When I was 18, the IRA leadership sent me to London to carry out a one-person letter-bomb and small time-bomb campaign in August of 1973 to make the IRA look better after the March 1973 capture of 10 Belfast IRA volunteers arrested at Heathrow airport immediately after they had planted bombs at the Old Bailey and other targets.

I returned to Dublin after that summer campaign without capture and after I had set up what became the IRA’s secret code-word for telephoned bomb warnings: “Double X”.

Then Chief of Staff of the IRA, Seamus Twomey, asked to meet me to congratulate me on the one-person bombing campaign and he did meet me at 106 Iveragh Road, Whitehall, Dublin 9 to shake my hand.

The IRA’s loss of the ‘Belfast 10’ in March 1973 and its loss three weeks later of 5 tons of Libyan weapons aboard The Claudia ship off the Irish coast had made the IRA look amateurish to the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, then the primary sponsor of the IRA’s England bombing campaign.

I was sent to London again for a second letter-bomb campaign in December of 1973 thru February 1974 and once more returned safely to Dublin without capture.

At that point, I refused to continue with the England bombing campaign – then in the charge of Kevin McKenna – because I disagreed with the move toward no-warning or slow-warning bombings which became common later that year mostly carried out by the “Balcombe Street” siege IRA unit, but not forgetting the IRA’s [denied] Birmingham Pub bombers.

After a year as Derry Brigade IRA explosives’ officer, I was arrested during the 1975 ceasefire for which I and others had voted.

I was tried at the Old Bailey in September 1976 for my London bombings.

I didn’t recognize the court. I didn’t deny the charges. I apologized to innocent civilians for injuring them. I didn’t mount any appeal or claim to be innocent of the charges.

In late 1977, I sent a letter to Martin McGuinness who – contrary to his later sworn statement to the Bloody Sunday inquiry – was still a Derry Brigade and GHQ IRA officer. I asked him to print my letter in the IRA’s newspaper, which he refused to do.

In the letter, I called on the IRA to dump the ‘armed struggle’ and enter democratic politics. After McGuinness’ censorship of my letter, I had it published in the national press in February 1978 – it was effectively my resignation from the IRA and my own rejection of terrorism as a means of achieving political change.

When I participated in Peter Taylor’s “Families at War” documentary about my part in the IRA’s campaign of violence a month before my release in September of 1989, nobody in the IRA complained that I was dishonest or inaccurate. In fact, they queued up to work with Peter Taylor later.

When I published a Hot Press interview with Martin McGuinness in March of 1990 in which he begged for talks to end the IRA’s campaign, nobody complained that I was dishonest or inaccurate.

When my book about my time in the IRA and my rejection of violence was published in September of 1993 and became a bestseller, nobody in the IRA complained that I was dishonest or inaccurate – Martin McGuiness thought it was an excellent book.

In the 9 years that I have been blogging since 2017 about IRA matters in response to a challenge from the IRA’s [denied] Claudy bombings’ victims – when I ‘outed’ Pat Finucane Centre director Paul O’Connor as an IRA bomber, gunman and involved in the murder of IRA volunteer Jim O’Hagan, when I named the Claudy bomber(s) and the murderer of census collector Joanne Mathers – nobody in the IRA complained that I was dishonest or inaccurate.

Not a single legal letter came my way. Nor any private communications from members of the IRA. Silence.

They may have disliked my rejection of IRA terrorism and the language I chose to describe it, but there hasn’t been a single public or private complaint of inaccuracy.

It was a pleasure to help the innocent civilian victims of IRA terrorism recently in the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

I was a self-confessed IRA witness without a single previous public or private complaint against me of inaccuracy or of lying about my past.

The only proper response of any member of the Irish republican movement in England is abject remorse and repentance for an IRA campaign of mass-casualty anti-civilian terrorist bombings and shootings.

I once more express my own regret for my own acts of IRA terrorism.

Terrorist violence is never right and should never be celebrated or glorified, nor should IRA terrorists ever be celebrated or glorified.

It is unfortunate that Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair in 1999 granted secret administrative amnesties to unrepentant terrorists that erased their record of human rights atrocities and denied innocent victims of terrorism any possibility of gaining either justice or truth.

We should all hang our heads in shame that innocent civilian victims of IRA terrorism – whether the three in the London case just withdrawn or the victims of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings – have been left unsupported by the Irish and British governments.