Since the formal end of the Northern Ireland conflict, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, there has been an ongoing debate in Ireland and parts of academia about who ‘won’ the conflict. This is more than just a macho ‘we won, you lost’ type of contest. It goes to the heart of the role played by Britain’s intelligence services (primarily MI5 and MI6) in both fuelling the conflict and then helping to bring it to an end.
Broadly there are two camps.
The first camp…
Since the war began in 1970, only four British soldiers have been convicted of the offence of murder. All four were subsequently re-admitted to the army.
In Derry alone, the British army was responsible for the deaths of 35 civilians. Not one soldier was made answerable before a court of law. Not one was subject to any proper criminal investigation until after the Good Friday Agreement was signed and pressure began to mount for truth and justice
Joe McCann, a leading member of…
There was a trickle of dishonest and…
On 13 July, the new police chief in Northern Ireland, Simon Byrne, warned that a hard Brexit could 'create a vacuum which becomes a rally call and recruiting ground for dissident [Irish] republicans and clearly any rise in their popularity or their capability would be very serious'.
PN has been arguing for some time that the overriding priority for the peace movement in the Brexit debate is Ireland.
Preserving the rather shaky peace process in Ireland means preventing a…
Years ago, I would on occasion have this conversation with my mother. ‘I think British troops should not be in Northern Ireland, clearly the north of Ireland is part of the island of Ireland and it should be one country’.
She would answer: ‘Ah, but you see the UK are in Northern Ireland to protect the rights of the women there to obtain divorce and contraception.’ She honestly believed that, and I didn’t know enough about it to contradict her.
I remember thinking it wasn’t…
Karen Bradley, the British government minister in charge of…
‘Norn Iron’ is a colloquial, phonetic term for ‘Northern Ireland’ and there are certainly some ‘Norn Ironies’ about.
One is that the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) have done more for a united Ireland in the last couple of years than republicans have done in decades.
Another irony is just when more Catholics and even some Protestants…
As PN goes to press, the British government is putting enormous pressure on the Republic of Ireland and on the European Union to weaken the Northern Ireland ‘backstop’. Peace News believes this pressure should be resisted, and the British peace movement should lend its weight to supporting the backstop.
Whether you are for leaving the EU or…
Corrymeela Community, in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, is celebrating 50 years of peacemaking this year with a summer festival called Aperture – a space through which light travels (Friday 31 July to Sunday 2 August). These are almost exactly the same dates as Peace News Summer Camp (Thursday 30 July to Monday 3 August)!
The…
Peace News had recently moved its main office out of London, as part of a strategy of changing the balance between its alternativist and ‘constructivist’ coverage on the one hand, and its involvement in more mainstream politics, on the other. Nevertheless, the paper found itself sucked into the defence of a group of activists – some closely connected with PN – who were facing the possibility of years in prison.
Six anti-militarists busted
Six pacifists were arrested in…
Pleased as I was to see a quiz about Northern Ireland in the PN February edition, your sub-editing let you down on the cover by asking ‘Ireland: do you know your facts?’. Ireland includes two political jurisdictions; the Republic and Northern Ireland, and all the questions related to the North.
If you were including the whole island of Ireland then other facts worth bringing out include big cuts in services because Irish citizens and taxpayers…
Our main interest was whether there was a knowledge gap between the generations who lived through the last phase of significant military conflict in the north of Ireland (the 1970s and 1980s) and those who came afterwards.
The result was: yes and no.
The one respondent under 25 (an 18-year-old) had no knowledge of the conflict at all (but sufficient cynicism to get a respectable 14 points out of a possible maximum of 35).
Much to our surprise, the next lowest-scoring…
The December 2012 de Silva report on the assassination of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989 led prime minister David Cameron to concede that there had been ‘shocking levels of collusion’ by the security forces in the killing. Cameron said he was ‘deeply sorry’ to the Finucane family.
The brief flurry of attention in the British media made us at PN reflect on the general level of knowledge and ignorance of the conflict in British activist circles. So here is a poll…
A recently-declassified memo indicates that the British government gave British soldiers a ‘licence to kill’ in Northern Ireland. The memo records a meeting on 10 July 1972 between then-secretary of state for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, the top army commander in Northern Ireland, the deputy chief constable and senior civil servants.
The 10 July meeting discussed the army’s strategy in Northern Ireland, noting that Whitelaw would announce the government’s intention to carry on…
