and Security, 5:169–171, 2009. Vol. 5, No. 2, Jun 2009:

In the preface to this book, the author Dipak K. Gupta reveals that he hails from “a long line of terrorists and their adversaries.”1 More importantly when he arrived at college in Calcutta he aligned himself with the Naxalite group which over the following decades was labelled a “terrorist” organization. He did not remain long and, when he left, he sought to bleed the political content from his motivation for having become involved to begin with. The need to belong and the sense of physical security that membership of a violent group afforded came to form the impulse to join up. The bond of esprit d’corp rather than the ideological glue of a political community held those in the movement together.

In this study Gupta overcomes a strong reluctance to use the term “terrorism.” He knows its pejorative impact and how it smothers intellectual investigation while distorting public understanding. Crucially, he accepts that excluded from its rubric is “by far the largest source of civilian death in the world: governments.”2 Recent evidence reinforcing this contention can be found in the assault on Gaza by the state of Israel.

Political violence has its own pulling power. Since 9/11, terrorism literature has witnessed massive exponential growth. This comes in spite of the RAND Corporation’s findings which purport to show that since 1970 there have been on average 375 deaths a year worldwide from terrorism. Gupta contextualizes this by pointing out that the casualties are about 50 more than the amount of people who drown in bathtubs in the US alone every year. For all the supposed proliferation of terrorist groups this work suggests that terrorist organizations are like small businesses—90% of them ceasing to exist or operate in the early years of their existence.

There is plenty of hype-induced literature and fascination but despite it Gupta believes public understanding remains bereft of a theoretical structure for understanding the motivations behind terrorism. This is what much of his work addresses: the reasons people become involved in “terrorist” organizations. This process is immediately preferred over politics: “the question of how one gets involved is far more interesting and instructive than wanting to know why.”3

There is a growing body of writers observing insurrectionary groups who build a mosaic of reasons as to why a person decides to become involved with a guerrilla group. In some cases their output is used to undermine the legitimacy of the armed actions carried out by insurgents by purporting to show that the calculations of the individuals involved were not political. Counterinsurgency strategists quickly latch on to this type of argument to make propaganda to undermine the insurgencies they seek to combat. But this is no reason to refrain from critical engagement with the professed reasons of those who take up arms. Otherwise society will simply be bombarded with propaganda from the insurgent camp trying to cloak both the cause they fight for and the actions they take in pursuit of their chosen Holy Grail.

In pursuing this engagement one of Gupta’s crucial objectives is to show that terrorism is an altruistic act rather than the simple self-serving activity favoured by economic and rational choice theorists. He states that the only common thread binding the diverse acts of terrorism together is their professed claim to be striving to attain a common good for their community. Where this may be said to be true it must come from terrorism as a political community rather than terrorism being the end result of the behaviour of those who need to belong.

This is where a serious tension slips into the work. Altruism appears not to figure in the motivations for joining even where it might later appear in the rationale of those who do join. It might be more useful to think of terrorism within a more structural framework. This permits conceptualizing it for the most part as a response to state violence rather than an act of altruism. To use Helder Camara’s term, a “spiral of violence” mushrooms and magnetizes people to it out of circumstance rather than conviction. Most “terrorists” fight against rather than for. This is why in the end so many individual guerrillas readily, in some cases eagerly, embrace outcomes which the ideological goals of the movement they belonged to bear no or little resemblance to. Moreover, Gupta’s discussion on altruism in the opening chapter of the book is a meandering one which concludes little other than that people have a mixture of motives. Profiling a terrorist is “such an impossible task. In their motivations terrorists remain indistinguishable from all of us.”4 This prompts exasperation in the reader who waded through 63 pages of profiling only to discover this.

For terrorism to work most efficiently, in the perspective of Gupta, it must be driven by “political entrepreneurs” who “connect the dots” for their followers and frame the issues that people are concerned about. Without the agency of the political entrepreneur terrorism will remain docked in the port of wishful thinking. Yet if entrepreneurs are so crucial it would be a relatively simple matter for modern states faced with a terrorist problem to resort to the colonial military logic of “shoot the big bugger at the front in the turban.” Why bother devising anything more complex?

Another attenuation in the reliance of the political entrepreneur is to be found in the author’s citing of the work of Daniel Goldhagen to support his case that under such entrepreneurship an entire country became “Germany’s Willing Executioners.” Yet the extent to which such a claim can be validated has been rigorously challenged by Ruth Bettina Bern and Norman Finkelstone inter alia almost from the time Goldhagen’s work was first published in 1996.

Gupta further claims that every insurgent movement large or small starts with an idea offered by a leader which then inspires a multitude. This seems an over simplistic view of conflict. In the case of the IRA, leaders followed with ideas events that were already happening on the ground. This pries open a critique that when Gupta journeys outside the realm of his model to test how it stands against facts on the ground the weaknesses are exposed. Where he may be more assured on his home territory of the Naxalites, he underachieves in his examination of the IRA. The notion that people join the IRA out of fear of those in it does not gel with the experience of academics who have either spoken to IRA members or who were themselves members. Whatever about the compromised-induced deficiency of IRA internal security policy, the organization based much of its security screening on weeding out the weak. And a person in the ranks out of fear was considered quite weak and therefore a risk to the organization.

Gupta also characterized the Northern Irish conflict as “sectarian bloodshed.”5 This is an inadequate characterization of the IRA campaign. The killing of around a thousand British security personnel should alert researchers to the folly of superficial labelling. Referring to a much publicized 1992 IRA operation as the “night of the long rifles” when in fact it was known as the “night of the long knives” reveals a lack of familiarity with the Northern conflict. Nor in that operation did the IRA target the INLA, but a group called the IPLO. “Long rifle” was a pejorative term used by northern republicans to describe other republicans residing or hiding out in the part of the country where there was no British presence.

Ultimately, this work provides food for thought. Refreshingly it does not slip into the strategic cul de sac of arguing that the only response to terrorism is a draconian military one. It also rubbishes the link that governments endlessly conjure between organized crime and political terrorism. But it does not provide the understanding suggested in its title. Terrorism and political violence to the degree that they were clouded before reading this book remain firmly ensconced behind the haze upon finishing it.

Notes
1. D. K. Gupta, Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence: The Life Cycle of
Birth, Growth, Transformation, and Demise (London: Routledge, 2008), xiv.
2. Ibid., 9.
3. Ibid., xviii.
4. Ibid., 63.
5. Ibid., 127.

Dipak K. Gupta: Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence: The Life Cycle of Birth, Growth, Transformation, and Demise (London: Routledge, 2008).

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Palma Nova

Not long back. 11 nights in the Majorcan resort of Palma Nova and I am not quite sure if the batteries were recharged by the sun or run down by the children. A holiday after a holiday doesn’t seem such a bad idea but in some ways it has the feel of the drinker’s cure. As I write, the sound of my son singing the Piano Song, which he picked up at the kids club in the resort where we stayed, drifts down the stairs from his bedroom. Somebody clearly enjoyed himself.

Now that we are sprawled in front of the television in our own living room there is the reassuring feel of no place like home. Relaxation comes easier when an ever vigilant eye does not have to cast itself over children near water. And there was plenty of water. My wife, daughter and I lunged into the Mediterranean from a slide on the back of a glass bottomed boat.

We brought an Irish theme to our holiday. Before we left my daughter had told me she would like to be president some day. A strange thing for an 8 year old to say so when I pressed her on her reasoning she told me it would enable her to make laws whereby everybody would speak Irish. Up until then I was unaware of her passion for the language. She doesn’t get it from me because while I speak it to a certain level I would not be regarded as a ‘culture vulture.’ So, my wife and I made the effort for her. Amidst the tower of Babel type din made up from so many languages the Irish tongue managed to make itself heard. We would call the kids in Irish or ask them to do something through the same medium. Although out gunned by the prevalence of French, it was nice to insert a smattering of Gaelige.

On one occasion the fizzy drinks dispenser was out of order. The A4 size page telling us so had three languages on it; Spanish, French and English. I took a pen and wrote the same in Irish. It was not an act of subversion, merely one of complementing what was already there. One of the staff took umbrage on the mistaken grounds that I was trying to use a machine that was clearly marked as not working. She was gesticulating and getting excitable in the way which seems to be a Spanish trait. I snapped back at her to the effect that she should stop making a fool out of herself. She snatched the paper away and ran over to manager pointing out that I had written something on it. Hardly an act of great subversion. I sauntered off to the pool, half expecting an angry exchange with him later in the day. It failed to materialise. By then an authentic act of subversion had seized the attention of most of those who have an interest in Palma Nova that lasts longer than two weeks. Two police had been killed a few hundred metres from our hotel. We heard the explosion which I automatically thought was thunder, a leftover from the amount of it we had experienced in Ireland earlier in the month. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sirens wailed and immediately outside the hotel a police cordon was set up. Later in the evening we watched as a controlled explosion was detonated across the bay. A pall of smoke drifted into the sky. The Spanish would gather around TV screens in bars and restaurants, faces strained as they listened to the news reports. For the tourists life went on pretty much as it had before the bombing. Later photos of six people said to be ‘suspects’ were posted in shops throughout Palma Nova. ETA, in the view of the local press seemed to be the moving force behind the attacks.

Apart from reading about the killings in the English language Spanish press there was little that I followed through newspapers. The whole time out there saw me read only one Irish paper. My normal interest in Irish affairs took a rest apart from a while out every now and then to exchange views with a Sinn Fein sparring partner on the Pensive Quill. A Novel by Janet Turner Hospital and a history by Anthony Beevor monopolised my reading time.

What I love about Palma Nova is the sense of privacy despite the crowds. Walking though it we never once met someone we knew, so unlike many Spanish resorts. In those places I have even bumped into people I was in jail with. The kids made friends easily although we preferred to keep our own company. Apart from a couple from Carrickfergus whose kids befriended ours we hardly bothered with anyone.

As our flight landed in Dublin this evening it was strange to walk from the plane into the sun. Ireland has been so plagued with rain as of late that we have now come to expect it as a matter of course. I asked my son would he like to go back to ‘Spain’. He thought for a moment and said, ‘maybe later.’ Indeed. For all the mediocrity of Ireland, it is home, sweet home.






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