Resurrections and Insurrections

'I am the insurrection' 

Apparently, on this day about 1967 years ago in Jerusalem, some Jewish guy who looked a lot like Che Guevara emerged from the grave where he’d been interred a couple of days earlier. If he did that today, he’d probably be shot as a zombie rather than being celebrated as the founder of a global belief system. Co-incidentally, Che Guevara died in 1967...there's a tenuous link for the numerologists...(At least the ones, like yours truly who couldn't let an arithmetical inaccuracy get in the way of a cheesy set-up)

Pascal-style resurrection through insurrection was the agenda in Dublin 95 years ago today. The Provisional Government of the Republic proclaimed Irish independence from the steps of the GPO in Dublin and the rest, as they say, is history. But nearly a century later, the struggle for ownership of that history remains a fierce battleground.

‘Hit them in the pocket book’

The self-appointed ‘Guardians of the Republic’s flame’ chose the secular anniversary of the Easter Rising, on 24 April 1993, to hit the British Establishment where it really hurt. Decades of sending working class British kids home in body bags failed to dent media and public indifference in the UK the way an IRA bombing campaign in the City of London did over a handful of months.

The Bishopsgate bomb, which cost the Square Mile in excess of £1bn, is one of the unacknowledged turning points in the Troubles. Once it became clear to the money men that no ‘Ring of Steel’ could keep out determined bombers, the British government’s need to seal a deal was the elephant in the room as negotiations pressed on.

Starting with the bombing of the London Stock Exchange in 1990 and then reaching a crescendo with the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate bombs in April of 1992 and 1993 respectively, the IRA had shown that UK plc could be brought to its knees economically with a few bags of fertiliser and a couple of flatbed trucks.

Of course, the peace process had been in train for several years by that point and was always moving (albeit glacially) towards closure. But it would be foolish to imagine that this negotiation strategy was not greatly leveraged by tactical ‘victories’ such as the City Campaign.

That, coupled with a string of ‘spectaculars’, must have given the British serious pause for thought. The mortar bombing of John Major’s war cabinet in Downing Street during Gulf War One in 1991 and the demonstration of an ability to attack Heathrow almost at will in 1994 showed a military organisation in rude health and growing in audacity, even after the attrition of a quarter century of ‘The Long War’.

Chinook crash – cui bono?

But then, if we’re talking about debatable turning points in the Dirty War, we should at least give the conspiracy theorists one bite of the cherry. And pick of the bunch would have to be the Chinook crash on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994 (just a few weeks before the announcement of the first IRA Ceasefire in August).

The twin-rotor military transport helicopter left Belfast and then shortly after crossing the North Channel, it crashed into the side of a Scottish mountain killing all 29 people on board. What really gets the Fox Mulders out there worked up is that among the passengers were almost all the UK's senior Northern Ireland intelligence experts.

Since the incident, enquiries have blamed pilot error but that explanation has never sat well with the families of the pilots who have campaigned to have the case re-opened. In September 2010, Deputy PM Clegg told MPs that an independent review into the crash would be led by a “respected lawyer” (surely an oxymoron?). Earlier this month, a Scottish paper revealed that newly discovered Ministry of Defence documents appeared to point to concerns about Chinook military helicopters before the 1994 crash.

So, first it was pilot error, now it’s mechanical issues...will this be end of it or is the truth still out there in the mists rolling in from the sea on Mull of Kintrye?

Igcuimhne na daoine go léir (Gall agus Gael) a bhfuair báis sa choimhlint ar son saoirse na hÉirinnigh