Legitimate Targets
In the first part of this blog, we looked at the IRA’s collaboration with the Nazi regime from the mid 1930s onwards. Eight decades later, despite everything we know about the IRA’s activities, followers of the Provisional IRA death cult still leap to the defence of former IRA leader Sean Russell, if anyone labels him as a Nazi collaborator. So let us judge Russell on the charge of collaboration, based on what is apparently PIRA’s own idea of collaboration.
During the recent conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, PIRA’s list of targets was not confined to police officers, soldiers, judges and politicians. The ever expanding list of so called “legitimate targets” would include people considered to be ‘collaborators’, such as: contractors doing building or maintenance work on police and military buildings; civilians making a living working as cleaners or in the canteens of their local police station; shop owners serving police officers; businesses that supplied goods or services to the police or military, and anyone else that PIRA deemed suitable for murdering. The brutal reality is that everyone was potentially a legitimate target, the only thing required was an excuse and if an excuse didn’t already exist, one could be conjured up.
Now let us look at Sean Russell. He was a leading member of the IRA and spent three months in Berlin, meeting with senior ranking Nazis, before being placed on a U-boat and sent home to assist in attacking a country that was the last hope for millions across Europe. The Germans had already invaded a number of countries and the Panzers were rolling across France whilst Russell was in Berlin, but that did not deter him. Although the pogrom against Jewish people was already underway, Kristallnacht for example having occurred in November 1938, the IRA looked the other way. The IRA were actively assisting Germany in time of war and they were willing to sacrifice everyone in occupied countries.
I would argue that if PIRA considered a civilian working in the canteen of a British military base, to be a collaborator, then by their rationale it is an unarguable fact the IRA were collaborating with the Nazis.
The Horror
Martin McGuinness joined the IRA in 1969. After two periods of imprisonment in the Republic of Ireland, related to terrorist offences, this senior member of PIRA’s Derry Brigade supposedly left the group in 1974.
The truth of course was that McGuinness continued in his terrorist career and in 1978 became PIRA’s Chief of Staff. Although he would step aside as Chief of Staff in the early 1980s to run in an election as a Sinn Fein candidate, he was still on the ruling Army Council and soon after became the Officer Commanding of PIRA’s ‘Northern Command’. He also remained a high profile member of Sinn Fein. During the Troubles, Sinn Fein was commonly referred to as “the political wing of the IRA” and it was viewed by many as being inextricably linked and subservient to its military wing, PIRA. McGuinness is an example of the overlap between the two wings.
It is unlikely you will find anyone in PIRA Sinn Fein who will accept all of this as fact. If I may paraphrase Martin McGuinness, they have their own interpretation of the past, in the same way they have their own interpretation for Sean Russell’s collaboration.
In his role as OC of Northern Command, McGuinness was regularly briefed on planned terrorist attacks and he authorised atrocities such as the bombing of Enniskillen’s war memorial on Remembrance Day in 1987. Three years later he also authorised the murder of Patsy Gillespie, a civilian chef in a military canteen.
In October 1990, PIRA terrorists chained Patsy Gillespie to the seat of a van containing a 1000lb bomb and forced him to drive towards a military border checkpoint in Coshquin, County Londonderry. It was one of three similar attacks that evening and this reveals coordination, a central controller in the form of Martin McGuinness.
As Patsy Gillespie neared the checkpoint, he courageously tried to get out of the vehicle to warn the soldiers but the terrorists had rigged the vehicle so that the bomb would detonate if the door was opened. Patsy Gillespie and five soldiers were murdered in a huge explosion. Martin McGuinness and his fellow PIRA terrorists viewed Patsy Gillespie as a collaborator, working for what they would call, “Crown forces”.
During an event in Oxford in 2013, whilst playing the role of peacemaker, McGuinness refused to condemn the murder of Patsy Gillespie. When an interviewer asked if the attack at Coshquin was anything other than cold-blooded murder, McGuinness replied: “Other people will have their own interpretation of that”. Ah, of course, their own interpretation about murders. Well, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, had his interpretation of the attack. He called it the work of Satan. That sounds about right.
McGuinness
the “peacemaker” who had supposedly been on “a journey”, not only felt the Coshquin
murders were justified, he saw Patsy Gillespie as a ‘collaborator’ who deserved
to die and he had no regrets about authorising the attack. There was little if
any dissent within PIRA Sinn Fein on this matter, indeed when McGuinness died a
few years ago, many hailed him as a friend, a great leader and an inspiration.
We can only wonder if they all concurred with their hero’s interpretation of
the Coshquin bombing.
Although the McGuinness “peacemaker” narrative has been pushed hard, he was really just a pragmatist who knew PIRA was being defeated in an intelligence war and that it was time for the leadership to cut a deal. There was no epiphany on the road to Damascus. No regrets about his complicity in mass murder, torture, the intentional targeting of civilians for murder, including children. It is hard not to view him as sitting somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum, but yet, as with his predecessors such as Sean Russell, the true believers within Irish Republicanism cope with their cognitive dissonance, by rationalising away awkward facts and embracing the reimagined and Disneyfied propaganda.
PIRA Sinn Fein members and supporters are heavily invested, psychologically, in their relationship with their cult. Despite any doubts that they may have had, they internalised the propaganda. They cannot afford to accept the truth about IRA terrorism as that would mean accepting their own complicity in mass murder. All those who supported violent Irish Republicanism during the Troubles and before, were enablers for killers satisfying a hate-filled bloodlust.
The IRA did not act alone. Others in society provided assistance to PIRA. Whatever form of support people gave, they have their own share of the blame for the horrors that occurred. It is therefore easier to sing rebel songs, attend IRA commemorations or funerals, and wallow in victimhood, rather than admit their own guilt, or repent for their sins. It doesn’t matter if it is something from 1990 or 1940, they have to believe the IRA mythology, the lies told by the cult’s leaders. If they allow themselves to doubt the validity of what the cult has been telling them over the years, their entire belief system could start to unravel.
The Niedermayer Family
As you may recall from the first instalment of this blog, in 2003 the PIRA Chief of Staff, Brian Keenan, spoke at a commemoration event for Sean Russell. Keenan praised Russell and called him a patriot, glossing over the problematic issue of Nazi collaboration.
As with Martin McGuinness, Keenan is also considered a hero within the PIRA cult. To any right minded person it is almost incomprehensible that degenerates such as this are held in high esteem, but when we look at the horrors that have been rationalised, it is easier to understand how the true believers within the PIRA cult, willingly fall into line with the narrative about Sean Russell.
One of Keenan’s many victims was Thomas Niedermayer, the director of a Grundig factory in Belfast and the West German honorary counsel in Northern Ireland. PIRA terrorists kidnapped Mr Niedermayer from his Belfast home in December 1973. His two young daughters witnessed the abduction. That was the last time they saw their father. In 1980, based upon information received, plain clothes police officers posing as workmen found Mr Niedermayer’s remains buried under a refuse dump. He had been bound and gagged and forensic examination revealed that he had received severe injuries to the head from a blunt instrument. Two members of PIRA were later imprisoned in relation to the murder. One of the killers said that their victim was buried face down so that, “he could dig himself deeper”.
Although Brian Keenan was never held to account in court for the murder, intelligence suggests he planned the kidnapping. Keenan was a former employee and union activist at the Grundig factory managed by Thomas Niedermayer.
The intention behind the kidnapping was to hold Mr Niedermayer hostage, in return for the release of two PIRA bombers named Dolours and Marian Price. A month earlier, the Price sisters had been imprisoned for their role in the March 1973 detonation of car bombs in London. Two out of four car bombs exploded, killing one person and injuring two hundred. Some people would say Brian Keenan had responsibility for controlling the bombing campaign in England. He had been the Quartermaster for PIRA’s Belfast Brigade in the early 1970s and had risen quickly to the role of Quartermaster General. The kidnapping of Thomas Niedermayer was his attempt to free some of his team, although it clearly didn’t go according to plan.
It’s also worth noting that another member of the PIRA gang, also convicted for his role in the bombings, was the then 19 year old Gerry Kelly, now a leading Sinn Fein MLA in Stormont and the party’s spokesman on policing.
Dolours Price claimed in 2010, that prior to her time in PIRA’s England department, she had been a member of a secret unit called ‘the Unknowns’. This unit was responsible for the abduction, murder and secret burials of the PIRA victims subsequently named ‘the disappeared’. Price also claimed that Gerry Adams commanded the Unknowns, but Adams has refuted this allegation. It is an interesting turn of events that as a result of PIRA’s attempt to free Dolours Price, Thomas Niedermayer became one of the ‘disappeared’.
The aftershock of Thomas Niedermayer’s murder continued to take its toll on his family for over two decades. In 1990, Thomas’ widow, Ingeborg, returned to Ireland and within a few days committed suicide by walking into the ocean. The following year their daughter Renate also committed suicide, as did their second daughter Gabrielle in 1996. A few years later, Gabrielle’s husband also committed suicide.
The Normalisation of Mass Murder
In May 2008, following the death of Brian Keenan from cancer, men with interesting backstories such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness carried the coffin at his funeral. During an oration in West Belfast prior to cremation at Roselawn, Gerry Adams praised Keenan for his “pivotal” role in the peace process. Five years earlier, Keenan had stood in a Dublin park and called a Nazi collaborator a patriot. It’s the narrative that matters.
Also in attendance were other notables that the news media like to call “senior Republicans”, such as Pat Doherty, Sean Murray, Brian Gillen, Martin Ferris, Gerry Kelly and Bobby Storey. All were there to pay homage to a terrorist.
I suspect no-one present at Keenan’s funeral mentioned the Niedermayers and the horror Keenan visited upon the family. The truth tends to be the first thing that is jettisoned in the manufacture of PIRA mythology. It’s hard to extol the virtues of someone, whilst picturing one of their victims buried face down under a dump, or the victim’s family committing suicide, one by one.
It appears that no act of depravity is beyond rationalisation in the PIRA cult. Anything goes. The ends always justify the means.
The nearly three decades long campaign of terrorism has in recent years been reimagined by PIRA into a human rights struggle. Of course the true believers are fully on board with the narrative, despite the fact PIRA’s retrospectively designated human activists, murdered over 1700 people and injured thousands more; intentionally targeted civilians; ‘kneecapped’ and exiled teenagers; murdered and ‘disappeared’ victims; used torture; groomed and recruited child soldiers; covered up child abuse and rape by PIRA members and on and on and on...
Decades of conditioning and social learning within a corrupted sub-culture produced people who were morally adrift. An authoritarian secular political religion preached hate and condoned violence, warped values and social norms. Daily indoctrination based around a victim / oppressor narrative, beguiled unlawful souls, removing their natural restraint to savagely killing fellow human beings.
The arrival of a peace process did not result in retrospection and repentance. People are still in thrall to the death cult and its mythology. They talk of looking forward, moving on, but they are trapped by a bloody past, much of which is a lie. Many of them possibly sense that the past is a fabrication, but they all engage in a conspiracy of self-deception rather than face the horror of ‘disappearances’, ‘human bombs’, Nazi collaboration and all the rest
And into a community in which murder has been normalised and the criminal is idolised, another generation is born.
First part of this blog is available here.
