On the day that Anne Maguire cut her own throat with an electric carving knife, January 18, 1980, her sister Mairead Corrigan was in her flat on the Cavehill Road, preparing for a three day trip to Cambodia, where she hoped to join Joan Baez and others in a symbolic march, bringing food supplies to refugees. She had that morning received her injections. A priest telephoned her around four in the afternoon to tell her of Anne's death. She went to the Maguire household.

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The real scandal of the arms crisis was not what Haughey did but in what was done to him and the other defendants.

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Part I: Mount Carmel Encounters

Peter Berry  was admitted to Mount Carmel nursing home in Dublin on September 27, 1969 for examination for an aortic clot.  He had suffered a number of momentary seizures around that time but had delayed his entry to hospital until suitable accommodation became available.  He was eventually accommodated with a private suite at Mount Carmel, which had an entrance through French windows from the gardens.

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The inside story of the most dramatic political crisis in Ireland's history.  Vincent Browne on how Charles Haughey became implicated in the arms plot, how exchequer funds were used to purchase arms for the IRA, and how the crisis erupted.

 

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Current official estimates of the IRA's strength are higher than earlier ones, while the guards demand a free hand.

In his book Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Sean MacStiofain writes nostalgically of his encounters with Greek Cypriots in EOKA whom he met in jail in England in the nineteen fifties, and of their discussions about the strategy of guerilla warfare. While MacStiofain himself ran the IRA very much along traditional lines, it does seem that his successors have absorbed many of the tactics set out by Grivas in his book, Guerilla Warfare, and to have added some new ones of their own.

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Tags: IRA, Northern IReland, H Blocks, Prisons

For the first time, a jourbalist writes about a visit to H Block in Long Kesh where over 400 republican prisoners are "on the blanket" demanding special category status. Add a comment

A UDA committee headed by Glenn Barr has drawn up plans for an independent Ulster incorporating a new constitution, a Bill of Rights and a phased British withdrawal.
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How investment patterns in Northern Ireland reinforce discrimination against Catholics. By Ed Maloney
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