Sinn Féin’s new Ethel Lynch Cumann in Derry and the Cult of Lies

The IRA movement’s Sinn Féin political front is built on a vast foundation of lies, really big lies.

There are so many lies associated with the IRA/Sinn Féin movement that I wrote an entire Blog post about the most blatant ones – it may be read here.

Derry/Londonderry [forgotten Londonderry already, Mary Lou?] is a locus of some of the grander lies at the heart of the IRA movement.

Certainly the biggest lie in the IRA’s past is its claim to have somehow fought for and represented the victims of Bloody Sunday – victims who were marching under the pacifist, anti-violence banner of Civil Rights…

How could the IRA and/or Sinn Féin ever associate with pacifist Civil Rights when it shot and bombed the Human Rights and Civil Rights of its 1,700 victims? That many victims equal a staggering 121 Bloody Sundays…

The IRA tortured victims, “executed” victims without trials, disappeared their corpses…

These massive lies trouble neither the IRA nor Sinn Féin nor their voters, nor the Pat Finucane Centre, nor so-called Relatives for Justice.

I was yesterday handed a poster announcing a new Sinn Féin Cumann in Derry/Londonderry named after a female IRA volunteer, Ethel Lynch, who was killed by an IRA bomb she was sent to collect in December 1974 when the IRA movement planned to enter a ceasefire or bi-lateral truce with the British Government as a result of an initiative of Protestant churchmen at the time [called the ‘Feakle talks’ because one of the meetings occurred there].

The poster was shoved into letterboxes in Creggan over the past few days.

The IRA leadership demanded a “Big Push” in the days leading up to the pre-planned 1974/75 ceasefire, to try to show that it was going into the ceasefire with some piss and vinegar still in its veins.

Some weeks before the ceasefire, IRA units had been asked to vote locally for or against the planned ceasefire. Quite a few people voiced objections to any ceasefire. Others stated that the ceasefire was the only choice since the violence had been so terrible on all sides. There were bitter disagreements.

The IRA had been lying to its cannon fodder volunteers already for some years.

In Derry, it had told some huge lies to its volunteers.

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 and the truth of the irresponsible nature of the organisation that took his life was covered up.

In 1972, the IRA had lied to all of the people of Derry about IRA activities on Bloody Sunday involving Martin McGuinness and others in possession of explosives and a Thompson machine gun at Duffy’s Bookies overlooking British soldiers in William Street. Derry people didn’t care that the Bloody Sunday families were lied to by the IRA.

The IRA had lied about shooting 14-year-old Kathleen Feeney in the Brandywell area in November of 1973 and had grandiosely claimed to have shot a British soldier who had allegedly shot her. This was a total fabrication – the IRA had shot her but didn’t want to admit it.

Embarrassingly for the Derry Brigade of the lying IRA, an IRA volunteer was arrested and admitted he had shot Kathleen, but the IRA waited another 30 years before belatedly telling the truth on that one in 2005.

The IRA lied about its booby-trap bomb that killed 9-year-old Gordon Gallagher in Creggan in 1973, falsely claiming that the British Army had added a detonator to the booby-trap left in a garden.

The IRA was lying about its campaign of sectarian murders of innocent Protestant civilians in Belfast and elsewhere – it lied to Derry volunteers that any alleged Protestant shot in Belfast or elsewhere was a loyalist paramilitary.

This was a gross lie covering up a sectarian tit-for-tat murder campaign that directly contradicted any true ‘republican’ identity deriving from Wolfe Tone and other Protestant radicals.

Ethel Lynch was quite unusual in Derry in that she had a Protestant boyfriend. She had voiced support for the upcoming ceasefire, as did so many others.

During the ‘Big Push’ before the ceasefire began, an untrained IRA volunteer was ordered to make a bomb to contribute to the Derry Brigade statistics. Ethel was told to collect that bomb and when she did so, it exploded fatally injuring her.

The Derry Brigade of the IRA had casually and cruelly taken her life – she had trusted that she would not be put at undue risk and she was mistaken. The IRA has never told the truth about her death.

She joined a long list of other IRA volunteers whose lives were also casually and recklessly put at risk – and taken – by the IRA organisation on its bloody road to Stormont – a Stormont it could have entered in 1970 if it had so wished along with Nationalist Party and SDLP representatives, without spilling a drop of blood.

There was another female IRA volunteer in Derry who was active along with Ethel Lynch. This young woman would have been very well known to everyone in the IRA in Derry in the 1970s.

She was Chris Sheerin. She was arrested and sentenced to a long period of years in Armagh Prison. Her family was very well known.

When Chris got out of Armagh Prison she made a new life in England.

She put as much distance between herself and the IRA as she possibly could.

She passed away only a few weeks ago and was buried without any fanfare in Derry. Extraordinarily, for those who knew her, she had no association of any kind with the IRA at her funeral.

It’s almost as if Chris Sheerin’s years of IRA service and years in Armagh Prison never happened. I’m sure she wished they never had.

I believe that if Ethel Lynch had been arrested and imprisoned as Chris was, she too would have disassociated herself from the IRA movement that went on to murder 120 women, girls and female infants in its campaign – read their names here.

Ethel Lynch would never have agreed with the horrific murder of young mother and census collector Joanne Mathers.

Nor would Ethel have agreed with the IRA’s most sectarian murder of the MD of Du Pont in Derry, Jeffrey Agate, a highly-respected Protestant who gave so much well-paid employment to people in Derry.

Nor would Ethel have agreed with the IRA’s ‘human bomb’ atrocity, chaining a Derryman to a bomb and blowing him – and many others – to bits.

Nor would she have agreed with the IRA’s abduction, torture and extra-judicial execution of Protestant mother of 10 children Jean McConville and the disappearance of her corpse.

In fact, if she had lived long enough to discover the IRA’s long list of lies and atrocities – its mass-casualty anti-civilian bombings such as in Claudy (which the IRA lied about), Birmingham (which the IRA lied about), its mass-casualty anti-Protestant murders such as at Kingsmill (which it lied about), Enniskillen (which it lied about) and elsewhere – she would have disassociated herself from the IRA as did so many other volunteers of that era.

Unable to speak from her grave, it is an atrocity that the IRA movement in Derry is once more exploiting Ethel by abusing her name in its cult of lies.

The IRA movement knows no shame over its atrocious Human Rights atrocities, its lies, its torture practices, its 1,700 murders, its “disappearance” of corpses of victims, its refusal to return the remains of Catholic soldier Captain Robert Nairac, its many thousands of maimings – so it will hardly repent its abuse of Ethel Lynch’s name 45 years after taking her young life.

How people who claimed an association with Civil Rights can vote for this IRA cult of lies and Human Rights’ atrocities is beyond me.