[…] do not document any contact between the Weathermen and the Brotherhood, let alone Stark. As it stands the assertion is worthless, in other words. Friends, Frendz, the IRA, Howard Marks and… In Britain, according to Black, Stark’s crucial contact was with ‘the ex-Situationist Friends magazine’: a nexus of psychedelia, political radicalism and armed struggle. […]
[…] quotes Steele as saying to the Provo leaders at the talks: ‘I hope you’re not going to start your bloody stupid campaign of violence again. If the IRA really wanted a united Ireland, it was wasting its time shooting British soldiers and bombing Northern Ireland into an industrial and social slum,’ he said. ‘It […]
[…] Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks’ name and address had […]
[…] Blake Publishing, London 1995, £15.99 The pseudonymous author claims to have been a member of a clandestine 4-man SAS squad which assassinated a couple of dozen alleged IRA members in the 1971-3 period in Northern Ireland. The author’s taped and transcribed memories are intercut with sections from an uncredited ghost writer – apparently Nick […]
[…] without destroying the Provos. Larkin believes that a decision was made by the British state in the mid-1980s to train, arm and direct loyalist para-militaries against the IRA. The one piece missing from his analysis is evidence of the political dimension. Did the Conservative government approve of this? Did they know of this? Larkin […]
[…] perception is that of a community that has systematically lost out, while Republicans hijack the Good Friday Agreement to their own ends. Nor, in contrast to the IRA, have Loyalists duped a section of the left into seeing them as freedom fighters. Historically, even bourgeois and mainstream unionists have been quite inept at handling […]
[…] certain distance from the leadership. Brady has said this label was his idea, the lesson having been drawn from Northern Ireland that what was once the Provisional IRA is now the IRA proper, and the ‘Official IRA’ is nowhere.(37) A long hot summer That there was no let-up in the internal conflict was in […]
[…] think what you have to communicate is so important or so secret, it shouldn’t be sent by letter at all. An oldie but a goodie After the IRA shot dead a British soldier with a single shot, Independent Television News on Saturday July 17 commented that there was ‘speculation that the IRA had trained […]
[…] anti-terrorism franchise. MI5 won. Part of the reason for MI5’s hatred of David Shayler is his revelation of just how incompetent MI5 were in dealing with the IRA in the UK having won that franchise. Currently there is a major struggle going on between the RUC Special Branch and the Army, with the RUC […]
[…] also suffers from strange lacunae in its coverage. Bloom has much to say about Irish nationalist violence in England in the 19th century, but totally ignores the IRA bombing campaigns in the 1950s and then from the 1970s until the 1990s (apart from the attempt to blow up Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet at […]
