It was the policy of the IRA to ‘shoot to kill’ at all times and in all places – whether it was a Catholic magistrate coming out of Mass [and shooting his Catholic schoolteacher daughter dead] in front of his wife and daughter – whether it was shooting a young mother census collector dead – whether it was shooting the wife of a prison officer dead beside her husband – everybody, Catholic or Protestant, Soldier or former Soldier, police, police reserve or former police or former police reserve – Irish soldier or Irish Garda or Irish detective – the IRA’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy was applied mercilessly to force a British Withdrawal from Ireland [What Happened to THAT?] and to SMASH STORMONT [What Happened to THAT?]…
That’s to leave to one side the IRA’s bomb-to-kill all kinds of civilians – men, women and children – whether in Claudy, on Bloody Friday, in Birmingham, La Mon or even at Remembrance Day Services – whether it was chaining a Derry Catholic man to a bomb and blowing him to bits – KILL KILL KILL was the IRA Army Council’s Order of Every Day to “Free” Ireland…
All of those “kills” were somehow – nobody knew exactly how – to Add Up to a magically-produced UNITED IRELAND – a WONDERFUL UTOPIA WHERE HAPPINESS WOULD SMOTHER EVERYBODY SPEAKING IRISH AND IN A SOCIALIST REPUBLIC UNITED TO CUBA AND VENEZUELA AND POSSIBLY EVEN THE SOVIET UNION…
I mean – that’s what Gerry and Martin and Ivor and Kevin and Seamus and Daithi and Maura and Sean had PROMISED the lads and lassies [canon fodder] who were sent out to KILL KILL KILL while the IRA Leadership got itself an Amnesty for engaging in Negotiations to Disband the Failed IRA and Get Into all of the Enemy Institutions they previously decried…
It’s not like the IRA’s leadership and volunteers weren’t regularly warned about the fact that the IRA campaign was THE GREATEST OBSTACLE to uniting the people of Ireland – John Hume laid it out to the IRA many many times…
Everybody knows that John Hume saw the IRA as Northern Ireland’s worst Civil Rights’ violator…
In November of 1987, a week after the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing that murdered 11 victims, the Irish Catholic Bishops said:
“There is no room for ambivalence in the face of the present campaigns of republican violence.
The choice for all Catholics is clear. It is a choice between good and evil.
It is sinful to join organisations committed to violence or to remain in them.
It is sinful to support such organisations or to call on others to support them. People must choose.”
In March 1988 following the murders of the two British army corporals, Cardinal Cahal Daly said:
“For God’s sake rid our hearts of this poison.
Evil must be rejected totally and unequivocally. There must be no ambivalence, no double standards, no selective indignation.
The real face of I.R.A. violence was shown and it was horrible to see.”
But such Catholic church condemnations of IRA terrorism had been expressed for many years.
Bishop Edward Daly of Derry – made famous on Bloody Sunday when he waved a bloody handkerchief – denounced the IRA when they murdered humble local Catholic and Protestant magistrates at home in front of their wives and children – on this occasion in September 1974 when the IRA murdered his friend, Derry-born Judge Rory Conaghan:
The death we mourn today is not just the act of an individual but of an organisation. Before it took place, there was in all probability a meeting, a discussion, a decision taken and a man designated to do the deed. Can any member of such an organisation feel free from the guilt of this crime?
Surely the murders of Judge Conaghan and Mr. McBirney must bring home to us the fact that our country has now reached a state where it can afford only one division, the distinction between those who believe in such deeds and those who do not.
Too many people who call themselves Christians offer passive support to organisations that, in their inner hearts, they know are directly opposed to the mind and teaching of Christ.
Perhaps these deaths may help to unite all people in our community who are prepared to take a public stand for Christian values. They cannot kill us all.
The difference between Unionist and Nationalist pales into insignificance when one is faced with this kind of savagery where a man is sent to his death at breakfast by a teenage gunman.
Bishop Daly and his fellow bishops were convinced that not alone were individual paramilitaries in a deeply sinful state owing to their participation in murders, maimings and bombings, but more importantly that the organisation that was directing the campaign of murder and bombing was itself deeply sinful – since it was the origin of the spurious quasi-governmental authority and lethal motivation driving ordinarily normal Catholic people – primarily young people – to murder and bomb their fellows.
On September 29th, 1979, Pope John Paul II before 250,000 Catholics at Drogheda said:
‘I wish to speak to all men and women engaged in violence.
I appeal to you, in language of passionate pleading.
On my knees I beg you, to turn away from the path of violence and to return to the ways of peace.’
By the early 1980s and the hungerstrikes, Ireland’s Roman Catholic bishops stated:
“We therefore implore the hunger strikers and those who direct them to reflect deeply on the evil of their actions and their consequences.
The contempt for human life, the incitement to revenge, the exploitation of the hunger strikers to further a campaign of murder, the intimidation of the innocent, the initiation of children into violence, all this constitutes an appalling mass of evil.”
Far from the condemnation of John Hume and the calls by Irish Catholic bishops, Derry poet Seamus Heaney – having been challenged to express support for IRA hungerstrikers – gave his view on the IRA’s campaign of murder:
Francis Hughes was a neighbour’s child, yes, but he was also a hit man and his Protestant neighbours would have considered him involved in something like a war of genocide against them rather than a war of liberation against the occupying forces of the crown.
At that stage, the IRA’s self-image as liberators didn’t work much magic with me.
Four Young Men Dead – Who Was to Blame?
Danny and Rose Vincent – parents of the shot dead 20-year-old IRA volunteer Patrick Vincent – told the IRA to stay away from their son’s funeral.
They were quite right.
They hadn’t known that the IRA “swore in” their son to secret membership of the terrorist grouping – while telling Patrick to keep his membership secret from his family and from his friends.
It was the IRA that created the false ideology that murdering and bombing would somehow Unite and Free Ireland.
It was the IRA that created the false notion of an ‘Army’ at ‘War’ – listen to King Rat Gerry Adams spoofing on American television that it was a “war” and in a “war” young Irish people were right to kidnap, torture, murder and “disappear” mother of 10 Jean McConville:
If the undisputed leader of both the IRA and of Sinn Féin was declaring that the young volunteers under his overall command were – in his view and that of his Army Council – in a “war” – then the soldiers who shot their armed enemy dead were entirely within their rights.
Who’s going to call Gerry Adams a Liar? He declared the four young men were ‘at war‘.
As the Catholic bishops had pointed out, the IRA was designed to corrupt young people into “swearing allegiance” not to their parents or families, not to their churches, not to their God, not to Jesus Christ but to the IRA’s Army Council – and to promise to carry out all acts of murder and bombing of their neighbours to magically and bloodily Unite Ireland – a campaign of terrorism that was not only morally and politically wrong, but that the IRA’s own leadership was ultimately going to admit was wrong resulting in the disbandment of the terrorist “army”…
So all of these young people were entirely misled – and this unit composed of Kevin Barry O’Donnell, 21, Sean O’Farrell, 22, Peter Clancy, 21, and Patrick Vincent, 20 – was sent to its death in February 1992, two years after another IRA leader, Martin McGuinness had publicly called for talks leading to the end of the IRA campaign.
The IRA leadership had caused the death of Patrick Vincent and his three “war army” comrades while in the very act of negotiating a secret amnesty for itself and for the very many prisoners who had spent decades in prison – negotations that had begun following Martin McGuinness’ public plea for talks back in March 1990, two years before the IRA leadership both ordered and authorised the attack with one of its most newsworthy weapons – the ridiculous lorry-mounted anti-aircraft style gun.
The Church Walkout
So the IRA leadership that was claiming to be about Uniting the People of Ireland had shown its ability to divide young people from their parents, from their families and even from their churches and to lead those young people directly to their deaths or to decades in prison – and in a state of “mortal sin”?
The IRA’s rejection of any and all criticism by the Catholic church was highlighted by the walkout of 200 people from the church during the funerals of two of the shot youths – Kevin Barry O’Donnell and Sean O’Farrell – a walkout that included relatives of those shot dead.
The walkout from the funeral Mass occurred as soon as Monsignor Liam McEntaggart merely asked IRA leaders to think again about their doomed ‘armed struggle’ [which those same IRA leaders were already secretly negotiating to end]:
“Could I appeal to them as they bury two of their dead comrades to think again, to embark on a better way, to turn to constructive ways of promoting justice and peace before more damage is done to their souls?”
The IRA leaders – formerly corner boys with little or no education – claimed to know politics better than educated politicians and theology better than educated churchmen – any criticism from the leaders of constitutional nationlism such as John Hume – or any criticism from leaders of the Catholic church – such criticism was to be rejected and IRA followers and members were to Walk Out and be further divided from the SDLP and from the Catholic church.
All of this division sown by those claiming to know how to Unite Ireland [by filling graveyards and prisons]!
Who was dumb enough to believe the IRA leadership – even while it was secretly negotiating the IRA’s endgame?
Apparently at least 200 funeral Mass goers in Tyrone.
British Courts – British Justice – Criminals or Soldiers?
It’s not so long ago that the Civil Rights movement called for more Catholic Nationalists to be represented in all powerful institutions in Northern Ireland.
In the early 1970s there were many educated Catholic Nationalists prominent in business and in other fields.
Among those were a number of Catholic local magistrates and judges.
Instead of celebrating the achievements of these persons who succeeded on their merits, the IRA chose to begin to murder them as “collaborators” with British Justice – by the way, not alone them but also their family members, women and children – mothers and daughters.
The IRA shot them outside churches, coming out of Mass – they shot them in front of their wives and children.
They even murdered their wives and children alongside them.
They blew up an entire family, the Hannas, who were returning from a holiday in the United States – mistaking their vehicle for that of Justice Eoin Higgins.
It’s remarkable to see the families of dead IRA volunteers – those IRA volunteers who would have not only been trained to reject any notion of British Justice, but also to murder any judges or magistrates or even their families – pleading for British Justice now – after the IRA’s misleading leadership has disbanded the misled IRA and achieved for itself a secret Amnesty and skedaddled.
Is there a more pathetic end to the IRA’s misguided 30 years of bombings and murders than the sight of families of dead IRA volunteers begging the Brits for crumbs of Justice – claiming that the British army should have “arrested” their relatives as criminals in a criminal enterprise?
I mean – it’s either that these four misguided young men were criminals who could have been arrested – or else they were “soldiers” fighting what Gerry Adams sometimes claims was a “war” in which case they could have been shot.
Which is it?
Criminals or Soldiers?
The Irish Peace Process 