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Christopher Owens 🏴I'm reaching out again and clutching flowers thrown in the breeze/They're all quite meaningless and yet they mean so much to me/We slipped up again by not recalling all the pain/And I wanna know why, I wanna know why. - The Mob
Petesy Burns
Petesy Burns is no more.

Receiving that message on New Year’s Day did put a dent in the day’s proceedings.

For those of us interested in punk rock and its visible manifestations in Belfast, Petesy Burns was the equivalent of a totem pole: someone who represented a rich heritage but could still inspire those who interacted with him.

From Good Vibrations through to the Harp Bar, the Manhattan, the Anarchy Centre and through three variations on Giros/Warzone Centre, Petesy helped to create and nurture not just punk rock in Belfast but also an alternative lifestyle and way of thinking during a time of intense conflict and ideological rigidness. Eternal respect is due.

♩ ♪♫ 🎹 🎷🎸🎻 🎺

From Sheridan Street in the New Lodge, his path in life was altered whenever he discovered punk rock. Speaking to Stuart Bailie in 2017 he said that the Sex Pistols ‘God Save the Queen’ offered a way out for him because:

…coming from the Republican tradition that sort of pricked my ears because music wasn’t really big on the agenda round our way. It was more sorta clodding things at the army. And I remember just being in the bedroom one day, and I used to listen to my ma and da’s radio in their bedroom, I used to listen to the charts every week and then this week’s Number Two was ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols. But then it was banned and I’d never heard it on the radio either. And it being Jubilee year, at first I thought it must be some sort of song, celebrating the Jubilee. And then I thought, the Sex Pistols? I’m not too sure about that. And then when I thought about it, I had heard of Johnny Rotten but never really heard who they were. And then when I got it, there was an affinity initially with where I was coming from. You know, that whole anti-establishment, anti-monarchy, anti-British thing. As it was then – ‘God Save the Queen, the fascist regime’. The argument was won at that point.

Soon making his way to Good Vibrations in Great Victoria Street, then onto the Harp Bar in Hill Street, it wasn’t long before he became involved in music. Beginning with the Stillborns before morphing into Stalag 17, their ferocious take on punk can be summarised with ‘Smash the Front’.



Beginning life as a Stillborns tune, it became Stalag 17’s most famous number.

It’s worth noting that, although small in numbers, the NF did have a hold in Protestant areas where the Shankill skins (including the likes of Johnny Adair, Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory and Donald Hodgen) would have the NF logo on their jackets. While it is true that Adair helped forge those links (particularly with his band, Offensive Weapon) I’ve been repeatedly told by those who were either their or part of the general subculture that emerged after 1977 in Belfast that it was the anti-IRA/pro-British angle that attracted so many loyalists.

Regardless, adopting an anti-fascist stance whenever genuine fascists were trying to organise in the North was a brave and bold move. Unsurprisingly, this led to manys a confrontation whenever the two groups were on the circuit.

There were many other bands: FUAL, Sledgehammer, Shame Academy, The Outcasts, A-Political, A.R.S.E, The Hoakers. All of them embedded with the same love of music, the same excitement of picking up an instrument and the same glee of performing live.

Check out this tribute from Hillary Midgley from Sledgehammer.

♩ ♪♫ 🎹 🎷🎸🎻 🎺

The opening of the Anarchy Centre in November 1981 was another seminal moment in the history of Belfast. It was somewhere the punks who had been just a little too young for the Harp and the Pound could convalesce on a Saturday afternoon, watch a film (like the banned Monty Python's Life of Brian) and see gigs by local legends as well as the likes of Crass and Poison Girls while getting up to all sorts.

Stalag 17 played as support to the latter two which had an even bigger impact on Petesy who was barely 20 years old because

…at that point I was still firmly entrenched in the sorta, not what I would call the fashion end of punk but the apolitical, the hedonistic sorta chaos type thing, and that was the first time … and I would have always dismissed Crass…just took the line from the media, basically saying they were middle-class hippies. And just took that line without really having met them or thought about it, and then when they came I met them and saw how engaged they were just with people, outside of being on the stage, sitting about, not being stars, just being really interesting and interested, you know. And then seeing the band and the spectacle of it – because they had all their films and banners and them themselves, just completely engaging, it was just like a completely different kind of experience and you sorta thought, that's what punk’s about.

This led to the idea of collectivisation, especially after meeting people like Roy Wallace from Toxic Waste who were running the Rathcoole Self Help Group. Thus the catalyst for what became the Warzone Collective came into play and what happened next would change the lives of manys a person in Belfast.
♩ ♪♫ 🎹 🎷🎸🎻 🎺

Talking to Ian Glasper in 2009, Petesy noted that while:

…Belfast was less of a grim place in the Eighties than it had been in the Seventies...there was still virtually nothing in terms of a non-sectarian shared space in the city centre. Youth culture - and especially punk youth culture - was still a dirty word, and there was fuck-all means of people exploring their creativity in a way that wasn’t controlled. Everything we wrote at the time was a reflection of how we viewed Belfast and Northern Ireland, the punk scene, and people’s perception of our situation.
Belfast always had a fairly healthy punk scene, the only problem being that we could never secure a venue or practice space. The Warzone collective had been running the café in the anarchist bookshop, Just Books, but when it became apparent that we needed much more space, we got a room in the newly opened Centre for the Unemployed and annoyed them - mostly through noise pollution - until they helped us acquire our own premises. We got down to building a practice room, café and art workshop; it was truly unbelievable the mix of people and ideas Giro’s brought together, the sense of enthusiasm and possibilities was palpable…”

While such places were common amongst squatters in Britain and Europe, Belfast had never had such a place before. One that consciously didn’t designate itself as one or the other. One that offered vegan/vegetarian food. One where artists could have exhibitions. One where you could make your own T-shirts and posters. One where you could see life changing gigs from incendiary acts.

Giros inspired the dreamers of Belfast and, as one of the main architects of this alternative way of thinking, Petesy put it in stark but simple terms: DIY not UDA/IRA!


Summing up the importance of punk, Petesy put it in utilitarian terms:

It took me out of a lifestyle that I would have, for not knowing any better that I would have just followed and done what everyone around me was doing. And followed that track. That everyone was following you know. It sorta took me away from that and showed me other possibilities.

Petesy Burns, lest we forget.


⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Petesy Burns

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Fifty Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3029

Jim Duffy ✍ An interesting report from Channel 4 News. 

It isn't anything new to those of us aware of what is happening, but something that, as the Taoiseach admits, the Irish are "blissfully unaware of" as they live in their neutrality fantasy that "sure we're grand!" He made the point that the Irish really live in their deluded bubble.
 
Part of that bubble is of course due to geography. Ireland perpetually is unaware of things outside its inward-looking society. After World War II, international leaders were flabbergasted at how much Ireland lived in its own bubble. International leaders would meet Irish leaders and find them off in their own reality. The world was worried about the prospect of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and the risk of mass starvation, yet when they'd meet the Irish Minister for External Affairs he would want to talk about nothing but partition, the Irish border, the treaty, and being good Catholics showing loyalty to the Pope.
 
That was demonstrated when the Atlantic Treaty was signed creating NATO. Ireland wanted to join NATO, a point Minister for External Affairs Sean MacBride made clear in the Dáil and Seanad in February 1949. But all MacBride and the First Inter-Party Government wanted to talk about in order to join NATO was . . . partition!!! Seriously! The government, a bit like some in Ireland today, thought other countries were desperate to get Ireland to join NATO - and so all they had to do is get other members joining NATO to gang up on Britain and force it to withdraw from Northern Ireland and so end partition as a quid pro quo to get Ireland into NATO.
 
In fact, then as now, other countries weren't fixated on getting Ireland into NATO, and they couldn't give a damn about some 'silly squabble' over partition in Ireland. They had far bigger issues on their plate, like the status of Berlin, millions of refugees, the risk of war, the fact that many countries were bankrupt, to worry about the "dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again", to use Churchill's famous phrase from 1922 once again.
 
It didn't help that Ireland's reputation had been catastrophically damaged by de Valera's crass condolences on Hitler's death.
 
The very idea that NATO members were going to gang up against Britain on behalf of Ireland was deluded in the extreme, but typical of how out-of-touch the Irish were. The war to the Irish was just 'the Emergency', where the main problems were no petrol and rationing food. To the other countries planning to join NATO, the war involved Nazi armies, Blitzkrieg, the bombing of cities, concentration camps and gas chambers, with millions dead. The Irish were entirely on a different wavelength to everyone else and living in a different reality.

Ireland's plot to use NATO membership to force British withdraw from the North failed abysmally.
Ireland's tendency to live in its own bubble has long been an issue. It remains an issue alive today in Ireland's neutrality delusions. Real neutrality is expensive, involves a large armed forces, and usually involves conscription (Sixty-six percent of remaining neutrals in Europe have conscription. Only one-third of NATO members do). It involves having a significant size of navy and air force. Irish neutrality however involves little defence spending, a two-ship navy, an air force with no means to intercept anything, and a tiny military incapable of fulfilling the elementary duties of a military due to chronic lack of defence spending. Whenever a problem arose, we play the 'beal bocht', even though richer than many NATO members, and look to get NATO to protect us for free with taxpayers in other countries paying our bills.
 
The reality is that continental Europe knows full well that it is being targeted by Putin's Russia, that efforts are being made to destabilise their states, that fundamental infrastructure is being targeted, that a full cyber war is being waged against them. The closer a country is to Russia, the more brutally they are being targeted and the more worried their citizens are.
 
Some countries in Southern Europe are less nervous than those in Central and Eastern Europe. However none is as much in its bubble of denial as Ireland. Part of that was due to World War II. Lots of neutrals naively thought the Second Hague Convention's declaration that "The territory of neutral Powers is inviolable" - even though that was broken by Germany in 1914 in invading Luxembourg and Belgium. World War II shattered them of that illusion - as neutrals Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Finland were invaded. It showed that the 'guarantee' in Hague II Title V Article I is worthless. If a country wants to attack a neutral it will. Hague is nothing more than an unenforceable gentlemen's agreement. That was why Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway abandoned neutrality after World War II and joined NATO. Finland and Sweden have since joined.
 
Ireland may well have been one of those neutrals Hitler planned to invade, though historians are uncertain if Operation Green, invading Ireland, was a real plan or a dummy one. If it had been invaded, that would have woken the Irish pretty quickly to the uselessness of Hague II's protection. The fact that it wasn't allows devotees of neutrality to cling to the delusion that it is protected by Hague II - despite Hague II not having protected any single country in its one hundred and fifteen years in force.
The extent to which the Irish remain "blissfully unaware" of how dangerous the situation is can be seen in the fact that Ireland has no full-time stand alone Defence Minister, has barely functioning defence, a laughably low defence budget, and the fact that neither RTÉ nor Virgin Media even bothers to have a Defence Correspondent.
 
The delusion was summed up by a typically crass intervention by Michael D Higgins where he lashed out at Estonia for taking defence seriously by increasing its defence spending as if it were acting aggressively. Typically he ignored that Russia has explicitly threatened it, that Russia spends 7.5% of GDP on defence, had been massing soldiers at its borders and had tried to provocatively steal part of its waters in breach of international waters. Then again, Higgins like many on the left is oblivious to the behaviour of Russia while always being in a rush to cast the first stone against democracies.
He is being replaced by an even more clueless nutter on the issue - a hard left woman who equates limited German rearmament in 2025, that it has to do to repair decades of underfunding, with the extreme and illegal aggressive rearmament of Hitler in the 1930s.
 
The Irish have no idea that not alone is Europe in a highly dangerous state, but it is in particular danger. 97% of the most vital data cables that Europe depend on are in Irish waters and the Irish waters are where they are most vulnerable. All Putin would have to do to throw Europe into chaos, including shutting its banks, emptying its ATMs, stopping its cards from working, etc would be to attack those cables in Irish waters.
 
Ireland is rated as one of the top three targets for Putin in any war: the Suwalki Gap; Gotland; cables in Ireland's waters.
 
Add to that Ireland is exceptionally vulnerable because it is dependent of underwater connectors to literally keep the lights on. Cut those interconnectors, and Ireland would lose 50% of its electricity generation capacity. If that happened, the government's own analysis makes it clear it would take six months minimum to fix the interconnectors. In the meantime there would be national electricity rationing. Major industrial users would be cut off indefinitely to give priority to homes, hospitals, schools, etc.
 
No other country is as vulnerable as Ireland is heavily reliant on electricity generation using gas but in an act of monumental stupidity has no gas storage facility. Add to that the Corrib gas supply is almost gone and for ideological reasons no other gas fields were opened.
 
A core aim of Russia is to destabilise the EU - which is why targeting vital data cables is central to his tactics. Destabilise states by things like throwing the electricity supply into chaos and again you make world headlines. Ireland, an isolated island with no gas storage and a demand that almost matches supply, and dependency on a limited number of interconnectors and just a two-ship navy to protect them, is a perfect target. Everyone else in Europe knows it.
 
Maybe it will take the lights going out to wake up their Irish from their blissful ignorance and realise just how dangerous the situation is internationally right now, and how its chronically underfunded defence is plain reckless and stupid.
 
It may be Ireland's Rotterdam moment. One prominent Dutch politician from Rotterdam was a pacifist who was convinced in World War II that the Netherlands was safe thanks to the Second Hague Convention. He was adamant. Then on 10th May 1940 the Nazis attacked the Netherlands, Hague or no Hague. On the 14th May, Rotterdam was bombed severely by the Nazis. Only then did he finally realise what Luxembourg and Belgium learned in 1914 - that Hague as protection is worthless. He wrote "I believed we were protected. I was wrong." His city, and his family, were destroyed in the invasion. He later went on to campaign for the Netherlands to join the new NATO being created, saying his country must never make the same mistake again.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Rotterdam Moment

Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum ☭ In this video, speakers from Social Rights Ireland and members of the Peadar O'Donnell Socialist Republican Forum discuss how states use criminalisation as a means of enforcing the ruling class's policies.



State Use Of Criminalisation Policies

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ On 3rd January 2026 Unites States President, Donald Trump, Commander in Chief of the US armed forces, ordered the illegal bombing of the South American country Venezuela. 

US forces then proceeded to, at the point of a gun, kidnap the oil rich county’s president, Nicolas Maduro, taking him back to the US for a show trial. This illegal act by Trump did not force the same protests and outrages from Western leaders as Russian President, Vladimir Putins, invasion of his neighbour Ukraine. In fact what Trump has done has semi-legitimised the Russian invasion of Ukraine because Putin can now reasonably claim; just as you dictate what goes on in your backyard, so do we in ours! 

Ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 the USA has considered Central and Southern America within their sphere of influence but this is the first time they have kidnapped a country’s leader. By the same token since the fall of the Soviet Union Russia can equally claim Ukraine to be within its orbit and therefore the same rule of influence must apply. Whether this assumption is right or wrong is not the topic here but Trump's actions in Venezuela have given Putin the rationale he needs to justify his invasion and demands of Ukraine. If anything Putin may have had more justification than Trump for his actions against his neighbour which is a matter of conjecture. 

Donald Trump, a man not known for his honesty, claimed, with absolutely no evidence, the Venezuelan leader was involved in the drugs trade and therefore his arrest was legitimate. Trump also claimed the former trade union leader and head of the Venezuelan Socialist Party is/was not the legitimate leader of the country and therefore he had to be removed. Madura’s political ideology is an antithesis to Trump and for this reason, among others, he has been illegally and forcibly removed from office and taken to a US kangaroo court. We only have Trump's less than reliable word for this allegation what in all likelihood could be a false claim. The real reason for this violation of Venezuela is because the country is rich in oil. Western sycophant leaders like Britain’s Keir Starmer are lining up to find words which can justify Trump's actions so they do not have to take action, sanctions for example, if they dare, against the US tyrant.

Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact he wants to annex his neighbour Canada to the north and most of the Americas to the south of the US. In this - what could be described as a bastardisation of the Monroe Doctrine - has Trump laid the first brick in his plans to occupy the whole of the Americas? If this turns out to be the case - and the early signs are not good - what will the reactions of larger South American countries like Argentina and Brazil be? Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has already told Trump Canada will not become the “51st state of the USA” earlier in 2025 when Trump was sabre rattling about such an eventuality. Now Trump is threatening Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with military invasion, claiming it is important to US ‘national security’ for Greenland to be governed by the USA. Once again this is make-believe stuff of comics. What the US Brigand really means is the ‘country is wealthy in minerals we want’. US security is presently guaranteed as they already have military bases in Greenland. Denmark and therefore Greenland are members of NATO and such an invasion by the USA, the leading NATO member without whom the alliance is virtually toothless, would no doubt split and possibly end the Atlantic Alliance. Article five of NATO’s constitution states, “if one member is attacked all other members come to help.” The six-million-dollar question is: will article five apply if the US invade Greenland? Just as Venezuelan sovereignty has, for the time being, gone so too would that of Greenland, and by virtue of that the sovereignty of Denmark would be eroded. On 6th January in a statement:

the leaders of France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Denmark, and Greenland said Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland and only them to decide on politics concerning Greenland. (Irish Daily Mirror 7th January). 

Trump has already indicated he does not care what Europe think: it shall be him who decides the future of Greenland! This is very similar to Adolf Hitler's attitude towards Britain and France after he had taken the Sudetenland - an area of Czechoslovakia - with the blessing of Britain, France, and Italy: and proceeded without care to take the whole country. Is Trump another Hitler?

Many Western leaders have claimed, wrongly in my opinion, that Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is only the start of his take over in Eastern Europe. I do not believe this to have been the case. But the actions of Trump and his threats to other sovereign nation states certainly may give Putin ideas in such a direction! With the Russian invasion of Ukraine and ongoing war British Prime Minister Starmer and his like-minded European leaders like French President, Emmanuel Macron, have gathered what they call the “coalition of the willing” to provide if necessary “boots on the ground” to guarantee Ukraine’s security once the conflict with Russia comes to an end. They have spent billions and billions in aid to Ukraine and have supplied much military hardware. 

The question now is to Starmer and his supposed “coalition”: will you provide the same arms and money to Venezuela to fight the US as you have to Ukraine to fight Russia? It is exactly the same principle of violation which Trump has done to that of Putin or do such rules only apply to Russia? Starmer has refused to call Trumps actions illegal in ‘international law’ probably because he knows to do so would stir the wrath of the US tyrant! Even the far-right leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, a friend of Trump, has said the US actions are “probably in breach of international law”. Starmer is a sycophant to Trump who must be laughing his balls off at the British leader. In fact all the Western European heads at their dithering over what to say or do about his actions and future threats. Just as the world stood still when Hitler invaded the Rhineland in 1936, then Austria in 1938, Czechoslovakia in 1939 and finally Poland again in 1939. Are they going to do the same again with Trump?

Donald Trump is, according to him, going to run Venezuela allowing “US oil companies” to administer the oil industry in the country. This again will be an act of theft no different in principle to housebreaking just on a far larger scale. Once again, such an act will be in breach of international law which in reality does not exist. If Trump does this and takes over the administration of Venezuela as a corporate business in effect he will have made his first move towards open fascism. Corporatism is an integral part of fascist governance (something the electorate in Britain should consider before voting for Reform UK as Farage wants to run the country as a business) and is a dangerous slide back into the darkest years of global history. Another major question is perhaps: will the US dictator invade any other country which disagrees with his far-right ideology, including Britain? The US already have around 10,000 fully active troops based in Britian so all they would have to do is take over British Army barracks while more US forces arrive!

In an act of piracy on 7th January 2026, the US boarded and seized the Russian flagged tanker, Marinera, in the Atlantic about 400 miles off the coast of Ireland. This act by the United States Corsair is once again an illegal action as piracy is a crime and has been for centuries. The US aircraft had to fly over Twenty-Six County airspace to carry out this deed. The question to be asked is did they have the permission of the administration in Leinster House for this incursion? When Twenty-Six County Minister for Foreign affairs, Helen McEntee, was asked this question she fudged and avoided answering. We can probably take that as a no, they did not have permission. In which case the sovereignty and neutrality of another small country had been violated by the United States. 

Another prudent question is: how will Putin react to this Russian flagged tanker being seized by the USA? Remember Vladimir Putin has the largest nuclear arsenal of any single country on earth! In a statement Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) stated “the UK helped the US in seizing the tanker”. If this assistance was voluntary then the so-called UK are complicit in breaking the fabled international law. What we should be asking is; did the “UK help” the US or, roughly translated, were they ordered to do so by the leading NATO country? Did Trump get on to Starmer and tell him this is what is going to happen and you will help us? Maybe being bullied by the US is part of Britain's “special relationship” with the United States!

With Donald Trump now doing whatever the fuck he likes where will it end? The European sycophants are doing their level best to justify the US dictator’s actions in typical grovelling fashion. Will Trump invade Greenland signalling a crisis within NATO? Or to avoid such a crisis and dilemma will the other alliance countries find a way of dumping Greenland and, in effect, Denmark possibly claiming NATOs article five only applies to actions by countries not in the alliance? 

The outcome of these US actions will end in tears for somebody with Venezuela and President Madura being the first victims. Columbia are now voicing concerns about their future, fearing a possible US invasion! The rest of the world might sit back and tell themselves in a couple of years Trump will have gone, voted out! Well, do not bank on that because this tyrant is not above, as did Hitler in Nazi Germany, cancelling elections in the USA under the guise of protecting their national security. Do not be surprised and will the world still sit idly by? Probably. They have never moved against the USA in the past why should this be any different?
 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Donald Trump 🪶Thief, Kidnapper, Corsair!

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Eight Hundred And Fifty One

 

A Morning Thought @ 3028

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Writing in the Irish News on 12-January-2026.

Just into the New Year Denis Bradley, writing in this paper, raised a matter which has defied resolution throughout many old years. 

Truth, despite acquiring a word association with reconciliation, is a concept which in the North has long been used for something entirely different - recrimination: our truth about you, but not your truth about us. 

Denis Bradley, alert to this, in suggesting that compassion should place limitations on clarity, invites his readers to reconsider the value of truth recovery in its most expansive form. His main concern is, briefly, that to come clean to the extent that informers be identified, will have a destructive affect on the families of those who are 'outed.'

One authentic, but not sufficient, reason for wishing to have informers publicly identified is curiosity. The titillation to be derived from the layers of deceit being pulled away from the spook world, causing spinners and spoofers to seek out new shadows, should not be understated either. Many aficionados of horror find rich pickings by flicking the mind's channel to one of the following stations: Internal Security Unit, Force Research Unit, MI5, Special Branch. John Ware's upcoming book on the moral quagmire inhabited by Freddie Scappaticci, Brian Nelson, and a range of state agencies is likely to be replete with the genre of nightmare that prevented Edgar Allan Poe getting a good night's sleep. Yet there is no compelling reason to insist that curiosity should trump compassion. Pursuing informers at this point is often driven by the same type of mindset that presses for prosecution of former combatants, As the former IRA prisoner Tommy McKearney once put it: why continue to take prisoners when the war is over?

While not intrinsically objectionable there is no uncomplicated way to erect the humane 'Bradley barrier.' Would the family of John Bingham be allowed to know the identities of those who killed him but not that of the informer who was also part of the same IRA operation? Perhaps the most that can be done is to erect the safety rail of compassion rather than a barrier in the hope that a society chooses wisely and opts not to go down a path that leads to even more destruction. 

One thing the Kenova Report demonstrated starkly is that there are families who have already been destroyed by the informer label. They lost loved ones, and forever walk the earth bearing the mark of Cain for a sin not their own, or a sin perhaps not even committed. Compassion should not be confronted with the harsh command of verboten at the family homes of those whose loved ones were executed on the orders of the IRA Army Council after it was fed information procured and processed by Freddie Scappaticci, and green lighted by his agent handlers in the British security matrix.  

The involvement of a British agent in the construction of cases against people accused of informing, leading to their execution, is as corrupting as police malfeasance in the Birmingham Six 'appalling vista.'  

Even within its own narrow ethical bandwidth, the deaths of all those executed by the IRA on the watch of Freddie Scappaticci amount to a gross miscarriage of justice, the cases contaminated beyond all reasonable doubt.  Each of the dead should be posthumously pardoned by the only body capable of doing so, Sinn Fein. The party still has within its ranks a former element of the Army Council, the institution which signed off on the Scappaticci executions. It alone carries the authority within the communities where the deceased once lived to remove the stain. Seeking to evade the obligation to exonerate by recourse to the mantra of the IRA has gone away, is as shallow as the secret graves the IRA interred some of its victims in. 

If Sinn Fein can lay wreaths at monuments for British war dead, it can just as surely lay wreaths at the graves of Vincent Robinson, Anthony McKiernan, Charlie McIlmurray and the many others the IRA and British state, in a macabre joint enterprise, forced to sail into nothingness under the 'tout' flag. The same military whose fallen Sinn Fein now honour on Remembrance Sunday stands accused by the party of being responsible for the killings procured and counselled by Freddie Scappaticci. To whatever extent the British state was responsible - and it is hugely culpable - showing compassion to the families of its victims is hardly a breach of any principle. Hubris should not stand in the way of an action that would be one of humility, not humiliation.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Truth, Recrimination And The Value Of A Little Compassion

Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee   is organising a tenth anniversary commemoration for Volunteer Tommy Gallagher.

Assembly Point: Hunger Strike Monument, Duleek.

Date: 22 February 2026.

Time: 1500.

Speaker: Francie Mackey



Tommy Gallagher Commemoration

Seamus Kearney 🎤 After his release from internment which officially ended on 5th December 1975, Freddie Scappaticci returned to the family home at Farnham Street in the Ormeau Road area of South Belfast. 

By the end of 1976 he had returned to the Provisional IRA, operating as a Belfast Brigade Intelligence Officer, but had also resumed work in the building trade, working alongside members of the Official IRA from the Markets area in a tax scam involving the misuse of 715 tax exemption certificates.

In 1977 he was arrested by the RUC fraud squad and threatened with prosecution and the real possibility of going back to prison over the tax scam, which seemingly terrified him. Significantly, others were compromised in a similar vein by the British security services after they had been released from the cages of Long Kesh, so Scappaticci was certainly not on his own.
 
After agreeing to work as a spy for the RUC, providing them with low level intelligence on the IRA, Scappaticci became uncomfortable as he believed the RUC to be a sectarian force, so simply walked into the heavily fortified British army barracks in Royal Avenue, Belfast, the former Grand Central Hotel, and offered his services to them instead. 

His first army contact was Sergeant Peter Jones from the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, on a four month tour of duty in Ireland from January to May 1977. After their assessment of Scappaticci the army decided to 'poach' him from the RUC and groom him into becoming a member of their Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), part of 39th Brigade of the British Army. For his part Scappaticci loved the attention and gradually seen himself as a British military officer in an elite group, convincing himself and being convinced by his handlers, that the IRA was a blight on the Nationalist population of the North and had to be defeated. The fact that his blood monies would reach around 80,000 pounds per year, directed into a bank account in Gibraltar, also played a role in his conversion to work for the other side. 

Fundamentally, Scappaticci did not possess a moral compass but had a dissociative identity disorder (DID), which allowed him to switch sides in the war for his own self interest and material gain. Again, it must be stated that he was not unique in this regard, as other IRA Volunteers did the same, including people close to him, self preservation taking precedence over ideological loyalty.

When the Provisional IRA commenced the total overhaul and restructuring of its units in 1977, cell structure, the ' Green Book' and a new 'Internal Security Unit' ( ISU) were included in the overhaul. Once the British army became aware of this, they set their sights on infiltration of the Internal Security Unit, as it was like' honey to a bee'.

The British army pushed for their man, Scappaticci, to enter the ISU, while at the same time the RUC 's Special Branch were using their best endeavours to get their agents into the same unit. As it turned out both security agencies succeeded when the IRA' s Internal Security Unit was eventually activated in the Autumn of 1978. Ironically, the head of the ISU, a former member of the British army's Special Boat Service ( SBS), had already been a Special Branch agent for years previous. Scappaticci became his second-in-command. As for the others, most from D company, Lower Falls, Belfast, they were compromised IRA Volunteers with a few exceptions.
 
The Internal Security Unit, whose remit was to root out informers, brief new recruits, investigate botched IRA military operations etc was heavily infiltrated from its inception. Furthermore and disgracefully, there was no rotation of personnel which meant prolonged and sustained damage could be inflicted on the IRA, blunting its overall capacity to win the war against the British. The Provisional IRA would not be defeated in the field, but a policy of containment ensured that a military victory was unachievable.


Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

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