On January 5th, 1976, members of an active service unit of the IRA stopped a minibus at Kingsmill, near Whitecross in South Armagh. They sorted out the occupants, all textile workers, by religion on the roadside. They let the sole Catholic, Richard Hughes, walk away, and they cut down the 11 Protestants in a hail of automatic gunfire.
They administered a coup de grace by a bullet to the head of the wounded, killing 10 – all except Alan Black, who was mistakenly left for dead, having taken 18 bullet wounds.
The IRA was on ceasefire at the time so it could negotiate with the British government. It lied that it was not involved and it pretended the killings were carried out by a non-existent “reaction force”.
The massacre at Kingsmill ended temporarily a ferocious cycle of tit-for-tat violence in South Armagh, including the Miami Showband massacre and other foul civilian killings – much of which had been orchestrated by the notorious Glenanne gang, a murderous combination of British military personnel, RUC members, UDR members and loyalist paramilitaries.
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The strategy of the 1975 loyalist murder campaign had been to provoke the IRA to abandon their ceasefire, which loyalists believed was intended to procure British withdrawal from the North.
That ceasefire broke down soon after. In June 1976, an IRA active service unit attempted an ambush of a British army post outside Newry, Co Down, which failed. One IRA member on this occasion was captured in possession of a rifle which was forensically shown to have been used in the Kingsmill sectarian massacre six months earlier.
He was Raymond McCreesh. He died on hunger strike for 61 days in 1981, having served five out of 14 years in the Maze prison for possession of that firearm.
A park in Newry was named “Raymond McCreesh Park” by decision of Newry and Mourne Council in 2001 on the proposal of Sinn Féin, three years after the Belfast Agreement but before the IRA decommissioned. It is now to be sold off for development with agreement of the DUP and Sinn Féin.
You might have thought that a local authority naming a children’s playground after McCreesh was hardly in keeping with community reconciliation and ending sectarian politics.
But Sinn Féin, which aspires to be republican in the tradition of Wolfe Tone, didn’t see it that way for some reason.
A former Westminster MP and Sinn Féin MLA, Barry McElduff, was forced to resign his seat in Westminster in 2018 after posting a nauseating video of himself balancing a Kingsmill bread loaf on his head on the 42nd anniversary of the massacre at Kingsmill.
Should we be surprised, then, that it was a Sinn Féin councillor, Kourtney Kenny, who proposed the de-naming of Herzog Park in Rathgar, Dublin?
Should we be surprised that a cross-party Dublin City Council committee, including other councillors of all parties, with the very honourable exception of Labour’s Dermot Lacey, approved the proposal?
The idiocy and political vacuity of the Social Democrats, whose TD, Sinéad Gibney, later supported the motion and then suggested consulting Ireland’s Jewish community about a new name, says everything you need to know about that party.
No reader of this column can have any doubts about my heartfelt and sustained disgust at the attempted genocide in Gaza and the bloodied hands of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, the Israel Defense Forces and their loathsome would-be real estate developers.
Ireland has always recognised the state of Israel and its internationally recognised borders as accepted in UN resolution 242. That has not changed since the Hamas atrocities or the Israeli counter-atrocities. Ireland has unfortunately a history of anti-Semitic subculture at social and, at one time, political levels.
The so-called republican movement has a history in relation to the Jews in Ireland. Ignoring the contribution of Jews to the War of Independence, Mary Lou McDonald and the late Belfast republican Brian Keenan, have, in their time, delivered orations at the egregious Sean Russell statue in Fairview Park, Dublin.
Russell’s IRA linked up and conspired with Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime. In 1940 the IRA issued a statement hailing the Nazis as “friends and liberators of the Irish people”.
The IRA’s publication War News in 1940 welcomed the “cleansing fire” of the Wehrmacht driving Jews from Europe. It also condemned the arrival of the pitiful trickle of Jewish refugees allowed by shameful policies of our immigration authorities from Nazi Europe. War News even attacked Éamon de Valera’s government as dominated by Jews and Masons, naming Robert Briscoe TD.
In Belfast, republicans kidnapped a Jew, Leonard Kaitcer, and murdered him in 1980 when his family failed to pay an enormous ransom. Provisionals also shot and wounded another leading Belfast Jew, Leonard Steinberg, who refused to pay protection money.
Kourtney Kenny and her colleagues may rightly condemn Zionists’ use of terror and ethic cleansing back in 1948, but they need to do a little more study of their own political history.
Alan Black was awarded an MBE for his work in cross-community reconciliation in 2020. Dublin councillors, cop yourselves on. You have a city to save.
