Did you know…

…that while Roy Greenslade was managing news editor of the Sunday Times, a ‘staunchly anti-IRA’ paper (according to the Sindo), he was secretly penning articles for the republican newspaper An Phoblacht? Neither did I until yesterday. The revelation came in Flat Earth News, and Greenslade appears to have given his blessing to on his blog, lending credence to the claim. I did know that Greenslade was the man who coined the phrase hierarchy of death in relation to how the media reported killings here during the Troubles. Now that the slaughter is long over, Greenslade’s theory has been adapted into the ‘hierarchy of victims’, applying similar logic to changed circumstances. Sinn Fein, for example, uses it in order to try to justify the republican narrative that the IRA and British security forces operated on the same moral level. While Greenslade’s original theory is pretty hard to refute, and given his interest in the Gibraltar 3, I wonder what his thoughts would be about how it evolved into, say, part of Sinn Fein’s argument for a commemoration to Mairead Farrell in Stormont’s Long Gallery.

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