North Korean Moments and Mandela Seconds

By AM Saturday, August 23, 2014

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John McDonagh (JM) and Sandy Boyer (SB) interview Anthony McIntyre (AM) via telephone from Drogheda, Co. Louth about the Boston College tapes and the arrest of Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams. Our thanks to the TPQ transcriber.

Radio Free Éireann
WBAI Radio 99.5 FM Pacifica Radio
New York City
10 May 2014


JM: I want to now introduce our next guest and we've been discussing about death threats.– now they come in many forms.  And one of the main forms that it comes through, particularly in Belfast or in Doire, is through wall murals. There are wall murals that are appearing all over West Belfast that says: “Boston Tapes Tout Anthony McIntyre”.  This is sending a clear message.  Even though Anthony McIntyre was with the project - he did the interviews - they're not mentioning anything about Brendan Hughes or Dolours Price. They're definitely zeroing in on Anthony McIntyre.

And even though we've been interviewing Anthony McIntyre about this project for years - and it's amazing to me because I listened to Anthony last Sunday on RTÉ, and then he did a show on the BBC in The Six Counties - we never asked him as a member of the IRA did he do an interview for The Belfast Project. And he said: Yes, he did. And Anthony, how did that interview go? Did you interview yourself or did you have someone interview you for the project?

AM: No, I had to have somebody of equivalent academic standing - and that means a PhD - interviewed me for the project. Somebody who had vast experience in considering, analysing the Northern conflict and had a very good grasp, at least in academic terms, of the written literature on the IRA and Sinn Féin and the history of the IRA and Sinn Féin. And he interviewed me for the project.

JM: Anthony, I want to get back to what we were talking about: the wall murals going up. How are you treating this? When you open up the newspapers and they're prominently showing the wall murals in a lot of the newspapers – it's all up on the internet stating: “The Boston Tape Tout Anthony McIntyre”. Can you go back to Belfast now any more?

AM: I don't go back to Belfast because the PSNI are said to be wanting to question me in relation to the withholding of information in respect of the Boston College tapes. I would probably not be safe to go back into Belfast because people like “Dodgy Danny” Morrison, Councillor J.J. Magee (Sinn Féin) and the former mayor of Doire Kevin, Kevin Campbell (Sinn Féin) have been labeling the programme a “touting programme”. 

“Dodgy Danny” Morrison has been calling me “Anthony McIntout”. Although there's a joke about Danny Morrison over here: that they Call him Radio 4. (because nobody listens to Radio 4.) I don’t really - I'm philosophical about these things. I know they're upping the ante. And it's to intimidate not just myself but to create an atmosphere as hostile as possible for the people who may have participated in the project, people who sympathised with them, people who tried to understand the project or gave it any support and also the family of Jean McConville.

It's an attempt to catch, cast a wide net and to catch everybody in it. And it's an accusation for intimidation. So, I've been through all this before with Sinn Féin and the IRA. They sought on numerous occasions to intimidate me and to say, John, as you can see by the fact that I'm talking to you now it's very, very interesting – it reveals that I have not been intimidated. But I will add to this: you see Danny Morrison is suspected in many circles, including Sinn Féin circles, of being a British "agent of influence" for many years. And one of the people organising the Sinn Féin press conference, heavily involved in it, Danny Morrison was accusing him in private for many years of also being a British agent. So these people who are organising press conferences or smearing the Boston College project are themselves subject to serious questioning.

Danny Morrison, is (laughs) I mean we call him “Dodgy Danny” because he is viewed with such suspicion in many circles. We – and he is himself accusing another guy: because he was associated with his own case ... when Morrison was arrested and later sentenced and later acquitted, Morrison accused somebody associated with that case of having been a long-time informer and gave out, gave that as the reason as to why he was so slow to nail Freddie Scappaticci when in fact he covered for Freddie Scappaticci.

So what we ... and this goes back to another point: Denis Donaldson once told an American journalist that myself and Tommy Gorman, a fellow Republican who worked with me in the Irish Republican Writers Group, Denis Donaldson actually complained to an American journalist, a well, prominent American journalist, that myself and Tommy Gorman were doing the work of the British.

So what we have here is a situation where people - who have themselves either had been informers or are strongly suspected of being informers - are spreading the mix in the mold that Denis, Denis Donaldson did.

So when people of this calibre, or lack of calibre, call me names I don’t, I certainly don't get insulted by it. I know it's a level of threat and Sinn Féin have a strategy of threat but I have faced it down before. And you don't get into these situations unless you're prepared to face it. It's big boys' rules. And you must take what comes.

SB: Anthony Explain to our American audience exactly why this accusing of “touting” or informing is so explosive and what traditionally happened to informers.

AM: Well, the IRA leadership have labelled people informers when … and after they labelled them informers they set up courts, probably run by Freddie Scappaticci - aka Stakeknife - a British agent. And I would that two British agents - the man who was P. O'Neill who was putting out the IRA's statement and justifying the killing, and Freddie Scappaticci, who was in charge of the security which led to the guy - that these two people acted in consort to kill, and to cover up, IRA Volunteers who were possibly not, may well not have been informers. And they were getting rid of those for the British. Now this came on the basis of findings by Freddie Scappaticci, and backed up by P.O'Neill, that these men were informers, these men and women were informers.

So within Republicanism, the Provisional IRA, anybody that's been accused of being an informer or has been found guilty by the IRA of being an informer have on occasion, on many occasions, been executed. And sometimes they've put them into exile. On other occasions they've not only executed them but they have disappeared them. And disappearing people was a policy that was initiated by the man who, the Pinochet-type character, who took over the leadership of the Belfast Brigade after Seamus Twomey in 1972. It's a very dangerous accusation to throw and it could lead to people, people being killed or people being harmed or people's lives being made very, very uncomfortable.

JM: You're listening to Radio Free Éireann and we're speaking with Anthony McIntyre who spent seventeen years of his life in Long Kesh prison as an IRA Volunteer. Anthony, we've been covering about you doing the interviews, recording them and like I said I was listening to RTÉ last Sunday and you described there to the presenter about the security that you took of getting these tapes to Boston, how you sent them on different planes in case the plane went down you – you had different copies – that you actually had other copies and got them over to Boston College.

Now The New York Times is reporting that Boston College has said “no mas” - they've thrown up their hands and they want to return the interviews back to the people who were interviewed. Now maybe you can explain how you got them to Boston? Do you have any idea how Boston is going to get them back to the people that were interviewed?

AM: Well, the, I got them over to Boston by a, by a pretty secure route. And I am of the view that there should be no attempt made by Boston to get any interviews back to people unless the people concerned - who might request that interviews be returned - reach an agreement in advance with Boston as to what should happen to those interviews. That should be an agreement between the interviewee and Boston College.  Now my problem with Boston's offer is that Boston College did this in response to two things: the criticism of it that it was taking and the flack that it was taking over the arrest of Gerry Adams; and, secondly, the criticism that a former Chair of the History Department threw it's way over the management of the project.  

Now Boston decided that the best PR, Boston College has decided that the best PR approach was to come out and say well, we're going to hand this back and that will be the end of it. And mea culpa - we regret our involvement in this blah, blah, blah.

What they have done is alert the PSNI, alert the British, to the fact that there's a window of opportunity for the British to come in and seize them before they hand them back and end up seizing even more materials!

If Boston College had been genuine in this they would have approached the interviewees privately and then made arrangements. But again, they're not interested in protecting the archive. They're not interested in privacy. They're not interested in confidentially.

And what I will, how I will demonstrate this: their attitude towards confidentiality was demonstrated once again by Jack Dunn, on Greater Boston Television when Jack Dunn, who is a PR man and who hates the project, and he said that he had read some of the transcripts. What right - what business had that man to read any transcript? Did any interviewee give him permission?

He was given this by Boston College to see if there was any way that he could use confidential interviews for his own nefarious ends which were about justifying the college's egregious position in trying to shaft myself, Ed Moloney and the interviewees who gave so generously and kindly of their time and who displayed remarkable courage in making these interviews available to begin with.

SB: Anthony, when you and Ed Moloney began this project the object was that future historians would be able to go back and get a richer understanding of what The Troubles were all about from the point of view of the people who actually did the fighting. That's not going to happen. It looks like it will never happen. How do you feel about that?

AM: well, I feel quite bad about it but I would advise everybody who's participated in the conflict, whether they be a Loyalist, a Republican, a member of the British state security apparatuses, to privately commit their experiences to record and put them in a safe place. Don't let universities handle them. Just make sure that you leave some record of your involvement otherwise it will be lost to history.

I've listened to people like Martin Mansergh, an academic, complaining in The Irish Times about myself and Ed Moloney that we shouldn't have been allowed to have carry out a project like this because it endangers the peace process. Well I'm sort of fed up with people saying that the peace process must be protected from this that and the other. 

It's time that academia, journalism, research, history is protected from the peace process. and it takes people to stand up and say that we are going to work to the best of our ability to produce knowledge regardless of the peace process.

JM: Anthony, one of the other reactions when Gerry Adams was released there was a wall mural up there in Belfast and it said: Our Leader. Visionary. Peacemaker. And they had signs: Our Gerry. Our Leader. And Suzanne Breen wrote that the Prime Minister of North Korea or their leader would be very jealous of the way the people are coming out and supporting there. They also had a poster of Gerry Adams with Nelson Mandela. Now, they're trying to equate the two. Nelson Mandela won his struggle. There's nobody in the ANC that’s going to gaol. Gerry Adams lost his struggle. He negotiated a treaty in 1998 and based on that negotiation he's been arrested for it. So they're trying to equate the two when one has nothing to do with the other. Mandela stuck by his principles. And he won his struggle. Adams didn't. And he's going to suffer the consequences of him losing the struggle and thinking that they could get away with whatever they did. They lost the thirty year struggle. They went in to administer British rule.

But how do you think the reaction to Gerry Adams, particularly up in Belfast, the wall murals – the Mandelas and the posters – and just Our Gerry. It just sounds very strange from an American point of view. You wouldn't say: Our Obama.. or our you might say Our President or something. But it's: Our Gerry.

AM: Oh, you're right. It's turned into a cult of personality. And there's a lot of sycophants about. And if you look at the photo of Martina Anderson. I mean Martina Anderson in her fifties. She's a member of the European Parliament. She looks … In one of those photographs, standing beside Martin McGuinness, she looks like a ten year old girl who has lost her daddy and is grief-stricken at the thought of having lost her daddy. It's this sort of cult-type mentality. 

And as regards Mandela – you know when the name Mandela is mentioned with, in association with Gerry Adams I never, ever think of Nelson. I tend to think of Winnie and the necklacing and that type of dark side of the South African struggle that the African National Congress were engaged in. I tend to think of that.

Now there’s more - one of the problems for Adams and Sinn Féin is that there are Republicans who depict him more as Pinochet than Mandela. And they think he is desperate to try and quell that dissent.

But in relation to the “North Korean Moment” that was experienced last weekend: I think that Adams himself is alert to the negative imagery that that tends to generate. I mean you put up a fascistic character like Bobby Storey up on a platform - and he looks remarkably like Reinhard Heydrich during the Nazi days - And you put somebody like that up on a platform there's a real air of fascistic menace that comes out.

And Adams, I have been told today, tweeted about taking down - he thanked the person who put up the, did the mural. Now the guy who did the mural's a talented wall, a talented wall artist. He's quite good at it. But he is so sycophantic towards Adams. And when Adams thanked him and then asked him to take down this wall mural and to replace it with something else it was an awful slap in the face. 

Most people get criticized for - I mean a cartoonist may be criticised, Martyn Turner may be criticised for example by Adams for doing a cartoon. our very own Brian Mór would have been criticised by Adams for doing cartoons that prevented him, sorry, presented him in a negative light. Now the wall mural has been criticised because he prevented him, sorry, presented it, presented him in a positive light. 

I mean, it's a case of brown-nosing and Adams has become embarrassed by it because I suspect that Americans and others are saying to him: 

Gerry, I mean big Storey and this sort of stuff that we're seeing over here - wall murals - it's all, its all North Korean stuff. That’s how it goes down with our people. We don't have a culture that seizes leader worship, this sort of obedience ... the elevation of the great leader, the deification of the leader, the glorification of the leader and the sort of demonising of his critics and opponents.

I don't think it rests well in any pluralist culture. So I believe Gerry Adams has decided to pull it back a wee bit, not so much that he wouldn't to use it to his advantage, but because he knows how it plays out in other areas.

JM: Well listen, Anthony, thanks for coming on. I have no doubt we're going to have you on in the weeks to come because this has not ended - particularly as you were saying the PSNI will try to short circuit getting these interviews from Boston College over to Ireland - and we'll be covering that. And thanks for coming on. And thanks for keeping Brian Mór's art alive on The Pensive Quill once a week ... as I call it now – Anthony, it's: “Cartoons From the Grave by Brian Mór Ó Baoighill”. Coming back!

AM: Absolutely! He was a fantastic man, a fantastic cartoonist.