‘The Good Old IRA’

Ed Moloney with a further piece on the ongoing discussion about the IRA of the 1920s. It featured in The Broken Elbow.


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Funny the tricks memory can play on people.

In a post yesterday dealing with Gerry Adams’ recent claim that the IRA had ‘disappeared’ an estimated 200 alleged informers during the Anglo-Irish war, and that the modern IRA had thus behaved no differently or more barbarously than the heroic founders of the Irish state, I made reference to a pamphlet called ‘The Good Old IRA’ which had been written by Danny Morrison.

A reader then wrote in to correct me, saying that it wasn’t Morrison who wrote the pamphlet but ‘Mick Timoney’ the late editor of An Phoblacht-Republican News, the republican weekly. When I posted the correction another reader wrote to say, no, I was wrong, it was Morrison who wrote the pamphlet, but it had been inspired by a famous editorial written by AP-RN editor, Mick Timothy, not Timoney, which was also reprinted in ‘The Good Old IRA’ pamphlet.

So a bit of checking was clearly called for and courtesy of the political archive compiled by the people at Cedar Lounge Revolution, this morning I was able to track down a copy of ‘The Good Old IRA’ and sure enough it was published by the Sinn Fein Publicity Department in 1985, then headed by one D. Morrison, and it reproduced the Mick Timothy editorial which had given rise to the pamphlet.

An introduction to the pamphlet carried no byline but there is no doubt in my mind that it had been penned by Danny Morrison. How do I know? Well, no-one else would write a sentence like this and then show his face in public:

Even if these operations are shocking revelations to those who have a romantic notion of the past then the risk of their disillusionment is worth the price of finally exposing the hypocrisy of those in the establishment who rest self-righteously on the rewards of those who in yesteryear’s freedom struggle made the supreme sacrifice.

Whew!

The other interesting snippet derived from the pamphlet is that Gerry Adams clearly borrowed heavily from Mick Timothy’s editorial both for his blog post on the old IRA and his speech in New York at a fund-raising dinner last week.

Anyway here is the pamphlet which makes interesting reading, Danny Morrison’s murderous assault on the English language notwithstanding.

2 comments:

  1. Danny Morrison were are you , Sinn Fein are up to their necks in as big a sex scandal as what happened the catholic church and when they need their most ferocious attack dog he has gone awol ????

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  2. Boyne Rover,

    he is very quiet on this one. He is usually at the front smearing.

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