#provisional ira

[khaperai]

IRA posters

[insidecroydon]

Union official who exposed IRA past of Tory councillor has died

DAVID WHITE offers his appreciation of the life and work of Dr Peter Latham, who has died, aged 83 Dr Peter Latham, who has died, aged 83 I was sorry to hear of the death last month of Dr Peter Latham, the prominent sociologist, author, political activist and trade unionist. He was 83. Peter might be best known in Croydon for having exposed Conservative councillor Maria Gatland as having been a…

[chthonickore]

Irish election at the end of the month 💀

[gregor-samsung]

" Sto qui, sulla soglia di un altro mondo palpitante. Possa Dio avere pietà della mia anima. Sono pieno di tristezza perché so di aver spezzato il cuore della mia povera madre e perché la mia famiglia è stata colpita da un’angoscia insopportabile. Ma ho considerato tutte le possibilità e ho cercato con tutti i mezzi di evitare ciò che è divenuto inevitabile: io e i miei compagni vi siamo stati costretti da quattro anni e mezzo di vera e propria barbarie. Sono un prigioniero politico. Sono un prigioniero politico perché sono l’effetto di una guerra perenne che il popolo irlandese oppresso combatte contro un regime straniero, schiacciante, non voluto, che rifiuta di andarsene dalla nostra terra. Io difendo il diritto divino della nazione irlandese all’indipendenza sovrana, e credo in essa, così come credo nel diritto di ogni uomo e donna irlandese a difendere questo diritto con la rivoluzione armata. Questa è la ragione per cui sono carcerato, denudato, torturato. "

Bobby Sands, Un giorno della mia vita, introduzione di Sean MacBride, Premio Nobel per la Pace, e di Gerry Adams, Presidente dello Sinn Féin; traduzione e cura di Silvia Calamati, Edizioni Associate, Roma, 1989¹; p. 115.

[Edizione originale: One Day in My Life, The Mercier Press, Cork, Ireland, 1982]

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1920 – Birth of Joe Cahill, a prominent Irish Republican and former Chief of Staff of the Provisional IRA.

Joe was known for his comment. “I was born in a united Ireland, I want to die in a united Ireland”. In May 1920, Cahill was born in Divis Street in west Belfast where his parents had been neighbours with Irish revolutionary James Connolly. Cahill was the first child in a family of thirteen siblings born to Joesph and Joesphine Cahill. Cahill was educated at primary level at St. Mary’s Christian…

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

The Cranberries - Zombie 1994

"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish alternative rockband the Cranberries. It was written by the lead singer, Dolores O'Riordan, about the young victims of a bombing in Warrington, England, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The song was released on 19 September 1994 as the lead single from the Cranberries' second studio album, No Need to Argue. While the record label feared releasing a too controversial and politically charged song as a single, "Zombie" reached number 1 on the charts of Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Iceland, and spent nine consecutive weeks at number 1 on the French SNEP Top 100. It reached number 2 on the Ö3 Austria Top 40, where it stayed for eight weeks. The song did not chart on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart as it wasn't released as a single there, but it reached number 1 on the US Billboard Alternative Airplay chart. Listeners of the Australian radio station Triple J voted it number 1 on the 1994 Triple J Hottest 100 chart, and it won the Best Song Award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards.

The Troubles were a conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), an Irish republican paramilitary organisation, waged an armed campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland and unite the region with the Republic of Ireland. Republican and Unionist paramilitaries killed more than 3,500 people, many from thousands of bomb attacks. One of the bombings happened on 30 March 1993, as two IRA improvised explosive devices hidden in litter bins were detonated in a shopping street in Warrington, England. Two people; Johnathan Ball, aged 3, and Tim Parry, aged 12, were killed in the attack. 56 people were injured. Ball died at the scene of the bombing as a result of his shrapnel-inflicted injuries, and five days later, Parry lost his life in a hospital as a result of head injuries. O'Riordan decided to write a song that reflected upon the event and the children's deaths after visiting the town: "We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that's why I was saying, 'It's not me' – that even though I'm Irish it wasn't me, I didn't do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension." The song was re-popularised in 2023 after it was played after Ireland games at the 2023 Rugby World Cup. It was picked up by fans of the Irish team, with videos of fans singing the song in chorus accumulating hundreds of thousands of views on social media. This offended other Irishmen, who identified it as an "anti-IRA" anthem, and said that that the lyrics failed to consider their experience during the Troubles.

The music video, directed by Samuel Bayer, was filmed in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the heart of the Troubles with real footage, and in Dublin. To record video footage of murals, children and British Army soldiers on patrol, he had a false pretext, with a cover story about making a documentary about the peace-keeping efforts in Ireland. Bayer stated that a shot in the video where an SA80 rifle is pointed directly at the camera is a suspicious British soldier asking him to leave, and that the IRA were keeping a close look at the shoot, given "the British Army come in with fake film crews, getting people on camera.” While "Zombie" received heavy rotation on MTV Europe and was A-listed on Germany's VIVA, the music video was banned by the BBC because of its "violent images", and by the RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster. Instead, both the BBC and the RTÉ opted to broadcast an edited version focusing on footage of the band in a live performance, a version that the Cranberries essentially disowned. Despite their efforts to maintain the original video "out of view from the public", some of the initial footage prevailed, with scenes of children holding guns. In March 2003, on the eve of the outbreak of the Iraq War, the British Government and the Independent Television Commission issued a statement saying ITC's Programme Code would temporarily remove from broadcast songs and music videos featuring "sensitive material", including "Zombie". Numerous media groups complied with the decision to avoid "offending public feeling", along with MTV Europe. Since it violated the ITC guidelines, "Zombie" was placed on a blacklist of songs, targeting its official music video. The censorship was lifted once the war had ended. In April 2020, it became the first song by an Irish group to surpass one billion views on Youtube.

"Zombie" received a total of 91% yes votes!

[ardri-na-bpiteog]

"just move to Ireland"

I'm gonna be real with you that IRA chants are not particularly well-received in most professional settings here either

[khaperai]

IRA checkpoint during the 70s

[generallynaive]

Os Melhores de 2023 - 25 Filmes

1. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Laura Poitras

2. Aftersun Charlotte Wells

3. Perfect Days Wim Wenders

4. Mal Viver & Viver Mal João Canijo

5. Retratos Fantasmas Kléber Mendonça Filho

6. Roter Himmel Christian Petzold

7. Cerrar los Ojos Víctor Erice

8. Saint Omer Alice Diop

9. No Bears Jafar Panahi

10. Tár Todd Field

11. May December Todd Haynes

12. Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese

13. Passages Ira Sachs

14. How to Blow Up a Pipeline Daniel Goldhaber

15. EO Jerzy Skolimowski

16. Retour à Seoul Davy Chou

17. Tori et Lokita Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

18. Showing Up Kelly Reichardt

19. Asteroid City Wes Anderson

20. Não Sou Nada Edgar Pêra

21. Under the Fig Trees Erige Sehiri

22. Syk Pike Kristoffer Borgli

23. Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan

24. Great Yarmouth - Provisional Figures Marco Martins

25. The Killer David Fincher

[captain-price-unofficially]

Provisional IRA "barracks buster" used to bomb a British barracks in Germany, 1996

[justforbooks]

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher

LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC (née Roberts; 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold the position. As prime minister, she implemented economic policies known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the "Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist before becoming a barrister. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her secretary of state for education and science in his 1970–1974 government. In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become leader of the opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the UK.

On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised greater individual liberty, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid recession and rising unemployment. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners' strike. In 1986, Thatcher oversaw the deregulation of UK financial markets, leading to an economic boom, in what came to be known as the Big Bang.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax") was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, and was succeeded by John Major, her chancellor of the Exchequer. After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire) which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, at the age of 87.

A polarising figure in British politics, Thatcher is nonetheless viewed favourably in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain; the complex legacy attributed to this shift continues to be debated into the 21st century.

Reputation

Thatcher's tenure of 11 years and 209 days as British prime minister was the longest since Lord Salisbury in the late 19th century (13 years and 252 days, in three spells) and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century (14 years and 305 days).

Having led the Conservative Party to victory in three consecutive general elections, twice in a landslide, she ranks among the most popular party leaders in British history regarding votes cast for the winning party; over 40 million ballots were cast in total for the party under her leadership. Her electoral successes were dubbed a "historic hat trick" by the British press in 1987.

Thatcher ranked highest among living persons in the 2002 BBC poll 100 Greatest Britons. In 1999, Time deemed Thatcher one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. In 2015 she topped a poll by Scottish Widows, a major financial services company, as the most influential woman of the past 200 years; and in 2016 topped BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Power List of women judged to have had the biggest impact on female lives over the past 70 years. In 2020, Time magazine included Thatcher's name on its list of 100 Women of the Year. She was chosen as the Woman of the Year in 1982 when the Falklands War began under her command, resulting in the British victory.

In contrast to her relatively poor average approval rating as prime minister, Thatcher has since ranked highly in retrospective opinion polling and, according to YouGov, is "see[n] in overall positive terms" by the British public. Just after her death in 2013, according to a poll by The Guardian, about half of the public viewed her positively while one third viewed her negatively. In a 2019 opinion poll by YouGov, most Britons rated her as Britain's greatest post-war leader (with Churchill coming second). According to the poll, more than four in ten Britons (44%) think that Thatcher was a "good" or "great" prime minister, compared to 29% who think she was a "poor" or "terrible" one. She was voted the fourth-greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a 2011 poll of 139 academics organised by MORI. In a 2016 University of Leeds survey of 82 academics specialising in post-1945 British history and politics, she was voted the second-greatest British prime minister after the Second World War.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ardri-na-bpiteog]

i feel like a lot of chronically online people would be surprised to find out that pro-Provisional IRA sentiment is not a particularly popular mainstream opinion in the Republic of Ireland, especially amongst people old enough to remember the troubles, and that it's usually a pretty big scandal when a politician is caught expressing support for the IRA.

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1988 – The Gibraltar Three | Three unarmed IRA members, Mairéad Farrell, Danny McCann and Sean Savage were shot dead by undercover members of the Special Air Service (SAS) in Gibraltar.

Three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) were executed by the British Special Air Service (SAS) in Gibraltar, referred to as Operation Flavius. The three—Seán Savage, Daniel McCann, and Mairéad Farrell were believed to be mounting a bombing attack on British military personnel in Gibraltar. What is undeniable is that just before 4:00pm that afternoon – just two or three…

[shituationist]

... A RAND Corporation analysis found that available evidence supported the hypothesis that concealed-carry laws may increase total homicides, and found some, albeit limited, evidence for concealed carry laws increasing violent crime in general. Likewise, researcher Stephen B. Billings found that gun ownership has a link to crime victimization: not only are people who have been victimized more likely to buy a gun to protect themselves, but they are more likely to be victimized again and have their gun stolen from them in turn. Billings found a vicious cycle of victimization leading to gun ownership, leading to theft, leading to victimization, as guns that are bought in response to victimization are then stolen, sold on the black market, and used to create new victims. This is what makes it very odd that concealed carry is touted by conservatives as a mechanism for improving public safety. So-called “constitutional carry” is more likely to make Louisiana’s streets more dangerous, and to lead to the proliferation of firearms on the black market as gun theft becomes more commonplace.

** Another argument for gun ownership comes from the far left as frequently as it does the far right, and has to do with gun ownership being a means for the preservation of liberty; that’s where the “constitutional” part of “constitutional carry” is supposed to lead you to in your head. Putting aside left-wing questions of revolutionary strategy, this law is also weaker constitutionally than its proponents let on. The second amendment does not specify concealed carry. It authorizes “the right to bear arms”, and to “bear arms” for the writers of the Constitution explicitly entailed visibly carrying a firearm in a public setting, or open carry. So-called “constitutional carry” also does nothing to restore the constitutional right to bear arms of individuals who have been felonized by the state; the abrogation of such right being one of the major contributors to mass incarceration, which, alongside mass surveillance, is possibly the greatest threat to liberty today. If the defense of liberty is what matters to someone in their defense of the right to bear arms, “constitutional carry” makes zero difference. Revolutions, anyway, aren’t made from concealed handguns, but from political parties dedicated to revolutionary struggle, and the paramilitaries attached to these parties, which are usually armed illegally (one must be armed illegally to have an arsenal that is a threat to the government), and which operate underground (sometimes literally). The provisional IRA, for example, smuggled weapons in from abroad, evading Irish and British gun control laws. While armalite rifles were sourced from North America, much more powerful weapons were sourced from elsewhere, including surface-to-air missiles provided by Gaddafi’s Libya. The Palestinian resistance depends entirely on smuggled and plundered weaponry, as well as domestically produced rockets using whatever scrap material the resistance can get its hands on. The Zapatista rebellion has maintained rebel-administered zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas for over thirty years with smuggled and sparsely used rifles, owing much of the persistence and longevity of their rebellion to their non-violent posture and reluctance to use firearms. For example, protesters loyal to the EZLN in 2001 occupied a military base in Chiapas without firing a shot or brandishing a weapon. The action resulted in the closure of the base and the re-opening of peace talks with Mexican president Vincente Fox. This is not to say that firearms are useless in the struggle or that the revolutionary left should support firearms restrictions. The best way to reduce crime would not be to arm everyone or to take everyone’s guns away, but to address the social forces that push people into lives of crime. A basic social democratic policy slate - universal healthcare, guaranteed housing, unionization of the workforce, and a robust welfare system - would go much further towards reducing crime rates than giving would-be vigilantes the go ahead to shoot first and ask questions later. There is an obvious reason why the Nordic social democracies produce fewer homicides annually than the city of New Orleans does alone. We know why the Louisiana GOP won’t go for such policies: high crime rates scare the populace into voting for policies that send taxpayer money, instead, into the pockets of politically powerful and well-connected sheriffs and their buddies in the private sector who have been enriched by mass incarceration, the Gerald Juneaus of the world who charge exorbitant rates for phone calls to and from parish jails, and who excise enormous profits from running jailhouse commissaries where they jack up the prices on goods sold to inmates; not to mention the private businesses who exploit contracted inmate labor for pennies on the dollar. Mass incarceration is big business, and high crime rates help that business grow.

[mapsontheweb]

Stances of IRA divisions on the Anglo-Irish treaty, which ended the Irish War of Independence.

by oglach:

For background, what made the treaty so controversial was the fact that it gave Ireland partial independence as a dominion (akin to Canada at the time), where politicians still had to swear loyalty to the crown. As well as effectively guaranteeing the partition of the island, and the creation of Northern Ireland.

Many within the IRA rejected these compromises and wanted to keep fighting for complete freedom, causing a civil war between pro-treaty and anti-factions. This was eventually won by the pro-treaty side with British support, with the pro-treaty IRA going on to become the new Irish military.

The anti-treaty faction was driven underground, but continued to wage a low-level insurgency against both Britain and the new Irish government until the 60s, when they split again into communist and nationalist factions. The latter of which became known as the Provisional IRA, and obviously experienced a huge "revival" during the Troubles.