What it means to pay the price for others' peace
Portraits capture what it means to pay the price for others' peace
Sam McBride, Sunday Independent and Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
When future generations look back at this period, there will be an issue that some will find bewildering. We live in a well-educated, prosperous and sophisticated society, yet we have repeatedly allowed hurt to be inflicted on those who have already experienced unbearable suffering.
When the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by the people of this island in 1998, it involved a messy compromise. There was a largely unspoken ethical argument that if hurting victims in the short-term meant fewer new victims, it was a price worth paying.
What is far less explicable is what has happened since. It's now more than a quarter of a century since that agreement, yet victims of the Troubles are still repeatedly forgotten and their needs ignored.
Those blameless individuals whose loved ones were killed or who themselves were brutally disfigured now suffer the perversity of a legal definition of "victim” which includes psychopathic killers. Some victims accept this definition; many find it obnoxious.
Under that definition, money for victims is appropriated for those who did the slaughtering. Nobody of sufficient power cares enough to change it. Instead, those in power have embarked on another strategy.
Shovelling money in wrong direction
Much of that has involved middle-class people living comfortable lives in big houses who now make up an industry that supposedly represents victims. Shovelling money in their direction salves the consciences of bureaucrats and politicians.
Yet a new book contains the wholesome tale of how a middle-class man living in a nice house took it upon himself to do something that has recorded the experience of Troubles victims in a form whose influence will endure.
Colin Davidson is one of Ireland's most celebrated painters. Even a print of one of his works could leave you with little change from €1,000. Queen Elizabeth II, Bono, Ed Sheeran and Seamus Heaney are among the famous faces to have sat for him. He has painted Angela Merkel for the cover of Time magazine. He has been employed to live with Brad Pitt to teach him how to paint.
Yet the Belfast-born painter regards his greatest work as a series of 18 portraits that he did for free. The subjects are far from celebrities; they are ordinary people whose lives were devastated by the Troubles. In a new book explaining his craft, Davidson speaks powerfully to BBC journalist Mark Carruthers about his exhibition, Silent Testimony.
Recognising some of those who suffered most
It was in part motivated by his own realisation that the Good Friday Agreement — for which he voted — failed those who had suffered the most. Bombers got out of jail and in some cases were venerated; victims were pushed to one side.
Silent Testimony was born out of his realisation when he voted for the agreement that it was "flawed” in this regard. Then, he said, he "came to realise that many tens of thousands of people who are carrying the weight of loss through the conflict on a daily basis were, in a sense, paying a price for everybody else's peace… it marked an end to hope because, for them, justice was going to be almost impossible”.
He says that he wanted to "lend the gravitas of having a portrait made of people who normally wouldn't be afforded that”.
Davidson tells of visiting Paul Reilly, whose daughter Joanne "would have been exactly the same age as me” but who was killed by an IRA bomb when she was just 20. Searching for the best light in which to paint, he asked: "Are there any other rooms we could try in the house?” There was one — Joanne's room, where "the light was perfect” and where her possessions lay untouched.
Davidson says of his victim-painting: "I painted what I saw. And in every case I saw what the viewer now sees — you can't escape it — particularly in people of a certain age. The lines on our faces are creases and valleys that have evolved as a result of how we have lived our lives, and if people spend a life of trauma dealing with loss — unresolved loss in particular — that is etched into the creases of the face.”
He recalls painting Thomas O'Brien in Dublin. His brother, sister-in-law and two nieces — a baby and a toddler — were murdered by loyalists in the 1974 Dublin bombing.
40 years inconsolable
Davidson says: "An entire family wiped out. Thomas talked about the horror of that, which I don't want to repeat, actually, but let me tell you this, we heard sanitised news at the time about somebody being caught in a bomb attack and being killed. Thomas told me the horror of what that actually means. It was horrific. It's what the word horrendous is made for.
"Thomas was inconsolable with me, 40 years on. Inconsolable. He had had very few instances to talk about what happened and suddenly here I was, as an artist, sitting listening to him.”
He adds: "Maybe our future depends on us acknowledging what we actually did to each other over a period of nearly 30 years and how, in so many ways, it was an inhuman period in our history. The poet Michael Longley talked about the 'years of disgrace' — and that's what it was.”
Speaking of the future, he says: "I'll tell you this — and this view is the result of me engaging with people who suffered loss — starting to scratch the surface of dealing with our past is an incredibly complicated and difficult task, but it's not as difficult as picking up the pieces of your loved one from the street after they've been blown to bits.”
At a time when the British government is again trying to pass legislation to "deal with” the legacy of the Troubles, the exhibition — now in storage — could be called "Silent Rebuke”. What does it say about our collective failure that for some of these victims it was a painter who sat and listened to their brokenness while society was either too scared or too insensitive to recognise their suffering?
Caroline Moreland's murder a hit job by PIRA agents covering their tracks
Martin Dillon, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
MORELAND WAS ALLEGEDLY PROTEGE OF LEADING BELFAST PIRA ACTIVIST UNCOVERED A NEST OF SPIES IN THE RANKS...A DISCOVERY WHICH SIGNED HER DEATH WARRANT
PART TWO OF MARTIN DILLON’S ARTICLE (see our belletin last Sunday for PART ONE) ON PROVO SLAYING OF BELFAST MUM in 1994
Several years after Caroline Moreland's murder, two IRA men visited her daughter Shauna and told her that her mother's death was something that happened in war.
Shauna also met PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, who led the Kenova investigation looking into the activities of State agent Freddie Scappaticci in particular.
Scappaticci was instrumental in running the Belfast Brigade ISU (Internal Security Unit). He was not involved in Caroline's murder though some journalists tried to link him to it.
This was a direct consequence of the fact the Kenova investigation was much too Scappaticci centred, allowing the IRA and its rival, MI5, to tag all murders carried out by the ISU to Scappaticci.
It meant other State agents within the IRA's Belfast Brigade, and its Northern Command, were free to blend into the background and vanish from public scrutiny. The ISU and Belfast Brigade were riddled with State assets.
Martin McGuinness, who sat at the top of the IRA and oversaw the Northern Command and Belfast Brigade, failed earlier to provide a report to the IRA's rank and file about the infamous Gibraltar operation, compromised in 1988.
Morbid
Three prominent members of IRA, including Mairead Farrell, were gunned down by the SAS on the Rock in Gibraltar. It was clear to many in the IRA intelligence ranks at the time, that the IRA's Northern Command and its Belfast Brigade, especially its ISU, were deeply penetrated by British intelligence agents.
The more I delved into this complex and morbid tale, the more evidence I gathered pointed to a deliberate policy to hide the truth about it, just like McGuinness hid the truth about Gibraltar.
Soon after publication of my latest book, The Sorrow and the Loss — The Tragic Shadow Cast by the Troubles on the Lives of Women, a source contacted me claiming that Brendan Hughes, the IRA's legendary spy-catcher, in the period around 1986/87 established a small unit to identify British intelligence assets in the Northern Command and the Belfast Brigade.
Hughes never mentioned the existence of the unit, but Hughes had concealed a lot of things from me. If there was such a unit, a possible contender who could have asked Hughes to run it, was Bobby Storey. He would later become director of the IRA'S intelligence. Storey liked to talk about “rooting out” British agents in the IRA ranks and he did not trust the ISU to undertake the task, convinced it was too compromised.
From what I know about Hughes, he was meticulous. According to the same source, Hughes recruited Caroline Moreland for his small counter-espionage unit. She was a newbie, having joined the IRA in 1986, aged 26. By all accounts, she was committed and trustworthy. This was in the summer of 1988, months after the Gibraltar debacle, when Martin McGuinness was promising to launch an inquiry into the failed operation; an inquiry whose findings were concealed from the IRA's rank and file.
Working for Brendan Hughes's unit would have meant carrying out surveillance on targets within the IRA ranks. Sometime after 1990, Brendan Hughes relocated to the Irish Republic. He later admitted he had been scared for his own safety and ignored subsequent requests from the IRA leadership in Belfast to return to the city.
He shared with me that Belfast had become a dangerous place for him and he could not trust people within the Belfast Brigade. I took that to include McGuinness. Hughes sensed some figures in the ISU feared he would expose them if he came back to Belfast.
Informant
They had become suspicious of him, so he left town, knowing they would not dare go after him in the Republic, where he had all the protection he needed. If it were true that he was running Caroline Moreland, his departure would have untethered him from his small unit and from her.
According to the source, Caroline reported only to Brendan Hughes, as did the others in the unit, and she worked with only one other member. During her investigations, she was able to discover a highly placed informant, 'X', and a large network of mostly RUC Special Branch informants around him. The network was spread across the entire Belfast Brigade and the Northern Command, comprising about a dozen agents, all in key positions to give Special Branch enough command and control to steer the republican movement in the direction they wanted.
When Caroline discovered the network in the early 1990s, Brendan Hughes had already fled South. According to the source, X and the network was the secret she was killed to protect. It happened because she made a fatal error by deciding to approach the ISU with her discovery in the absence of Brendan Hughes. She confided in a person, 'Y', who turned out to be an informant.
Special Branch panicked on learning of her “discovery” and immediately got their network to start rumours in IRA ranks that she was not to be trusted and volunteers should stay clear of her, probably as a damage limitation until a plan to take care of her was put in place. Caroline picked up the rumours and realised her life was in danger.
By then, Y had convinced her he was genuine and asked her to report to him every two weeks to help the ISU trap X and his network. She agreed. From that moment until her death, she believed, she was a part of a sting operation to capture X with his Special Branch network of agents.
She was actually being set up to be killed as an informant. Her murder was designed to hide the truth about the existence of a large network of informants.
Caroline, claimed the source, followed orders from Y to become an informant herself to better penetrate the network of informants, all the time imagining that she was working as a double agent for the republican movement.
The source claimed that Caroline was a loyal republican who “cared deeply for her comrades, her family and her community. I am sure, deep down she believed, she would be pardoned and freed from ISU arrest once X and his network was outed, but Y and the Special Branch had other plans in store for her. She carried out her duty without realising she was being set up by Special Branch to be killed”.
Was she so naive to fail to grasp that the ISU was riddled with spies? We may never know because she took her secrets to her grave. Those secrets included what she may have learned through pillow talk with her secret lover about the IRA/Sinn Fein leadership.
What did she overhear from the conversations of the IRA/Sinn Fein staff when they were holding meetings or drinking in her home in the Beechmount area of the Falls in west Belfast?
Did she eventually suspect her secret lover of being a spy? Did she realise that she was sold out to Special Branch, possibly by her lover, or by someone else she trusted? All these secrets may never be revealed, including why the IRA never admitted that she was a member of the organisation.
One is entitled to ask why British intelligence did not make any attempts to rescue her, even though it had assets in the IRA who knew where exactly she was being held. It suggests that she was a sacrificial lamb of sorts in a dangerous game in which implacable enemies conspired in their respective ways to kill her.
Unthinkable
British intelligence was in the unenviable position of knowing the IRA and the British Government were negotiating the terms of a ceasefire to bring an end to the conflict.
Mounting an operation to rescue her would have required the use of the SAS, supported by a major back-up security presence.
It was believed that it had the potential to lead to the deaths of some IRA personnel and possibly trigger riots in west Belfast.
It also risked spiralling out of control and forcing the IRA to abandon peace talks going on in London. Both sides had much to lose.
Saving Caroline was deemed an unthinkable outcome by the IRA and British Government negotiators. British intelligence for its part would have gained nothing by burning its assets in mounting an operation to save her.
After all, even after the end of the conflict, those assets would still have value in helping British political mandarins monitor the political path of Sinn Fein/IRA on both sides of the border.
I was reluctant to trust a second source who approached me months after my latest book was published. Usually, I am wary of sources who prefer to hide their identities, but this source provided me with a name and asked me not to identify him for reasons of his personal security.
According to him, the republican movement was exploiting the murder of Caroline Moreland to damage the reputation of a person who was a public servant whom I shall call 'A'. He was running a non-profit organisation financed by Government. I am using the term republican movement because I am not entirely convinced that this story could be attached to Sinn Fein only.
The source said a senior republican started a rumour mill that A had been Caroline's secret lover.
It was a lie designed to damage his reputation and to force him to resign from his job, allowing for him to be replaced by a member of Sinn Fein which was trying to seize control of many non-profits.
Murky
Although this piece of information had no bearing on my investigation of Caroline's murder, it pointed to the murky world of post-conflict politics, as well as the way some republicans continued to operate in the shadows, willing to exploit the murder of a mother-of-three for its agenda more than three decades after her murder.
I felt obliged to warn A about the efforts to discredit him. He was genuinely worried, but he was far from surprised. He had been aware of Sinn Fein's efforts to force him out of his job, but he had resisted so far. Their goal, he added, was to dominate local non-profit organisations in Northern Ireland.
I believe Caroline Moreland was murdered in what was affectively a conspiracy of silence which suited enemies who were about to make peace. It suited very powerful figures in the republican movement, some of whom were British intelligence assets, to rid themselves of a woman who knew too much. For its part, the British Government felt powerless to intervene to save her without jeopardising ongoing critical peace talks in London.
By letting her die, British intelligence allowed its agents in the IRA's Belfast Brigade and Northern Command to create their own narrative about her and to demonise her as a means of discrediting anything she had learned about compromised IRA figures, some of whom held very senior positions in the organisation.
The fact that sordid claims about her have continued to spread so long after her murder, and that her death has been exploited for political reasons, are proof the IRA always feared their constructed narrative of this ghastly crime would collapse, exposing them to public scrutiny.
I think there are men linked to this murder who have feared that others will break ranks and reveal the truth, thereby identifying them as State assets who had her killed to cover their tracks.
Presbyterian minister spied on by congregation criticises church heads
EXCLUSIVE ANGELA DAVISON, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
ELDERS ARE URGED TO 'FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS' EX-MINISTER MONITORED BY MEMBERS OF OWN CONGREGATION SAYS SCANDAL IS NO SURPRISE TO HIM
A former minister who was spied on by members of his own congregation has gone public for the first time to speak about the disarray within the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI).
Waiving his anonymity, Rev Robert (Robin) Greer said that his experience within the denomination echoed recent allegations of an internal culture of bullying, so the latest revelations were no surprise to him.
The retired minister from south Belfast welcomed the resignation of outgoing moderator Dr Trevor Gribben and the announcement of a formal police investigation into PCI following safeguarding failures.
Speaking to Sunday Life, Rev Greer said: “I'm not in the least bit surprised by what has been exposed in the Presbyterian Church, though I deeply feel for any of the victims affected including children, young people and vulnerable adults. They are in my prayers.
“My heart also goes out to the faithful ministers and elders who have been shocked by the recent headlines in the press, along with the faithful people who sit in the pews week on week.”
Culture of bullying
He claimed that he experienced a culture of bullying during his time with the church, mirroring claims also made by former head of safeguarding Dr Jacqui Montgomery-Devlin, who said in a BBC interview earlier this month that the internal culture in PCI enabled serious errors in safeguarding procedures.
She spoke out after Rev Trevor Gribben made the shock announcement that he was standing down after an internal review found “serious and significant failings” in safeguarding functions from 2009 to 2022.
Rev Greer added: “The PCI must be transparent and desist from cover-up. After all, the Lord himself never did anything in secret. Nothing was done in a corner. It was open for all to see.”
Earlier this month, PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Davy Beck said that the police investigation would seek to establish “victims of offending” and perpetrators of crimes within the Presbyterian Church.
It is thought that the failings in safeguarding came to light when former primary school teacher William Maher (38) was jailed in May for sex offences against two boys.
The pervert, from Shaftesbury Drive, in Bangor, was sentenced to one year in prison and one on licence. He is thought to have been a voluntary church youth group leader.
He had already been handed a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (Sopo), along with a three-year probation order, in May last year for communicating with two young boys for sexual gratification.
Earlier this year, Sunday Life carried Rev Greer's shocking story, revealing how he had been spied on by members of his own congregation between October 2012 and January 2013.
Recorded
A surveillance rota was drawn up because of a belief he was not staying in the church manse after a request to live in his own home was refused by the church.
The spying charts, disclosed to the former minister by the church after a Subject Access Request, showed that times were recorded at which lights were on and in which rooms, if a car was at the property, if a Christmas tree was switched on, if blinds were open or closed, and details of any coffee meetings he had.
These forms were then sent to the South Belfast Presbytery.
At the time, Rev. Greer asked for his identity to be kept secret, fearing repercussions from the church.
When the evidence was disclosed, the clergyman contacted police, who said while the matter warranted a criminal investigation, because the alleged offences had taken place more than six months beforehand, they were statute-barred.
The Information Commissioner's Office said the minister was being “covertly monitored” for “insurance purposes”.
It disclosed a church secretary was ordered to stop after the extent of the surveillance log was discovered.
The situation led to Rev Greer having to go off sick, later suffering a mental breakdown.
At his request, the church launched an investigation, eventually producing a report which confirmed “no charges against him”.
The PCI, however, decided to retire him in 2014, but feeling like he had been unfairly treated, the minister decided to appeal to the church's judicial commission.
He also asked the presbytery to hand over any information it had on him, which led to the surveillance eventually being exposed.
The former minister said that when he tried to bring evidence of the spying before the General Assembly, he was gagged by the then general assembly clerk and now outgoing moderator Dr Rev Trevor Gribben, who told him he was not allowed to speak.
Mr Gribben is alleged to have said that if he raised the matter, he would be “in contumacy” (wilful disobedience).
Rev Greer said: “The General Assembly is the governing body of the church, and I wanted them to hear my evidence, but I was completely shut down, contrary to comment that there was an open space for ministers to debate.”
A spokesperson for the PCI said they would not be making any comment on this occasion about Rev Greer's claims.
However, we can reveal that a previous statement, agreed by Rev Trevor Gribben and sent to a newspaper in 2017, regarding Rev Greer's story (which was never published as he withdrew fearing repercussions) said: “We are deeply saddened by the allegations made by the Rev Robin (Robert) Greer.
Exaggerated
“Over the last number of years, Mr Greer's ill-health has caused much sadness to many who know him and regrettably led to him having to stand down from ministry in his congregation.
“The wider Presbyterian Church in Ireland has made appropriate provision for him under a pre-existing scheme for ministers in such circumstances.
“Mr Greer has a number of strongly held views of what may, or may not have happened, towards the end of his ministry in his last congregation.
“Regrettably, over the years, many of these have been exaggerated or taken out of context.
“The church would hope and pray that Mr Greer would be able to move on and know better health in the days to come as he and his family continue to benefit from the provision that the PCI has put in place for him.”
'Troubled' Presbyterian Church rebels attack leadership
ANGELA DAVISON, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
A group calling itself Troubled Presbyterians has blasted the church after the resignation of Dr Trevor Gribben.
In its latest email, the group said it was “astonished” by Dr Gribben's exit as both moderator and clerk.
But it added: “(This was) the correct course of action, not only as an acknowledgement of responsibility for failings in safeguarding... but also because many of the (church's) troubles in recent times are a result of the increasing concentration of power and control in the hands of the clerk during Trevor Gribben's term.
“Information about the safeguarding issues was initially vague, and details which have since emerged only muddied the waters further.
Failures
“It's far from acceptable that we have had to rely upon the media to fill in the gaps.
“The (church) has claimed the issues only came to light in May, when church authorities were contacted by the PSNI, leading to an internal review which has just concluded.
“But we now know that (safeguarding expert) Ian Elliott informed the (church) about serious failures as far back as 2023, and Jacqui Montgomery-Devlin, former head of safeguarding, has outlined her attempts while in post to alert senior church officials to serious deficiencies.”
The rebels also said the church's planned use of a Section 12 review into safeguarding failures did not go far enough and called for an independent review.
They added that a dossier compiled three years ago by Lord John Alderdice should form part of the probe.
Two people arrested as rival protests collide in Belfast
ANGELA DAVISON, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
PSNI OFFICERS SET UP BUFFER ZONE OUTSIDE BELFAST CITY HALL
Police made two arrests as a loyalist march and pro-Palestine parade took place in Belfast city centre at the same time yesterday afternoon.
Hundreds of people gathered as the PSNI set up a buffer zone outside the front gate of City Hall, which is currently hosting the Christmas market.
One person was arrested for public order offences, and another was arrested following a report of an assault. It is understood one of the arrests related to a man wearing a tricolour balaclava.
Some traders shut their businesses during the largely peaceful protests, with the front entrance to the Christmas market closed for a period.
A third parade also passed City Hall earlier in the day, with the second annual Belfast Tartan Day Dander including pipe bands and Highland dancers. That event was organised by the Ulster Scots Agency.
Half an hour later, the 1642 Boyne Bridge Defenders Historical Group kicked off their parade to City Hall from Sandy Row, crossing the newly reopened Durham Street/Boyne Bridge Place.
Not long after, activists taking part in the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally made their way along Royal Avenue to Donegall Place before reaching City Hall.
On approaching City Hall, they played music and carried a banner demanding “freedom and justice for Palestine”, while some loyalists across the road chanted “You can stick your Palestine up your h***” and “We're not Gaza, we're Northern Ireland”.
The Parades Commission had been notified of all three events.
The front gates of City Hall remained closed as bandsmen gathered outside to play The Sash and the national anthem.
Speakers included Boyne Bridge Defenders founder Billy Dickson. The crowd clapped for Soldier F, who was last month found not guilty of two murders and five attempted murders on Bloody Sunday.
‘Sandy Row can start to recover’
The campaigner, who grew up on Utility Street, added: “We're delighted the road's open and Sandy Row can start to recover.
“We're delighted about the retention of the 1642 Great Bridge, along with the name too, with the area between Glengall Street and Hope Street now being called Boyne Bridge Place.
“We are also celebrating the 13th anniversary of the Union flag protest.”
Those opposing the Palestinian rally included far-right agitator Steven Baker (44) who was spotted singing, “We're not Gaza, we're Northern Ireland”.
Accompanying him was Belfast martial arts teacher Nicola Cree, who was sacked from a gym after being filmed screaming “f**k Islam” at a far-right rally at City Hall on November 8.
The protest came after Belfast City Council confirmed a Palestinian flag would not be flown from the building to mark the UN International Day of Solidarity with the People of Palestine yesterday.
The authority agreed earlier this month to fly the emblem. However, unionist councillors opposed the move, prompting council chiefs to seek legal advice. Records show the legal call-in was considered to have merit on procedural grounds but not on community impact grounds.
As people waved Palestinian flags and cheered, a speaker at the rally said: “They thought the Palestinian flag wouldn't be flying today.”
Annual ‘Reclaim the Night’ march seeks to make streets safer for women
LIAM TUNNEY, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
The rise in 'far-right' and so-called vigilante groups is fuelling hate and misunderstanding and putting women at risk, a protest march against gender-based violence has heard.
Activists took part in the annual Reclaim the Night march yesterday in Belfast, with organisers warning that those seeking to divide communities were making women less safe.
Helen Crickard from Reclaim the Agenda, which coordinated the rally, said society needed to change harmful attitudes that have normalised violence against woman and girls.
“The threat to women's safety is not from outsiders, nor is it from a mythological 'monster'. Sadly, it is embedded in our society, and tackling that can only be achieved through education,” she added.
Silenced
“For the majority of the 30 women and girls murdered in Northern Ireland since 2020, their killers were well-known to them.”
Speakers at the rally included Rita Aburahama, who has worked in Palestine, supporting victims of violence, human rights abuses and state oppression.
She said: “Women's voices, including those of Palestinian women in Gaza, are being silenced in the very moment they need the world to hear them most.
“Gender-based violence in conflict is often dismissed as 'secondary' to the bigger picture, yet women bear some of the deepest wounds. By speaking at Reclaim the Night, I'm standing for every woman whose suffering is overlooked.”
Dr Becca Watson, mental health and psychiatry historian, who also spoke at the rally, said: “Reclaim the Night matters to me because I survived domestic abuse as an adult and lived through it as a child.”
Boundary Commission: Lessons from a historic fiasco
Irish Times, November 30th, 2025
EDITORIAL
The Boundary Commission
One hundred years ago this week, the Irish government entered crisis talks with its British counterpart over the unresolved question of the Border. The Boundary Commission, created under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, had finished its long-delayed work. Its conclusions were a calamity for the Irish side. Many nationalists had believed the commission would transfer substantial areas of Northern Ireland. The assumption was that a truncated Northern state would soon prove unworkable and that unity would inevitably follow.
Instead, the commission recommended only marginal adjustments to the existing line and even proposed that certain districts in the Free State be moved under Northern jurisdiction. For WT Cosgrave’s government, the report represented a humiliation at the hands of a process that had given the British and unionist perspective an advantage from its inception. The hurried negotiations that followed between Dublin, London and Belfast ended in a face-saving formula: the recommendations would be set aside and the Border would remain untouched.
A century on, with the question of reunification rising steadily up the political agenda, the Boundary Commission marks the moment when partition, viewed by many in the early 1920s as temporary, became firmly embedded. This was despite the fact that the frontier confirmed in 1925 cut abruptly across communities and landscapes. It severed towns from their hinterlands, disrupted trade routes and led to social and economic dislocation that endures in subtle ways even today. More profoundly, it set both jurisdictions on paths shaped by narrow and often defensive understandings of political identity. Ultimately it laid the ground for the violence that would erupt in the late 1960s.
Removing the Border is an ambition shared by every major party in the Republic and by a strong majority of its citizens. In Northern Ireland demographic and cultural shifts have removed the unionist parties’ built-in majority, but that does not in itself satisfy the criteria under which a border poll may be called by the Secretary of State. That could change in the years ahead. One lesson from 1925 is that it is unwise not to make preparations for all eventualities.
There are other lessons. Nationalism underestimated the depth of unionist attachment to British identity. That position was too often expressed through policies of dominance and exclusion, but it was also deeply rooted. To ignore its contemporary expression would repeat a historic mistake.
A newly assertive and sometimes irredentist Irish nationalism has begun to surface, dismissive of the other traditions on the island. The presidential campaign offered glimpses of this tendency. It will better serve the reunification project if such instincts are kept firmly at bay.
[NOTE] The agreement of the British Government to take over the Free State’s liability to repay its share of the of the First World War debt was an important facesaver - and financial relief.
Margaretta D'Arcy Artist and activist who was imprisoned while ill with cancer
LORNA SIGGINS, Sunday Independent, November 30th, 2025
Margaretta D'Arcy, who has died aged 91, was a fearless activist, artist, filmmaker and member of Aosdána whose commitment to peace and social justice resulted in several prison terms.
She was almost 80 and being treated for cancer when she spent three months in jail over opposition to the use of Shannon Airport for military transit flights, drawing on the experience for Ireland's Guantanamo Granny, her last book.
Last month, she returned an honorary doctorate she had received in 2002 from the University of Galway in protest over its links with Israel's Technion Institute of Technology.
D'Arcy was born in London in 1934. Her Irish father, Joseph D'Arcy, was a civil servant in the Department of External Affairs who had been a member of the IRA during the War of Independence, while her mother was of Russian Jewish origin.
She was five when World War II broke out, and she and her three sisters were sent as boarders to the Dominican Convent in Cabra, Dublin. She was working in theatre in London in 1955 when she met John Arden. They married in 1957, and their first son, Gwalchmai, died at eight weeks.
They had four more sons during decades of activism and artistic collaboration. In the 1960s, they joined Bertrand Russell's Committee of 100, set up to oppose nuclear weapons through civil disobedience.
In 1967, the couple staged a 12-hour spectacle, The Vietnam War Games, at New York University. In 1969, they travelled to India with their children to study theatre and were arrested and imprisoned briefly in Assam on suspicion of being Maoist spies.
In 1975 The Non-Stop Connolly Show co-written by John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy was premiered in Liberty Hall, Dublin, during Easter Week 1975.
D'Arcy served two spells in Holloway prison for her role in the Greenham Common campaign against bringing cruise missiles into Europe. The couple moved to Galway in the 1970s, staying for a time on an island on Lough Corrib, and setting up the Galway Theatre Workshop in 1976.
D'Arcy was jailed in Armagh women's prison in 1981 after defacing a wall at the Ulster Museum. She said the constant tremor in her neck dated to mistreatment by the RUC.
She hosted a community pirate radio station, Radio Pirate Women, from her house in Galway, was a founder member of Women in Media and Entertainment, and she received a Katherine Davenport Award from Women's International News Service.
After she became carer for her husband, who died in 2012, she continued to support protests at Shannon against US military transit flights and environmental causes such as the campaign against the onshore location of the Corrib gas project. Her film, Shell Hell, in 2005, was co-directed with her son, Finn Arden.
She was a founding member of Aosdána, dating from 1981. Apart from her books, including Loose Theatre: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Theatre Activist, she wrote and co-wrote plays, many broadcast by RTÉ and the BBC.
Plays with Arden included The Non-Stop Connolly Show, and an Irish-language production of Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, which was performed in the Taibhdhearc theatre in 1974, directed by Eamonn Draper and starring Mick Lally.
In December, 2013, she appeared in an orange Guantanamo-style prison uniform at Ennis District Court after being arrested with Niall Farrell for an unauthorised incursion at Shannon Airport. In court, she tried to perform a citizen's arrest of Judge Patrick Durcan for "making Irish people active allies... in illegal wars”. After refusing to sign a peace bond, she spent over nine weeks in prison. She was critical of then president Michael D Higgins, believing he could have risked a constitutional crisis to prevent the use of Shannon by the US military.
D'Arcy is survived by her sons Finn, Adam and Neuss. She was pre-deceased by her husband and sons Gwalchmai and Jacob.
Sir Paul McCartney on his anger at Bloody Sunday anger and reaction to BBC ban
BBC OBJECTED TO SONG DECRYING BLOODY SUNDAY
NOEL MCADAM, Sunday Life, November 30th, 2025
BBC OBJECTED TO SONG DECRYING BLOODY SUNDAY
Sir Paul McCartney was stunned when his hit song Give Ireland Back to the Irish was banned by the BBC after he wrote it in anger about Bloody Sunday, a new book reveals.
In a just-published oral history of Wings, his band after The Beatles, Macca explains he was angry over the Bloody Sunday shootings in January 1972, regarding those killed as his “Irish brothers”.
But even fellow group member Denny Laine had reservations about the controversial song, which despite the ban went into the Top 10 and was No 1 in the Republic and Spain.
McCartney says: “I read the newspapers the day after what came to be called Bloody Sunday. It just looked a bit wrong.
“To me, as a British citizen, what the Army had done, it wasn't on. Liverpool had so many Irish people living there, we used to joke it was the capital of Ireland, and here were my Irish brothers getting shot.
“I don't often get so angry that I write so explicitly about an event. I've found it's not a good outlet for me. But this felt personal.
“These were my people. You'd seen that in foreign countries, these rebellions put down. Here it was at home.”
The veteran singer, writer and performer also disclosed in the book he was urged by the head of his then record company, Sir Joseph Lockwood, not to release the record.
“We put it out just three weeks after Bloody Sunday, against the record label's wishes. I was even rung by the head of the company, the chairman Sir Joseph, 'Paul, you can't put this out. It's going to be banned immediately'.
“'Well, I'm sorry, Sir Joe, but I've got to do it because it's the principle of the thing.”
The BBC said: “At a time when we are striving to be impartial, the record can only be described as inflammatory.”
Fellow Wings singer and guitarist Laine revealed that McCartney was surprised by the ban, which was followed by other broadcasters.
Heartfelt
Laine said: “I wasn't happy about the song, although it was heartfelt. I thought it was too political, and I don't think it made the situation any better.
“I'm not criticising Paul though — if he wants to write about Ireland, then good luck to him.
“I don't think he expected that ban — he did it in all innocence.”
Another musician also reveals that Wings member Henry McCullough, who had just joined the group shortly after Bloody Sunday, was unable to travel home to Northern Ireland for a while.
Denny Seiwell, who had been with McCartney on his pre-Wings solo album Ram, said: “We were all brokenhearted over that Bloody Sunday and Henry — I mean, he was from Northern Ireland and he couldn't go home for a long time because the area he lived in was mainly Protestant.
“And this was a statement, 'Give Ireland back to the Catholics, be Irish' you know. And so, he was afraid to go home for a long time.”
And McCartney remembers: “The song made it to number one in Spain, which was a nice surprise. Franco was still in power, but maybe people were wanting a change? Or maybe they couldn't understand the words and they just liked the tune?”
But the book also points to the comments at the time by DJ John Peel: “The ban disturbs me — the act of banning it is a much stronger political act than the contents of the record itself. It's just one man's opinion.”
McCartney's grandfather on his mother's side, Owen Mohin, was born in Co Monaghan before emigrating to Liverpool where he married another Irish immigrant, Mary Theresa Danher.
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney edited by Ted Widmer, Allen Lane, £35
