The Broken Elbow

From the outset of the affair over the Boston College archives one aspect of the business has puzzled me and that was the apparent failure or refusal of the Obama Department of Justice (DoJ) to realise that the PSNI subpoeanas had the potential to cause big problems for one of the US’ few positive foreign policy successes in recent years (as opposed to negative successes like winning a war in Iraq at the cost of alienating and angering half the world).

It is, I would submit, undeniable that the peace process in Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement that it produced were in large measure the result of direct US involvement in Northern Ireland, firstly by the Clinton White House which broke the ice by giving Gerry Adams a visa to visit New York and then by the Bush administration, whose ambassador to the process, Mitchel Reiss arguably forced Adams and the Provos to complete IRA decommissioning, thus paving the way for the power-sharing, DUP-Sinn Fein government that currently sits at Stormont. Without these efforts it is very questionable that the process could have succeeded.

So why was the Obama DoJ, the Attorney-General, Eric Holder and the US Attorney’s office in Massachusetts so uncritically bent on going down a road that a few moments of due diligence would have revealed was littered with political tank traps that could quite readily destroy or seriously harm a project that American diplomats and politician were justifiably proud of, a project that set a positive example elsewhere in the troubled world that America polices?

After all we have all known since at least 2002 that any serious probe of the disappearance of Jean McConville would lead back to Gerry Adams, the principal architect and instigator of the IRA’s journey out of war but also the man, according to Brendan Hughes, who gave the order to disappear the alleged British Army spy. A threat to Adams, the Kim Il Sung of the Provos, is by extension a threat to the process. And to those who would say that the British would never countenance such a move I ask: well then why have they persisted with the subpoenas?

And it has also been evident since 2010 that if the British finally do shrink from prosecuting Adams, which is of course very possible, then there are others in the wings all too ready to take on the task. One of those is ex-Chief Superintendent Norman Baxter, the PSNI’s former liaison with those nice fellows in MI5, who  publicly called for Adams’ prosecution for war crimes in 2010 and failing that  endorsed Helen McKendry’s threat to sue Adams in a civil court for her mother’s murder and secret burial.

Indeed there are reasons to suspect Baxter’s hidden hand at work somewhere in this whole business and that a civil action was always the real if hidden goal of the action. He was the senior detective in the failed Omagh bomb trials which ended when the families, frustrated at the failure of criminal prosecutions, successfully took a civil case against the chief suspects. Is it beyond the bounds of credence that this subpoena effort had its genesis in his Omagh experience and the knowledge that if criminal proceedings fail or never materialise there is the alternative of a civil action against Adams, a person whom Baxter makes no secret of loathing?

Baxter knows that in a civil case the standard of proof is much less rigorous than for criminal trials: ‘on the balance of probabilities’ as opposed to ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’, a very telling advantage in a case that would be reliant almost entirely on peoples’ ancient recollections. And he knows that in all the important ways, for instance evidence would be presented in court by police witnesses, the proceedings would differ from a criminal prosecution only in the punishment available to the court. And if you don’t believe that, go ask O J Simpson.

Assuming the DoJ did its due diligence – and I am not assuming that it did – all this would have been quickly apparent to Eric Holder’s people but notwithstanding the risk that Obama’s White House could be remembered, at least in Ireland, for undoing all the good that Clinton and Bush did, it perservered. And not just perservered but pursued the case relentlessly even when opportunities to retire gracefully presented themselves (as with the death of Dolours Price).

One possible explanation of why the Obama administration has acted so evidently against US’ foreign policy interests by pursuing the BC tapes has emerged in the last fortnight or so with the chilling stories of the DoJ’s pursuit of the American news media for doing its job, i.e. unearthing government secrets and telling the public.

First there was the revelation that the DoJ had secretly acquired the work, home and cell phone records of some twenty journalists at the Associated Press in an effort to trace the leaker of a story that the government was planning to make public anyway, that it had, with the help of an agent, sabotaged a plot by Al Qaeda in Yemen to bomb a US-bound aircraft.

The government complained that the story endangered the life of its agent but it was going to do that itself by boasting about its achievement, something that automatically would have alerted Al Qaeda to the possible presence of a traitor in its ranks. (Ask the IRA: whenever a plot is interdicted in such a way the automatic assumption is that it was betrayed internally)

Then in the last day or so we have learned that in 2010 the same DoJ used a search warrant to acquire the email and phone records of a Fox News reporter, James Rosen in pursuit of a leaker who told him….now hold your breath….that North Korea might respond to new UN sanctions with more nuclear tests. Now even I, whose knowledge of North Korea is confined to writing stories about some dodgy bank notes that circulated in Ireland a while back by people not a mile away from the current leadership of the Irish Labour Party, could have written that story but nonetheless the brave folk in DoJ pursued Mr Rosen undaunted.

The worst aspect of the story however is that in order, it seems, to avoid a court challenge to the search warrant the DoJ accused Rosen of being a co-conspirator of the leaker and had aided and abetted the alleged breach of security. What Rosen did is what every journalist does, or, if they have any sense of self-worth, what they should do, which is to encourage holders of secrets to let them go.

The Obama DoJ’s action effectively threatens to criminalise the media in an unprecedented way. Obama had already, pre-Rosen, chalked up the worst record since Richard Nixon of pursuing journalists who had gotten hold of government secrets and leakers who provided them. But arguably Obama is worse. With Nixon you got what you expected and at least in his case he was fighting for his own survival. Obama, he of “Change We Can Believe In” and “Yes, We can”, was supposed to be different but now the hypocrisy (or is it cowardice, as in the act of a Black President seeking to assure the White establishment of his trustworthiness?) is breaking through, becoming visible even to his most zealous supporters.

The action against Rosen unquestionably pushes Obama ahead of Nixon in the creepy president stakes but it also sets the stage in a very convenient way for the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, if or when he is extradited from Sweden, via the UK, to the US. Assuming Bradley Manning is convicted of the spying charges he faces then Assange could, like Rosen, be accused of aiding and abetting Manning’s treachery. That compelling case is outlined here.

Which brings me back to the Boston College case. I am not arguing that it is on the same level as Wikileaks or the AP and Rosen cases but it does strike me that a DoJ in hot pursuit of Wikileaks, that is determined to bring Assange to his knees and, with threats and intimidation, to plug for evermore leaks from government – and in the process is ready to alienate what is normally a tame, well-behaved media and outrage both left and right -  is more likely than not to take a very uncompromising line in any legal action it is involved in which undermines the ability of non-government agencies, like Boston College, to claim the right of confidentiality. Even more so if the foreign government behind the action is one the US is dependent on to send Assange to Sweden and thus to a federal court.

And if all that implies a willingness to do damage to something like the Irish peace process then so be it. As the man said “Yes, We Can”.

Following the recent disclosures from Margaret Thatcher’s private papers compiled during the 1981 IRA hunger strike while she was Britain’s prime minister, TheBrokenElbow.com asked Richard O’Rawe to assess the importance of what has been revealed and to recall how he got involved in this lengthy but pivotal controversy over a key moment in the Provisional IRA’s history:

The Rock Bar on Belfast’s Falls Road was the place to be on a Saturday afternoon if you’ve a few pounds in your pocket and a penchant for the horses.  I was at the bar on just such a day, buying our company another round of drinks (my generosity was boundless) when my cousin approached me.  After some small talk, he asked if I would like to participate in an oral history project.  He went on to explain that the purpose of the project was to record for posterity, the participant’s role in the war against the British.

Richard O’Rawe, IRA public relations officer in Long Kesh during the 1981 hunger strike

My initial reaction was negative and that was where the matter stayed for months.  But a seed had been planted.  Why not, I thought, give my testimony?   After all, it would not be published until after my death and hopefully that would be in the distant future.  Moreover, I would not be identifying comrades or referring to specific operations.

During the 1981 IRA/INLA hunger strike, I had been one of the IRA prison leaders and since my release from prison in 1983 I had told quite a few people that I felt the IRA leadership had mishandled the hunger strike.  But did I want to put that criticism on the record?  No.  Yet something drove me on to do the interviews.  Perhaps, unconsciously, I wanted to get the story out, as I knew it to be.  After all, ten of my comrades and friends had died horrible deaths, and the last six hunger strikers, in my opinion, should not have died at all.

Anthony McIntyre, who we all knew as Mackers, was the researcher and we began the sessions at the start of 2001.  We slowly built up to the period of the hunger strike.  I was still resisting going over the top and telling my version of what happened during that awful period.

In the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, the public relations officer of the IRA prisoners was charged with drafting press statements and advising the prison O.C. on policy. Such was the case when, at the start of the 1981 hunger strike, I became the IRA prison PRO. While in that role, I became Bik McFarlane’s closest confidante (Bik had been O.C. of the IRA prisoners). Consequently, I had intimate knowledge of the hunger strike.

Mackers and I went through the deaths of our first four comrades: Bobby Sands MP., Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, and Patsy O’Hara.

The ten Republican hunger strikers who died during the 1981 protest. O’Rawe says the last six could have lived had the deal he and prison OC Brendan McFarlane accepted been endorsed by the committee which ran the protest from outside the jail. L to r: Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McIlwee, Michael Devine.

But when we got to Joe McDonnell’s death, I broke down. Perhaps it was frustration. Perhaps it was because I had known Joe from before our time in the H-Blocks and had regarded him as a good friend. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t understand how things had reached the stage where he had had to die – especially since Bik McFarlane and I had accepted an offer from the British which should have honourably ended the hunger strike.

I think it was the mere mention of Joe’s name in the context of historical accuracy which triggered the opening of the floodgates: from that point on, there was no holding back. I wanted to tell the truth as I knew it, of what happened at the time of Joe’s death. And so Mackers recorded my story of what happened in July 1981, how I believed senior figures outside the jail had killed off a proposal that would have handed the hunger strikers a famous victory over Margaret Thatcher and saved six of our comrades’ lives.

Afterwards I felt a burning urge to do more than that. The Boston College tape would stay secret for many years but I now wanted the world to know what I knew; I wanted those republican leaders on the outside, who took the decisions that I believe doomed six of my comrades to horrible deaths, to answer for their actions.

And so I wrote my first book, Blanketmen, in which I said that the British government had made an offer to end the hunger strike in the days before the fifth hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, died.  (At the request of those involved in creating the archive I did not reveal Boston College’s role in my journey to writing the book) I added that the offer, communicated to Bik McFarlane during a prison visit, had been accepted by Bik and myself because it meant we could end the fast with honour. And I described how a committee, headed by Gerry Adams, had rejected this offer, despite the prison leadership having endorsed it. The message came in a terse comm smuggled into the jail which said that he was ‘surprised’ that we had accepted the offer and that it did not validate the loss of the first four hunger strikers’ lives.

Gerry Adams headed the committee which O’Rawe says rejected the British offer.

I can sum up in a single sentence the question my book posed to Gerry Adams and his colleagues on the committee: Why had they turned down a deal that we, the prisoners’ leaders, had approved and which would have saved the lives of six of our comrades?

The book’s publication caused ructions, with defenders of the committee lining up in the media to attack me.  Ed Moloney had advised me against publication, saying that I would be savaged those who supported the Gerry Adams/Sinn Féin leadership.  He had been right.  But I stood firm behind what I knew to be true.  Simply put, I had nowhere else to go.

From the start, those shouting the loudest in defence of the committee, principally Bik and Danny Morrison, were in opposite corners.  While Bik publicly said there had been no British offer ‘whatsoever’, Danny, a committee member, said there had been an offer and it ‘…was a better offer than that which the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace [a body which tried to mediate between the parties] believed they had secured.’  These two positions are irreconcilable and indicative of the malaise that infected the committee’s position.  Of fundamental importance is Danny’s contention that the prison leadership and the hunger strikers ran the fast, and not the committee.  We’ll come back to that.

For eight years now the battle for the truth about the 1981 hunger strike has raged.  I have never altered a word of my account of what happened as I saw it in the H Blocks that awful July of 1981.  In fact, I reiterated and expanded upon my position in my second book Afterlives in 2010.

One by one, my opponents dropped off until only Danny Morrison and I were left.  The evidence mounted in my favour: in 2010, a journalist secured a Freedom of Information request and received a copy of a draft 1981 statement from the British Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, in which he outlined the offer.

Also in 2010, Brendan Duddy, the man who acted as intermediary between the British and the committee, authenticated the offer and said that the committee had sent word back to the British that ‘More was needed.’   Then, in 2011, with the publication of the thirty-year government papers and Brendan Duddy’s private records of the exchanges between the parties, and in the face of overwhelming evidence, Danny altered his position and said that there had not been an offer after all.

The irony in this whole saga is that it is Maggie Thatcher, speaking from beyond the grave, who has now proved to be the decisive voice.   Upon her death in April 2013, her private papers were published and they showed that the hunger strikers – by the force of their sheer courage – had broken her resolve.  Amongst her documents is a copy of a letter that is also in the Brendan Duddy files (dated 11.30pm 6 July 1981) entitled HUNGER STRIKE: MESSAGE TO BE SENT THROUGH THE CHANNEL .   The substance of the offer is outlined in this message.  Notably, the message contains amendments to the offer in Margaret Thatcher’s own hand-writing.  Undoubtedly Thatcher’s amendments would have been incorporated in the final text that was sent to the committee (minus her hand-written notes, of course).  The question therefore arises: why would Thatcher bother to amend a text if she never intended it to be read by those with whom her government were negotiating?   At the end of this message there is a very telling paragraph:

‘If we receive a satisfactory response to this proposal by 9.00am on Tuesday 7 July, [a day before Joe McDonnell died] we shall be prepared to provide you [the committee] with an advanced text of the full statement [SOS Atkins’ statement announcing the new prison regime].’ Full text of statement with Thatcher’s written amendments:

So, if the committee had told the British by 9.00am on Tuesday 7 July that they accepted their offer, the choreography would have been kick-started: the British would have shown the committee Atkins’ statement; the committee would have been obliged under the agreement to ‘advise’ the hunger strikers to end their fast (which I believe they would have done); Atkins’ statement would have been released; Joe McDonnell and the five brave hunger strikers that died after him, would have survived the fast.

The committee’s reply to the British offer was nothing if not stark: ‘The position outlined by you is not sufficient to achieve this [an end to the hunger strike].’

So the committee rejected the offer and Joe McDonnell and the five heroes who perished in his wake, followed to needlessly early graves.

Brendan Duddy – The Derry-based intermediary who said of his efforts to get a hunger strike deal: “The British are asking for their plan to be accepted.  ‘A’ won’t move.”

What is striking in both the Duddy and Thatcher papers is that the prisoners have no input into what was or was not acceptable and if these papers demonstrate anything it is that Gerry Adams and those around him had absolute control over the hunger strike.  Neither the prison leadership, nor the hunger strikers, were ever shown any of these communications between the committee and the Brits.  In fact, it was not until the 2009 Freedom of Information revelation, that this writer became aware that the British were prepared to release a statement from their Secretary of State containing the offer.

At the conclusion of the negotiations, on 20 July 1981, a frustrated and weary Brendan Duddy observed: ‘The British are asking for their plan to be accepted.  ‘A’ won’t move.’  I wonder if this is the same ‘A’ who went into the hunger strikers nine days later (29 July 1981) and told those courageous men that ‘…there was no deal on the table from the Brits, no movement of any sort.’  I wonder what type of man could look those great men in the eye and not even blink while he proffered such an abominable lie?

‘A’ knows who he is. Does he have the courage to stand forward and explain just why he turned down Margaret Thatcher’s offer and why six more of his comrades had to die?

Margaret Thatcher’s private papers show that a deal was offered but rejected. According to O’Rawe, the dealings between Thatcher’s office and the committee were kept hidden from the prisoners.

In the meantime the Thatcher archive confirms the truth of what happened in July 1981: there was a deal and it was the deal that myself and Bik McFarlane accepted but which the committee threw out.

Press release from Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre on today’s decision by the Supreme Court not to hear their challenge to the PSNI/Department of Justice subpeonas on Boston College:

The US Supreme Court today rejected a request from lawyers acting on behalf of Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre to hear their appeal against a lower court’s refusal to grant them standing in legal efforts to resist an attempt by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to gain access to IRA interviews archived at Boston College.

We began this fight almost exactly two years ago and all along the campaign has run on two tracks, one legal, the other political. The legal track has almost come to an end but the political campaign continues.

In recent weeks the United States government has been made aware of just how damaging to the political situation in Northern Ireland these interviews could be and how this PSNI request has both dubious motives and derives from a broader failure of the parties in the North to agree on a way to deal with the past in such a way as to allow the future to begin.

A few days ago the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Robert Menendez issued a statement in the form of a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry whose significance has gone largely unnoticed by the media. In that letter he referred to the United States’ role as “a steward” of the peace process in Northern Ireland while noting the potential of this PSNI action to “re-open fresh wounds and threaten the success of the Good Friday Accords”.

Addressing Secretary Kerry directly he continued: “…I encourage you to raise the potential political implications of this request with your counterparts in the United Kingdom and under any circumstance the United States should review whatever materials are shared carefully to ensure that their provision does not undermine the United States’ essential interest in the progress achieved by the people of Northern Ireland.”

We warmly welcomed Senator Menendez’ letter and hope and trust that Secretary Kerry will in the coming days act on his wise and well-informed advice.

This is a very disappointing decision by the Supreme Court but we wish to express our deeply felt gratitude to all those who were involved in the legal campaign, principally our attorneys Eamonn Dornan, JJ Cotter, Jonathan Albano who laboured long and hard in a tenacious and skilled legal battle against the combined legal forces of two governments.

They were ably and skillfully assisted by a large number of lawyer colleagues, including members of the ACLU of Massachusetts as well as Cliff Sloan, Bob McDonnell of Bingham McCutcheon, Sarah Wunsch, John Foley, Matt Seagal of the ACLU, Kevin Winters of Belfast, Peter Kissel and Mike Carroll to whom we also send our thanks.   All our legal advice was given on a pro bono basis, for which we will be forever grateful. If other names have been omitted by pressure of events we beg indulgence.

Amicus briefs were also presented to the Supreme Court in our support by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, by Article 19 and by a group of professors from Indiana led by our good friend Bob White. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their courage and a dedication to principle that was notable elsewhere for its absence. California attorneys, John De Stefano and Mary-Christine Sungaila gave great help in preparing the amicus briefs for which we are deeply indebted.

A special mention must be made of the Irish-American groups that came to support the campaign notably the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Brehon Law Society and the Irish American Unity Conference who worked tirelessly to prevent these interviews from being handed over. We thank them for all their great work.

A large number of individuals also gave freely of their support and advice and while all deserved to named we would like to thank in particular Sandy Boyer, Chris Bray, Lin Solomon, Harvey Silverglate, Sabina Clarke, Michael Cummings, Helen McClafferty, Cathleen O’Brien, Jim Lockhart, Tom Burke, Ed Lynch, Tim Miles, John Lowman and Ted Palys. They are just a few of the friendships we have made or cemented during this campaign.

We are also deeply indebted to our wives and families for all the loving support they gave us during this stressful period.

All of those involved in this campaign can be assured that it is not over yet.

Senate Foreign Relatons Committee chairman Robert Menendez

Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has made a dramatic intervention in the Boston College subpoenas case with a plea to newly appointed US Secretary of State John Kerry to raise the political implications of any handover from the Belfast Project archive of IRA interviews with his counterparts in the British government.

Menendez also asks Kerry in the event of the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case brought by Belfast Project director Ed Moloney and researcher Anthony McIntyre that the US government should then “review carefully” any interviews that are subsequently handed over so that their provision “does not undermine the United States’ essential interest” in ensuring that the Good Friday accords are not damaged.

This is the first time that the possible handover of interviews from the Boston College archive has been couched in terms of US foreign policy interests by a senior American politician. John Kerry has also gone on record expressing his opposition to any handover of Boston College interviews in a letter written to his predecessor, Hillary Clinton in early 2012.

The Supreme Court is due to deliberate this Friday whether or not to hear the Boston College case with an announcement due possibly on Monday.

The following is the text of Senator Menendez’ letter to Secretary Kerry:

The competing roles of Margaret Thatcher and Gerry Adams during the 1981 hunger strikes have produced one of the most bitterly contested disputes of the Troubles – who was most responsible for the ten deaths? Here, in a guest column, Richard O’Rawe, the former IRA public relations officer in the H Blocks during the prison protest, explains why he believes Adams not Thatcher must carry blame for most of the deaths during the historic fast:

A section of the vast crowd that attended Bobby Sands’ funeral in West Belfast in May 1981. Nine other republican prisoners followed him to early graves.

I never liked the tenor of Margaret Thatcher’s voice.  It was either too raucous, or too fawning: too rehearsed for my liking.  Image, presentation, a certain charisma: the MP for Finchley, I’m convinced, would have made it on the silver screen (but then all politicians are actors, aren’t they?)  I was fortunate in that my experience of the 1981 IRA/INLA hunger had taught me not to be fooled by her ‘Iron Lady’ image, that The Truculent One was rather more receptive to the sweet scent of common sense than she let on.
Gerry Adams said as much in his 1996 autobiography, Before the Dawn when he wrote ‘Margaret Thatcher presented a public face as the Iron Lady who was “not for turning”, yet she was no stranger to expediency.’  Mr. Adams went on to refer to him seeing a draft of a speech that Mrs. Thatcher intended to make at imminent international conference in Ottawa, where she hoped to announce an end to the hunger strike.

Margaret Thatcher was more pragmatic and flexible on the hunger strike than her image suggested

For that to happen though, she had to persuade Mr. Adams and his committee of political colleagues and advisers to accept a set of proposals that she had sent them on 4 July 1981 and which they had rejected.  At that point there had been four deaths in the blocks but Mr. Adams and Co. spurned the British prime minister’s offer, the hunger strike continued, and accordingly another six hunger strikers lost their lives.
It is now eight years since my book Blanketmen and three years since my second book, Afterlives were published.   For seven of those eight years I have had the fight of my life with Gerry Adams and his acolytes.  Throughout I have stood by the assertion that the British government had made a substantial offer on 4 July 1981, which was rejected by the committee – against the wishes of the prison leadership, of which I was a part.

Richard O’Rawe was ‘in fight of his life’ with Gerry Adams over the truth of what happened during the protest

Furthermore, I said that the committee did not make the hunger strikers aware of the particulars of the Brit offer.  On both accounts the hard evidence has shown that I was telling the truth.  My vindication has come via a tortuous process of British government Freedom of Information requests, the release of thirty-year British government documents, the verbal and written testimony of the intermediary, Brendan Duddy, and the numerous contradictions and evasions from those who tried, unsuccessfully, to cover for the committee.
All that remains to be settled is the motivation for the committee’s behaviour.  Was it out of its depth in its attempts to outsmart the British?  Or was it so intoxicated with the prospect of impending electoral success (in the impending by-election for first hunger striker, Bobby Sands’ seat) that they took a decision to ignore the offer and thence allow for hunger strikers to die?

Sands’ funeral cortege winds through streets of Nationalist West Belfast

When I sat down to quietly collect my thoughts before I began writing this article, I asked myself a series of questions: what do I want to say about Margaret Thatcher?  That I despised the woman?  Of course I did.  She was no friend of the Irish – much less Irish republicans. She had it in her power to go the clichéd ‘extra mile’, but didn’t.  But then: would the extra mile have mattered to Adams and Co.?
Margaret Thatcher is dead.  There’ll be no crocodile tears or sugar-coated words from me about the life and times of the Iron Lady.  She was our avowed enemy and we expected no quarter from her.  Still, we can’t blow back the tide of history and we can’t resurrect our brave, brave hunger strikers.  We can, however, treat our own with respect.  We can be honest.  Our hunger strikers deserve that.  If that means Big Gerry and his committee accepting culpability for the deaths of the last six hunger strikers, then so be it.

Within an hour of hearing the news that Maggie Thatcher had died I logged on to Sinn Fein’s website to see what the Provos were saying about the woman and her political legacy. The BBC World Service had made a passing reference to negative comments having been made by Gerry Adams but no more detail than that.

Margaret Thatcher meets her troops in Northern Ireland

Given that she was, at least in popular perception, the most consequential and divisive of British prime ministers during the Troubles in Northern Ireland but that at least part of her story – the bit dealing with the hunger strikes of 1981 – has been considerably revised and challenged in the decades since, I was eager to see just exactly what the Sinn Fein leadership was saying about her.

But what caught my attention was not what was said about the 1981 protest that led to ten prison deaths – and there was very little dealing with that – but Gerry Adams’ concluding remark: “Her Irish policy failed miserably.”

Death of Bobby Sands and other IRA prisoners led to Sinn Fein fighting elections and ultimately to the peace process – did Thatcher make it all possible?

It caught my eye because I had to scroll down the page to get to the Adams’ statement and in the process I noticed this headline: ‘Carrier Bag Proposer Welcomes Introduction’. It was a story about how Daithi McKay, a Sinn Fein Assembly member from North Antrim had successfully introduced a new law in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont imposing a levy of five pence on plastic carrier bags supplied by supermarkets.

His proposal won sufficient cross party support to become law and as Mr McKay put it: “(The levy) has been enormously successful in the rest of Ireland and I expect that it will also lead to a significant reduction in the number of carrier bags being used in the north.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I hate plastic supermarket bags as much as the next man (and I live with someone who insists on hoarding the damn things!) so anything that helps get rid of them must be good. Nothing is more unsightly than this industrial equivalent of tumbleweed; it gets blown everywhere and has an annoying knack of getting caught on wire fences, visually blighting working class housing estates in particular.

So fair play to Daithi McKay. But I just couldn’t see how what he had achieved could sit comfortably with Gerry Adams’ claim that Margaret Thatcher’s Ireland policy had failed miserably.

What I mean by that is this: if you had said to Maggie Thatcher back in 1981 that as a result of her stance during the hunger strikes, or at least her stance as it was successfully depicted to their supporters by Sinn Fein, the Provos were able to move into electoral politics and channel all that resulting Nationalist anger into votes and that as a consequence within a decade or so there would be a unilateral IRA ceasefire and a peace process that would lead to the IRA destroying its own weapons, Sinn Fein becoming ministers in a power-sharing government in Belfast and Daithi McKay proudly proclaiming his achievement in persuading his Unionist colleagues at Stormont to impose a five pence levy on plastic bags, and all this without even a hint of a threat to Northern Ireland’s Finchley-like Britishness, Maggie Thatcher might well feel entitled to say: “If that is what failing miserably looks like, then give me more!”

I have the following statement to make in reference to the NUJ’s decision to suspend Anthony McIntyre from union membership for six months on foot of a complaint lodged by Allison Morris of The Irish News and Ciaran Barnes of The Sunday Life that he had allegedly breached ethics.

The wrong person was brought up in front of the NUJ’s ethics council in relation to this matter. Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes are the people who have breached the NUJ’s code of conduct and it is they who should be suspended, not Anthony McIntyre.

Anthony McIntyre, the wrong person was accused of NUJ ethics violations

The following facts in relation to the origins of the PSNI subpoenas issued against the Belfast Project archive at Boston College are, I believe, beyond dispute:

1. When Allison Morris interviewed the late Dolours Price in February 2010, Dolours was undergoing psychiatric care at St Patrick’s hospital Dublin. When her family learned that the interview was underway they asked Morris to end the interview because of her illness but this request was refused;

2. Following subsequent conversations between Dolours Price’s family and the management of the Irish News, agreement was reached on the manner in which the story would be treated in the paper’s coverage. No direct quotes were used, restraint would be exercised in relation to what she had alleged in the interview and Dolours Price would agree to take her story to the ICLVR, the so-called ‘disappeared’ commission. The Irish News evidently accepted the family’s view that in Dolours’ mental state caution should be exercised in how the story was treated;

Allison Morris gets a journalistic prize for her interview with Dolours Price

3. The Irish News complied with that agreement but Allison Morris breached it. She took her tapes/story to her friend and former Andersonstown News colleague Ciaran Barnes in The Sunday Life and three days later he published an unrestrained account based, I firmly believe, on Allison Morris’ taped interview with Dolours Price. The Irish News abided by the agreement with her family but their reporter did not. If that is not a breach of ethics I do not know what is;

4. In the course of his story Barnes suggested that he had listened to Dolours Price’s taped interview with Boston College and in it she had admitted helping to ‘disappear’ Jean McConville. The US Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz specifically cited this claim from Barnes in court papers as justification for issuing the subpoenas against Boston College. There is no doubt in my mind that the behaviour of Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes led directly to the legal action instituted by the PSNI in Belfast and the Department of Justice in America;

5. The proof that Ciaran Barnes could not have listened to the taped interview that Dolours Price gave to Boston College lies in the fact, to which I have attested in an affidavit, that she never once mentioned the Jean McConville case nor her alleged part in that woman’s disappearance in her interview with Anthony McIntyre. The effect of his claim was to disguise the fact that his source was Allison Morris and that she had breached the agreement her editor made with the Price family;

Ciaran Barnes (left) also won a prize the same year as Allison Morris

6. It therefore follows that Barnes’ source had to be Allison Morris, the only other person who had talked to Dolours Price in the run up to his article. It is surely no coincidence that his story appeared three days after Allison Morris’ story appeared in The Irish News, and that he and Allison Morris are friends and former colleagues.

I too am a member of the NUJ although I now live and work in the United States. In 1999 I was made an honorary life-time member of the union, an award I was honoured to accept. I have to say however that I am dismayed at this decision by the ethics council and more so by the manner in which it was reached. The wrong people were charged with a breach of ethics and I now call on the leadership of the NUJ to institute a full inquiry into the behaviour of Allison Morris and Ciaran Barnes in relation to the interview of Dolours Price of February 2010 and its aftermath.

I also call on the NUJ to include in this investigation an examination of the relationship between the PSNI and the media in Northern Ireland with specific reference to the differential treatment of journalists in the pursuit of confidential sources.

Proof of my lifetime membership of the NUJ, the union pin presented to me in 1999