|
 Email: info@searcs-web.com Searc's Web Guide to 20th Century Ireland - Sean MacStiofáin (1930-2001) |
 Sean MacStiofáin (1930-2001) |
|
Sean MacStiofáin was born in Epping, London. He joined the IRA in 1949 and completed his
National Service with the RAF in Jamaica in 1951. He was arrested with Maurice Canning and
Cathal Goulding
after an IRA arms raid on an English Army base at Felsted, Essex in 1953
and sentenced to eight years in prison. MacStiofáin served six years in Woomwood Scrubs and on his release he went to Ireland. In 1966 he was elected Chief of Staff of the IRA. He was arrested under Section 30 of the Offenses Against the State Act on November 19th, 1972 and imprisoned in the Bridewell, Dublin where he went on a hunger and thirst strike. MacStiofáin was released after 48 hours and was immediately rearrested and charged under Section 21 of the Offenses Against the State Act (1939) with 'membership of an unlawful organisation and raising and maintaining an armed force contrary to the Constitution'. He was imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol. At his trial in the Special Criminal Court, Dublin on November 25th, 1972 MacStiofáin refused to plead when the only evidence produced by the prosecution was a tape recorded interview which MacStiofáin had given to an RTE radio editor. On the following day the RTE journalist concerned, Kevin O'Kelly, refused to identify the voice on the tape and was sentenced to three months imprisonment for contempt of court. O'Kelly was acquitted on Appeal but the tape was taken as admissable evidence together with the evidence of a Detective Garda who stated that the voice was that of MacStiofáin and he was sentenced to six months imprisonment. MacStiofáin, weak from his hunger and thirst strike, was taken to the Mater Hospital and moved several days later to the Curragh Military Hospital by helicopter. MacStiofáin came off his thirst strike after ten days but continued his hunger-strike for a further forty-nine days. This extract is from MacStiofáin's autobiography Revolutionary in Ireland (1974). © The experience of [General] Kitson and many other British counter-insurgency experts was formed in Africa, the Far East and the Middle East. They studied and exchanged their ideas with their American opposite numbers, whose counter-insurgency experience was formed in Vietnam and other parts of the Far East. In all these places women played a significant part in the struggles, but the strategists failed to appreciate this (particularly in the British Army) because they came from societies in which women's contributions are usually underrated. In the North of Ireland, however, the women of the Nationalist areas showed a spirit of defiance that had to be seen to be believed. That was why the colonial-type pressures failed to crack the population. The women were completely undefeatable. They were the first to give the warnings, the first out on the streets to face the oncoming troops. I say without hesitation that it is due to this determined spirit of resistance by the Nationalist women of Ulster that the campaign has gone on for so long. I have personal experience of a number of cases in which the widows of IRA volunteers killed in action asked that they themselves be allowed to become active members of the Republican movement as soon as possible. On a Saturday night at the end of October [23rd of October, 1971] two women activists were shot dead by the British in the Lower Falls. Dorothy Maguire [Adjutant, 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade, IRA] and Máire Meehan [Dorothy Maguire's sister], though members of the Women's Action Committee, were never combatants in any military sense. They were passengers in a car when soldiers suddenly opened fire on it. The British army immediately put out the same story as in the killing of Harry Thornton. They said they had been fired on from the car, and claimed that the two women had been dressed in men's military-type uniforms. But there were two many witnesses. People by now had learned to get as much proof on the spot as possible, and photographs were taken of the interior of the car with the bodies of Dorothy and Máire still in it. The manner of the women's deaths shocked and grieved me, because Dorothy Maguire had called to see me a few months previously on a visit to Dublin, and I had met Máire Meehan in Belfast. After the shooting, the British beat up and systematically persecuted her husband for months in revenge for the way their story had been proved false. This double killing played a considerable part in making Republican women more militant still. The trend eventually developed in a new feature of revolutionary war in Ireland - the participation in combat of women volunteers. In previous phases of the national struggle, from the beginning of the century on, Irish women had been prominent as organisers. It was a woman, the remarkable Constance Markievicz, who founded Fianna Eireann, the Republican youth movement (and incidentally was the first woman to be elected to the British parliament though she never took her seat). In periods of fighting they had given courageous service in intelligence, liason, courier work and the transport of war materials, but not in actual combat.* However, in the early 'seventies, a selected number of suitable women were taken into the IRA and trained. Some of the best shots I ever knew were women. So were the smartest intelligence officers in Belfast. From that time onwards women were admitted to the IRA on the basis of full equality with men, as in Israeli, Chinese and certain other armed forces. In support roles, the Women's Action Committee were the very effective organisers of demonstrations, early warning networks and the simple but unfailing bin-lid alarms, which were the bush telegraph of the Nationalists areas. The approach of danger was signaled ahead from street to street by banging the dustbin lids, a noise that never ceased to needle the Brits. If they found a walkie-talkie while searching a house, the owner was for it. But they knew they couldn't arrest anyone for possession of a dustbin, which could be heard nearly as far and wasn't vulnerable to the British radio jammers. One of the stock British propoganda stories that turned up every couple of months was that the IRA had lost so many men that it was being forced to use women and children fighters. The people who wrote them didn't know about life in the Nationalist areas, where entire families have been involved in continuous resistance for almost six years. * MacStiofáin is not correct in this point. They are many recorded instances of women participating as armed combatants in the IRA prior to the 1970's. For example, see Lily O'Brennan and Margaret Skinnider's accounts of their armed role in the 1916 Rising in Dublin. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008 |
|
|
