Shergar:

So much for the famous cell system. Why would a bunch of trainess ‘need to know’ that this guy was an informer? What about this secrecy?

I thought you volunteers were all in your little cells, cut off from everyone else, with instructions not to talk to anyone else in your lives about anything. It isn’t as if you would be shooting the shit about your latest operation with soem PSF driver is it? If things were done on the cell system as claimed, he would never know you were a volunteer, and you would never say anything to him about what you did. So why would you be warned about him.

Either you are making this IRA volunteer stuff up, or you were an IRA volunteer and it isn’t all as secretive as you folks like to make out. Maybe it is the cowboy outfit that we have come to know so well. The cowboy outfit where you all talk about everything.

Is the tale now that you all knew about him all along and he was deliberately left alone to feed disinformation back to his masters? Spooky stuff, except that it is claimed he was only suspected for the last 2 or 3 years.

Twinbrook:

Outcry? What outcry?

The security forces used informers/agents?

Wow.

It was a non-conventional conflict?

Wow.

I think the security forces release the name of one of these guys every once in a while just to keep the pot boiling. To keep the Provos continually looking at themselves.

The watcher:

Who died and put you in charge of who gets to be called Irish and who doesn’t?

As a republican you are out of touch with 95% of the people on the island of Ireland. If you are a true republican, you don’t even see the Provos as being true Irish people these days.

I doubt the real Irish people give a fig for what some mouthy snotbox self-proclaimed republican on a message board says.

IRIA:

No, not at all.

This is classic counter-insurgency tactics. You place people in the enemy organizations, or recruit existing members. Police and security agencies do it all over the world.

I see some are all upset again about the supposed British dirty tricks/tactics, but really. What would anyone have expected them to do?

If you aren’t fighting a conventional enemy, you use unconventional means. Agents and informers.

It’s time for all the naive SDLP types to suck it up and accept that this sort of tactic was the obvious one that would be used.

I assume they accept it wasn’t a conventional conflict where one set of people in uniforms took on another set of people in uniforms.

Even the republicans had recognised that there was no support for violence by the mid-60′s.If reasonable reforms, as promised by Wilson before the election had been delivered by the British, or even if O’Neill had been able to make a start on his ineffectual reforms there would have been no support for a campaign by any of the IRA’s.

It was the refusal of British politicans to imtervene which gave the British Army the opportunity to try for a military solution. Even then it has taken them so long to face unionism down that they have made the worst of a bad job.

“an acceptable level of violence” is a phrase attributed to Maudling very early in the conflict here. That was where the problem began not as you claim where it ended with the current crop of politicans.

As for who gets the blame for all this? Nationalists tried democratic means of redress and were denied them, then tried civil disobedience and were murdered by the security services. After that what happened was probably inevitable and the blame could possibly be shared by all participants but to condemn the Civil Righters and their marches is to go against the grain of history. Was Martin Luther King guilty of KKK violence? It was the authorities who refused to introduce reform who are invariably blamed.

The later marches in the early 70′s became more militant and could be considered to be a response to the sectarian Orange marches of the past century. As an attempt by republicans to take back the streets they were inevitably provocative but by that time the British were already talking of ‘acceptable levels of violence’. Again I would contend that the authorities bear the guilt and the responsibility.

Hardly, BG …

All the paramilitaries are fascist and mafiaist outfits.

The two Governments have been strong on appeasement and their ‘acceptable level of violence’ here, in order to protect their strategic economic and other interests, has inevitably meant that innocent folks have become victims. The need to use and protect informers has also meant that the risk to life was a bit like a lottery. It would also appear that some of the paramilitary godfathers were immune from prosecution.

Those who promoted street confrontation in the late 60s (and later) played a significant part in creating the mess and ought to share some of the blame, including the need for informers.

I think the ‘blue skies of Ulster’ quote is from Edward Carson, father of unionism.

gareth mccord

I’m working on the assumption that Bunter is the one that Brian Rowan keeps referring to mysteriously in his UVF articles of late.

Graham’s name has popped up frequently in the past over suspicions of being an SB agent, most recently in relation to the Haddock affair, but nothing ever seemed to happen.

Presumably when he met the Eames-Bradley group the other day, it was about seeing how much his ass was going to be exposed than about freeing the truth.

Questions might also arise about why an SB employee would be pushing the UVF to hold onto its weapons.

The amazing thing is that Nevin still doesn’t understand that he has just destroyed his own case.

SF is the PRM’s political wing and fascist and Mafiaist are apt labels for such a barbaric organisation. Those who think otherwise are IMO deluding themselves

Some contradiction here. Let me follow the logic of these two posts through. PIRA is controlled by MI5 and the Special Branch. PIRA is a barbaric organisation. Therefore, MI5 and the Special Branch are barbaric organisations. Therefore, we’re all as bad as each other, so the fact that SF is the largest party in Belfast and 2nd largest in the rest of the country means it should be accorded the respect due in a democratic system.

So shut up then seems to be the obvious rejoinder

lib, SF is the PRM’s political wing and fascist and Mafiaist are apt labels for such a barbaric organisation. Those who think otherwise are IMO deluding themselves. London and Dublin have been quite prepared to sacrifice ordinary decent folks here in order to protect their own interests.

This is no thanks to the killers, bombers, mutilators and paid informants of PIRA/PSF. Bernadette McAlliskey and her generation got to unversity without the bombs, bullets and Brits of PIRA. PIRA derailed NICRA; PIRA was a Brit/Branch operation from start to finish. The Bearded One still walks.

I am not saying you are wrong to welcome the fact that your children and their children’s children have the freedom to get jobs and houses where they never could before. All I was saying is that the British have returned the north to the status quo. [as far as they are concerned]

Your also correct in that there are new political battles to be fought, I became angry and desperately sad when I read the RIRA spokesperson the other week saying in an interview, in I think the Sunday Tribune that their strategy was to force the British government to over react and return to the streets, as it will turn the nationalist people against them and open up a vista of war. [OK he never said the vista of war bit, but that is what he meant]

His remarks told me that for him the struggle in itself was all that mattered and any hard ship and suffering the nationalist community experience in the process is collateral damage, to be used to the advantage of those fighting militarily for a united Ireland. Desperately poor stuff.

Good luck to you and your family

My children and their children’s children have the freedom to get jobs and houses where they never could before. To me that’s what politics are all about, equality and peace. I’m a constitutional nationalist and proud of it. There are new political battles for the younger generation to fight – the anti-Muslim madness which has replaced the Cold War for a start, the need to build a decent health service, North and South and many more besides including making sure that the disadvantaged and the New-Irish get the same acess to education as everybody else.

Arguments about the tactics of an occupation which is finally ending seem pointless to me, as pointless as the efforts of others to ‘spin’ that there wasn’t spying on all sides. We can only tackle each other’s ideas if we start with the premise that people mean what they say though we may have our doubts. Endless negative propaganda doesn’t work in the long run and Adams etc have to fight where the political battles are now not where they were in 1969.