Bank heist puts focus on IRA’s brutality and lies
That’s a very healthy attitude. It’s a sentiment shared by the vast majority of people on this island and by many further afield. But if it’s facts she wants, the facts speak for themselves.
And they don’t do the IRA any favours.
The fact is, the history of the IRA is a brutal litany of murder, mayhem, lies and manipulation. It is an almost unbroken sequence of delinquent behaviour, a mishmash of rhetorical fiction and historical criminal action.
But don’t take my word for it. Read all about it in the hundreds upon hundreds of ‘kills’ they boasted about over the past 30 years.
Each of them a precious life extinguished by some desperado dragging us closer and closer to the abyss.
The IRA’s campaign was, in brief, an indecent celebration of real life pornographic violence.
From Jerry McCabe to Stephen Restoric, from isolated Protestant farmers to pregnant Catholic mothers, from people enjoying a night out in a Birmingham pub to unfortunate lorry drivers strapped to their booby-trapped vehicles while their families were held hostage by crackpot heroes of the ‘revolution’.
The surprise, my friend, is not that Hugh Orde has finally pointed the finger of suspicion at the IRA, but that it took a rotten bank robbery to alert so many intelligent people to the truth about Sinn Féin and the IRA.
And while the facts about the bank robbery may eventually lead to a criminal conviction, only truth (which involves more than the bare facts) will set us free.
And truth is not an area of expertise we should relinquish to the men and women of Sinn Féin-IRA.
Their very violence gave the game away long ago.
Richard Dowling
Patrick Street
Mountrath
Co Laois
