Bloody Sunday and the rise of Martin McGuinness
Sunday Life, May 11th, 2025
WHY BLOODY SUNDAY AND RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN ICON WAS A DEADLY MIX IN HIS NEW BOOK, JONATHAN TRIGG EXAMINES ROLE OF THE IRA CHIEF IN TURNING THE PROVOS INTO BRUTAL KILLING MACHINE IN HIS HOME CITY
Two weeks after internment without trial was introduced in August 1971, and with the Brigade OC languishing in Magilligan, Seán Mac Stíofáin — the Provisionals' chief of staff — effectively handed command of Derry PIRA to Martin McGuinness.
For the Provos and the security forces, nothing would ever be the same again.
The effects of Bloody Sunday will be forever entwined with the history of the city itself and the IRA brigade that called it home.
1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment were the resident battalion in the city at the time, but had been replaced in their usual role of crowd control by the soldiers of 1 PARA.
Tony Jones was among the majority of Royal Anglians who were surprised by that decision: “I never understood why we were basically stood down and the Paras were brought in. We knew Derry, knew every inch of it, and we knew the score with the locals, they were stoning us mind, petrol bombs and the like, but we — that's them and us — had a set of rules and we stuck to them.”
Another former soldier had a view as to why the switch was made: “I think the high-ups at brigade thought we weren't robust enough with the locals to do the job on the day so they decided to bring in the Paras.”
Whatever the reasoning, the result was disaster. For those killed and their families, it was a tragedy, for the British Army it was appalling, and for the IRA it was both a huge boost as well as a day of horrors. As a former Royal Anglian officer opined: “Bloody Sunday was a total shock for everyone, not just us and the people of Londonderry, but the IRA too. They didn't expect it. They thought it would be the usual; rioting, bricks and stones, hopefully a soldier would get hurt, but nothing like what actually happened.”
‘A united Ireland or nothing’
The day after Bloody Sunday, the SDLP's John Hume stood on Derry's walls and gave an interview to an Irish radio station.
Pointing down towards the Bogside he said: “Many people down there feel that now it's a united Ireland or nothing. Alienation is pretty total.”
That alienation generated a tsunami of support for the IRA, with more recruits coming forward than they could possibly arm.
With more men than guns, the Derry Brigade's answer — and more specifically Martin McGuinness's answer — was, as Seán McGlinchey put it “…to launch a massive bombing campaign, bombing town centres, an economic war to bring the attention of the world on the North”.
Using large car bombs, as well as relatively small devices — such as the Durex incendiary Derry IRA pioneered, where detonation occurred after acid had eaten through a condom — explosion after explosion rocked what the Brigade viewed as the 'Prod city centre' and reduced much of it to rubble.
Over the next few months well over 60 people were injured and dozens of commercial premises were attacked, eventually leaving only around 20 of the city's 150 or so shops physically trading.
McGuinness — never one to shy away from the media — even went as far as appearing in the documentary the American writer and film-maker J Bowyer Bell was making at the time on the IRA — The Secret Army. Given behind the scenes access, Bell filmed McGuinness ordering volunteers to load a 100lb bomb into a car on March 21, 1972, and deliver it to its target. Twenty-six people were injured in the resulting explosion.
'Aidan' was an experienced Provisional volunteer and was at the forefront of the renewed offensive: “Those were all commercial targets we bombed, it was all a matter of letting people in England know what was happening here, and to try and bankrupt the Brit government you know, and Stormont.”
Flawed strategy
Looking back now he thinks the strategy was flawed but believed at the time there was no alternative. “OK, it wasn't realistic, but it got the message across and let them know we were there and wouldn't go away.”
He also feels very strongly that every institution of the State and the wider establishment was actively working against the Provos. “The BBC was run by Protestants, and they didn't tell the English a lot of what was happening here in terms of attacks, bombs and so on. For instance, there were times when soldiers were shot here and nothing was reported, then two or three days later there'd be a report on the BBC saying a soldier had been killed in Germany in an accident, and it was a lie — he'd been killed here, and it was covered up.”
Aidan went on to explain how the offensive was run on the ground: “We had safe houses in the Bogside and in the city centre, and we had women who brought in small amounts of explosives — a bit at a time — and we'd then put it all together — maybe 10 or 20lbs — put in a detonator, a timer and wrap it in Cordtex (a type of detonating cord generally used in mining). It uses an explosive core inside its plastic coating and away we'd go.
“Car bombs were different, lorry bombs too, you'd have to take a risk about going in, but you'd watch the soldiers on the gates and the checkpoints and you'd see... say a meat lorry would go in on a Tuesday, and the first Tuesday it'd be stopped and the soldiers would look all over it, then the next Tuesday, same lorry, same driver and the soldiers would check it again, and the next Tuesday and the next, and then someone would say, 'Hey, did you see, the meat lorry went in and the soldiers didn't look', and you'd think, 'They've got complacent', so you'd take the risk and put the bomb in the back with the meat and sometimes it'd get in.
“One bomb we did was a lorry loaded with bricks, it was hijacked in the Bogside, we took the bricks off, put a 500lb bomb in the middle and put all the bricks back around it and then in it went. That one worked a treat.”
* Death In Derry - Martin McGuinness and the Derry IRA's War Against the British, by Jonathan Trigg is on sale now, priced £17.99 (Merrion Press)
A Mole Hill to climb for Sinn Fein
Sam McBride, Sunday Independent and Sunday Life, May 11th, 2025
NEVER MIND BRITS OUT, SINN FEIN CAN'T EVEN PEDESTRIANISE A TINY STREET
Belfast's Hill Street is shorter than the short walk from Dublin's GPO to O'Connell Bridge, yet this tiny cobbled street is exposing a baffling ineptitude at the top of Sinn Fein.
At just 194 metres long, Hill Street can be traversed in moments. The problem it throws up is not a conundrum of complex engineering, like the Channel Tunnel, or a scene of interlocking sectarian geography, as in other parts of Belfast.
At the heart of the bustling Cathedral Quarter, it is, in fact, emblematic of the post-Good Friday Agreement city. If you want to find the new Northern Ireland, this is where to go. It's buzzing with bars and restaurants and artistry and tourists.
King Charles went there a few weeks ago, and is a return visitor. The picturesque street was closed to cars for his visit, but everyone else has to endure revving vehicles honking at them to get out of the way in this historic narrow route.
For years, there has been near-unanimous agreement that the pretty street should be closed to traffic, and for years implementing that uncontentious idea has proven beyond Stormont.
All of this is familiar for a government system which sees no contradiction in flushing raw sewage into Lough Neagh and then drawing drinking water from the same location. What's unfamiliar is the pathetically minuscule nature of the obstacle which is tripping up Stormont's biggest party.
There is no reason to believe Sinn Fein secretly opposes pedestrianising this street. On the contrary, it has espoused the manifold benefits of such a decision. Yet with a Sinn Fein minister in charge of the department responsible, the party has been incapable of enforcing its will.
Dysfunctional
For those who wonder what a Sinn Fein government might do in Dublin, this episode is instructive. When criticised in Dublin about its record in Belfast, Sinn Fein invariably blames the mandatory coalition system which shackles it and the DUP together in dysfunctional unity.
That defence is entirely reasonable; one of the problems of the Stormont system is holding anyone to account in a system where almost everyone is in the government.
But issues solely within the remit of Sinn Fein ministers involve no such messy compromises. Putting bollards at the end of a tiny stretch of a city centre street isn't high politics; it's not even tribal politics; it's basic politics, yet it has proved a bollard too far for two Sinn Fein infrastructure ministers, John O'Dowd and now Liz Kimmins.
More than a year after devolution was restored, cars still plough up and down the street. Initially, Sinn Fein blamed the big bad Brits for not sending enough money. Last September, O'Dowd said work on the project had been “put on hold” due to “several competing work priorities”. He went on to blame “underfunding and austerity by the British government”. But he told people not to worry because “officials will keep the position under review and recommence work as soon as resources are available”.
What resources was he talking about? In February, O'Dowd's successor admitted that the estimate for carrying out the work — £5,000 — was so tiny that a minister normally would have nothing to do with such expenditure. Kimmins' own monthly gross salary of £7,541 dwarfs the cost of installing the bollards. Yet, somehow, out of a Stormont budget of £19bn, resources couldn't be found for this work.
None of this added up, and it was attracting derision not only from Sinn Fein's rivals and the public, but from local businesses exasperated at the absurdity of the explanations. Yet still, Sinn Fein ploughed on with ever more embarrassing arguments as to why this work couldn't happen.
A fortnight ago, Kimmins claimed it would take a lot of time and effort, reading out a cliche-laden bureaucratic answer which said her officials would “commence engagement with stakeholders” and then it would be “progressed at pace”. The pace, needless to say, would be a slow one.
This week, this trifling issue took up an entire debate on the floor of what is meant to be a legislative assembly.
SDLP leader of the Opposition Matthew O'Toole suggested that if the minister really couldn't find £5,000 for a few bollards, he would set up a GoFundMe page to raise the money.
Kimmins then denied the £5,000 was the problem and said the issue was she didn't have enough staff (she has 2,162 staff).
Now she says that “officials have been exploring options” and she's promising an “experimental scheme” by an unspecified date.
O'Toole said: “Lots of things in politics are really hard — they are complicated and difficult and involve trade-offs, vested interests and challenges that can be philosophical, bureaucratic and economic — and lots of other things are expensive and cost money.”
Stating the obvious, he told Kimmins pedestrianising Hill Street was “neither difficult nor expensive”.
This episode is just an extreme example of the baffling poverty of ambition in how Sinn Fein governs.
This is a party which portrays itself as radical, yet in power, it could often be renamed 'the Civil Service Party' because its ministers seem to overwhelmingly rubber stamp the ideas put to them by officials.
A canny minister would not only order her civil servants to pedestrianise this street, but would go down and oversee the work herself in front of the TV cameras to make the point that in a democracy power lies with elected ministers, not unelected bureaucrats. Instead, she's reduced to reading out the words of those bureaucrats, even as they grow more preposterous.
If a minister is so powerless that she can't do something this basic, what's the point of being in power? If a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael minister had been in charge of this debacle, Mary Lou McDonald would have roasted them.
Just after the Good Friday Agreement, Gerry Adams told his party: “Our interest is in freedom and in winning maximum changes in every aspect of our lives.” The reality is that Sinn Fein hasn't even been able to free a tiny stretch of road from unwanted cars.
How gunrunner Winkie Irvine was snookered by a fluke
Ciaran Barnes, Sunday Life, May 11th, 2025
UVF BOSS'S DOWNFALL SPARKED BY QUICK THINKING OF EAGLE-EYED OFF-DUTY COP
UVF gunrunner Winkie Irvine was sunk by an off-duty cop who noticed his car acting suspiciously.
The eagle-eyed officer had no idea the loyalist was driving the vehicle, reporting the Volkswagen Tiguan's registration to Tennent Street PSNI station.
A patrol car was tasked to tail Irvine and witnessed him take a bag of guns and ammo from Larne UVF boss Robin Workman and place it in the boot of the Tiguan, which had stopped on Glencairn Crescent at the top of Belfast's Shankill Road.
He was arrested minutes later on Disraeli Street and is now facing up to five years in prison for possessing firearms in suspicious circumstances.
Loyalist sources told Sunday Life how Irvine, who is on remand at Maghaberry Prison awaiting sentencing on Thursday, had been undone by a remarkable stroke of bad luck.
They also believe that anti-terror cops wanted the weapons 'jarked', which would involve them being fitted with a tracking device in the hope they would then be brought to a bigger UVF arms dump and this would reveal its location.
Irvine has never provided an explanation as to why he received the firearms and ammo, or what he intended to do with the haul.
However, in statements to police he did hint that he intended to dispose of the guns and stressed his “reputation as a trusted interlocutor engaging with the community on key outstanding issues in relation to the Northern Ireland peace and political process”.
A UVF source said: “An off-duty PSNI officer noticed Winkie's car acting suspiciously that morning and reported the registration. A patrol car was sent to monitor it and that was when it spotted him taking the bag of guns and ammo from (Robin) Workman.
“It was just bad luck that he was caught in the act. If the handover had taken place a few minutes earlier they would have been in the clear.”
UVF insiders insist the terror gang's leadership had “absolutely no knowledge” of the weapons movement.
“Winkie wasn't asked to do this by brigade staff, he was doing it off his own bat,” added the insider.
“An internal inquiry established that the police wanted the weapons jarked in the hope they would be moved to a B Company arms hide, the location of which would then be revealed.”
Stunt that backfired
At the time of Irvine's June 2022 arrest the UVF was coming under huge pressure for its involvement in a hoax bomb attack three months earlier on Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney who was speaking at a peace conference in north Belfast.
The stunt, carried out by B Company members, made international headlines and deeply embarrassed the British government.
Our source added: “The feeling is that Winkie was going to dispose of the guns as a peace offering to get the cops off his back.
“At time he was doing a university degree in Maynooth funded by the Irish government and he had met officials down there along with Harry Stockman (UVF leader) to deny B Company was responsible for the Coveney hoax bomb.
“They were blaming it on hardliners from Mid-Ulster, East Antrim and East Belfast UVF, which was nonsense as B Company was responsible,” said the UVF insider.
“This caused a lot of ill-feeling towards Winkie and a lot of UVF members are actually quite happy that he is getting jail.”
At Irvine and Workman's pre-sentence hearing last Wednesday a prosecutor explained how Assistant Chief Constable Bobby Singleton — who was called as a witness at an earlier hearing — “had never spoken with him (Irvine) about decommissioning weapons of any description”.
The loyalist was also branded a liar and accused of misleading police over having no knowledge of the weapons in the boot of his car.
Irvine and Workman, a former UDR soldier, also produced a number of references attesting to their good character.
Among Irvine's referees were ex-Policing Board member Debbie Watters, Loyalist Communities Council chair David Campbell, East Belfast-based Rev Gary Mason, and Paul Crawford whose father John was murdered by the UVF.
Workman produced a reference from a former police officer “with many years of service”, who had also worked as a close protection officer for members of the judiciary.
Famine village fire unites Orangemen and former Provo
Ivan Little, Sunday Life, May 11th, 2025
KIDNAPPER GALLAGHER AND LODGE MEMBERS FROM NI OFFER SUPPORT IN REBUILDING OF DONEGAL TOURIST ATTRACTION DEVASTATED BY BLAZE
A former IRA kidnapper and members of the Orange Order are among the unlikely allies supporting the rebuilding of the Doagh Famine Village in Co Donegal after a devastating fire last week.
The tourist attraction near Ballyliffin, which attracted upwards of 50,000 visitors every year, was more than just a folk museum, with part of it also serving as a quirky history of the Troubles.
Eddie Gallagher, who in the 70s was involved in one of Ireland's longest-running kidnaps, designed an IRA safe house for the village on the Inishowen Peninsula.
Nearby stood a recreation of an Orange Hall with banners and flags donated by Orange Order lodge members from Northern Ireland.
For good measure, Pat Doherty, who developed the famine village, put together an extensive exhibition about the peace process, incorporating a timeline with the names of all the people who died in the Troubles.
It also included photographs of politicians and former paramilitaries who were pivotal in bringing peace.
Most of Pat's work, for which he received no funding from the Irish government, was lost in the blaze.
He was alerted to the fire raging through his labour of love by a farmer.
Pat said: “We evacuated the place very quickly. The flames soon spread through the more modern history section of the village.
“The thatched cottages, which focus on the famine, plus the wake houses and the poteen-making houses survived, but it's heartbreaking to see the devastation to the safe house, the Orange Hall, the Presbyterian meeting house and the peace process exhibits.
Landmark
“The Orange Hall was never looking better. We had just received a lot of new material from members of the order.”
Pat went to great lengths to ensure his Troubles storytelling maintained a balance between the two sides of the community.
A GoFundMe appeal launched to repair the damage has raised more than €85,000 so far, with 1,300 people contributing.
An explanation of the appeal on the GoFundMe website says that because the “one of a kind cultural landmark” could not be insured affordably, there was no coverage for loss from the fire, which is believed to have been accidental.
It adds: “The village was self-sustaining, relying solely on visitor income, with no government funding or large sponsorships.
“And yet, it has played a vital role in peace and reconciliation, welcoming groups from both sides of the political divide and helping foster understanding and dialogue.”
When it was opened, the reaction to Gallagher's safe house from visitors was largely positive.
However, some people said they thought it was offensive to victims of the Troubles.
Gallagher was jailed for 20 years for the 1975 kidnap of Dutch industrialist Dr Tiede Herrema.
He and IRA woman Marion Coyle held the businessman captive for 36 days before freeing him following an 18-day siege by the Republic's security forces at a house in Monasterevin in Co Kildare.
The former Provo, who later expressed support for the peace process, has been associated with the famine village for many years, organising horse-riding treks.
He and members of the Orange Order have already been in touch with Pat to offer their backing.
