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Professor Roy Greenslade


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What I take from this, laying aside the smug self satisfaction,  is that Greenslade, like legions before, and after, him hated the Crown, but loved the Half-Crown.

I take from it, also, that Greenslade is an advocate of violence (or "armed struggle" as he will no doubt prefer to call it), but one who is neither prepared to use it, himself, or put himself in any danger, whatsoever, of being on its receiving end.

 

Not a man to trust, then.

 

As for the radiant future, perhaps Greenslade might explain what the slogans "KAH" (Kill All Huns, ie Protestants) and 'Brits Out' actually mean. I take the former to be an exhortation to genocide; the latter to ethnic cleansing. Maybe they are merely a bit of craic.

 

I remain to be convinced of that, and, worringly, these self same entreaties appear, not irregularly, in Scotland, at football matches (or at least they did, pre lockdown), and on walls, bridges etc.

 

 Greenslade displays the zeal of the dyke-jumper, but is really, no more than a convert without cojones.

 

 

Roy Greenslade: I cheered on the IRA from Fleet Street — you just didn’t read all about it

He worked as a senior editor on Britain’s biggest newspapers, including The Sunday Times, all the while keeping secret his support for Irish paramilitaries. Now a member of Sinn Féin, Roy Greenslade explains why he still thinks the atrocities were justified

Sunday February 28 2021, 12.01am,

The Sunday Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roy-greenslade-i-cheered-on-the-ira-from-fleet-street-you-just-didnt-read-all-about-it-vc3zbl6n9

 

Roy Greenslade stood surety for one of the men accused of involvement in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing, which killed 11 military personnel

 

 

One grandson asks: “Why did you become an Irish republican? After all, you’re not Irish.” Another grandson asks: “When did you become a republican? Why? When?” These are simple enough questions, although answering them is anything but simple. Much tougher questions have been asked about me by journalists since the 2008 publication of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. In my Wikipedia entry it states that Nick “exposed” my having secretly written for the Sinn Féin newspaper, An Phoblacht, while I was a senior executive at The Sunday Times.

A report about the book in The Independent said he had “outed” me. He neither exposed nor outed me. I made a conscious decision to tell the truth after years of concealing my republican sympathies, choosing to do so through someone I could trust. Nick and I remain good friends.

He related how I used a pseudonym for my An Phoblacht columns, George King, a reversal of King George, as bland an English name as I could come up with. He also told how, after the murders of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar in 1988, I had engaged in subterfuge to direct a reporter towards evidence that contradicted the version of events that had taken hold within the newspaper. More of Gibraltar in a moment. I will deal also with the rest of that Wikipedia entry:

“Greenslade also spoke at a Sinn Féin conference in London on the 30th anniversary of the hunger strikes, and he wrote an article on the same subject for An Phoblacht. He has had a house in Co Donegal for many years, and a close personal friend is Pat Doherty, who from 1988 until 2009 was vice-president of Sinn Féin, and who has been publicly named as a former member of the IRA army council. He also stood surety for IRA member John Downey,one of the suspects in the 1982 bombing of Hyde Park, which killed four soldiers.”

 

Greenslade: ‘I knew that to own up would result in me losing my job’

 

I have decided, at last, to address this matter of my covert political beliefs because various critics — some named, many more remaining anonymous on Twitter — continue to make much of my supposed “exposure”. They include Stephen Glover, Charles Moore, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Ed Moloney. I have refused to respond to them, but it has been increasingly clear that my never-complain, never-explain non-response to criticisms has been inadequate. It implied that I am unwilling to justify what I have done. So, having given up full-time journalism and become a member of Sinn Féin, I want to place in context my reasons for being a republican and my passionate wish to see a united Ireland. At the same time, it enables me to provide coherent answers to those questions asked by my grandsons.

My Irish political journey is also a journalistic journey. Not just for me, but for British journalists and politicians who woke up 50 years too late to the iniquities of allowing a separate parliament with a built-in Protestant-unionist-loyalist majority to administer part of what was regarded as the United Kingdom on sectarian lines. My story began in 1968, when I was a sub-editor on the Daily Mail in Manchester. In those days, for reasons that were unclear, the newspaper’s northern office was responsible for covering Ireland. We published separate editions for the republic and the north. Two of the essential requirements when subbing stories for the former were to substitute any mention of the abbreviation IRA with “an illegal organisation” and to delete any reference to contraception. As for the latter edition, the work became ever-more time-consuming throughout my 18 months with the paper, because it marked the beginning of what would become “the Troubles”.

 

For a young man from London with zero knowledge of Ireland, including the fact that the country had been partitioned, events in the six northern counties made no sense. I was not alone. Many Mail reporters and sub-editors were baffled by the violence with which loyalist mobs, seemingly aided by a police force called the RUC, attacked marches organised by the recently formed Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Those clashes were soon followed by riots in Derry, the forcible eviction of residents in Belfast and the burning of people’s houses. Night after night, we subs could overhear a harassed news desk assistant shouting down the phone: “How high are the flames?” As if that made the slightest difference.

 

In the stories filed about those events, whether by our resident reporter or the Press Association correspondent, there was precious little room for explanation. Both men were imbued with knowledge about the underlying reasons for the divisions in their society but, whether they wished it or not, the conflict was immediately assumed by us at the Mail and those at almost every other British newspaper to be an age-old religious dispute between Catholics and Protestants. For most of us in the office, that schism was the most bewildering element. Hadn’t that been sorted out in the 17th century?

Some of the older, wiser heads at senior level did their best to explain. The most detailed counsel to a group of young subs came from the chief sub, Michael Taylor, a Methodist without a trace of religious partiality who went on to edit the Methodist Recorder. He gave us an eye-opening history lesson on the politicisation of religion. Once news broke of the first death in July 1969 — a 67-year-old Catholic man struck by an RUC baton — he said, with a prescience absent in Westminster, that the worst was yet to come. The army was deployed the following month, and in September 1969 management decided to double the staff by sending in a reporter from Manchester to assist their Belfast-born correspondent, Ted Scallan.

 

That reporter, Andy Rosthorn, was a friend and suggested I would benefit from spending a week with him. The Mail, to its credit, funded what the deputy editor called, with a straight face, “a quick-fire educational tour” of Belfast and Derry. Scallan’s early briefings, which took place in a succession of pubs, involved grumbles about how difficult it had been to get his copy into the paper in the years leading up to the civil rights marches. Now, with people being driven from their homes amid nightly riots, he was upset that the news desk demanded stories only about results, rather than causes. Scallan was amazed that I had no grasp of the unionist-nationalist division. He lived it because — born a Catholic and estranged from his Catholic wife — he now lived with Annie, a Protestant. In the autumn of 1969, she received a chilling message: “We like hearing Ted’s stories in the Northumberland Bar about Dr Paisley and the goings-on at Stormont, but Ted’s the last wee **** [a derogatory term for Catholics and/or Irish nationalists] living in Northumberland Street and he’s got to go.”

So, he went, moving into Andy’s flat in a safer area.

 

Derry was scary. And, to the eyes of a Londoner who had thought Blackburn down at heel after a spell on its paper, the housing on the Bogside was how I imagined a Victorian slum must have looked. We spent a terrifying hour there, dodging imaginary bullets, before taking refuge in the City Hotel, where a nationalist politician explained the system of gerrymandering. I was quickly convinced of the civil rights argument.

Two years later, now on the subs’ desk at The Sun in London, I fell in love. Noreen, imbued with a republican spirit, had been born in Donegal and raised in a Glasgow community where everyone seemed to hail from her county. Soon after we met, I accompanied her one Saturday while she sold a paper produced by a small left-wing Irish group, Clann na hÉireann, in the pubs of Kilburn. She then decided I should know about her birthplace and took me to Falcarragh. That week, we also visited her father’s home town, Carrigart, and it was there she introduced me to a couple she had grown up with, Patrick and Mary Doherty, who had left Glasgow to make a life in Donegal.

They were warm and friendly and amused by a Brit who asked so many naive questions about his own country’s part in the developing conflict across the border. Why was Donegal, the most northerly Irish county, not part of Northern Ireland? Wasn’t the army the unfortunate piggy in the middle between two warring tribes? What was the difference between the Official IRA and this new breakaway group, the Provisionals? I can’t remember what was said, but I do recall their passion for argument and their belief in the need for Ireland to be reunited. It proved to be the beginning of a close friendship that has endured for 50 years.

 

The relentless cycle of violence in Northern Ireland took a dramatic turn in 1981 when Bobby Sands and nine other IRA prisoners went on hunger strike

Noreen and I had not long moved in together when, on January 30, 1972, British paratroopers shot 13 people in Derry. As for so many in Ireland, Bloody Sunday was a turning point for me. We joined a demonstration in Whitehall the following Saturday with the ambition of embarrassing the prime minister, Ted Heath, by placing 13 coffins on the doorstep of No 10. Although there were no gates to Downing Street in those days, the authorities were not going to allow it and a riot broke out. We got right up to the police lines and Noreen’s glasses were broken by a wayward blow from a truncheon. As we turned around, we saw a man throw a bottle into the street. There was something different about him from almost everyone else: a smarter anorak perhaps, shorter hair maybe. I could tell he was merely mouthing the slogans shouted by the rest of the crowd. Nearby, another man strapped on knuckle-dusters. We realised they were not protesters. Here, surely, were Special Branch agents provocateurs.

We had little time to speculate because the mounted police launched a charge, ignoring the ball-bearings strewn across the road to unseat the riders. In the melee, we managed to take cover behind the Cenotaph, watching as police began to arrest demonstrators and bundle them into police vans. We felt lucky to make it home. Next day, on my way into The Sun for a subbing shift, I stopped at a newsstand to scan the front-page headlines: “Riot! Police charge IRA demo” — Sunday Mirror; “10,000 battle with police in Whitehall” — Sunday People; “100 arrested, coffins thrown in Downing Street demo clash” — The Sunday Times.

The claim that the protest was organised by the IRA was preposterous, but it was repeated in the paper for which I was working. February 7, 1972 was the first day of my long silence. I knew that to own up to supporting Irish republicans would result in me losing my job. I could have taken that step myself by walking out on principle. But the idea of forsaking a Fleet Street career — indeed, a career of any kind in journalism — was unthinkable. I couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. Join an agitprop publication? I couldn’t see a future there. Become a librarian, a schoolboy dream? It wasn’t really a feasible alternative. Anyway, I needed a wage because I was on the verge of taking on a mortgage. Better, then, to button my lip and carry on.

 

Meanwhile, I deepened my knowledge about Irish history and about the post-partition situation in the north. I still have a battered copy of the first book I consulted, written by Michael Farrell, one of the founders of the civil rights group People’s Democracy. It was an influential text, explaining in detail how the Stormont administration had treated working-class Catholic nationalists as second-class citizens.

A couple of years later, I left The Sun because of my involvement in disruptive activity as a member of the newspaper’s militant National Union of Journalists chapel. Subsequently, while writing a book, I took casual shifts at The Argus in Brighton and BBC Radio Brighton. I also became a leading member of Brighton’s NUJ branch, which enabled me to attend the union’s annual delegate meeting in 1974, held in the Irish town of Wexford. For the first time, I revealed in public my growing allegiance to the republican cause by speaking out against the Irish government’s use of censorship to prevent spokesmen for Sinn Féin or the IRA from being interviewed on the country’s main broadcaster, RTÉ.

After my speech, I was buttonholed by an angry English visitor to the conference, who led me to a side table where he had laid out photographs taken in the aftermath of several IRA bombings. There were graphic shots of devastation, with people lying dead or injured, blood seeping in the gutter. Had I no heart, no humanity? How could I want these murderers to have a platform? Did I enjoy seeing “our soldiers” die? I stuttered and dodged the substantive issue, choosing instead to repeat the arguments I had made at the microphone: gagging the IRA was counterproductive because it underlined its alienation from ordinary society and prevented public discussion of its political justification for its actions. He sneered as I walked away, shouting after me: “There is no justification for bombings in which innocents are killed.”

It was an uncomfortable confrontation. I recognised that I had failed to offer a coherent answer and, while convinced of the IRA’s political ambitions, I began to doubt its bombing tactics. Those concerns increased later that year when 21 people were killed by bombs placed in two Birmingham pubs. In Belfast, in discussions with republicans, I heard about the beginnings of what came to be known as “the dirty war”, the security forces’ use of collusion, the deliberate failure by the authorities to act quickly enough in response to phone calls warning of bomb placements, and the willingness of the RUC and army to allow loyalist paramilitaries to bomb and kill with impunity.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Noreen and I spent several summer holidays and Christmases in Donegal with the Dohertys. Given the number of police raids on their house, we could not be unaware of Patrick’s republican connections, but we did not know the level of his participation and, despite making assumptions, we knew not to ask. Of course, we talked incessantly about the war — yes, that is the correct term for the conflict between the Provisional IRA and the British forces — and about politics in general. From early on in our friendship, we four found ourselves in complete agreement about the right of the Irish people to engage in armed struggle.

I came to accept that the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms. In other words, I supported the use of physical force. In 1976, having belatedly started a university degree course, I began to see comparisons between the Irish republican struggle and similar conflicts elsewhere in the world. To pay for my studies, I worked part-time as a sub at the Sunday Mirror. So, naturally, I continued to keep my views on the IRA to myself. However much I believed its tactics to be valid, I could not hope to convince colleagues that the killing of civilians, albeit by accident, was justifiable.

 

My studies, in company with my newspaper experiences, deepened my understanding of the way in which a supposedly free press marginalises all ideas counter to the prevailing mainstream ideology. A dissertation on the relationship between Noam Chomsky’s linguistic and political theories proved to be invaluable. On obtaining my degree, I hoped to work at last for a serious newspaper with a left-of-centre political outlook. In other words, The Guardian. I got an interview but, sadly, the paper’s editors rejected me.

 

So it was back to the popular right-wing press and, through a series of strange twists of fate, I found myself back at The Sun in 1981, this time as assistant editor in charge of the features department. In every way, the job was to prove an excruciatingly difficult test of my political omerta, not least because that year was another turning point in my support for republicanism. I was outraged by the way the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, handled the hunger strike in which 10 prisoners fasted to death in protest against her government’s withdrawal of special category status. Above my desk, I put up a photo of the first of the 10 to die, Bobby Sands, and it has remained there ever since. I regard him as a hero, as I do all of them.

Now I was utterly convinced by the merit of the Irish republican cause. There were still painful moments, such as the 1983 bombing of Harrods in which six people were killed, including a Daily Express journalist, Philip Geddes. His friends included former colleagues of mine, who told me he was a fine young man. But I knew people who had been killed by the security forces in Belfast and Derry too, also fine young men. In what was an urban guerrilla insurrection, there was suffering on all sides. That is not to say, however, that I was not appalled by the carnage. I was not alone. Several republicans, having seen the ballot box as the future, were beginning to visualise a political path beyond the bombs and bullets. Too many people were to die before the British responded positively to the IRA’s overtures.

 

I cannot say for sure when I started to write for the republican paper, An Phoblacht. My contributions, some of them under the George King pseudonym, some unattributed, were irregular. They reflected my belief that the British state was dragging its heels over the IRA’s clear wish to make peace. There was a long stalemate. Army chiefs accepted that the IRA could not be defeated militarily; within the IRA there was a similar recognition that it could not defeat Britain militarily. Yet Thatcher was determined to take the military route, thereby prolonging the conflict. Her government’s shoot-to-kill policy culminated in the 1988 killing of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, which had the effect of kickstarting another phase in the war.

By the time it happened, I had escaped from The Sun to take up a senior executive role at The Sunday Times. Once again, not a paper with my politics, but, let’s be frank, no mainstream national paper in Britain shared my politics. Press freedom in our society is a theory. In practice, owners and their chosen editors call the shots. Aware of that reality, I maintained my silence and wrote for An Phoblacht as often as possible. I was not alone in believing that the shootings in Gibraltar were unjustifiable. Thames TV’s This Week documentary strand produced a programme called Death on the Rock, in which interviews with witnesses provided compelling evidence that the government’s account of what had happened was false.

With the controversy raging, The Sunday Times — at the request of the editor, Andrew Neil — launched an investigation into what he later called the “infamous” Thames TV programme. Even though the reporting team’s inquiries tended to support the TV version of events, what appeared in the paper was a one-sided article that attacked the documentary-makers and amounted to a justification for the killings. Three of the reporters, Rosie Waterhouse — later a colleague at City, University of London — David Connett and Barrie Penrose, were infuriated by the inaccuracies contained in the published article and made formal complaints. Waterhouse, who resigned over a different matter, later wrote a letter to the newspaper trade magazine, Press Gazette, saying her copy had been distorted to fit the paper’s agenda.

Nine months later, there was vindication for her, the other angry reporters and me, when The Sunday Times made a mealy-mouthed admission of its “mistakes”. I need to state that, this episode apart, my three years on the paper were some of the happiest of my career, and Neil, despite his Conservative and unionist sympathies, proved to be an excellent editor with whom I enjoyed a good relationship. That would certainly not have been the case had he known of my republican work.

I did not feel compromised when I became editor of the Daily Mirror in 1990 because it was the only mainstream newspaper to have consistently urged the removal of British troops from the north of Ireland. I do not regard it as dishonest to have written covertly in opposition to the editorial stance of the papers for which I have worked. It was sensible and pragmatic. In a sense, I guess I employed what might be called “journalistic entryism”, working as required by my employers while holding polar opposite political views that, were they to have been known, would inevitably have led to me not only being fired but also being unemployable thereafter. Thankfully, from 1992 onwards, almost all of my journalistic life was spent on The Guardian, where I worked on contract as a media columnist for the best part of 28 years.

I no longer felt it necessary to conceal my Irish republicanism, allowing it to leak out gradually as the peace process got under way. Several journalists working in Belfast liked to tell me the armed struggle would never end, and even if it did, peace would never last. More than 20 years on, these experts should be eating their words. Their incorrect reading of the runes, and their willingness to side with the authorities throughout the Troubles, contributed to the lack of understanding by British people about Ireland. The biased media output and/or the failure to report has been one of my areas of study. It underpinned the “hierarchy of death” theory that I first proposed in 1998 when I delivered a lecture in Belfast about the murder by a loyalist gang of 17-year-old Damien Walsh.

I have also spoken openly on Sinn Féin platforms and routinely attend the party’s events, including those held in parliament. These are not clandestine affairs. In 2006, I contributed a chapter to a book on the hunger strike edited by Danny Morrison, the former Sinn Féin publicity director and secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust. Some seven years ago, as that Wikipedia entry rightly states, I did stand surety for John Downey when he was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing. He did not stand trial because, as part of the Good Friday agreement, he had received a “letter of assurance” from the government that he would not be prosecuted for any alleged past crimes. John was, and is, a Donegal neighbour. All I know of him is his dedication to peace.

We are beyond war now. The weapons have been destroyed. The bombings are over. The soldiers have left. I wanted peace and played a very minor role as messenger at a crucial moment during the process itself. But I understand why the conflict occurred and do not regret my support for those who fought it. I am pleased at last to come out from hiding and explain myself to everyone, including, of course, my grandchildren.

This article is taken from the British Journalism Review Vol 32 No 1 March 2021, out this week. Roy Greenslade is honorary visiting professor of journalism at City, University of London

 

 

Edited by Uilleam
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He lectured on Ethics in Journalism: some might feel a contradiction in terms, in itself.

Ally this to his double life, his duplicity, his breaches of contract,  and his support of wanton and indiscriminate savagery, then we realy have the post-truth era writ large. 

 

Former editor Roy Greenslade quits ethics post following backlash for supporting IRA

David Brown | Marcus Leroux

Tuesday March 02 2021, 12.01am, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/former-editor-roy-greenslade-quits-ethics-post-following-backlash-for-supporting-ira-3c506h9tp

 

Roy Greenslade wrote that he had “come out of hiding”

 

A former Fleet Street editor resigned as a lecturer in journalism ethics yesterday to save the university “from any embarrassment” after he admitted having supported IRA terrorism.

Roy Greenslade was criticised by victims of terrorism, while the prime minister’s spokesman said that Boris Johnson “outright condemns” the journalist’s comments in an article republished in The Sunday Times that the murder of innocent civilians was “justifiable”.

Greenslade, a former Daily Mirror editor, was a Guardian media columnist before he began teaching at City University in London in 2003. He told The Times: “Why did I resign? To save the university and its journalism department from any embarrassment. Also, it was a very marginal unpaid position, necessitating one lecture a year.”

A university spokesman said: “While acknowledging Professor Greenslade’s contribution and his right to express his views, the university has accepted his resignation.”

In his article, first published in the British Journalism Review, Greenslade revealed how he had “come out of hiding” to explain his support for IRA terrorism. He wrote: “I came to accept the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms. In other words, I supported the use of physical force.“However much I believed its tactics to be valid, I could not hope to convince colleagues that the killing of civilians, albeit by accident, was justifiable.”

Greenslade, 74, once guaranteed bail for John Downey, an IRA member accused of participating in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing that killed four soldiers and seven horses. The High Court ruled in 2019 that Downey was an “active participant” in the bombing. He is currently on bail accused of the murder of two Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers in Enniskillen in 1972.

Greenslade also admitted engaging in “subterfuge” while he was a senior executive on The Sunday Times to try to influence its coverage of the “murders of three IRA volunteers” who were shot by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.

In the article Greenslade recalled how he had already been outed by his fellow Guardian journalist Nick Davies, 67, for writing in An Phoblacht, a Sinn Fein newspaper. Davies, in his book Flat Earth News, reported that Greenslade had received “useful information” from his Sinn Fein contacts about Gibraltar.

Greenslade “faked an Irish accent” to call Peter Hounam of the Sunday Times Insight team pretending to be a friend of an airline pilot who had overheard a discussion by members of the SAS team.

Hounam, 76, said yesterday: “I cannot understand why Roy would have gone to this sort of trouble because we were quite good mates and he could have told me in confidence. He was quite secretive about his beliefs but he was a good boss. I feel no grudge.”

Greenslade, who has homes in Brighton and Co Donegal, said yesterday: “None of the info I passed on about an interviewee worked out. I honestly can’t recall the details now. I merely asked him to check it out. I don’t even know if he did. It was just one lead among many. I didn’t make any secret of my sympathies during lectures. Nor have I done so ever since 2008.”

Analysis
The departure of Roy Greenslade as lecturer in journalism ethics yesterday brings to an end his double life at the heart of British journalism while “secretly” supporting IRA terrorism.

He had been assistant editor at The Sun before joining The Sunday Times, where he rose to become managing editor (news). Robert Maxwell appointed Greenslade editor of the Daily Mirror in 1990 where he admitted fixing a spot-the-ball competition to avoid paying the £1 million prize. Greenslade joined The Guardian in 1991, and obtained a high profile attacking the perceived bias and wrongdoing by the rest of the press. He was appointed a professor of journalism at City, University of London in 2003.

When The Spectator magazine, then edited by Boris Johnson, accused Greenslade of being part of a secret “Republican cell at the heart of The Guardian” that conspired to published articles that “lean alarmingly towards the IRA”, there was a furious denial by the editor at the time, Alan Rusbridger. Greenslade remained a regular commentator for The Guardian until March last year.

Liam Clarke, the long-serving Northern Ireland editor of The Sunday Times, wrote in 2000 that Greenslade had put Clarke’s life at risk with an article in The Guardian insinuating wrongly that he was working with MI5, despite knowing that the IRA had already attempted to abduct and kill him.

Clarke, who died in 2015, ended his article: “I regarded him as a friend, though he did warn me in a rare moment of frankness, ‘They call me Mr Kipper — two faces.’”

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You will probably find that there has been an IRA cell working within the Guardian to manipulate the news media away from the evil atrocities committed by his  Irish chums . 

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And talking of Greenslade's ethics, Giles Coren observes in today's Times:

 

I was very impressed by the former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade’s revelation in The Sunday Times this weekend that he had been a big fan of the Provisional IRA and a supporter of armed struggle throughout a 35-year career in journalism, while pretending not to be...........

 

This tower of journalism — whose long list of achievements on Fleet Street include fixing a £1 million spot-the-ball competition at the behest of his proprietor, Robert Maxwell, and robbing millions of credulous working-class Brits of their small change — revealed that his appetite for the ambushing of soldiers, the blowing up of busy pubs and hotels and the evisceration of horses began, as these things often do, when he met a pretty Irish girl and discovered a liking for late nights, Guinness and fiddle music (a bit like Ed Sheeran in Galway Girl)...................

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-time-to-come-clean-about-me-and-al-qaeda-ps06dbg86

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Well, well, well, Greenslade, lecturer on the ethics of journalism, attacked, in print, a rape victim in order that the, ahem, "good name" of the IRA was not -what's the word?- aaah, that's it-

"besmirched".

How very surprising; how very reminiscent of something similar.

 

Who called the ethicist a cu nt? Who called the cu nt an ethicist?

 

IRA rape accuser criticises Guardian over Roy Greenslade

Matthew Moore, Media Correspondent

Wednesday March 03 2021, 12.01am, The Times

 

The Guardian is reviewing articles by Roy Greenslade after his admission

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ira-rape-accuser-criticises-guardian-over-roy-greenslade-sq2nwl9kq

 

The Guardian has launched a review of Roy Greenslade’s articles after it was accused of allowing him to question the credibility of a woman who accused an IRA member of raping her.

Greenslade, 74, resigned as a lecturer in journalism ethics at City University of London on Monday after confessing to supporting IRA violence.

The newspaper’s investigation follows a complaint from Máiría Cahill, a politician and member of a prominent republican family who waived anonymity to allege that she was raped by a senior IRA figure as a teenager.

Greenslade, a former Daily Mirror editor, wrote several articles on the Cahill case for The Guardian while employed as its media commentator.

In one piece in 2014 he criticised a BBC documentary that exposed her ordeal for its “lack of political balance”, saying that viewers should have been informed that she was a member of a “dissident republican organisation with an anti-Sinn Fein agenda”.

Despite demanding full disclosure of Cahill’s past political affiliations, Greenslade did not mention anywhere in the piece that he was an IRA supporter who had previously written for Sinn Fein’s newspaper, An Phoblacht.

Cahill accused Greenslade of hypocrisy. She wrote in The Spectator: “My previous political affiliations, long gone by the time of the programme, had no more bearing on my rape than my later position as an Irish Labour senator when in government, or my time as an SDLP councillor. That Greenslade chose to conflate it illustrated for me the depths to which some would plunge in attempting to deflect attention from the real issue: my treatment at the hands of the IRA and Sinn Fein.”

She continued: “That Greenslade chose the angle he did is not surprising but it is disgusting. No abuse disclosures should be weighed against victims’ previous politics. That The Guardian chose to print it is extremely questionable, given that it was widely known that he had written anonymously for An Phoblacht.”

 

Greenslade often strayed into Northern Irish politics in columns and blogs up to last year. Several appear to reflect his republican sympathies, including “BBC programme used anonymous single source to smear Gerry Adams” in 2016, and “The IRA hunger strike and Fleet Street’s graveyard of truth” in 2011. Some of these articles carry a note acknowledging his past work for the Sinn Fein newspaper but others do not.

In the British Journalism Review, Greenslade said he had “come out of hiding” to explain his support for IRA terrorism. He said the fight was unequal and therefore he supported the use of “physical force”. His contributions to An Phoblacht, under the pseudonym George King, were first revealed in the book Flat Earth News by his Guardian colleague Nick Davies in 2008.

After being approached by The Times, a Guardian spokesman said: “The Guardian’s independent readers’ editor has received a complaint from Máiría Cahill and is investigating this issue.

“The readers’ editor will also be reviewing other historical Roy Greenslade articles concerning Northern Ireland, to ensure that they meet The Guardian’s editorial standards and are sufficiently transparent.”

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The estimable Ruth Dudley Edwards weighs in:

 

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/ruth-dudley-edwards-idiots-as-useful-as-the-ira-apologist-roy-greenslade-are-in-short-supply-3151699

 

Ruth Dudley Edwards: Idiots as useful as the IRA apologist Roy Greenslade are in short supply

Like a few other journalists, I have written occasionally about Roy Greenslade, a very successful journalist and later a professor of journalism who has caused a furore with an article in the Sunday Times.

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

Tuesday, 2nd March 2021, 12:53 pm

 

UpdatedTuesday, 2nd March 2021, 12:55 pm

 

In it, Greenslade explained how he came to be an IRA supporter and why he is unrepentant.

In 2008 he admitted to being an IRA supporter (the satirical magazine Private Eye nicknamed him “Roy of the Provos”) and over the years, like a few other journalists, I wrote about the bias in his Guardian media column and his failure to disclose there he had been a contributor to the IRA propaganda sheet An Phoblacht.

It was astonishing deceit for someone who made his handsome living in senior jobs in newspapers that opposed terrorism.

 

Roy Gleenslade did not disclose in the Guardian he had contributed to the IRA sheet An Phoblacht, writes Ruth Dudley Edwards. "He was a committed republican but didn’t want to lose his job, because he wanted to stay a journalist and had mortgages to pay in London and Donegal"

 

As Ed Moloney, an historian of the IRA, put it in 2014, when Máiría Cahill publicly revealed the shocking behaviour of the Sinn Féin leadership over her rape allegation against an IRA activist, “the sun rises each morning and sets each evening and with the same certainty whenever Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams is in trouble Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade can be relied upon to come riding to the rescue”.

Greenslade had attacked the powerful Spotlight programme that told Máiría’s story as “flawed by lack of political balance”.

What Greenslade wanted was what the Provos wanted, said Moloney: “The resulting silence in the media, the absence of any probe into Sinn Fein and the IRA’s more seedy secrets, especially in the past”, for “the cudgel ‘enemy of the peace process’ has been used in an effort to silence journalism about a party and political leadership that is in government in one part of Ireland and may soon be in the other part.”

And that’s mostly what he got.

 

Greenslade appeared frequently on the BBC and RTE as an expert on journalism with few asking him difficult questions.

Then he stood surety for his Donegal neighbour John Downey, who was charged with four murders in the Hyde Park Bombing but got off because he had one of Tony Blair’s dodgy on-the-run letters.

Downey has since been found liable to pay damages as a result of a civil case brought by Sarah Jane Young, the daughter of one of the victims.

I doubt if he’ll be paying up, but he has been named and shamed like the Omagh bombers which means his life will never be the same again for no decent person will want to have anything to do with him.

Indecent people will, though.

And the ignorant.

And the gullible.

Greenslade’s story began with him falling in love with a beautiful left-wing, republican activist who took him to her birthplace in Donegal, when she introduced him to Patrick and Mary Doherty, whom she had grown up with in Glasgow, who now lived in Donegal. “They were warm and friendly and amused by a Brit who asked so many naïve questions about his own country’s part in the developing conflict across the border.”

Greenslade recalled “their passion for argument and their belief in the need for Ireland to be reunited. It proved to be the beginning of a close friendship that has endured for 50 years”.

I’m sure it has.

Idiots as useful as Greenslade are in short supply.

 

And then came Bloody Sunday, the “turning point”.

Greenslade now knew he was a committed republican but didn’t want to lose his job, because he wanted to stay a journalist and had mortgages to pay in London and Donegal.

He had a slight wobble about the IRA’s “bombing tactics”, when 21 people died in the Birmingham pub bombings, but republicans told him about “‘the dirty war’, the security forces’ use of collusion, the deliberate failure by the authorities to act quickly enough in response to phone calls warning of bomb placements, and the willingness of the RUC and army to allow loyalist paramilitaries to bomb and kill with impunity”.

And Pat Doherty was close by to help him understand.

 

The first time I met the then MP Doherty, close colleague of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, after shaking hands, I said pleasantly, “How nice to see the Army Council represented,” and he responded,

“I hear you were in Donegal a few weeks ago.” 

It was not the first time I met a senior republican who told me they knew where I’d been recently.

Conversation was a bit stilted, so this sinister smiler began the Sinn Fein all-purpose grievance-mongering that a child could see through.

But not Roy Greenslade. “I wanted peace and played a very minor role as messenger at a crucial moments during the process itself,” he wrote at the end of the article.

He has no regrets and is “pleased at last to come out of hiding and explain myself to everyone”.

 

He’ll have a nasty shock if he reads many hundreds of comments.

Here are a few of my favourites.

The Times “has allowed Greenslade to both terminate his credibility and destroy his reputation via the very same channel he hypocritically and dishonestly used during his entire career”.

“What he’s been given is rope, not oxygen.”

“I am surprised,” said another, “he does not disgust himself.”

Quite.

• Ruth Dudley Edwards is author of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice.

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Apparently, the Editor of The Guardian made his excuses and left

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-claims-ignorance-of-roy-greenslades-ira-support-p09kp0tvn

 

Ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger claims ignorance of Roy Greenslade’s IRA support

 
Matthew Moore, Media Editor
Friday March 05 2021, 12.01am, The Times
Alan Rusbridger urged his old newspaper to add notes to Roy Greenslade’s articles

 

The editor of The Guardian during Roy Greenslade’s time as a columnist has urged the newspaper to add disclosure notes to his old articles so readers will know that he supported the IRA.

Alan Rusbridger insists that he was not aware of Greenslade’s backing for terrorist violence during the time he was the paper’s media commentator.

The Republican sympathies of Greenslade, a former Daily Mirror editor, were known across Fleet Street for decades but he attracted widespread condemnation this week after revealing his support for IRA bombing campaigns in the British Journalism Review.

The Guardian is reviewing all his past pieces relating to Northern Ireland to ensure that they meet editorial standards. The inquiry was launched following a complaint from Mairia Cahill, a Republican politician who was raped by a senior IRA figure as a teenager. Cahill accused The Guardian of “extremely questionable” editorial conduct in allowing Greenslade to raise doubts about her allegations without disclosing his own ties to the Republican movement.

 

Rusbridger, who edited The Guardian from 1995 to 2015, told The Times: “Trust is best served by transparency, and I’m sure all the editors and proprietors Roy worked for would rather have known of his sympathies at the time.

“Equally, it would be a service to readers to attach a brief note to Northern Ireland articles he was involved in editing or writing recording what he has now chosen to make public.”

 

Greenslade wrote media columns and blogs for The Guardian between 1992 and March 2020, frequently offering his personal opinions on issues relating to Northern Ireland. Some of these pieces acknowledged that he had previously written for Sinn Fein’s An Phoblacht, but many others, including his attack on Cahill’s credibility, did not.

The Guardian is reviewing Greenslade’s writing on Northern Ireland

 

Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and The Independent on Sunday, said Greenslade’s “high-minded columns for The Guardian . . . now look shabby and hypocritical”.

Although open about being a supporter of Sinn Fein, Greenslade is not known to have voiced approval for violent terrorism in conversations with his bosses.

Greenslade, 74, also held senior roles at The Sun and The Sunday Times, as well as writing for The Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard. He resigned as a lecturer in journalism ethics at City University in London on Monday following the outcry.

 
Edited by Uilleam
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And, while we are at it,  let's not forget the lunatic apparently helping to run the asylum, Dame Claire Fox.

 

Claire Fox, one time a leading  Revolutionary Communist Party cadre, and sjupporter of the most brutal Irish Republican violence,  now a fully enobled Dame of the Realm, and champion of libertarianism: seemingly the type of person who will grab at any set of theories or beliefs provided they are far, far, more extreme than those of the next person.

A woman whose politics are completely discredited. 

 

Here's a little something from politicalbetting.com last year

 

https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/08/04/if-youre-in-a-glasshouse/

 

A woman who has consistently denied the war crimes carried out by the Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims, who – as publisher (of Living Marxism) – was found by a court to have libelled two ITV journalists who reported the facts about what was happening, who dismissed the court’s decision, after the verdict likening the two journalists to David Irving because they had both brought litigation – ignoring the critical difference between them. (Perhaps the differences between telling the truth and inventing facts might be a worthy topic for a future Moral Maze programme.) Certainly, disregard for facts and dismissal of court rulings is now very a la mode. Ms Fox was simply ahead of her time. If you want an example of the intellectually dishonest reasoning of the founder of The Academy of Ideas on this topic, read here. The inability to understand the difference between the denial of established facts and shutting down unpopular opinions would disgrace an averagely bright A-level student. As Deborah Lipstadt, a woman who knows a thing or two about genocide denial, has put it: everyone is free to have their own opinions; they are not free to invent their own facts.

Ms Fox did not have much regard then for freedom of speech though, strangely, when it came to child abuse and jihadist videos, her concern was all for freedom of speech including, apparently, the freedom to disseminate films of criminal offences, though she apparently knows (how?) that most child abuse videos are “simulated”. Nor – more grotesquely – has she ever resiled from or apologised for her pro-IRA views and their campaign of violence before 1998, a campaign which killed and injured, not just thousands of innocents in Ireland and Britain, but 3 Tory MPs, their wives and tried to assassinate a PM.

 

Aaronovitch in The Times is right to ask the question.

 

Boris Johnson has double standards on the IRA

How can the PM condemn an ex-editor’s stance on terrorism after sending a woman of equally extreme views to the Lords?

David Aaronovitch

Thursday March 04 2021, 12.01am, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-has-double-standards-over-the-ira-2hqdjswm6

 

In 1990 Roy Greenslade was appointed editor of the Daily Mirror by the late Robert Maxwell. That autumn the Provisional IRA adopted a new tactic in their war to force the British out of Northern Ireland.

Patsy Gillespie was a Catholic who worked in the canteen at the Fort George army base in Derry. He was 42 and had three children. On October 24 Gillespie was forced into a van full of explosives, tied to his seat and told to drive to the base. He seems to have been assured that he would have four minutes to get the soldiers at the checkpoint to release him before the bomb went off. In fact the IRA waited until the van arrived at the base and then, using a remote device, blew the life out of Gillespie and five soldiers.

The Catholic bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, said that with this attack the IRA had “crossed a new threshold of evil”. But I wonder how the newly promoted editor felt when he heard that story? Because it turned out at the weekend that for most of his career Greenslade was a supporter of the Provisionals. This by his own unrepentant admission in the latest edition of British Journalism Review.

 

As a young reporter with no knowledge of Ireland, Greenslade went to Northern Ireland as the Troubles began, hitched up with an Irishwoman, learnt how the Brits were to blame for everything and drank deep of the heady Republican brew. He became a little drummer boy in the army of the liberators.

 

Only he couldn’t say so to his newspaper colleagues because . . . because what? Greenslade suggests that he kept schtum because he needed the job, had a mortgage to pay and in any case was a keen newspaperman. But then he writes that he had come to believe “that the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms. In other words, I supported the use of physical force.” The IRA’s tactics were “valid” but he couldn’t hope to convince his colleagues of this. So he didn’t try. His views went — how shall I put it? — unaired.

 

In 1983 a young journalist called Philip Geddes was killed by an IRA bomb that went off outside Harrods. Greenslade knew people who were friends of the dead man, so it was a “painful moment”. But “I also knew people . . . who had been killed by the security forces. In what was an urban guerrilla insurrection, there was suffering on all sides.”

 

And all the Provos desired was peace. “The bombings are over,” Greenslade concludes in his article, “The soldiers have left. I wanted peace and played a very minor role as messenger at a crucial moment during the process itself.”

 

I wonder if even someone as affably plausible as the former professor of journalistic ethics can avoid noticing what self-serving bullshit this is. Look at the language: “valid tactics” — making a man into a human bomb, “physical force” — shooting a man dead in front of his 13-year-old son.

Falling altogether out of Greenslade’s slippery recollection is the fact that the majority of nationalists in Northern Ireland never supported the Provos’ terrorism. At one stage the IRA even discussed whether to assassinate John Hume, the SDLP leader and later Nobel peace prizewinner.

That’s the real reason, secret even to himself, why Greenslade didn’t try to win over his colleagues — for fear they would relieve him of his self-idealisation as a (silenced) romantic revolutionary.

 

Enter now our second character. When Greenslade’s defiant apologia hit the newsstands, one early critic was the prime minister himself. Boris Johnson’s spokesman quoted him as saying that he “outright condemns” the former editor. No qualification. This prompt condemnation itself garnered headlines. And Johnson’s reaction was understandable. The IRA very nearly killed his own Conservative predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major, one with a hotel bomb that took five lives and the other with a mortar fired at Downing Street.

 

And yet, such is the character of the prime minister that I couldn’t help wondering whether, had Greenslade become an enthusiastic Brexiteer late in his career, he might have avoided the condemnation and won instead a seat in the House of Lords. Because that’s exactly what happened last summer when Claire Fox, formerly of the Irish Freedom Movement, became Baroness Fox.

 

When in 2019 Fox stood for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the North West Euro-constituency that includes Warrington, I pointed out that she and her Trotskyist sect had supported violent republicanism, including IRA bombings in Britain, and that she had never recanted. Indeed she was several shades more extreme than Greenslade because she regarded the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday agreement as betrayals.

Her refusal to recant led to her being condemned during the election by the peace campaigner Colin Parry, father of one of the two boys killed in Warrington by an IRA bomb in 1993. Fox’s response was to state that “my personal politics and views are well known and I have never sought to deny them, though on this issue they have remained unaired for many years”.

Johnson or his advisers will have known all this when they nominated Fox for a peerage last summer. But asked for comment about her elevation they waved it away with the entirely inaccurate assertion that Fox had “addressed her historic comments about the Troubles”. Bish, bash, bosh. Dealt with that.

 

So IRA-supporting Greenslade is to be condemned but the even more IRA-supporting Fox is to be ennobled. And why? It’s simple: Johnson doesn’t care and he and his coterie don’t think you care either. If the history of those times can be deployed against a political opponent, like Jeremy Corbyn, then invoke it. But if it doesn’t suit your purposes when you want to put Brexiteers in the Lords, then brush it off.

This is a careless prime minister for a time of amnesia. Careless in both senses of the word. If it benefits you to pitch up in Northern Ireland in 2018 and promise the DUP never to have a border in the Irish Sea, then do it. If it benefits you one year later to break that promise, then do that. Who really cares? It worked, didn’t it?

 

But things do live on and a good leader in a good society should care about them. Looking back at reports of the Harrods bombing, I saw that one of those who died was a young mother aged just 25. Her son was two. He’ll be nearly 40 now. What should we say to him?

 

Edited by Uilleam
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