On This Day PIRA

I have previously blogged about how the PIRA often didn’t claim murders which they obviously carried out because they believed admitting to them would damage their campaign and the image they sought to present, particularly outside Northern Ireland. That is not to say that they never owned up to murders which they recognised might damage their cause. In fact, throughout the terror campaign they quite often issued statements apologising for murders. The idea for this blog came to me when I recently tweeted about the bombing of Newry customs office in 1972. I noted that on that occasion that the PIRA apologised for the “unintentional loss of life” but seemed more concerned with responding to a statement issued by the Official IRA which criticised the bomb: “In their very prompt statement condemning this morning’s accidental explosion in Newry, the National Liberation Movement (Official IRA) have once more joined in the Imperialist chorus led by British Government mem...

In April 1994 the Irish Times carried a letter from a Belfast Catholic. It read: In 1979, I went to Drogheda with my wife and two daughters to see the Holy Father. There we heard him say: 'Murder is murder and never let it be called by any other name.' We took comfort from his words. The great and the good of church, politics and the law murmured their approval. In this some were hypocritical because, as future events were to show, they must, when they heard the Holy Father's words, have had mental reservations. These people, suffering from an obsession with the 'constitutional imperative of reintegration of the national territory', must in reality have believed that murder could be called by another name. Ten years ago, on 8 April 1984, my dear darling daughter, Mary, was murdered as she walked home from Mass with her mum and me. Mary's murder was carried out by members of an evil and brutal criminal organisation. Some of her killers were memb...