Ireland's political and cultural magazine
By Joseph de Burca 1. Getting away with murder. Sir Patrick Walker was in charge of MI5 when the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane was assassinated by MI5 agents. Those agents were handled by the RUC Special Branch on behalf of MI5. They included Tommy Lyttle, Brian Nelson, William Stobie and Ken Barret. The assassination, which […]
By Joseph de Burca. Prince Andrew is hardly sweating after the publication of the report on Lord Greville Janner by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Janner was a paedophile who abused boys and girls. IICSA has confirmed what has been known for decades, namely that witness statements taken by the British […]
By Colin Wallace. 1. Memories of Brigadier Frank Kitson. David Burke’s fascinating new book on Frank Kitson includes a comprehensive analysis of what has become known around the world as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Reading it has stirred a lot of memories of the time I spent at Army HQ in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. As […]
By Joseph de Burca. Introduction to Village’s online pamphlet on the Colin Wallace Affair. The Tory Government of Boris Johnson is routinely accused of deceiving the House of Commons. Many British commentators behave as if this is a new low in their democratic history. Yet, there is nothing unusual about the situation. […]
By David Burke. Andrew Lownie will be known to many Village readers for the depth of his research into the life of Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, especially the former’s abuse of boys in the Republic of Ireland. During his research into Mountbatten, Lownie tried, and failed, to gain access to Garda logs […]
By Deirdre Younge. Introduction. Freddie Scappaticci became an agent for British Army intelligence in 1978. A member of the IRA in Belfast he worked his way up the IRA hierarchy, eventually becoming second in command of the ‘Internal Security Unit”, known as the feared “nutting squad”. He joined the British Army’s newly-formed Force Research […]
By Ed Moloney. The document reproduced above is the opening five-paragraph extract of a four-page, forty-paragraph Ulster Defence Association (UDA) intelligence report, or ‘memo’ as it is titled, describing the genesis of the corrupt relationship that developed in the late 1970s between the Official IRA and some leading members of the UDA. Since both groups […]