THE LUNACY OF DEFECTORS AND THEIR POMPOUS TITLES
The lunacy of defectors and their pompous titles
THE inevitable has happened. The old provisional technology from the 1970s has done its worst, and the result was the Omagh massacre. This action will go down in history as one of the most dastardly deeds ever perpetrated by a gang of over-the-hill rebels and the impressionable young cannon fodder they have recruited.
A sustained campaign of reckless folly and lunacy from the armchair generals, social defectives and pathetic failures who attach to each other such grand titles as OC, QM, adjutant, operations officer, Real IRA and Oglaigh na hEireann. They like titles, and some irresponsible media hacks are only to ready to oblige.
'The former quarter master general', now that's a mouthful if ever there was one. Those who know him might say: "Wee fat...? Ah, you must be joking". But now that he is a leading dissident and a former quarter master general, what is his present title? Could it be chief of staff? Well, why not ? After all, all it takes is a half a dozen characters from Newry and Dundalk to sit in a spare room in a Dundalk pub and hand out the appointments among themselves. It is irrelevant that they are mostly in their 40s and 50s because a title does not recognise age.
Recently, I spoke to a journalist from a leading Sunday newspaper about the former quarter master general. He expressed the opinion that the ex-QMG was good at what he once did and that was the importation of arms. I thought about that for a moment and decided, no, he was fairly useless at that, otherwise why did we have old rifles that had to swapped around between units again and again? Why was there never anything state-of-the-art to knock out armour-plated cars, Land Rovers and helicopters? Answer: the ex-QMG never managed to get any. The 1986 windfall from Libya was a one-off special not even the provisionals in their wildest dreams expected. The QMG was taken completely unawares. The ex-QMG is a traditionalist and sticks with the old dependables. Homemade notoriously defective mortars, the old trusty incendiary devices burning down wee small shops across Belfast. Dead handy. You can get any amount of wee girls to carry them in their handbags and shove them down a sofa. And as for car bombs - well, sure they're the best: Bloody Friday, Claudy, even Dublin and Monaghan. The ex-QMG and his cohorts have almost surpassed their greatest enemies in degrees of brutality.
The Omagh bomb has a similar pattern of incompetence and stupidity as the bomb in Banbridge which killed schoolboy Alan McCrum 16 years ago. It could have killed many more. A warning was telephoned after the bomb had gone off. The bomber wanted to be ultra-safe and secure before he told anyone else about the bomb. And he was safe and secure across the border before he picked up a telephone. Another bomb in the early 1980s at Railway Avenue in Newry was of a similar degree of ineptitude. There was a bomb under a culvert in South Armagh designed to kill police or soldiers. The targets never turned up, the bomb was decaying and had become dangerous. It was taken out and doubled up as a car bomb for Newry, the only problem was the country boys involved did not know the streets of Newry and gave a warning for the wrong location. Civilians ran screaming in every direction with one little girl holding a bleeding head with part of a bolt in the side of it.
Was Omagh any different? A bomb is ferried into a packed market town at the height of the main shopping day. The bomb was supposed to be at the courthouse or in a street close to the courthouse. What happened? Was there a checkpoint and the bomb meant for the courthouse abandoned at the most convenient location? Did the bombers want to get clear of the scene before they rang in a warning? Did they look at the faces of the fathers, mothers, children and teenage girls they were about to murder as they passed through the crowd? The bomb may have been originally designed for the courthouse, but that is not where it ended up, and it ended up killing 28 people because of the gross incompetence of a combination of inexperienced recruits and smug indifferent veterans who directed their bomb to damage the republican leadership and Martin McGuinness in particular.
Where do they go from here? Will their arrogance and meaningless lies still lead them to seek the power they so desperately crave? The provisionals will only "take them out" if they attempt to raid the arms and explosives dumps. They know better than to even try.
I find it ironic that several men who were part of a potential INLA unit in 1980 which was closed down and who were subsequently recruited to the Provisional IRA have now gone over to the dissidents. Their OC at the time was right when he said they should never have been touched with a barge pole: they had loyalty to nothing other than their own megalomaniac drive. One of these men has become the lynchpin of the dissidents in the Newry area. He has brought with him several inexperienced young provisionals who joined the organisation after the first ceasefire. He got seven years in a southern court for possession of an armalite rifle in the 1980s, but the sentence was suspended. He and another Newry man, who is now on the run in Dundalk and who served half of a 15 year sentence he received in 1975, form the nucleus of dissident activity. A few former IRSP members, an aging ex-QMG, and a half-wit ex-Provo who was once convicted of stealing an old age pensioner's electricity supply. Needless to say, this motley crew enjoy their drink. In a pub in Dundalk on Saturday night, the despicable, murderous operation that must shame all self-respecting Irishmen, would have been discussed. It would be too much to hope that they decided to disband. Knowing these fools, they will plan the next dastardly murder even though Omagh is their epitaph.
Finally, I must recall the recent bomb on the Omeath/Newry Road which some journalists speculated was a form of decommissioning. When asked what 1 thought it to be, I explained at the time that it had to be dissidents attempting an attack on the security forces which went wrong or was aborted. How anyone could imagine the provisionals would attempt decommissioning just across the border in a particularly dangerous zone is beyond me. No, it was the work of the "disasters". Banbridge last month was almost a "disaster". Omagh is the expression of a malign collective personality which has not even got the courage to admit to its actions. Where is their grandiose Real IRA/Oglaigh na hEireann now?
THE inevitable has happened. The old provisional technology from the 1970s has done its worst, and the result was the Omagh massacre. This action will go down in history as one of the most dastardly deeds ever perpetrated by a gang of over-the-hill rebels and the impressionable young cannon fodder they have recruited.
A sustained campaign of reckless folly and lunacy from the armchair generals, social defectives and pathetic failures who attach to each other such grand titles as OC, QM, adjutant, operations officer, Real IRA and Oglaigh na hEireann. They like titles, and some irresponsible media hacks are only to ready to oblige.
'The former quarter master general', now that's a mouthful if ever there was one. Those who know him might say: "Wee fat...? Ah, you must be joking". But now that he is a leading dissident and a former quarter master general, what is his present title? Could it be chief of staff? Well, why not ? After all, all it takes is a half a dozen characters from Newry and Dundalk to sit in a spare room in a Dundalk pub and hand out the appointments among themselves. It is irrelevant that they are mostly in their 40s and 50s because a title does not recognise age.
Recently, I spoke to a journalist from a leading Sunday newspaper about the former quarter master general. He expressed the opinion that the ex-QMG was good at what he once did and that was the importation of arms. I thought about that for a moment and decided, no, he was fairly useless at that, otherwise why did we have old rifles that had to swapped around between units again and again? Why was there never anything state-of-the-art to knock out armour-plated cars, Land Rovers and helicopters? Answer: the ex-QMG never managed to get any. The 1986 windfall from Libya was a one-off special not even the provisionals in their wildest dreams expected. The QMG was taken completely unawares. The ex-QMG is a traditionalist and sticks with the old dependables. Homemade notoriously defective mortars, the old trusty incendiary devices burning down wee small shops across Belfast. Dead handy. You can get any amount of wee girls to carry them in their handbags and shove them down a sofa. And as for car bombs - well, sure they're the best: Bloody Friday, Claudy, even Dublin and Monaghan. The ex-QMG and his cohorts have almost surpassed their greatest enemies in degrees of brutality.
The Omagh bomb has a similar pattern of incompetence and stupidity as the bomb in Banbridge which killed schoolboy Alan McCrum 16 years ago. It could have killed many more. A warning was telephoned after the bomb had gone off. The bomber wanted to be ultra-safe and secure before he told anyone else about the bomb. And he was safe and secure across the border before he picked up a telephone. Another bomb in the early 1980s at Railway Avenue in Newry was of a similar degree of ineptitude. There was a bomb under a culvert in South Armagh designed to kill police or soldiers. The targets never turned up, the bomb was decaying and had become dangerous. It was taken out and doubled up as a car bomb for Newry, the only problem was the country boys involved did not know the streets of Newry and gave a warning for the wrong location. Civilians ran screaming in every direction with one little girl holding a bleeding head with part of a bolt in the side of it.
Was Omagh any different? A bomb is ferried into a packed market town at the height of the main shopping day. The bomb was supposed to be at the courthouse or in a street close to the courthouse. What happened? Was there a checkpoint and the bomb meant for the courthouse abandoned at the most convenient location? Did the bombers want to get clear of the scene before they rang in a warning? Did they look at the faces of the fathers, mothers, children and teenage girls they were about to murder as they passed through the crowd? The bomb may have been originally designed for the courthouse, but that is not where it ended up, and it ended up killing 28 people because of the gross incompetence of a combination of inexperienced recruits and smug indifferent veterans who directed their bomb to damage the republican leadership and Martin McGuinness in particular.
Where do they go from here? Will their arrogance and meaningless lies still lead them to seek the power they so desperately crave? The provisionals will only "take them out" if they attempt to raid the arms and explosives dumps. They know better than to even try.
I find it ironic that several men who were part of a potential INLA unit in 1980 which was closed down and who were subsequently recruited to the Provisional IRA have now gone over to the dissidents. Their OC at the time was right when he said they should never have been touched with a barge pole: they had loyalty to nothing other than their own megalomaniac drive. One of these men has become the lynchpin of the dissidents in the Newry area. He has brought with him several inexperienced young provisionals who joined the organisation after the first ceasefire. He got seven years in a southern court for possession of an armalite rifle in the 1980s, but the sentence was suspended. He and another Newry man, who is now on the run in Dundalk and who served half of a 15 year sentence he received in 1975, form the nucleus of dissident activity. A few former IRSP members, an aging ex-QMG, and a half-wit ex-Provo who was once convicted of stealing an old age pensioner's electricity supply. Needless to say, this motley crew enjoy their drink. In a pub in Dundalk on Saturday night, the despicable, murderous operation that must shame all self-respecting Irishmen, would have been discussed. It would be too much to hope that they decided to disband. Knowing these fools, they will plan the next dastardly murder even though Omagh is their epitaph.
Finally, I must recall the recent bomb on the Omeath/Newry Road which some journalists speculated was a form of decommissioning. When asked what 1 thought it to be, I explained at the time that it had to be dissidents attempting an attack on the security forces which went wrong or was aborted. How anyone could imagine the provisionals would attempt decommissioning just across the border in a particularly dangerous zone is beyond me. No, it was the work of the "disasters". Banbridge last month was almost a "disaster". Omagh is the expression of a malign collective personality which has not even got the courage to admit to its actions. Where is their grandiose Real IRA/Oglaigh na hEireann now?
Further Information
Publisher: THE IRISH NEWS
Ref: IN/0035
Published Date: 17-Aug-98
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