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Showing posts with label Joe O'Connor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe O'Connor. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre  ✒ Twenty-two years ago this very day, we had just returned home from the BBC where myself and Tommy Gorman had been interviewed by David Dunseith on Talkback. 

The subject matter was the Provisional IRA killing of Joe O'Connor the previous Friday. That morning a joint piece by the two of us in the Irish News had laid the blame for the killing firmly at the door of the IRA. The evening before, in the offices of the paper, its editor had expressed concerns about our safety following publication. His fears would prove not to be groundless.

The Irish News piece led to the IRA issuing a denial. Like many later denials of other activities it had been responsible for this one had no substance and was blatantly false. By early afternoon the apprehensions of the Irish News editor began to prove well founded.

In our living room sat Brendan Hughes where he was being interviewed by a Boston journalist, Jim Dee. I looked out the window and said, here's the IRA. The journalist immediately said I know Bobby. It was a reference to one of two men about to ring the doorbell, Bobby Storey. I answered the door and invited them in. In the kitchen I offered them tea or coffee in the sure knowledge that I was going through the motion of a polite formality. They were there for neither coffee nor pleasantries. It was the calm before the storm. The night before I had drunk more than a few cups of Irish coffee in the home of Victor Notarantonio, an uncle of the slain man. Like the Irish News editor he too had concerns about safety. I suddenly wished I had remained sober and availed of the benefits of a clear and pain-free head.

Immediately the IRA figures raised the issue of the article in the Irish News. Storey, wearing a combat style jacket, tapped his shoulder to indicate rank - that it was the senior echelons of the IRA in our home and not some local who I might be tempted to tell to fuck off. They denied the IRA had any role in killing Joe O’Connor. My response was to ask them if not the IRA, then who. Storey nonchalantly but chillingly said I don't give a fuck who killed him but it wasn't us. I responded that in such circumstances he would hardly mind an investigation along the lines that Tommy Gorman and myself had called for.

That seemed to rile his colleague who assumed a menacing posture. He asked with more than a hint of menace are you looking an inquiry into the IRA? My response increased his anger: So the IRA did it. We faced up in the centre of the kitchen. He placed his forehead against mine although not violently, more like boxers do during the battle of wills before they step into the ring. My heavily pregnant partner - we would later marry – moved to intervene. Storey raised his hand in a calm down gesture, telling her not to worry about the standoff in front of her eyes, that we all knew each other from jail and understood the rules of the game. It was one of the lighter moments during what was a very tense affair. Yeah, this is how we conduct business in West Belfast, nothing to get excited over - that type of thing. 

When we both stepped back, the man who seconds earlier had his head pressed to mine said to my partner that she needn’t stand there like little Ms Innocent, a pregnant woman merely defending the father of her child, that she too had been up to her neck in maligning republicans online. She lit on him, telling him to learn how to turn on a computer before raising objections to matters that had appeared on the internet.

They left the house as quickly as they arrived, their parting shot a sarcastic dismissal  that I could inform the press that they had been by. I lifted the landline phone right beside the front door and said I’m ringing them now.

As much as I resent their calling to my home in what was an overt act of intimidation, Storey at least was courteous, almost as if this was a routine type of thing he had to do. He was assertive without being aggressive. I guess he felt he did not need to be given that he carried the authority of the IRA.

Later the Boston journalist would publicly state that he had heard a heated row from behind two closed doors but was unsure of what was said. 

I knew both men pretty well, having spent considerable time in their company over many years. I knew the calibre of the opposition on the day. I had made my bed so was prepared to lie in it. My wife just said she felt they were like the LA gangs she knew of in California. Not only did she take no nonsense from Storey’s colleague on the day, later when Sinn Fein assembled a mob outside our house when she was home alone she stepped into the garden and faced them down. We can never forget the neighbour from across the street who pushed her way through the mob, and stood alongside her in the garden, giving out spades about ganging up on a pregnant woman.

It's water under the bridge now although it irrevocably changed my relationship with the local Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein members, raising their animus towards me to a new level. There was the exception but most of them never spoke to me again. Given what has since come to pass, I can hardly say I miss most of them.

When I look back on those dark days in Springhill, I now wonder if anyone among the assembled mob reflects that all of their energy might just have been expended in protecting a British agent at the heart of Joe O’Connor’s killing. Up until recently I thought Christine was a supernatural car Stephen King wrote about. Now I think it is indicative of the spectre haunting the IRA.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

A Visit From The IRA

Anthony McIntyre ✒ Twenty-two years ago today in West Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate, the Provisional IRA carried out a shoot to kill operation. 

Its target was Joe O’Connor, a senior figure in the city’s Real IRA. O’Connor was killed as he sat unarmed in a car talking to a relative. His companion was unharmed. The killing was discriminate. The IRA got who it came for. To this day it has not admitted its role.

A few days later myself and Tommy Gorman wrote in the Irish News that it was a state killing, albeit one carried out by the Provisional IRA. Our reason for characterizing it as such was that Martin McGuinness at the time was on the army council that authorised the killing while simultaneously serving in the Stormont state administration as the education minister for the North.

That is not to say he was personally responsible. But the structural links between the IRA leadership and the Stormont state administration coupled with the corporate responsibility that cannot be evaded by individuals at the top of corporations made our suggestion that it was a state killing an arguable case.

In recent days, that assertion, now two decades old, has even more to buttress it.

The family of the late Joe O’Connor has launched a legal action against the office of the Police Ombudsman on the grounds that it allegedly failed to investigate the role of a person the family believes to have been a British state agent. The Ombudsman’s office was first requested in 2012 to examine the circumstances surrounding the killing and last year was asked to focus specifically on the alleged role of a person referred to as Agent Christine. The Irish News reported that Agent Christine was alleged to have been “one of the main protagonists” in the daylight execution. 

It was also reported by the paper that the solicitor representing the family, Michael Brentnall, had claimed that his office was in receipt of information:

that an RUC Special Branch asset was involved in the murder of Joseph O’Connor. We believe this information came to light as a result of the break in at Castlereagh Special Branch Offices in 2002. We are informed that the individual held the codename Christine … we are now aware that this individual rose to further prominence within the republican movement after the murder and subsequently was involved in serious criminality.

The legal firm went on to detail more accusations against the person.

Immediately after Joe O’Connor was killed, the Provisional IRA, Sinn Fein and the RUC all moved to close down any speculation as to what body might have been responsible. Within hours the RUC raided the offices of Republican Sinn Fein in what was a diversionary tactic. The IRA denied any culpability and offered its condolences to the dead man’s family - a deception tactic. From the mutual entanglement of shared interests both institutions were parents of a strategic subterfuge.

IRA leadership figures visited my home in a vain bid to coerce my silence on the matter. After briefing journalists with spin, Sinn Fein placed mobs outside my own home and that of my co-writer of the Irish News piece, Tommy Gorman.

At the inquest into Joe O’Connor’s death the coroner criticised the RUC for not having made a single arrest after the killing. The force was obviously not interested in investigating those behind it. Even though we would not have cooperated, it never once approached me or Tommy Gorman for the purpose of ascertaining who we had spoken to that enabled us to identify with certainty the organisation responsible. Contrast that with how the PSNI hared off in pursuit of the Boston College tapes, ostensibly as part of an investigation into another killing which, previously, it had shown no interest in.

The behaviour of both the Provisional Movement and the RUC around the killing of Joe O’Connor suggest that this was collusion on tour. While collusion is not an illusion, it is a term that causes confusion. There are some who think it means the state forces colluding only with the loyalist agencies.

The identity of the person alleged to be Agent Christine is an open secret in Ballymurphy and wider afield. He is said now to cut an isolated figure, with many of his closest erstwhile companions having concluded that he is a “wrong one”. Agent or not, he was party to:

  • the Sinn Fein led mob picketing of our homes
  • the distribution of leaflets which led to the PSNI arriving at our door with a warning that it considered us to be under threat
  • dissuading members of the community turning out in traditional community solidarity in July 2003 during an unlawful police search of our home
  • smearing us at public meetings in West Belfast

In my experience this is consistent with the modus operandi employed by other agents in their bid to protect the Provisional leadership from probing or scrutiny. It is not, however, conclusive proof.

Is this individual Agent Christine? Although, I continue to mull it over, I cannot be definitive about it. If he was working for the British state, he was hardly alone in that role within the ranks of the Ballymurphy IRA, as the RUC killing of Pearse Jordan in November 1992 would strongly suggest.

Two killings in the same street, in the same week but thirteen years apart, of a grandfather and his grandson, both homicides seemingly involving agents of the British state. That was a seriously loud fuck you to the supposed rule of law, in essence amounting to a brazen assertion of the rule of law enforcement. 

Thirty-five years after the first and twenty two after the second, the family of both slain men is resolute in its determination not to be sent round the Mulberry Bush. Instead through its legal action it has opted to unearth the poisonous roots at the bottom of the bush which have nutrified its noxious special branch.

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre

Agent Christine

Tarlach MacDhónaill writes on the Andersonstown Town News admission of IIRA culpability in the 2000 murder of Joseph O'Connor.

This week’s Andersonstown News has finally accepted and printed what Belfast Republicans have known for almost two decades, that the Provisional I.R.A. murdered Volunteer Joseph O’Connor.

It is not altogether surprising that such a ground-breaking shift from Provisional policy has passed-off largely unnoticed. The O’Connor family are in mourning following the tragic, sudden death of Jo Jo’s second youngest son Eamon (18) only weeks ago. Eamon’s death was preceded by that of his Grandmother Margaret’s just last year.

It is then understandable that the wider O’Connor family and their friends are presently consumed by grief. As Jo Jo was a member of the Real I.R.A which doesn’t exist anymore; it is unlikely that any statement from the group in relation to Jo Jo’s death will ever be carried in the media again.

The British-backed murder of I.R.A volunteer Joseph O’Connor arrived at an extremely delicate time for the Provisionals, during the initial stages of a sham-peace. The murder was planned and carried out with an immediate dual-aim, to execute an anti-agreement Republican while designating blame to other Anti-agreement Republicans in the process. From the very moment they shot him multiple times in the head and face, the death-squad busied themselves with the task of concealing their movement’s involvement in his murder.

Unfortunately for Sinn Féin, Ballymurphy is a small place. A seemingly arrogance-based brazenness allowed people to identify the death-squad who shot ‘Jo Jo’. This was followed by a number of mistakes being made during their escape. Logistical blunders aside, locals talk, and literally within minutes of Joseph O’Connor’s murder, his neighbours, his family, his friends and his comrades knew who was responsible, the Provisional I.R.A.

Immediately after the murder, local Sinn Féin spokespersons attempted to deflect blame onto other Republicans, they were assisted in their attempts by the RUC who raided the offices of Republican Sinn Féin, publicly citing Joe’s murder as their motive.

Within days the party’s accepted local mouthpiece “The Andersonstown news” also helped to raise the notion of an internal Republican feud by using ambiguous language to report on what the community knew to be facts. Even a year later the “Andersonstown news” continued to ply the idea of an internal Republican dispute as being responsible for the murder of Joseph O’Connor. Upon being challenged by members of Belfast 32CSM the paper’s editorial board smugly stated that their editorial line was ‘No I.R.A. involvement in the murder of Joseph O’Connor’, and that his death was the result of a ‘dissident feud’.

Joseph’s family friends and comrades were not alone in voicing their disgust at what the Provisional movement had done. Many well-known Republicans, including former life-sentence prisoner and blanket-man Anthony McIntyre and Maidstone escapee Tommy Gorman, added their voices to a steady stream of condemnation which naturally emanated from within the Republican base.

All of those who told the basic truth, for the simple sake of basic truth, faced immediate vilification for doing so, homes were picketed, vile abuse was spat at the direction of honest commentators, and one of the weapons used to attack them was the indisputable Sinn Féin alligned “Andersonstown news.”

A decade ago an opinion piece written by ‘Squinter’ criticising Gerry Adams appeared in the Andersonstown News. This story made international headlines because the Andersonstown News was then, as it is now, considered to be an organ of the Provisional movement and such internal criticism of Sinn Féin was unprecedented. When Gerry Adams was accused of forcing the paper’s editorial board to issue a grovelling, front-page apology to him, Sinn Féin’s critics went into overdrive. It is in this story that you will find evidence of the AndersontownNews’ links to and representation of Sinn Féin.

The magnitude therefore of the paper’s admission of I.R.A responsibility for Joe O’Connor’s murder poses a particular significance at this time.

Margaret O’Connor did not want revenge for her son’s death, all she asked was an admission of responsibility, perhaps an apology from those behind it. As a grieving mother, she lobbied Sinn Féin through Relatives for Justice and promised that as a republican, she would not pursue prosecutions, she kept that promise till her dying day.

Margaret O’Connor was denied this grace, she was offered nothing in return and sadly died last year in the very same turmoil that had been imposed upon her by a Provisional death-squad on Friday 13th of October 2000 outside her own home.

Perhaps the Andersons town News did not intend to accept that Jo Jo’s death was at the hands of the I.R.A. It has done so however and this simply cannot be ignored. The paper has gone out of its way over the years in publicizing its position that there is only one I.R.A, and that they are the Provisionals. Maybe it is an editorial oversight and maybe it is in preparation for something to come, maybe it is even a huge-leap forward in the pursuit of truth for victims of conflict.

Whatever the reasons questions now exist which demand answers. Why was Margaret O’Connor sent to her grave without an admission by Sinn Féin that the Provisional I.R.A had murdered her son?

Why has a media outlet, so closely and openly associated with Sinn Féin MLA Máirtín Ó Muilleoir challenged the leadership of Sinn Féin in this fashion?

Will Sinn Féin now tell the Republican people of Belfast the truth and apologise for the lies they told them in 2000 and ever since?

Will all of those who received Provisional death threats for telling the truth about Joseph O’Connor’s murder now be pardoned by the Army Council?

Or, Will Squinter return next Wednesday and apologise for making the biggest blunder since ‘they haven’t gone away you know’?

Provos: “We Killed Jo Jo”

With a new spotlight being shown on the bullying and intimidation practiced by Sinn Fein, we remind our readers that this behaviour is nothing new.

It is always right to expose bullies and thugs.

Sinn Fein, like other bullies and abusers, survives with the complicity of silence, whether it is politically motivated - to "protect the peace process" - or via intimidation.

Abusers survive by isolating the abused. The silence surrounding the experience enables and perpetuates the isolation. "Gas-lighting" is a contemporary term applied to the tactic: the victim is made to be the one with the problem, crazy, exaggerating, nothing to see here...an isolated case of a bitter misfit. Whisper campaigns are a form of abuse and gas-lighting. Those on the outside believe the whispers and contribute to the isolation of the victim.

When individual people now come forward with their experience, we must support them, and help amplify their experience through validation in sharing our own similar experience. They are not alone. It happened to others. It happened to us. It will keep happening. Victims are doing the right thing in speaking out.

We must also keep in mind the larger picture; this is not just an abuse of individuals in the party, or in the movement, in the community, or of those who disagree with the party. This is an abuse of society.

Originally published in 2014, we believe this article by Carrie Twomey is worth revisiting, in light of the ongoing exposure of Sinn Fein bullying within the party .

Republicanism, especially as it hoovers up young people who are only beginning in politics, suffers from goldfish syndrome in its short-term memory of what came before. The lies of the leaders are accepted blindly and forgotten. What was done to others can come as a shock to those who perhaps previously participated in unthinkingly repeating slander unquestioningly.

This is the value of gas-lighting and isolation for the abuser: it is only when that abuse comes to your own door that you really see it for what it is. Until then, it's just the party line. And what is the harm in that?

The Bare Face of Fascism 


This Sunday’s papers made for difficult reading. Much of the news coverage of Máiría Cahill’s case has been both invigorating and hard to bear. It is wonderful to see such plain spoken audacity finally get both heard and due recognition. The requirements of the processing of peace meant that challenging voices have been too long silenced and vilified. Censorship, self or otherwise, and a deliberate averting of the public eye was the rule rather than the exception. This allowed the fascistic monster in our midst to morph and take on a new form rather than disappear. All for the sake of peace, a peace without justice or principle, and increasingly, without meaning.

Other aspects of the Cahill commentary and information relayed is personally challenging, as what is discussed is so similar to my own experience. I understand fully and painfully what it means when Máiría, speaking of the way she has been treated by Sinn Fein, says it has re-traumatised her: it shocks me, because it is forcing me to confront the plain fact of my own trauma.

You get through crisis because you have to. It is what it is. You don’t wallow or think of yourself as a victim; you take responsibility for your life and you do what needs done. So to think of the last few years of my life as traumatic is not easy for me. But reading about Mairia’s fear, tears, and anger, and knowing how intense everything she is going through right now is shakes me and forces me to name my trauma for what it was. Saying that the last few years of my life has been a nightmare is easy – it is a way to both acknowledge and dismiss how much it hurt. To accept that I have been traumatized is something altogether different. To see a mirror of my experience so readily accepted in the media as traumatic, and horrible, and cruel is shocking. Because it means what I have had to deal with is also cruel, and horrible, and traumatic.

At one point it got so bad I went to my GP begging for help. I stopped sleeping out of fear, was up all night every night. A monster had taken over my life. I suffered from severe depression and exhibited all the hallmarks of PTSD except that the TS was never fully P, and still isn’t to this day. I was prescribed Prozac which helped tremendously and availed of counselling which was even more helpful and for which I am extremely grateful.

Because my experience is political it is hard to explain or express emotionally. Traditionally, we are supposed to be unemotional, or at least, hold emotion back from politics; the rules of the game are that it gets dirty and low, and the only way to win on that is to never let them see you cry. You have to take it on the chin and move on.

My experience, however, while rooted in politics is not unemotional nor without consequences. For speaking out against Sinn Fein, I have been traumatized. Vilified, intimidated, and threatened, I have lived in fear and under surveillance. I do not have a private life; my life with my husband is an open book as we have no sense of privacy and know that anything can be used against us at any time.

It first began in earnest in the wake of the IRA’s murder of Joe O’Connor, where I was subjected to a picket of my home, new in a foreign country with no family and few friends, six months pregnant. I had been a union organizer and was no stranger to pickets, although picketing a home in the dark of night was unusual. I faced the mob with my back straight. I named my daughter Truth in honour of our defence of it.

And that is what I, and my husband, had done. We had spoken the truth. And we continued to speak the truth, no matter how difficult or how scary it was. And we highlighted the truths the processors of peace wanted buried: that fear and intimidation was being used to impose an imperfect peace that would never last because its foundation was as false and hollow as the lies being used to uphold it were.

For 8 years we published The Blanket, and were hated, attacked, and smeared for doing so. On the Slugger O'Toole website, I helped expose the terrible lie at heart of the 1981 Hunger Strike because I refused to be silent, and refused to stop asking questions.

Alongside this, the oral history of the Belfast Project was being collected by my husband. Others, too, refused to be silent, and understood the importance of leaving a record of their truth. Given what we faced for what we published in The Blanket, we knew the danger his taking this project on entailed. We thought the institution sponsoring the project appreciated the risk too, but found out to great cost that they only cared about their own financial risk.

When we moved south we thought we were closing a chapter in our lives. We wound down The Blanket and attempted to adjust to a new life. The attack on our neighbour’s home upon the publication of Voices From the Grave reminded us that our new life was still our life. My husband was under threat; Bobby Storey thundered about the IRA code in speeches and the Andersonstown News put it on the front page to reinforce the message.

The arrival of the first subpoena of the Belfast Project truly upended our lives. The sustained intimidation and character assassination that was conducted by Sinn Fein was unrelenting. And it was cruel. They came at us from every angle, including my husband’s own union, seeking every opportunity to undermine and discredit him, all in order to protect their leader, Gerry Adams. They want to break you, to place you under so much pressure and strain that you crack.

Unfortunately for Sinn Fein we had been living, as my husband often described it, at the bottom of the ocean for so long because of the sustained hate campaign Sinn Fein waged against us, we had become so well acclimatised to intense pressure that it was normal.

But what I am faced with today is that what we went through and what we have faced is not normal, and should never be normal. What Máiría Cahill, and the McCartney Sisters, and the Quinns, and the Raffertys, the Donnellys, the Perrys, the Notorantonios and O’Connors, the Kearneys, the Bennetts, and far too many more, have gone through and are going through is not normal.

It is not normal to be afraid to answer the phone or open your door. But I am. Every time a little surge of fear, a small question, is present. I answer it anyway, but the fear never leaves.

Like Máiría Cahill, I have reported online threats to the Gardai. Like Máiría Cahill, I have no faith or trust in the judicial system in the north. Months after I had reported the online death threat made against me to the Gardai, my husband’s judicial review of the subpoenas took place in the north. It was a disappointing and expensive farce. It was supposed to review the impact of the subpoenas on our safety. It was an exercise in the PSNI self-justifying itself. They had no knowledge of any of our contact with the Gardai. Why would they risk their subpoena case in acknowledging the reality of the threat we faced? Of course they were always going to say they had no knowledge of anything. To admit we were at risk because of their actions would mean an end to their fishing expedition. Our lives didn’t matter and mean little to the machinations of the state.

Like Máiría Cahill, I know the fear of going to Belfast in the wake of a Sinn Fein rally. The weekend of Adams’ arrest, when ‘Boston College Informer Republican McIntyre’ went up on the walls and Bobby Storey thundered about not having gone away to remind everyone else to keep their mouths shut, when the cultish mural of abject adoration went up and the online chorus sung that people should ‘direct their anger at the touts’, I was due to be in Belfast for the annual Brendan Hughes Memorial Lecture. I am on the Family and Friends of Brendan Hughes Committee, along with Ivor Bell, Paddy Joe Rice, Danny McBearty, and Gerard Hodgins; Gerry Conlon was also on our committee before he died and was instrumental in organizing this year’s event. Clare Daly and Gareth Peirce were due to speak in West Belfast. I had a responsibility to be there. Bell, who had been charged before Adams’ arrest, was going – I could hardly not show up. But I was terrified. I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life. I swallowed my fear and I got on the train, but I will never forget how scared I was, and when I saw the graffiti on the walls I knew I was right to be afraid.


I have not even scratched the surface of what I have gone through – these few examples are just the first that come to mind, but leave me feeling I have done an inadequate job of explaining what we, and those like Máiría who challenge the protected species that is Sinn Fein, face, and the emotional impact it has on us.

Like Máiría, I deeply understand the need to be believed, to be told, you are right, you are not crazy, you are not paranoid, you are not bitter, or a dissident, or out to get Gerry Adams or undermine the peace process, you are telling the truth, this did happen, and it was wrong. This is the beating heart of the desperate need of a truth process, for the ending of the conflict has meant too many victims have been denied even the basic dignity of acknowledgment and validation of their experience.

My family do not deserve to live through the fear of the threats we face for having dared to document history. No family does.

The bottom line is that the peace process has never been about peace. It has always been about protecting the British state at the expense of the people and it still is. Anything that challenges that or threatens to expose the real cost of what is being peddled is a threat to that state and treated as such. Nevermind if it is a victim of rape, or a child, or the family of someone brutually murdered, or a historian, or a journalist or just someone who has a sense of justice and outrage and dares to express it when wronged. The state's dirty secrets are worth more than all of us put together and they will do anything to protect them.

It is not the Mary Lou McDonalds who are the new face of Sinn Fein. Instead, it is the children who have come of age between peace and conflict. This is what Mairia Cahill symbolizes: those younger people who have grown up in the peace process, who have been gifted the promise of normality, who should remain untainted by the Troubles and have every right to demand to be so.

The Mary Lous of Sinn Fein want to continue with the corrupted legacy of power and control that the conflict gave to their leaders. The true future lay with those who say, “Enough” and speak out because it is the right thing to do. Stop traumatizing us. It is time for true and actual change, and those who face the future with courage and openness will be the ones who achieve it. The others will only deliver more of the same old lies and deceit, and with them the dirty war will continue on, business as usual.


See also: Killing Joe O'Connor


Sinn Fein Bullying: A Reminder Of The Face Of Fascism

Ciaran Cunningham recalls the Provisional IRA slaying of his friend Joe O'Connor in Ballymurphy 15 years ago tomorrow.


IRA Volunteer Joe O'Connor

15 Years On. Joe O’Connor. No Need For An Admission

Today, on the 13th anniversary of IRA volunteer Joe O'Connor being gunned down by Stormont militia men, TPQ features this piece by guest writer Carrie Twomey. It was originally published to mark the 10th anniversary of his killing on Slugger O'Toole, under her pen-name, Rusty Nail, and is an article that bears repeating. It is hard to believe that Joe was not taken out on the orders of his MP, but all we have gotten on that was more lies.

Killing Joe O’Connor

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