They Haven’t Gone Away You Know
It has been
over twenty years since the signing of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and
much has changed in Northern Ireland, but one constant has been the existence of
a terrorist group called the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Whilst PIRA has certainly changed over the
last couple of decades, a ceasefire and peace process did not signal its
demise. As all systems do in order to survive, it adapted to change within its
environment.
Although
people who are euphemistically known in the news media as “senior republicans”
(or senior terrorists to everyone except members or supporters of PIRA) have
told us in recent years that PIRA had gone away, intelligence reports and a
modicum of common sense say otherwise. The most recent intelligence assessment
in November 2019 was that PIRA’s ruling ‘Army Council’ still exists, retains ‘oversight’
of Sinn Fein and there had been no change to the 2015 assessment on the relationship
between PIRA and Sinn Fein.
The Dark Shadow
According to the
psychoanalyst Carl Jung, everyone has a ‘shadow’, often referred to as a ‘dark
shadow’, that is an unconscious or unknown aspect of our personality. Jung
believed that the shadow was perhaps linked to our dark, primitive animal instincts
and that it personified everything that people refuse to acknowledge about themselves.
PIRA could be
viewed as Sinn Fein’s dark shadow.
Throughout the so-called ‘Troubles’ in
Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein was regularly referred to as “the political wing of
the IRA”. Whilst membership of Sinn Fein did not necessitate membership of
PIRA, there was overlap with members of PIRA in Sinn Fein and the “military
wing” was the dominant partner in the relationship, controlling Sinn Fein. The organisational
structure was helpfully spelled out in secret IRA documents that were seized by
Irish police in the 1970s. This could hardly be called a surprise, as the same
relationship existed as far back as the late 1940s.
In 1949 IRA
members were ordered to join Sinn Fein and the party recognised the supreme
authority of the IRA Army Council. Sinn Fein would maintain the same abstentionist
policy as its IRA masters, refusing to take seats in either the southern or northern
parliaments. The IRA also refused to recognise that the southern state was the ”Republic
of Ireland” and even today, the hard core within the PIRA Sinn Fein death cult have difficulty referring to the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland by
their correct names. It was also around this time that the IRA leadership
decided to avoid ‘military’ activity in the Republic of Ireland and focus it’s
campaign of terrorism in Northern Ireland. This was partly due to the death of
several Irish police officers (Gardi) in clashes with the IRA and the resentment
that this created.
When the IRA
split in 1969, followed soon after by a split in Sinn Fein, the breakup resulted
in the same type of power structure within the new ‘provisional’ IRA and Sinn
Fein.
Double Jobbing
A number of
informed commentators have stated that throughout the recent ‘Troubles’ of the
1970s to 1990s, Sinn Fein was represented on the PIRA Army Council by one or
more individuals. No-one in Sinn Fein rushed forward to admit their membership
of a terrorist group, never mind admit being one of its leaders, but it’s safe to
say that Martin McGuinness was one of those people. McGuinness of course twice served
time in prison, south of the border, for IRA related activities, but he would
later claim to have left the IRA around 1974. As with many things McGuinness
said, his claim about leaving PIRA was a lie.
McGuinness
would eventually become PIRA’s Chief of Staff in early 1978, although he would
reluctantly have to give up that role when he stood for election to the Northern
Ireland Assembly in 1982. All was not lost however, although no longer Chief of
Staff, McGuinness retained his seat on the Army Council and he would later become
the Officer Commanding (OC) of PIRA’s ‘Northern Command’. This in effect meant
that whilst McGuinness was a high profile member of Sinn Fein, he was also on
the ruling PIRA Army Council and in control of the day to day running of PIRA’s
terrorist activity in Northern Command. Part of his role included the
allocation of weapons and explosives that PIRA had acquired from Libya and this
endeavour led to the murder of an alleged informer named Frank Hegarty, a
murder in which McGuinness has been accused of having a personal involvement...
but more of that perhaps in a later blog.
As OC of
Northern Command, McGuinness was being regularly briefed on planned terrorist
attacks and was authorising atrocities such as the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing
in Enniskillen and the use of ‘proxy’ or ‘human bombs’ at border checkpoints in
1990, that the Roman Catholic Bishop Edward Daly described as the work of people
who follow Satan. It’s worth noting at this juncture that the ‘Adjutant’ in
the Northern Command, who was also complicit in multiple murders along with the
dearly departed McGuinness, is still alive and apart from being a professional “senior
republican”, somewhat amusingly dabbles in human rights activism and spinning
conspiracy theories about the British security forces.
Through The Looking Glass
This is just
a glimpse of what you will find if you step through the looking glass and enter the morally
bankrupt world of militant Irish Republicanism. A place where there has been a reimagination
of the past and a Disneyfication of terrorism to help the members and followers
of a death cult rationalise their support for decades of mass murder, maiming
and wanton destruction. A place where members of a political party prefer to
engage in verbal gymnastics, rather than condemn murders committed by a
terrorist group. A place where Sinn Fein claim to be a normal political party,
but all right minded people can see its ever present dark shadow called PIRA.
