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Seamus Kearney 🎤 ' Be not afraid, i go before you always. Come follow me and i shall give you rest.'

After my brother Michael was cleared from any suspicion that he was a paid informer on 28th January 2003, the IRA leadership not only cleared him but continued to meet me in a series of clandestine meetings until September of that year.

I had been informed by the IRA leadership that Freddie Scappaticci had been involved in the Court Martial and subsequent execution of my brother, but had not played a central role, which I accepted. However, in May 2003 a journalist, Greg Harkin, appeared at the front door of Freddie Scappatticci's house in the Riverdale area of West Belfast and accused him of being a British agent with a codename, Stakeknife.

I was still meeting the IRA leadership at the time so raised my concerns with them at our next meeting, underlining that if true then Michael had been interrogated by the British more so than the IRA. My concerns were dismissed and Iwas told by the two IRA staff officers that Scappaticci was " innocent until proven guilty".

Before the IRA investigation commenced in October 2001 I had deliberately organised and set up a secret strategic 'think tank' of 5 former IRA soldiers, which included myself, with a 6th man in place designed to be a 'spearhead'. The role of this 6th man was to co-ordinate and impress upon the IRA leadership the need to commence an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the execution of Volunteer Michael Kearney on the 12th July 1979. He succeeded in carrying out that task and hence the unprecedented IRA investigation came about as a result.

After meeting the IRA leadership in May 2003 I then reported back to my own group and discussed the current situation. To confuse matters further all shades of the Republican Movement were informing their base that Freddie Scappaticci had been the victim of a gutter press with a sinister British Intelligence motive to undermine the Peace Process. Incredibly, people who I had earlier thought were intelligent and free thinkers, were accusing me of being a 'dissident' which I was not, and for attempting to 'smear a hard working Republican from Riverdale, the victim of an anti-Republican media campaign'.

A member of my own group then suggested that I settle the matter and arrange a meeting with Brendan Hughes (The Dark) who had particular knowledge of the IRA's Internal Security Unit (ISU), as he was in charge of GHQ Intelligence which overseen the workings of the Internal Security Unit. I was informed that Brendan took on this role after his release from prison in November 1986.

Consequently, a few weeks later in June 2003, after climbing the stairs of Divis Tower, I appeared outside the small flat at the top of the tower and rapped the front door, eager with anticipation.

When the door opened I met my old comrade with a smile on his face and we embraced. When I entered his living room he motioned me toward his sofa with the words :" be careful what you say in here because a bug was discovered recently under that sofa". I automatically asked, "was it RUC Special Branch?" But he replied, "no, Sinn Féin!". With a puzzled look upon my face we moved on with the matter in hand.

I told him that my brother Michael had been cleared by the IRA leadership and he became emotional, a common trait of his, and hugged me. I informed him that the publicity would come later in the year as I was still meeting the IRA leadership with a view to agreeing a text for a public statement and the official statement had to be agreed by the Army Council.

He enquired about my mother and I was happy to tell him that she was still alive which brought a sigh of relief from him, as we both understood how poignant and important that was in the overall scheme of things.

We then discussed the current media speculation concerning Scappaticci and the confusion from all sides. When I informed him that my brother Michael had been interrogated by Scappaticci he replied:

Seamus, your brother was interrogated by a British Military Officer, not a member of the IRA. Standing over your brother was an enemy officer, the only thing missing was the fact that Scappaticci wasn't wearing his British Army uniform, complete with his riding crop.


After this revelation he began to explain, "I believe that whole unit was infiltrated". He went on to elaborate on the mechanics of the Internal Security Unit and how they worked for British Intelligence since their inception in 1978. He had voiced his concerns to a senior figure in the IRA leadership but was dismissed by him who instead told him he was paranoid and had been in prison too long.

He mentioned the Joe Fenton case and told me he had become afraid after his execution in February 1989 and left the IRA as a result, claiming Belfast was rotten.

When i asked Brendan for the names of those involved in the ISU he got up and opened a drawer and took out a sheet of paper and a pen. I watched intently as he wrote the names down on the paper and then handed it to me. I studied the names, five in total, and then stuffed the sheet of paper into my pocket.

At exactly 2pm that day Brendan Hughes suddenly stood up, put his jacket on and told me he had to leave. We hugged and then shook hands. I thanked him for his honesty and he smiled in return. He reminded me of my loyalty to the Irish Republic and to the Army we both fought in and to give no quarter to traitors who undermined the integrity of that Army.

When I returned to my group and informed them of developments, we all more or less came to the conclusion that Michael and his story would not be straightforward and my journey toward truth and justice would be a long and arduous one.

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

Stakeknife 🕵 The Rise And Fall 🕵 Act XVII

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Sixty Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3137

Gary Robertson ⚽Unlike the pervert formerly known as Prince Andrew I am quite capable of sweating.
 
Hardly a revelation worthy of headlines but as I grabbed the remote to turn over from the Celtic match on Sunday beads of perspiration glistened on my arms and I realised my heart rate was clearly faster than normal.
 
Far be it from me to suggest that Celtic are attempting to kill off their older fan base but seriously with three must win games left I’m not sure I’ll be here to cover the crowning of champions of the SPL if this keeps up.
 
As is their want these days the ‘Tic flew from the traps and were “at it” from the ref's whistle but once again not having a recognised striker meant chances were squandered.

Then what seemed to have become obligatory for Hibs in recent matches - the red card.
 
A pretty stupid, reckless challenge by Jamie McGrath on the recently returning Alastair Johnston saw the Irish forward walk that lonely path off the park, but only after a VAR check.
 
Now we all know that theatrics play a large part in the game, attempts to gain advantages by fooling the ref, the “dark arts” if you like, but Johnston's painful cry as McGrath's boot made contact just above the ankle was unmistakable and difficult to ignore. However, David Dickinson (not to be confused with that other orange b***d of Bargain Hunt “fame”) decided this was worthy of only a yellow card and but for the intervention of the Video Assistant Ref he (McGrath) would have escaped the punishment that every fan in Easter Road and watching around the world felt was fitting.
 
Reduced to ten men Hibs came to life, battened down the hatches and made it much more difficult than it should have been for the current Champions.
 
The clock ticked and the first half almost over when a cross from Johnston met the boot of Maeda who fired past Hibs' Smith and in for Celtics opener again only after a VAR check to ensure Maedas eyebrows weren’t offside. The goal stood and for a brief moment we breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Parity was controversially restored less than five mins later when Joe Newell assisted Twice by his arm/hand controlled the ball and put it into the net. Again VAR took a look and decided no offence took place. Despite the rules being crystal clear on this one the members of the LOL that are Scotland's referees, linesmen and related brethren chose to ignore the rules, the SFA later releasing a statement to Sky Sports claiming “insufficient evidence”. If Newell had caught it and thrown it into the net I’m pretty certain at this point the SFA would have let it go.
 
Some may detect a slight anger in my tone and you’d be right. I want rules that stand for everyone not different interpretations for each club.
 
Indeed a very similar incident occurred during the Man United v Liverpool match with the Sky Sports commentator stating clearly that if the ball hits the arm or hand the goal cannot stand. It did and after perhaps 20 replays and close ups the decision was right at Old Trafford. The decision at Easter Road was yet again another failure for Scottish refereeing and further evidence that bias can’t be left in the dressing room.
 
Celtic did go on to win the match. Again, a goal by super sub Ihenancho separating the sides but it would be hard to walk away from this without a bitter aftertaste in the mouth.
 
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Scottish referees shouldn’t be officiating over Scottish matches involving Celtic and The Rangers.
 
Football isn’t a game here, it’s a religion, an identity and whilst not everyone is a fan of the Glasgow two almost everyone you meet has a preference for one or the other.
 
As a friend of mine once said “I’m not a football fan, I hate the game but I do hate Rangers a little more than Celtic”
 
Anyway three points in the bag and a Glasgow Derby at home on Saturday to come here’s hoping the blood pressure can stand it.
 
Away from Celtic, champions were crowned and goodbyes were said.
 
Congratulations to:

⚽ St Johnstone - Championship winners
⚽ Inverness Caley - League one winners
⚽ East Kilbride - League two winners
 
Of course other teams still have play offs to navigate and the winners of these will find their names on these pages.

Commiserations to:

⚽ Livingston - Relegated from the SPL
⚽ Ross County - Relegated from the Championship
⚽ Kielty Hearts - (already stated) relegated from League one
⚽ And finally Edinburgh City despite a final day victory, 5-0 over Dumbarton slip out the leagues altogether.
 
With joy comes sadness and whether you have any affiliation to a club or not it’s always sad to see any team suffer relegation.
 
Bank holiday Monday (May 4th - I must remember to message Mark Hamill on BlueSky and say “May the forth be with you Luke” - I’m pretty certain he’s never heard that before and he’ll be in hysterics at my original wit) came the clash of the weekend (least in terms of the SPL title) as The Rangers made the journey to face Hearts at Tynecastle knowing a win is a must at this point or their already slim title hopes would be all but finished. Hearts on the other hand needing a victory to once again open up a gap on their nearest pursuers Celtic.
 
I think it’s safe to say the match itself wasn’t a classic. It’s what we’ve come to expect recently, two teams on the brink neither can afford to lose so what we’re “entertained” by is a nervy encounter mistakes galore and a few heroics by those who hold their nerve.
 
As I settled down to watch my money (if id invested any) would have been on The Rangers as they had much more to lose than Hearts. A Hearts defeat and they’d still be top of the league, a Rangers defeat would have far bigger consequences for the Ibrox mafia.
 
Of course it didn’t take Ian Crocker long to mention the upcoming “Old Firm” which whilst important must be quite irritating for the Jambos - I mean, there’s a massive game happening in front of you, Crocker, FFS, it’s Monday. Sky have all week to worry about the upcoming Glasgow Derby concentrate on this game man.
 
Rangers were in no mood to give up their title challenge easily and when Sterling fired the visitors ahead in the 23rd minute it looked for all the world like Röhl's tactics were paying off and his team had settled more quickly than a shaky Hearts side. The game sort of fizzled out toward half time and despite some pressure from both sides the half ended with Rangers one point behind Celtic and Hearts.
 
Love him or hate him you can’t deny McInnes is doing an amazing job at Tynecastle, and whatever he said at half time reinvigorated his troops they stormed into battle after the break with an intensity that was clearly missing in the first 45+. It wasn’t long before this pressure paid off when Kingsley pounced on a rebound, the shot from Kyziridis hitting the post and landing at the foot of the left back and parity restored.
 
Games like this need a hero and Hearts have theirs in a certain Lawrence Shankland, the 30 year old striker has assumed this role numerous times throughout the season and once again stepped up to the plate and as soon as he made contact with Kingsley's cross in the 77th minute you knew it was game over.
 
Rangers to their credit did fight for an equaliser but for the despairing 600 fans present and countless others elsewhere it never materialised.
 
Rangers now find themselves seven points behind Hearts and four behind Celtic. Whilst it’s not mathematically impossible to win the league from this position it’ll take something of a biblical miracle. As club captain James Tavernier has already announced this will be his final season at the ‘Gers questions must also be asked regarding the future of Danny Röhl and many of his squad.
From a Celtic point of view it’s fun to watch the demise of The Rangers, no chance of silverware and potentially ending up third in the league isn’t going to sit well with fans and club custodians alike. A sobering thought that since they returned to the SPL one league title in the bag how much longer can they take to the field to “Simply the best” without opposition fans mocking the irony of it all? Self awareness has left the building.

PS Glasgow Derby as if anyone needs reminding is a lunchtime kick off on Sunday with Hearts facing Motherwell on Saturday at 8pm at Fir Park. Come kick off on Sunday both sides of the Glasgow divide could potentially be a minimum of 6 points behind Hearts (Rangers could be 10) The outcome of the Glasgow Derby could in theory seal the title for Hearts.
 
All is still to be revealed.

Til next time …

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Hearts Broken Huns

Links ☭ Written by Dan La Botz.

Though he has been dead for more than 100 years, Vladimir Lenin continues to stand at the centre of debates about modern Marxism for his leading role in the Russian Revolution, for his reputed strategic and tactical acumen, and for his vaunted political theories. 

Evaluating Lenin, however, is a complex task, because of the turbulent and complicated times in which he lived and all that followed. Exalted in the Soviet Union, vilified elsewhere, we must be discerning to discover the significance of Lenin’s thought and work.

Consider this: after his death in 1924, at the age of 53, he was virtually canonised, his embalmed body in its open casket in his tomb in Red Square became a place of pilgrimage for tens of millions of the Communist faithful. His ideas received similar treatment. 

The Soviet state published his most important books — virtually sacred texts — in myriad languages in hundreds of thousands of copies, distributing them for free or at little cost in many countries. 

In Joseph Stalin’s era, Communists created the term “Marxism-Leninism” as the name for their ideology. Everywhere in the Soviet Union, and later in Eastern Europe and countries around the world, reading Lenin’s work became the heart of the Communists’ catechism. 

Continue @ Links.

Goodbye To Lenin And Leninism

Barry Gilheany 🎥I recently took a trip into the Kafkaesque and inverted reality word of the Soviet Union at Peak Stalin by attending a showing of the film The Two Prosecutors at Firstsite contemporary arts centre in Colchester. 


Made in 2025, it is an historical drama directed by Sergei Loznitsa and is based on a 1969 novella by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist who spent 14 years in a Siberian labour camp after being convicted as a Trotskyist in the late 1930, and tells the story of an idealistic young prosecutor who in response to a secret message from a loyal Bolshevik who has become one of many thousands of fellow party devotees to be incarcerated at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937. In the course of his investigation, he uncovers a web of corruption in the local NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and his sense of public service and commitment to the original ideals of the Revolution brings his concerns to his superiors in the State Prosecution Offices in Moscow. But he is gradually but steadily enveloped in the labyrinthine of intrigue, malfeasance and paranoia that was the culture of the Stalinist judicial system – office politics with lethal outcomes. The film shows how he is progressively sucked into a vortex of suspicion and risk culminating in the denouement of his own arrest.

Alexander Kornev, a newly appointed idealistic prosecutor in his 20s just out of university receives a rare, undestroyed letter from a prisoner named Stepniak, an old Bolshevik unjustly imprisoned in Block 84 for Political Prisoners in Bryansk prison 200 miles southwest of Moscow. The letter describes NKVD corruption, torture, and wrongful convictions. The first hour of the film is taken up with Kornev’s struggles with an obstructive prison management to seek permission to see Stepniak. It is on its own a vignette of the claustrophobia and the argot associated with any prison environment but with the particularly cruel quirks of the Soviet penal system with the jibes directed by prison guards towards the political allegiances of the prisoners and the knowing nods and winks between prison administrative staff about the quirks of the Gulag Archipelago that everyone knows about any yet do not know about. Throughout the prison officials treat Kornev with suspicion and hostility. The prison directors secretly report higher up the chain of command on Kornev’s inquiries placing him in certain jeopardy.

When he finally gets to see Stepniak, he witnesses firsthand the effects of the torture inflicted on him by his erstwhile comrades. The bastinado type bruising inflicted on his feet and ankles; the kaleidoscope of colours and weals that are the results of prolonged assaults on the chest and torso; the injuries inflicted to the head. When Stepniak begins to peel back one of the many lacerations on his skin, the camera mercifully pans away from the scene remaining silent throughout, Kornev listens to a stream of consciousness and cathartic outpourings of the crimes of the comrades; the purging, torture and liquidation of good revolutionaries deemed to belong to whatever faction the Party deemed deviant; Bukharinites, Kamevitres, Zinovievites, Trotskyist-Fascists or any other category artificially created in opposition to whatever current Party orthodoxy was in vogue. 

Obsession with factions has always dogged parties of the Marxist and non-Marxist left; think of the factional civil wars that have dogged the British Labour Party, but they have been matters of career peril rather than life or death. Stepniak also details the fiddles around quotas of arrests and misappropriation of state monies within the local NKVD and how the Animal Farm dictum of some being equal but some more equal than others had already taken hold in the world’s first self-proclaimed workers’ state. On his train journey home he hears further confirmation of these social realities from a vox populi of disabled war veterans and those with barely a kopek between them.

So he travels directly to Moscow to appeal directly to Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky. Again he is forced to wait for hours for a meeting, and the film effectively conveys the petty fogging bureaucracy and the sheer opaqueness of the architecture of gatekeepers and clerks that he has to navigate. When he finally presents Stepniak’s case to Vyshinsky, the stony inscrutability of the Prosecutor General’s demeanour and his formulaic responses to the evidence he presents, Kornev realises that the judicial system is designed not to correct errors but to erase them. Vyshinsky who served as the Hanging Judge for Stalin’s purges and would go on to be a joint prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials is of course appraised of Kornev’s career background and his unwelcome interest in and pursuit of allegations of abuses of power in a supposedly egalitarian Utopia.

Kornev’s rubbing up against a regime built on feeding quotas and fabricated evidence will not end well for him. On his journey on the sleeper train back to Bryansk he enters into a - on the surface - jovial encounter with a team of engineers sent on a project to repair infrastructure sabotaged by “wreckers.” Wine flows and we are treated to a rendition of proletarian, revolutionary songs. However, when Kornev and his new accomplices board a taxi in his home town, the atmosphere turns perilous when after his responses to their boorish questions about the reputations of local women and on his own virginity status, he is suddenly arrested after being presumably briefed by one of the stool pigeons that such compulsively self-surveillance (a product of the need for self-preservation) societies generates.

The thematic carapace of the film can be summarised by the question “Where’s the way out?” asked of Kornev by a man, looking lost and terrified inside the maze of offices and corridors in Moscow. For his fear is ours too. [1] It conjures up the image of the perpetual panopticon. There is literally no way out of labyrinthine of unseen, hidden yet unhidden, self-reinforcing, internalising codes of subservience.

The film conveys a stifling claustrophobia as well as an omnipresent dread. Everything about it feels premonitory; a chronicle of the future foretold in real time, from the jibes of the prison guards to the surreal encounters that turn Kornev’s Moscow expedition into the stuff of nightmares[2].

Shooting entirely in Riga, Loznitsa cast actors from different corners of the former USSR, including Alexander Kuznetsov who plays the part of Kornev who fled Ukraine after the full Russian invasion in February 2022 and has lived in exile ever since. It is subtitled and runs for 1 hour 40 minutes. It is a valuable addition to the cinematic canon around the experiences of life under “actually existing socialism.” Regretfully it could not be made or shown in Russia.

[1] Leonaedi Gai” Everything Must Be Said Again” Loznitsa on Two Prosecutors. Notebook Interview MUBI 23 April 2026

[2] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

The Two Prosecutors

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3136

Remembering Bobby Sands On The 45th Anniversary Of His Death On Hunger Strike In The H Blocks Of Long Kesh.

Bobby Sands 🏴 45 🏴 Eternal Dreamless Sleep

Martin Galvin📺 RTE’s acclaimed documentary Noraid: Irish America And The IRA was named the Best Factual Series by Ireland’s Royal Television Society in Dublin on April 16th. 

The two part series tells how Irish Americans, over a quarter century, defied opposition, indeed vilification by the British, Irish and American governments, to deliver vital political backing and publicity for the Irish Republican Army struggle, and millions of dollars for prisoners’ families. Director Kevin Brannigan and Producer Jamie Goldrick of Up and Away Media, won the coveted award for telling a story that had been all but hidden.

Line-Up

Early on, viewers see Michael Flannery, the Tipperary IRA Veteran of the Black and Tan, and Civil Wars, who fifty years later helped found Irish Northern Aid or Noraid, when money was desperately needed by the families of those arrested or interned.

Viewers glimpse the forces lined up against Noraid. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, shrilly condemns Noraid support. She is echoed by Irish Prime Ministers Charles Haughey, Liam Cosgrove and even American President Ronald Reagan. Former New York Governor Hugh Carey, one of the “Four Horseman” who along with Ted Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Tip O’Neill aligned with John Hume and Irish officials against Sinn Fein, bitterly attacks Michael Flannery as Grand Marshal leading the 1983 New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade,( one of the largest ever held despite boycotts.)

Hostile press is exemplified by a 1985 Irish Independent editorial, expressing outrage that Americans would want to see the north firsthand, or hear Irish Republican leaders banned from broadcast airways, and denied visas to the United States.

News coverage, termed Irish Republican Army Volunteers, “sectarian terrorists” or “mindless criminals” whose American supporters must be “misguided” or “misty-eyed”. British officials even blamed Irish Americans, not British injustice, for the Irish conflict, or incidents like the brutal Internment Day 1984 attack on peaceful demonstrators including 130 Noraid tour members, watched by millions, during American network coverage of the Olympics.

Top British spy Denis Donaldson would be sent to wreck Noraid from within, while an FBI official admits getting frequent demands for action from the White House at Britain’s behest.

Joined

Against this array Irish Americans, some born in Ireland and others generations removed, joined together simply because they saw Irish men and women in a desperate struggle against British rule, and would not stand idly by. For them, tirades by Thatcher, or her various allies, were accolades, to be repeated aloud at rallies with cheers and laughter. It was truly Noraid: Irish America And The IRA, because as long as Noraid members were willing to take a stand, Congressmen, labor leaders, civil rights lawyers, Hibernians and other Irish organizations were willing to stand with them.

Motives

Brannigan and Goldrick tell this remarkable story by mixing historic archival film with first hand interviews of Noraid members. As the words of the 1916 Easter Proclamation, “supported by her exiled children in America” are highlighted, John McDonagh explains how Irish Americans were part of every struggle for freedom in Ireland, since the early 1800s. John himself played a major role in a Times Square display, planned as a Christmas message to Irish political prisoners, which unexpectedly became an international news story, courtesy of hysterical British tabloids.

Brigid Brannigan, from South Armagh and Fr. Patrick Maloney from Limerick, were two of the Irish born members who joined Noraid when conflict broke out and carried the organization during its early years, headquartered in a small Bronx office with two phones, taking on the unlimited resources of the British.

Kathleen Savage, and Michael Shanley met on the 1985 fact-finding visit, which so outraged the Irish Independent. Kathleen defied Royal Ulster Constabulary commands to surrender her camera, while Michael was arrested for shouting “British troops out of Ireland” in a chance encounter with a British royal in New York.

He describes his emotional trip to Manhattan on the day of Bobby Sands’ funeral, followed by a television news clip, “They are massing by the thousands outside the British Consulate outraged by the death of Bobby Sands.”

Chris Byrne’s song “Fenians” captured the spirit of Noraid, and the former New York City Policeman described how the New York City Emerald Society Pipe Band came to march in honor of the Hunger Strikers in Bundoran County Donegal, despite Gardai complaints, in what became “the band’s finest hour”.

IRA Arms Questions

This documentary goes right at questions of whether Noraid monies went to finance arms for the IRA.

The producers managed to get groundbreaking interviews with three men, Gabriel Megahey, John Crawley and Patrick Nee, who make no apologies for helping arm IRA Volunteers during the Troubles, and served years of imprisonment for doing so.

They each made the point, categorically, that not only were Noraid monies not used for arms purchases, but it would have been foolhardy to become involved with a public organization like Noraid.

Breakthrough

The program traces how Noraid was key to the decade long fight to put the Irish conflict on the American Presidential agenda, with a Noraid leader positioned to ask candidate Bill Clinton to pledge a visa for Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams during the historic Irish American Presidential Forum of 1992. Clinton’s Irish pledges followed by his election victory opened the door for the American involvement that followed.

That breakthrough can be traced directly to the H-Blocks and ultimately the Hunger Strikers, whose inspiration transformed Noraid. In 1978 two Irish Republicans came to New York with a message from H-Block prison leader Brendan Hughes, that the Blanketmen needed American publicity and political pressure to win their fight against brutal British attempts to break them.

A key part of the reorganization and campaign which followed, were Blanketmen, Ciaran Nugent, Fra McCann, Joe Maguire and Seamus Delaney coming illegally, for rallies organized by Noraid across the US, making the H-Blocks an American issue. Viewers see film of one Noraid rally outside New York’s Lincoln Center, where 15,000 stood with siblings of Bobby Sands, Patsy O’Hara, Ray McCreesh and Joe McDonnell to humiliate Britain’s then Prince Charles.

The daily rallies across America during the 1981 Hunger Strike contributed to the victory over criminalization. They also convinced New York Assemblyman John Dearie we could make Ireland a Democratic Presidential issue using Irish candidate’s forums.

The influx of new supporters led to bringing hundreds of Americans like Kathleen Savage and Michael Shanley to see the six counties for the first time. When the Thatcher government tried to quell Noraid support by an Exclusion Order forbidding me entry to the six counties, Sinn Fein decided the ban must be challenged. The televised scenes of the murderous RUC attack on unarmed Internment Day demonstrators shocked millions by showing the true face of British rule.

There followed political battles around the MacBride Principles and Irish Political Deportees that time would not permit to be included in the two hour program.

Ultimately with Clinton’s pledges and election victory, many of those who had condemned Noraid and Sinn Fein now came around.

Noraid and its historic contributions against overwhelming opposition seemed all but whitewashed out of history. Now Kevin Brannigan and Jamie Goldrick have told that story, with a skill and authenticity that won Noraid: Irish America and the IRA the prestigious Royal Television Society award as Best Factual Series. It also won them plaudits from former Noraid members, who never expected credit but are thankful to have their story told.

Martin Galvin was National Publicity Director of Noraid from 1979-1995 and for most of that period Editor of the Irish People Newspaper. He has been AOH Freedom for all Ireland Chairman since 2018.

Royal Society Honors For Noraid Broadcast

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

2-April-2026

We need a collective discussion about “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”, my friend and comrade Bob Myers wrote on this blog (27 March), in a book review. Of course, I agree.

But I think that, to set the terms of such a discussion, we need to do better than what Bob proposes.

A Zapatista meeting in 1996. Photo by Julian Stallabrass / wikimedia commons

Specifically, first, I think that our generation, which set out to try to challenge capital and resist hierarchy half a century or more ago, can convey our experience less one-sidedly.

Second, we can offer a more accurate characterisation of the crisis between humanity and our natural surroundings.

Third, and perhaps most important, in developing our understanding of the gathering catastrophe, we can not only learn from the experience of social movements but also assimilate what science has learned about the world.

On the first point, Bob writes of our attempts to find ways to challenge capitalism:

All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever.

The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly.

Yes, the slaughter goes on. And yes, the horror expressed on the streets of rich countries makes little difference to the killings in Gaza and the West Bank. But surely people who have been trying to change things for as long as Bob and I have (I dislike the word “activist”) can come up with a more convincing retrospective.

Before the century-plus of activity that Bob points to, there were genocides such as Belgium’s in Congo, and Turkey’s of Armenians. These were covered up from most people. The perpetrators remained unpunished. In contrast, today, we all know about the genocide in Gaza, and despite the best efforts of the world’s most powerful governments, millions of people have been moved to protest against it. The lie that they are motivated by “anti semitism” has been confounded.

Countries that for much of the last century were in the grip of extractive dictatorships – I am thinking of South Africa and Brazil – are leading international legal action against Israel. The US-Israeli relationship, key to the international order for the last half century, is creaking. It may not break; it may produce fresh horrors. But it will not remain the same.

Again, none of this lessens Palestinians’ suffering. My answer to Bob’s picture of catastrophe is not to pretend that there isn’t one. My answer to his view that “the goal seems further away than ever” is not to claim it is closer (although it may be that “the goal” needs clearer definition). But I think we need to get on top of history, to recognise it as an ever-shifting combination of catastrophe, confrontation and resistance.

I agree with Howard Zinn:

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

Further on in his review, Bob writes about the long process during which capitalist social relations emerged in predominantly feudal societies, culminating in the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. He asks:

How does this past reality chime with our present situation? We have no areas of socialised production, no places where people can form new relations, new cultures based on collective productive activity. Capitalism, with all the power of technology, seeks to suppress and destroy even the most marginal attempts to create other ways of living.

All this is too one-sided, in my view. Right through the century-plus during which, according to Bob, “anti-capitalist” activists tried to galvanise masses into action but ended up further than ever from their goal, there were numerous large-scale attempts to bring into being “areas of socialised production” and “places where people can form new relations”. They should be soberly assessed, not written off.

The Russian revolutions of 1917, and the attempt to create a “workers’ state” that followed, failed to defeat hierarchy and exploitation in the way many participants had hoped. (I spent a few years writing a book about why.) But that does not mean it had no purpose. Nor were millions of people in a range of revolutionary situations through the twentieth century put off by that experience from trying to live differently.

Movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the semi-state formations in Rojava aspired to that explicitly. As for the statist “socialism” of e.g. Cuba or Vietnam, we don’t have to share any illusions in its economic and social character to recognise the liberatory potential of the struggles that produced it.

The workers’ rebellions in Europe after the second world war fell well short of overthrowing capitalism, but led to changes that took capital decades to reverse – and, relevant to this conversation, brought into being the world in which Bob, and I, and tens of thousands of others, connected with radical ideas.

The manifold movements that did not articulate their goal as post-capitalist must also be accounted for, to understand their limitations and potentials: feminism and the changes it has wrought; the struggles for democracy across Latin America, east Asia and elsewhere; the “Arab spring”; battles against racism and for civil rights across the rich world; the struggle for Dalit rights in India.

To recognise what these movements achieved, and failed to achieve, is not to downplay the scale of the catastrophe twenty-first century capitalism is inflicting on humanity. In some ways it makes it appear all the more alarming, because it points up the limits of humanity’s ability to resist. But the younger people now trying to challenge capitalism and its evils deserve more from our generation than outbursts of pessimism.

I think Bob is right that we have no areas of socialised production or cultures based on collective activity. It is hard, and to my mind long has been, to envisage how collectivist and communist relations between people can grow at scale in a society dominated by capital.

But I see no justification for Bob’s assertion that “the social disintegration taking place all around us is going to continue and accelerate”. How can you be so sure?

My second point is about the character of the rupture between humanity, organised hierarchically, and nature. Bob writes:

From the earliest hierarchical societies right through to today, this form of human organisation continually tends to consume resources at a quicker rate than the environment can reproduce it.

The word “tends” is doing a lot of work here. I think the damaging impacts on the natural world by forms of human economic activity have unfolded in more chaotic, complicated ways than Bob suggests. It is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle impacts that result from humans living socially, and those that can be attributed to hierarchy.

I think that “consumption of resources” is an unhelpful framework for judging. And I doubt the arithmetical computation referred to (“quicker rate”) has much meaning.

Bob takes us through the history of hierarchical societies as set out in Roy Ratcliffe’s book, and concludes:

We, one of the most recently evolved life forms, are exhausting the resources needed for existence and changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible.

Of course I agree that human economic activity is “changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible”. Global heating and the destruction of biodiversity are the most alarming manifestations of this. The “planetary boundaries” project presents perhaps the best available overview. But this is not the same as saying that humanity is “exhausting the resources needed for existence”.

For a start, nature is not just “resources”, not in any socialist understanding of humanity’s place in it. And the issue of what “resources” are needed is socially and politically formed. Take oil, for example: right-wing commentators warn that oil resources will run out, whereas it’s clear that the amount of atmosphere in to which greenhouse gases can be pumped is running out much more quickly.

What’s more, there is little doubt that humanity, if its economic activity got anywhere near to being organised rationally, could take from its natural surroundings the means of its existence, while pulling back from inflicting irreversible damage.

It is the anarchic, materials-hungry expansion of capitalist production, driven at an even more frenzied pace in the twenty-first century, that is pushing at limits – not human consumption per se.

I am not quibbling about words. The claim that “resource depletion” is pushing society unilaterally towards disaster is central to the misconceived idea of “social collapse”, popularised by Jared Diamond and challenged by other anthropologists.

In 2018-19, with the emergence of new, potentially radical environmentalist movements in rich countries (e.g. Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion), one-sided – and in my view, essentially reactionary – stories of “collapse” were recycled, tending to disarm people politically and drive them away from anti-capitalist perspectives.

I am not suggesting that Bob cares for this type of reactionary doomism. But his sweeping generalisations do us no favours. We need a coherent understanding of capital’s reckless rampage against the natural world, and that means being accurate.

This brings me to my third quarrel with Bob, about how we develop our knowledge of humanity’s relationship with nature.

He writes that:

even while life forms continually changed over time, there was always a balance between the nutritional intake of one life form and the rate at which the supply of that nourishment was itself reproduced. 

This “balance”, in his view, was the prequel and counterpoint to the “resource depletion” now underway. I don’t think this is right, either.

Surely that balance was and is constantly interrupted, by processes that cause life forms to multiply, to need more nourishment than is immediately available, and in some cases to die out as a result. That is how I (no biologist or natural historian) understand one aspect of the theory of evolution.

Charles Darwin wrote, in a section entitled “Complex relations of all animals and plants to each other in the struggle for existence”:

Battle within battle must be continually recurring with varying success; and yet in the long run the forces are so nicely balanced that the face of nature remains for long periods of time uniform, though assuredly the merest trifle would give the victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel whe we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of forms of life!” (from The Origin of Species, chapter 3).

Bob is no help here. In his telling, Darwin was:

Very much a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite, and of his time – with Britain laying hold to a third of the world’s resources. So we get Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – a notion thoroughly in accord with an elite man in an elite nation.
Darwin saw all life forms battling to survive against all others. However, in his book, Roy [Ratcliffe] outlines the real history of the evolution of all life forms is the story of interdependence. And crucially there was always a “balance”.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The “balance” and the “struggle for survival”, in Darwin’s understanding at least, were two sides of the same coin.

The “survival of the fittest”, in Darwin’s presentation – the competition for nutrition between and within species, which forms the background to the processes of adaptation and natural selection – is quite different from its presentation by Thomas Huxley, and then by others who exaggerated the element of direct conflict and applied it to society (“social Darwinism”). And different again from its life as an element of ruling-class ideology from that day to this.

What’s more, arguments have been raging around Darwin’s share of responsibility for “social Darwinism” for a century and a half already. Socialist and left-leaning biologists and natural historians have played their part, and their years of work on this deserve our attention. One of them, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote in 1988:

Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about a bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts.

Gould was reviewing an argument in 1909 between the writer Lev Tolstoy and the anarchist naturalist Petr Kropotkin. Tolstoy railed against those who saw the “struggle for existence” as a moral imperative, and held Darwin responsible; Kropotkin argued that this struggle often resolved itself as mutual aid, both among animals and humans.

Stephen Jay Gould at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1980s, next to a
Tyrannosaurus rex specimen that inspired him at the age of five to become a paleontologist

Gould wrote that, when re-reading Kropotkin’s writings, he had found that his research, conducted in nineteenth-century Russia where the low population density of all species meant that animals were more likely to be battling against harsh environmental conditions than against each other, lent credence to his optimistic view of the “struggle for existence”. (If you enjoy Gould’s witty dissection of difficult arguments as much as I do, this one is also worth reading about social Darwinism.)

What does all this matter now? In my view, firstly, because the fearsome dangers of global heating and other breakdowns in human-nature relations should encourage us to think again about how Darwin’s understanding of natural history, and Karl Marx’s understanding of human history, might be synthesised.

This is the subject of Joel Wainwright’s book The End: Marx, Darwin and the natural history of the climate crisis, published in November last year. He argues that Marx was much more strongly influenced by reading Darwin than many Marxists have allowed; that elements of natural history run through Marx’s analysis of the origins of capital and its expansion, in ways that excessively “economistic” readings of Marx have failed to recognise; and that a re-reading of Marx with this in mind can help us to formulate an understanding of the grave crisis capital has brought us into, from a perspective aspiring to supercede capitalism.

Wainwright is clear that Darwin was, in his political and social views, a social Darwinist, and that he “applied his theory to political economy to justify class inequality” (The End, page 79). But he believes, nevertheless, that socialist thinking must assimilate the scientific achievements of Darwin, Alfred Wallace and subsequent natural historians, if it is to confront the crisis we face now. I agree.

What Darwin said also matters, because it is under sustained attack by the most reactionary anti-human forces. Just look at the battle raging in the US between teachers and an alliance of creationists and “intelligent design” advocates. This goes alongside the monstrous assault on climate science that has intensified under Trump’s second administration.

In this world, we need a serious, thought-out appreciation of Darwin, as we do of all science. We need to treat thinkers who have grappled with this – Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Stephen Jay Gould, all the many others – as our predecessors in a collective endeavour.

Bracketing Darwin with social Darwinism, and dismissing him as “a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite”, will not do.

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Knowledge Is Power 🪶 And it Is Produced By Collective Endeavour

Dr John Coulter ✍ Even before the current Iran conflict may finally come to an end, talk of ‘war crimes’ has already been kicked around by some in the liberal, left, woke commentary lobby.

During one intense live television panel debate on the war in which I participated, the question was posed that the International Criminal Court (ICC) lacks jurisdiction over the United States, Israel and Iran, who are all non-members.

The suggestion based on this observation was that it made the prosecution of war crimes alleged by human rights organisations nearly impossible. It was further posed that international law experts have documented alleged violations including strikes on civilian infrastructure, more than 600 schools demolished or damaged across Iran and systematic attacks on residential areas.

This prompted the question from a political and legal perspective, what does this jurisdiction gap mean for the future of international criminal law if the ICC cannot touch the most powerful actors in the world’s consequential conflicts, what is its actual function, and what, if anything, can constrain the behaviour of states outside its jurisdiction?

Another supposed analysis for discussion asks what it calls the most obvious question the so-called liberal media refuses to ask: that the Iran war itself is criminal, unjustifiable and illegal under international law and that any remaining doubt should have disappeared when the US-Israeli strikes hit civilians areas, including schools and residential districts, killing many civilians including women and children.

Bearing this liberal analysis in mind, the obvious question is: do supporters of the Trump administration agree with this assessment, and if the Iran war itself is illegal, what legitimacy can any ceasefire or agreement negotiated under its shadow possibly claim? Hard-hitting and soul-searching questions!

From a purely cynical point of view, has all this talk of ‘war crimes’ hit the headlines because of the cinematic success of the latest blockbuster, the two and a half hour epic Nuremberg, starring movie icons Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, which dramatises the trial of Nazi war criminals in Germany in 1946?

Then again, given the history of legacy issues arising from the Troubles in Ireland, could the so-called finger of alleged legacy ‘war crimes’ be pointed at the United States over the civilian deaths in 1945 when the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on two Japanese cities bringing the Second World War to a swift conclusion?

Or in that same war, what about the Allied bombing of German cities such as Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg which saw tens of thousands of civilians killed? Should Germany as a nation still be held accountable for the deaths of civilians during World War Two in the Blitz of British cities?

One of the tragedies of war over the ages is that in almost all cases, it is the civilian populations which bear the brunt of the conflicts. If this is the reality of warfare, is there any such thing as a righteous war? Indeed, what is the difference between a terrorist campaign and a legal war, if the latter actually exists?

As mankind develops even more deadlier weapons of mass destruction, could a time come when wars actually cease because those nations are too scared to deploy these horrific weapons? Or will there be always that one nation or group which decides to try and gain the upper hand in a conflict by using weapons which either their opponents do not possess, or deploy them on a ‘first strike’ basis?

Can serious ‘rules of engagement’ ever be drawn up for conflict, or are we just entering the fantasy world of computer games? The bitter reality of human nature is that what one person calls a ‘war’, another person can see the same conflict as a ‘criminal terror campaign’.

The famous wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is credited with the saying that it was better to ‘jaw, jaw’ up, than ‘war war’. But can a mediation panel ever be conceived internationally that when a potential conflict is looming or bubbling up, those panellists can be sent in to defuse the situation?

Or given human nature, is it totally cynical thinking that in some situations, conflicts erupt because the leaders of those nations simply just want to get all their pent-up aggression out of their systems? Could the Christian churches act as mediators across the globe, or is the reality that religions have been the causes of many wars?

For example, in Christianity, many quote the example of Jesus Christ Himself when He physically threw the money changers out of the temple. Then again, others point to the fact that when His disciple Peter hacked off the ear of one of those coming to arrest Jesus, Christ healed the wounded man.

Perhaps the even more bitter reality which folk have to face is that man will always want a fight with his fellow man, so that the best people can hope for is to develop a comprehensive clean-up operation after the destruction.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

When Is A ‘War Crime’ Not A War Crime?

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

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