Belfast 1971 - A lesson in counter-subversion PDF Print E-mail

Tom Griffin, 6 November 2009

The controversy around the British Government's approach to the Muslim community has deepened in recent weeks, with critics warning against a counter-subversion strategy that stigmatises innocent people because of their political views.

The dangers of creating a 'suspect community' were underlined last week by a story in the Irish News,  Northern Ireland's main nationalist newspaper.

Researchers looking into the 1971 McGurks Bar Massacre uncovered a document written in that year by Col. Maurice Tugwell, the head of the British Army's Information Policy unit. Entitled Public Opinion and the Northern Ireland Situation, the document effectively labelled most politically active nationalists of the time as IRA propagandists:

 

IRA Propaganda Organisation
7. IRA propaganda has its base in Dublin where both factions run their own information centres, both with the title "Irish Republican Publicity Bureau." Each has a full time staff and has subordinate directors in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere. The campaign is pushed by numerous front organisations and by Republican sympathisers who, having themselves been taken in by the propaganda, are willing to spread the word. These organisations include:
a. The Association for Legal Justice (which has been the principal agency for co-ordinating the campaign alleging brutality during internment and interrogation).
b. Republican Clubs (which have always been fronts for the Sinn Fein political party and which now help to disseminate the propaganda of whichever faction they have chosen to support).
c. The Belfast Central Citizens Defence Committee (once given a cloak of respectability as representative of the Catholic population of the city, but now heavily involved in promoting IRA interests).
d. The Irish News (a newspaper that has long represented Republican opinion in Ulster and is now an organ for printing IRA propaganda).
e. Catholic Ex-Servicemans Association (is becoming increasingly involved with the IRA as a front organisation).
f. NICRA (Directed by Kevin McCorry)
g. Various Relief and Action Committees in Catholic Areas.
h. Minority Rights Association.
j. Various regional Citizens Defence Committees working to the CCDC.
k. SDLP.
l. PD and other "New Left" organisations.
m. Vigilante or street committees, who organise allegations and fake damage, etc.
n. University groups and teachers.
o. RTE and newspapers in the Republic to varying degrees, with the Irish Press particularly active.
p. Committee for Truth (Fr Denis Faul - brutality allegations vehicle).
q. Association of Irish Priests (Ulster Branch) (Secretary Terrance O'Keefe, Coleraine University)).
r. A number of RC priests, but Frs Brady, Faul and Egan are prominent Reacting to the document, the current editor of the Irish News, Noel Doran:
“While at one level the comments from the British army source are amusing, it still has to be alarming that such ludicrous attitudes could be found at a senior level in the security establishment of the period,” Mr Doran said. 
“This was a time when The Irish News was holding the line for constitutional politics in very dangerous circumstances and being castigated by republican and loyalist extremists as a result. 
“Our office was wrecked by a republican bomb in 1971 and it was also separately entered at night by members of another republican group who threatened journalists at gunpoint precisely because the paper refused to carry their propaganda statements in the way they demanded.
Few today would defend the Tugwell's action in labelling the Irish News a propaganda outlet. Yet its worth reflecting that the paper would almost certainly have failed the rigid tests of political orthodoxy that some now argue should be imposed on the Muslim community.
 
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