Anyone who thinks they understand the Irish Troubles has not a clue what they are talking about, Declan Hayes writes.

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While the dying Bobby Tohill, once one of the IRA’s top Belfast assassins prior to the IRA trying to assassinate him a couple of years back, prepares to meet his Maker over the next few days in North Belfast, Tommy Tolan, his one time friend and IRA comrade, comforts him by bringing Holy Communion to his sick bed.

What is noteworthy about that is that Tolan was caught by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in the process of kidnapping Tohill so that the IRA could torture and then kill him. In a remarkable act of forgiveness that would leave even Jesus scratching His head, these two lifelong “friends no matter what” have since metaphorically kissed and made up and Tolan, having previously failed in his mission to kill Tohill, is once again pulling up his sleeves to help his friend cross the Styx to the land beyond. As regards the PSNI, well Tolan, Tohill and their buddies spent the best years of their lives killing 314 or them and injuring a further 9,000 them but that, as they say, is another story from another time

Though that is but one tiny vignette of the old maxim that anyone who thinks they understand the Irish Troubles has not a clue what they are talking about, there is no shortage of other tales and many of them, in the case of Belfast at least, lead right back to Gerry Adams, long regarded as both the head of the IRA and, along with Martin McGuinness, MI6’s main plant within the IRA.

Take, for example, this account of Tohill’s involvement in the IRA’s murder of Joe O’Connor, as well as related IRA murders and their wholesale persecution of the extended Notorantonio family (of which O’Connor was a part) around the time of the Good Friday Agreement, when IRA knuckledragger Bobby Storey warned connected busybodies like former IRA gunman Anthony McIntyre to watch out if they too didn’t want bullets through their heads and that of their families. Sinn Féin and the IRA, who now complain about Irish mothers objecting to child abductions, essentially cleansed, with the full support of the British authorities, Adams’ Ballymurphy stronghold of all dissidents at the point of their guns; the Notorantonios, having had members murdered by Kitson’s Protestant counter gangs, then had more murdered by Kitson’s Catholic counter gangs.

As regards the Notorantonios, Francisco, one of their number, had been murdered by MI6 counter gangs in 1987, supposedly in a case of mistaken identity where Stakeknife, Freddie Scappaticci, had been the intended target. If you wonder why IRA intelligence could not figure out that MI6’s agents had got the wrong Italian, that is because IRA intelligence was controlled by Scappaticci, JJ McGee and other MI6 intelligence double agents like McGuinness, Donaldson and Adams further up the tree. If you have read thus far, all of this macabre Puckoonery. gets curiouser and curiouser.

As regards Storey, the IRA gave him a lavish funeral at the height of the Covid lockdown up the Falls Road and into Milltown Cemetery, even though Tohill had been earlier cremated and his ashes buried in Roselawn on the other side of dreary Belfast town. Giving their knuckledragging hero a huge send off, even as they demanded jailing other lockdown breakers, was just too good a PR opportunity to miss, lockdown and no mortal remains notwithstanding

Although the essential reading that is Ed Moloney‘s excellent TheBrokenElbow blog claims here that “it would be no exaggeration to say that the ability of Gerry Adams to lie and fool so expertly was the peace process’ most valuable asset”, it is essential, seemingly impossible though it is, to depersonalise all this betrayal so that we can better come to terms with its realpolitik. Though Moloney is right to claim there and in his excellent A Secret History of the IRA that they were two of MI6’s main Trojan Horses that allowed them win this “war”, we must go back to the beginning of the Troubles to get our heads around these arrays of enigmas.

Though this post about Jimmy Steele tells us that the early Provisionals were, like Tolan and Tohill, devout and God fearing Rosary bead rattlers, The Secret Army, this (viewable here) MI6 movie on the early Provisional IRA is noteworthy for a myriad of reasons, the chief of which is that MI6, the CIA and Irish military intelligence already had the measure of the Provos by 1970.

If we check the credits, we see Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, pictured here with his Sinn Féin TD printer cartridge hoarding son Aengus, honorably mentioned in this dishonourable film. More to the point was the movie was directed by J Bowyer Bell, who almost certainly was in the pay of MI6, the CIA and Irish military intelligence, a conclusion we can adduce from the fact that the movie was suppressed for all of 50 years until MI6’s BBC were recently ordered to resurrect it.

Although Adams and his surviving cronies would deny that MI6 had them infiltrated (they would say that, wouldn’t they?), the facts are that that 1972 movie implicated Martin McGuinness in serious criminal activity for which he was never jailed and it displayed on a platter the IRA’s Order of Battle to MI6. And that was in 1972, decades before the 1998 Good Friday surrender.

If we leave aside that the movie also shows, in the early 1970s remember, British MPs organising Kitson’s Protestant counter gangs to slaughter Ulster Catholics, we should also recall this was happening when the Irish Secret Service arrested at gun point senior British Embassy official John Wyman in the act of receiving top secret documents from senior Irish policeman Patrick Crinnion. Though Wyman should, of course, have been shot dead on the spot, the bigger picture is that MI6 and the CIA had already infiltrated the Irish security services and, as the mongrel fox saga shows with WEF big wig Peter Sutherland et al, the mainstream Irish political establishment as well.

Having infiltrated Ireland’s establishment, the task then was to also contaminate those outside the tent and, as this prophetic speech from former IRA boss (and Rosary bead rattler) Ruairí Ó Brádaigh shows, Adams, McGuinness and their fellow social climbers with guns were the means to do that. Whereas former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe has written best sellers on the IRA’s betrayal of their H Block hunger strikers (whose anniversaries, for what it is worth, occur at this time of year) and of their Stakeknife collusion, the real betrayal and infiltration took place outside the prison gates, when Adams et al opened Sinn Féin to every MI6, CIA and ASIO agent from Tipperary to Tasmania.

Here, for example, is O’Rawe opining on the evidence on McGuinness and others MI6 processed from The Secret Army movie, on what a gang of self serving hypocrital narcissists Sinn Féin are and what a conundrum Gerry Adams is.

Here is Adams in Kerry’s south west of Ireland praising Martin Ferris, his chief enforcer who “remains the most knowledgeable person on Gaelic games that I know. A hurling and football encyclopedia”. Not only was Ferris a low level thug on the football field but Adams’ own son was an inter county football and hurling player and manager for Antrim which, unlike Ferris’ immediate backyard, has a strong hurling tradition. Whatever about Adams’ son, Ferris missed out on playing with one of the GAA’s greatest ever teams and Adams, in the course of his own meanderings as well as that of his son, would have come across plenty of current and former players and managers in both hurling and football infinitely more knowledgeable than Ferris or his dysfunctional Australian wife who, Adams shamelessly exclaims, was imprisoned by nuns as a youngster.

But bluffing and bluster is Adams’ game. He tweets photos of himself in the bath with plastic ducks. He sells Easter eggs to mockingly commemorate those who died on hunger strike. And he gets his health needs paid for by his CIA benefactors.

Gerry Adams, like the coke smuggling “republican” gangsters of “republican” Kerry, has had a good war and, no doubt he could spin many fine yarns, like this one about his party lamenting the death of their kidnapping victims. He could tell good stories about promising revenge for Loughall, whilst he sold them down the river for the sake of good dental treatment, a couple of plastic ducks and, as one of his sidekicks now puts it, taming Irish democrats who object to CIA colonialism.

Though Gerry Adams is now 75, he will easily outlive Tohill, for whom the end is now as nigh as it gets. And, though Adams, as is his cynical wont, might appear at Tohill’s funeral for the photo op of lifting the coffin, as Tohill has eschewed the IRA’s trappings of black beret, gloves and tricolour, that might not be as photogenic as Adams and his plastic ducks might have wanted.

Whatever about Tohill, Adams, when his time comes, will get the mother of all send offs, just like McGuinness did before him, with Bill Clinton perhaps again leading the festivities and no matter whether, a la Storey, his mortal remains are in attendance or not. And though he will take some seedy stories about his child molesting family to whatever hole they toss him into, that slate can be wiped clean with a good Confiteor, after which “Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints and you my brothers and sisters” will put things right with Jesus and heaven’s other shot callers.

What cannot so easily be put to rights is that Adams and his equally pompous crew have been fully complicit in selling out the Irish people for some Yankee dental treatment, a couple of plastic ducks and the more substantial trappings of collusion Tohill, Toland and countless others with even an ounce of integrity never got to enjoy. Though Adams and his gang can blather about the hunger strikers, about good Republican like Tohill and Toland or about anything else that crosses their mercenary minds, at day’s end, it is their complicity with emasculating radical Ireland, her Rosary bead rattlers and other honest Joes and Janes included, that is the primary secret to the ongoing success of MI6’s Secret Army.