Hamas, the IRA & Clonard Monastery

Apart from the IRA’s continual preparedness to kill civilians – men, women and children – as collateral damage during attacks against police, soldiers, judges and politicians – the IRA’s entire terrorist campaign relied on hiding among the civilian population allowing civilians to suffer risks more properly due to the IRA.

Like Hamas, the IRA not only routinely hid weapons and explosives in civilian properties but also launched attacks from civilian homes, schools, hospitals and even churches.

The IRA’s newspaper, An Phoblacht, 3 July 2020 recorded the following about IRA actions in St. Matthews Roman Catholic Church grounds in June 1970:

“But when the first unionist paramilitary shots rang out later that night, they were met with returned fire. A local IRA unit, supported by other Volunteers from the Belfast Brigade (and assisted by the Citizens’ Defence League) fought an eight-hour battle in the grounds of St Matthew’s Chapel.

A small brick cottage in the chapel grounds – home to the sexton, his wife and six children – came under sustained petrol-bomb attack from the Orange mob. The children were dragged from their beds as the McGourty family fled under the cover of trees and bushes out of the chapel grounds.

The cottage was burnt to the ground as the family took refuge in the local primary school. It was here that 11-year-old Ignatius McGourty watched a fatally-wounded local man being carried into an adjacent classroom, together with injured IRA Volunteer, Billy McKee.

• A painting of St Matthew’s Chapel, Short Strand taken from An Phoblacht/Republican News June 1980, with Henry McIlhone who gave his life in defence of the area (inset)

Henry McIlhone had originally been from the Pound Loney, settling in the Short Strand after marrying a local woman. He was fatally wounded in the chapel grounds. A small metal cross at the side of the chapel, at the foot of a mature tree, marks the spot where he was shot. McIlhone was not a member of the IRA, he was 33 years of age when he died.

As dawn broke, the level of destruction visited on the area by the unionist mob became apparent. In an orgy of burning and looting, 20 Catholic-owned business premises on the outskirts of the Strand had been destroyed. But the district itself remained intact.

It had been more than just another sectarian attack. In June 1970, unionist mobs had intended to drive out the entire Catholic population of east Belfast in a Bombay Street type of scenario. Instead, the mob had been thwarted by a disciplined and valiant response in what was later recognised as the first major engagement of the IRA in defence of a nationalist area.” END OF ARTICLE

However, in 1971 and 1972 during the period of some of the IRA’s worst atrocities involving civilians – the Belfast Bloody Friday bombings and the Claudy Bombings to name but a few – the IRA’s leadership and its Northern Ireland campaign only survived because a Catholic monastery in Belfast city gave the IRA a secret operational headquarters from which the IRA planned and executed murders and bombings.

Of course, it was the Redemptorist Clonard monastery that provided the secret operational headquarters to the Belfast Brigade of the IRA – some of whose leaders were also in fact the General Headquarters Staff of the IRA nationally and more usually billeted in the Republic of Ireland, mostly in Dublin city.

I have no doubt that without the Clonard Monastery IRA Headquarters, the Belfast Brigade of the IRA would have been entirely defeated by the Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary by 1973 such was the number of arrests effected by the security services.

I attended a meeting in Dublin in the summer of 1973 with Martin McGuinness at which Belfast Brigade Staff commented that they were short of Volunteers and would have to consider importing active Volunteers from the Republic of Ireland. This meeting was held to discuss the dire circumstances facing the Belfast Brigade of the IRA.

In spite of the available evidence for Clonard Monastery’s collusion with IRA murders and bombings – which in that period mostly decimated civilians both Protestant and Catholic – there is a general unwillingness to confront the collusion.

Roman Catholic authorities – such as the IRA-friendly Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin and the recently removed Bishop of Down and Connor (Belfast) Noel Treanor – have turned their faces away from any enquiries in the direction of Clonard Monastery’s collusion with the IRA.

How is it that Roman Catholic authorities don’t want the full facts of Clonard Monastery’s IRA activities published, especially since Archbishop Eamon Martin [laughably] offered his services as a Truth Seeker on behalf of victims of terrorists in Northern Ireland?

You’d have to ask the bold Archbishop Eamon Martin for that contradiction.

So what of the evidence for Clonard Monastery’s collusion with the IRA as it bombed and murdered wholesale across Belfast and indeed across wholesale Northern Ireland?

Let’s look at another blog post previously entitled “Gerry Adams and God – Why the IRA hasn’t Repented”:

The Evidence – I

In 1971, there was a stand-off or virtual split for a very short time in the Derry Brigade of the IRA. Creggan and other units wanted a particular IRA man to be the new O.C. – Roddy Carlin – while the Bogside and Brandywell units wanted a different IRA man – Robbie Griffin – to be the O.C.

It wasn’t a stand-off that was likely to be violent or even hot-tempered. It was a cool, calm and quite friendly difference of opinion as to who was best-suited to command the local operations (which continued in spite of the debate over who should rise to be Officer Commanding).

[Robbie Griffin got the job, but within months of his appointment, Bloody Sunday happened and Robbie – to his credit – had a massive row with his Adjutant Martin McGuinness about McGuinness’ unauthorised bomb and gun activities on Bloody Sunday and Robbie resigned as a result of the row.]

The difference of opinion went on for some weeks and eventually – I know not how – it came to the attention of the Belfast Brigade. I have my suspicions that a Derry family with highly-placed IRA relatives in Belfast must have mentioned the matter to their Belfast RA-relative.

Representatives of both camps were summoned to the Belfast Brigade of the IRA to make their respective cases, and I – young as I was – was chosen to represent Creggan.

A prominent non-republican family (still alive) provided neutral transport to Belfast and, after a stop at a well-known republican house in Crocus Street, it was off to meet the IRA leadership in its secret HQ.

Of all places – and to my enduring surprise – the IRA HQ was located in Clonard Monastery.

There in a smoke-filled room I made the Creggan case to a number of senior IRA persons who asked some questions and said the matter would be considered.

These senior IRA persons were on-the-run and ‘wanted’ by the police and army. One of them was rumoured to be Chief of Staff of the IRA and a member of the IRA’s governing Army Council. [He was arrested some time later in Belfast in a blaze of publicity.]

The Clonard Monastery locus was a fully-functioning, operational HQ and was not in any way, shape or form a ‘conflict resolution’ centre – it was the very opposite, a conflict PROVOcation centre.

I have no idea how long Clonard Monastery offered HQ facilities to the Belfast Brigade of the IRA, but I think the IRA leadership was welcome to come and go from Clonard Monastery for many years.

The truth of such matters will probably never be told – northern nationalism and catholicism are in the throes of Big Secrets and Lies these days – not forgetting ‘mental reservations’ – and there they want to remain.

How many people were murdered by the IRA while it was ensconced in Clonard Monastery?

Does anybody really care?

Clonard was not the only Catholic monastic community in Northern Ireland to offer succor to the IRA in 1971/72.

Our Lady of Bethlehem Abbey, Portglenone,  County Antrim is a well-known Cistercian monastic community founded in 1948. Two members of its community, Fr. Thomas O’Neill and Brother Patrick Joseph Skeehan, appeared before Belfast’s Magistrates Court on January 22nd, 1972, charged with aiding IRA escapees from Belfast Prison.

They were jointly charged with five others, one of whom was also charged with possessing explosives. Supporters outside the court, The Guardian reported, later gave them a ‘heroes’ welcome’ and they were driven off in a car.

The Cistercian monks had been arrested driving the two prison escapees toward the border with the Republic of Ireland.

Then there was the old fake news yarn about the priest visiting his brother in Long Kesh and being held against his will and tied up while his IRA brother took his clerical garb and escaped posing as him – wait a minute – it actually happened to Fr. Gerard Green whose brother, Francis, overpowered him, dragged off his priestly clothing and had him tied up by other IRA prisoners while he escaped dressed as him in September 1973 – geddit?

I have written elsewhere about the new warm relationship between the Catholic church and the IRA – the IRA that has stepped sideways lock, stock and barrel into various roles in the new hybrid Sinn Féin party, the party that also functions as a cash cow for former shooters and bombers, the party which might yet launder them into the body politic, partly deodorized.

Here I want to look at how the IRA leadership managed to negotiate itself out of an armed struggle without in any way, shape or form repenting the hundreds of murders it committed from Northern Ireland to England, from the Netherlands and Germany back to the Republic of Ireland.

The IRA’s repentance need not have any religious motifs, but if it had any moral or ethical basis, it would have been moved to come clean to the thousands of victims of its armed struggle by giving them the reparation of the truths of their relatives’ maimings, tortures and murders – truth was what they mostly wanted, not mi££ions released to obfuscating legacy mills making lawyers very wealthy.

As things stand, the IRA has totally stonewalled victims since the beginning of the peace process and leading members – Martin McGuinness and others – have brazenly lied on the record about their IRA activities and about their lack of knowledge of IRA atrocities. McGuinness took thousands of IRA secrets to his grave.

Sinn Féin is a puppet of the IRA Army Council and of no use to victims seeking truth.

So, if the road to Damascus, no, to Stormont was not paved by repentance of any kind, what else might have been the motive of the IRA’s endgame?

Nobody knew better than the IRA’s various leadership echelons the degree of its penetration by informers and agents right to the very top. The fact that agents worked alongside the highest leadership – Denis Donaldson, Alfredo Scappaticci and many others – meant that the British side could at any moment have arrested and charged IRA leaders with very many murders, some of them horrific in their detail as outlined by Scappaticci when he was secretly recorded talking to television journalists about the torture and murder methodology of the IRA’s internal ‘nutting squad’.

Journalist Ed Moloney in his 2002 book, ‘A Secret History of the IRA’ has publicly described the ‘nutting squad’ as having been founded by Gerry Adams himself, whom Moloney has described as an IRA leader in Belfast at the time.

Strangely, litigious Gerry never bothered to seek a defamation case against Moloney or to block his book’s publication.

So, the IRA leadership had a choice – fall into line with the dictates of the two governments motivated by the threat that British Intelligence would activate its informers and agents in a series of show trials of, say, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and others or else – as has most likely happened – the IRA’s leadership was guaranteed (in secret talks) immunity from prosecution (and a raft of OTR letters) if it shut down the IRA, decommissioned its weapons and – like shamefaced schoolboys – played by the rules in the classroom in Stormont from then on.

The problem is – why have leaders and members of the IRA never repented their many murders? Why have they come to believe that their murders need no repentance of any kind? Why have they felt able to stonewall all their victims?

The IRA’s failure to repent in any moral or ethical manner may only have two possible explanations.

One perfectly credible explanation may be that the majority of the IRA’s leadership – if not membership also – has no particular belief in God or in the traditional Christian forms of repentance.

The second explanation is much more likely, based as it is on the clergy involved in the peace process. If republican leaders like Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and others preferred the close association of clergy – religious men in religious garb – why have these religious not prompted the kind of repentance that we might expect from the IRA, whereby victims of violence might have gotten reparation in the form of the respect and truths they deserved?

Did these clergy fail in their task, or did they not even try to achieve this kind of repentance? Did they themselves not believe that the IRA owed this kind of repentance and reparation to victims and to wider society?

Unquestionably, one of the leading clergymen involved in the peace process foisted on Northern Ireland was Fr. Alec Reid, a member of a religious order within the Catholic church, the Redemptorists in Clonard monastery in Belfast.

[It’s important to note for non-Catholics that religious orders are semi-independent within the Catholic church – answering to their own leaders and not necessarily to the diocesan bishops outside the walls of their monasteries. This accords their monks a generous degree of freedom not available to diocesan priests who are almost totally subject to the discipline of their bishops.]

During the peace process, Reid one evening lost his temper in a public meeting in Belfast and referred to Unionists as ‘Nazis’. He recovered quickly enough, but it was a telling insight into his deeply held republican beliefs which made him so attractive to leading republicans like Gerry Adams.

It was a grossly offensive and racist insult for a clergyman to utter, for all his other efforts.

Another Clonard monastic participant in the process was Fr. Gerry Reynolds.

Reynolds betrayed spiritual confidences I gave to him in Long Kesh directly to IRA members within minutes of talking to me.

He infamously opined that it was ‘stupid’ to ask Gerry Adams if he was an IRA member. Reynolds was a dyed-in-the-wool IRA supporter.

There was no way either Reid or Reynolds were ever going to broach a traditional Christian view of repentance to IRA members – on the contrary, they had bought into the IRA’s legitimacy arguments lock, stock and car bomb.

I wrote about Reynolds here – and I included this paragraph:

“How could a catholic priest like Fr. Gerry Reynolds ever have held that asking Gerry Adams if he was in the IRA was ‘a stupid question’? How could a follower of Christ ever hold that victims of murder and bombing – and society in general – would be ‘stupid’ to ask for truth?

After 30 years of brave and often unpopular church teaching that all murderous violence was utterly wrong in all circumstances there now appears to be a more popular but corrupted clerical consensus that a paramilitary organisation might after all create its own paramorality and be retrospectively excused from the requirement to tell the truth about some of the worst atrocities ever committed in Britain and Ireland.

There is the very real possibility that McGuinness and Adams have been the victims of spurious spiritual direction by beguiled priests encouraging them in their arrogant silence before God and their victims.”

In State Papers released some months ago, Gerry Adams’ former parish priest, Fr. Hugh Forde, noted to diplomats from the Republic of Ireland that Adams had stopped attending his Ballymurphy parish church and had instead moved his religious observance – whatever that was – to Clonard monastery, which Fr. Forde described as less likely to ask searching questions of him, composed as it was of a lot of Southern religious.

A former Belfast seminarian – trainee priest – who attended a St. Malachy’s College vocations’ evening back then heard a current northern bishop refer openly to Clonard monastery as “D” Company [of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA].

The truth of Clonard monastery’s support for the IRA’s bloodiest campaign years in the early 1970s may never be fully known.

However, the consequences of Clonard’s participation in formulating the IRA leadership’s perverse ‘mental reservations’ about the truths of IRA atrocities and in formulating the IRA leadership’s supposedly-legitimate ‘mental reservations’ about reparation of truth to victims – these consequences are now coming home to roost in Northern Ireland.

A monastic wing of the catholic church teaching the IRA and Sinn Féin ways to legitimize telling Big Lies and keeping Big Secrets is the last thing the peace process needed.

The IRA’s brazen belief that it may legitimately worship its own past violence and its own former killers and bombers – while stonewalling and disrespecting victims of its thousands of denied human rights’ violations – is the basis of the very real distrust and discord not only affecting Unionists but also many catholic nationalists who abhor the new cosy relationship between the catholic church and the IRA.

How is it possible to build a real peace process on a foundation of Big Secrets and Lies maintained by the new pan-nationalist front of IRA/Sinn Féin, the catholic church in Northern Ireland and cadres of one-eyed republican lawyers getting wealthy on British monies?

Until the IRA, Sinn Féin and the catholic church admit and acknowledge the IRA’s thousands of human rights violations – and declare that worshipping bombers and murderers is fatal to the peace process – and set about giving the reparation of truth to innocent victims without quibble – we are condemned to Wilfred Owen’s ‘profound dull tunnel’ – a hell of our own making. ” END OF ARTICLE

The Evidence – II

The prominent family that provided the transport from Derry to Belfast was the McAteer family – the family of Nationalist Party Leader Eddie McAteer – and the members of that family with anything relevant to offer about Clonard Monastery are still alive and hale and hearty.

The house in Crocus Street where the car initially stopped was the house of the IRA’s former Chief of Staff of the IRA – Hugh McAteer – brother of Eddie McAteer – and home of the later and rarely-photographed IRA SuperSPAD Aidan McAteer.

And it was from the Crocus Street house that the car then made its careful way into Clonard Monastery for the meeting with the IRA’s Belfast Brigade leadership.

You can read about IRA SuperSPAD Aidan McAteer toward the end of the article here, but I will copy the details below:

“And so it is with our final IRA SPAD, whose name – and not omitting the regard which Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams have had for him – should more properly earn him the title of IRA SuperSPAD – the largely unphotographed and secretive Aidan McAteer.

No bumbling blunders, repeated arrests or voluntary admissions from Moby!

[‘Moby‘ was his Long Kesh comrades’ unkind 1970s nickname for him – ‘big fat bastard with red hair‘.]

To the rough, uncouth and often bloody Belfast IRA felons, Aidan brings a touch of his father Hugh’s more cerebral quality.

Hugh McAteer was Chief of Staff of the IRA in the 1940s and served time in prison.

Hugh’s constitutionalist brother, Eddie McAteer, was a Stormont Member of Parliament and leader of the Nationalist Party.

What makes Aidan McAteer a SuperSPAD?

Gormless Martin Miller revealed during the Renewable Heat Incentive ‘Cash for Ash’ inquiry that even after the passage of Jim Allister’s SPAD Bill, Sinn Féin broke Stormont’s own laws in order to contine to employ and pay Aidan McAteer who “oversaw and managed both Sinn Féin’s special advisers and ministers“.

So unelected, unchecked, unsupervised IRA SuperSPAD McAteer not only had oversight of all of the other SPADs, but also of all of Sinn Féin’s elected Ministers!

What body – unknown to the mere electorate of Northern Ireland – conferred upon Aidan McAteer the authority to oversee both SPADs and elected Ministers?

The only body capable of conferring such authority – the body that regards itself as the “rightful government of the Irish Republic” since 1918 – is the IRA’s Army Council.

McAteer swore his allegiance to the IRA’s Army Council back in the 1970s when he joined the IRA and went out shooting.

Ed Moloney has reported that McAteer was under a cloud in the 1970s.

If Aidan McAteer was under any form of a cloud back in the 1970s, his resurrection would have been wrought solely by the expressions of loyalty to and faith in the Provos’ one and only Messiah, Gerry Adams.

It’s not important for Aidan McAteer to be intellectually gifted, university educated, well-read, respecter of Human Rights, voice of the tortured and disappeared – no, his position of power over both SPADs and elected Sinn Féin Ministers is founded upon his uncritical and unswerving loyalty to Messiah Gerry Adams.” END OF ARTICLE

So, there is plenty of evidence and there are still living witnesses for journalists or churchmen to sift to uncover the truth of Clonard Monastery’s Collusion with the IRA as it murdered and bombed the innocent Protestants and Catholics of Belfast and of Northern Ireland as a whole.

A respectable nationalist family with impeccable Catholic church credentials provided the transport into Clonard Monastery for the meeting.

But didn’t IRA leader Gerry Adams offer to Sky’s David Blevins that he would finally admit to his mass-murdering IRA background when circumstances allowed, and are these circumstances not now in place, Gerry a chara, since Derry’s own Dekkie Morgan is going to hear Confessions with the promise not quite of absolution but of Amnesty instead?

Here’s your chance, Gerry, to admit all and to tell us all about your and the IRA’s activities in Clonard Monastery in the 1970s in the periods when you weren’t in prison, and recalling Fr. Forde’s statement that you dumped your parish church in Ballymurphy in favour of attendance at – wait for it – Clonard Monastery’s IRA Headquarters – the perfect Irish blend of Catholicism and IRA Terrorism under God’s gaze.

I invite you, Archbishop Eamon Martin, to make your enquiries of the McAteers – undoubtedly known to you since you are yourself a Derryman and would have recalled hearing of the then Fr. Hugh McAteer, your once co-diocesan priest comrade.

You’ve offered your services to victims of Terrorism – best place to start is surely the Roman Catholic Monastery in the heart of Belfast that aided and abetted IRA terrorism that murdered and maimed many innocents in the 1970s.

Christ Jesus said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32).

Anybody betting that the Confessional Catholic Church will never want this Truth confessed?

Listen to the then Rector Fr. Patrick Egan (head honcho) of Clonard Monastery praise the “local lads” who threw petrol bombs and rocks in August 1969 – it was Fr. Egan who granted the IRA the secret Headquarters in Clonard in the early 1970s: