The IRA’s Legacy of Lies

Gerry Adams’ Cult mantra of late has been: “the IRA has left the scene”.

Not so, Gerry – virtually all IRA members and prominent leaders have been absorbed into Sinn Féin and there they remain under the new disguise of democratic politics without a shred of remorse, repentance, truth or integrity.

Look around you, Gerry, at the many self-confessed IRA shooters and bombers known to you and to us all in high-level positions in Sinn Féin, convicted of multiple murders, shootings, bombings, escapes, extraditions – they haven’t gone away, you know.

In Spain, while ETA is similarly claimed to have “left the scene”, ETA leaders are nevertheless facing charges of ‘crimes against humanity’ for a small number of bombings and murders, a fraction of the IRA’s ‘crimes against humanity’ bombings and murders – the claim that ETA “has left the scene” is dismissed as entirely irrelevant in Spain.

In case you don’t understand the legacy of lies you are undertaking to lead in the new hybrid SFIRA movement, Mary Lou and Michelle, here are some of the bigger ones:

For instance, in 1971 the IRA had lied about the entirely unnecessary death of 16-year-old IRA Volunteer Jim O’Hagan in a shooting incident in the Waterside. The truth of what happened to Jim O’Hagan was never told to the people of Derry and the truth of the irresponsible nature of the organisation that took his life was covered up.

It was rumoured that Jim did not accept a “direct order” from a fellow IRA volunteer who put a gun to his chest and pulled the trigger – the bullet went right through him. His teeenage comrades (now effectively his murderers) basically scarpered and left him to die after informing some adults nearby.

Jim O’Hagan died shortly afterwards. He had called to my home in Clarendon Street the previous day and chatted with me for some time.

When covering up scandals like that involving Jim O’Hagan, the IRA used mendacious phrases such as “killed in action” and “died for Ireland”…

Martin practices shooting with a Luger pistol

The IRA denied armed activities by Martin McGuinness and other IRA volunteers on Bloody Sunday in January 1972 – this was a lie. McGuinness and a very well-known Stanley’s Walk quartermaster were seen by many people breaking into the rear of Duffy’s Bookies with a view to attacking British soldiers in William Street.

McGuinness had a Thompson machine gun (used the previous Thursday evening to kill 2 RUC officers on nearby Creggan Hill) while his comrade had explosives in his possession. The attack was aborted.

IRA volunteers with knowledge of this action were silenced.

McGuinness lied on oath to The Bloody Sunday Inquiry when he stated that he had left the IRA in 1974 – everybody in the IRA and Sinn Fein knows very well that he never left the IRA.

McGuinness’ tombstone had the last laugh on this matter when it recorded for posterity in Irish that he was ‘Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army’ – he was that to the last and never gave his many victims the restitution of Truth about why their relatives were murdered.

The IRA denied the Abercorn restaurant bombing in March, 1972 – this was a lie. Two young women were killed and 130 people were maimed or injured.

The IRA denied the Anderson Street bombing in the Short Strand in May 1972 – this was a lie. Eight persons were killed – four IRA volunteers and four civilians.

The IRA denied the Claudy bombings in July 1972 – this was a lie. Nine civilians, including children, were killed.

The IRA denied murdering and “disappearing” Jean McConville and at least eight other victims between December 1972 and 1981 – this was a lie.

The IRA began around this time the practice of torturing victims in order to force confessions from them before murdering them. Torture and murder of civilians are contrary to Geneva Conventions, but the IRA Army Council didn’t care.

The IRA denied the booby-trap bomb murder of 9-year-old Gordon Gallagher in Creggan, Derry, in February, 1973 – this was a lie.

For a time, the Derry Brigade attempted to blame the British Army for arming the bomb before it was eventually forced to admit the truth.

The IRA denied hanging Paddy Joe Crawford in Cage Five of Long Kesh in June, 1973 – this was a lie. Crawford, an orphan, was alleged to have ‘broken’ during police interrogation and to have given information.

If the IRA had decided to hang all of the IRA prisoners who broke during interrogation, at least half of the Long Kesh population would have merited execution.

The IRA denied shooting 14-year-old Kathleen Feeney in Derry in November, 1973 – this was a lie. Not only did Martin McGuinness’ Derry Brigade lie about shooting her, it went on to fancifully claim to have shot and killed the British soldier who had allegedly shot her. All lies.

The IRA lied about the abduction of German industrialist Thomas Nedermayer in West Belfast in December 1973. Mr. Nedermayer was the Managing Director of Grundig and was also the German Honorary Consul to Northern Ireland.

After ransom attempts and other deals failed, the IRA beat Niedermayer to death (that’s right, they didn’t shoot him) and ‘disappeared’ his body in a shallow grave in an illegal dump in the Colin Glen area of Belfast. His skeletal remains were not found until 1980.

A series of tragedies struck the Niedermayer family in subsequent years, possibly making for the saddest reading to come out of the IRA’s campaign of murder. Niedermayer’s wife, Ingeborg, and his two daughters, Gabrielle and Renate, all committed suicide in later years, as did Gabrielle’s husband.

The Nedermayer human rights’ atrocity was masterminded by Brian Keenan, the IRA’s GHQ Quartermaster and pal of Libyan Dictator Muammar Gadaffy. Keenan was later the IRA’s Chief of Staff and is celebrated by the IRA and Sinn Féin.

Mary Lou McDonald spoke with Keenan in Fairview Park in Dublin in tribute to the IRA’s WWII Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, a Nazi collaborator who organised a bombing campaign in England in 1939 on behalf of his Nazi Intelligence controllers.

The IRA denied murdering alleged informer Kenneth Lennon in Surrey in April, 1974 – this was a lie. False rumours were spread that Lennon was killed by Special Branch police and these lies made their way into books and reports for years.

The IRA denied the Birmingham bombings in November, 1974 – this was a lie. 21 civilians were killed and 182 were maimed and injured.

The IRA claimed it would court martial and execute identified Birmingham bombers – this was a lie.

Mick Murray, one of the bombers who was captured and imprisoned for conspiracy to cause explosions, was treated as a hero upon his release and return to Dublin, Ireland. He was employed as a van driver for the IRA’s newspaper, An Phoblacht, and got a eulogy in the same paper after his death.

Another of the bombers, Mick Hayes (‘Jungle Jim’) , was not captured and continued to make and plant bombs for the IRA for years. Claims of courts martial and punishments were just lies. The IRA did absolutely nothing to help the innocent and wrongly-convicted Birmingham Six.

In July 1975, the IRA lied about torturing, murdering and disappearing 22-year-old Eamon Molloy who was alleged to have been an informer in its Belfast brigade. Molloy’s remains were secretly disinterred and returned in a coffin 24 years later by the IRA following its belated admission that it had murdered and disappeared him.

In November 1975, the IRA lied about torturing, murdering and disappearing 17-year-old Columba McVeigh who was originally from Donaghmore, County Tyrone, but was abducted from his flat in Dublin. Columba was one of the youngest teenagers ever to have been regarded as an informer by the paranoid Provos. His corpse still has not been found.

The IRA denied the Kingsmill massacre of 10 Protestant civilians in January, 1976 – this was a lie.

Kingsmill was a nakedly sectarian massacre of innocent Protestants, part of a campaign of IRA murders of innocent Protestants allegedly to counter UDA/UVF attacks on Catholics.

The IRA falsely claimed it would never stoop to sectarian murders and ignored the fact that relatives of innocent Catholics murdered by loyalist paramilitaries wanted no such retaliatory murders in their name.

Martin McGuinness denied knowing who murdered innocent Protestant businessman Jeffrey Agate, MD of Du Pont, in February, 1977 – this was a lie. His leadership position within the IRA since the early 1970s meant that he not only knew the shooters, but that he was one of the IRA leaders who authorised the shocking murder.

Martin McGuinness denied knowing who murdered 29-year-old mother and census collector, Joanne Mathers, in April, 1981 – this was a lie. Again, McGuinness knew very well who pulled the trigger and was the IRA leader who ordered her murder.

The crazed gunman shot the unarmed woman in the neck and grabbed her census forms before running away. Virtually everybody associated with the Derry Brigade of the IRA knows who murdered Joanne and they all keep the mafia-style ‘omerta’. Keep up the integrity, lads – it’s all for Ireland.

The IRA denied shooting Irish Prison Chief Brian Stack in Dublin in March, 1983 – this was a lie. Gerry Adams was able to magically create a meeting between Brian Stack’s family and an IRA leader in 2013 during which the IRA leader not only belatedly admitted Brian Stack’s murder, but claimed that one of the shooters was ‘disciplined’ – this was also a lie.

Martin McGuinness denied luring alleged informer Frank Hegarty home to Derry in May 1986 and promising his mother, Rose, that he would not be harmed – this was a lie. McGuinness was so involved in the Hegarty murder that he had a Guardian journalist, Peter Murtagh, removed from the Hegarty home and told him outside that ‘the interview is over’ in an act of intimidation of the press. McGuinness continued to lie about the Hegarty murder until his own death.

Martin McGuinness denied knowing the murderers of civilian prison instructor, Leslie Jarvis (shot dead after a psychology class at Magee College) and of two police officers murdered shortly afterwards by a booby-trap bomb in a briefcase similar to that of Mr. Jarvis – this was a lie. He certainly knew the team that carried out the triple murder and was one of the IRA leaders who authorised the attack.

The IRA denied triggering the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb in November, 1987 – this was a lie.

A false story was spread that the bomb was triggered by some unknown British Army security radio device before the truth had to be admitted.

The bomb murdered 12 people and maimed 63.

The IRA denied the Tullyally bombings in Derry in December, 1987 – this was a lie. Two of three bombs exploded in a largely Protestant housing estate, killing an elderly Catholic pensioner. The Derry Brigade of the IRA had planted the bombs near homes of persons suspected of being members of the security forces and when the ‘job’ went wrong, Martin McGuinness denied responsibility and cynically blamed British Army or loyalist paramilitary ‘dirty tricks’ attackers. Lies on top of lies.

The IRA denied the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe in County Limerick in June, 1996 during a botched robbery of a ‘cash in transit’ van – this was a lie. Gerry Adams later developed a convoluted distancing explanation for the robbery – the IRA Army Council had not authorised it, but a lower-level commander had authorised it.

This did not explain the gunmen spraying the Garda car with automatic weapon fire contrary to alleged IRA Army Orders and killing McCabe and injuring his Garda colleague, Ben O’Sullivan, who was shot 11 times but survived.

In August 2001, three years after the signing of The Good Friday Agreement, the IRA denied sending two of its GHQ engineering/explosives experts – James “Mortar” Monaghan and Martin McCauley – and its Cuban-based Sinn Fein representative to Latin America, Niall Connolly, to Colombia to engage in training of the FARC narco-terrorists.

The three travelled on false passports and spent five weeks in a FARC-controlled zone before their arrest. An American Embassy explosives’ expert, Anthony Hall, had tested possessions of the three for explosives and confirmed traces of five different high explosives including nitro, tetril, HMX (high melting explosive), TNT, and ammonium nitrate. Colombian witnesses claimed the three had been regularly seen in FARC territory since 1998.

Sinn Féin denied that Connolly was its representative in Cuba – this was a lie. Sinn Féin later admitted that Connolly was indeed a party representative.

Alex Maskey suddenly volunteered information to the press that both Monaghan and McCauley ‘had left Sinn Féin’ – thanks, Alex, but it’s ‘Mortar’ Monaghan’s alleged membership of the IRA Army Council and McCauley’s alleged expertise in the IRA GHQ’s Engineering Department that’s at issue.

The three were ultimately convicted and sentenced to 17 years imprisonment, but had already fled the country and returned to Ireland, impervious to an outstanding Colombian arrest warrant.

In 2002, Gerry Adams refused to give evidence to a US Congressional hearing into links between the IRA and FARC and his right-wing Republican party friend, Congressman Peter King, stated that innuendo that the IRA was involved in narco-terrorism was ‘damaging to the peace process’.

SFIRA were caught with their pants down playing to the right wing in America and to the left wing in Cuba and Colombia. There are too many SFIRA lies to fit in this article.

The IRA denied the Northern Bank robbery in December 2004 – this was a lie. Who has been benefiting from the tax free £26.5m pension fund? Come on, Gerry, use your magic ability to find out for us.

The IRA denied the murder of Robert McCartney in Belfast in January, 2005 – this was a lie. The murder became a severe embarrassment in the United States for a time during the ‘peace process’ before it was smoothed over.

The IRA denied the murder of Paul Quinn in October, 2007 – this was a lie. Quinn wasn’t just murdered, he was beaten to death to the point that there was hardly an unbroken bone in his body. This was a lesson to anyone in South Armagh who might oppose the IRA during the ‘peace process’.

The IRA’s Army Council personnel – Martin McGuinness and others – began denying membership and leadership of the IRA and knowledge of countless IRA human rights’ atrocities – these were and remain barefaced lies.

The Pat Finucane Centre has managed to avoid enquiring into any of the thousands of IRA civil and human rights’ violations while Sinn Féin spouts about a ‘rights-based society’ for all.

So, Mary Lou and Michelle, you might begin your reign by dealing with the IRA’s legacy of lies as outlined above by acknowledging them and apologising for them also.

Stop celebrating murder and those who practiced it.