Belleek is the most westerly point in the United Kingdom. It’s a small village, right on Northern Ireland’s frontier where Country Fermanagh reaches out towards the Atlantic. The final destination for many motorists driving across a now invisible border are the beaches of County Donegal. It is the place we learned this weekend where journalist Roy Greenslade was persuaded to support the violent extremism of the provisional IRA in the 1970s and 80s.
Greenslade’s views on republican terrorism were, of course, an open secret for many years, as he rose to senior positions at the Sunday Times, the Daily Mirror and, latterly, became a professor of journalism at City, University of London. He now discloses with some pride that, at the same time as working for papers that condemned the IRA’s dirty work, he was anonymously contributing to Sinn Fein’s media outlet, An Phoblacht, justifying it.
His rationale for breaking silence in a piece for the British Journalism Review was to try to explain this subterfuge to his grandchildren. He has failed in this task. Greenslade is an unrepentant supporter of the ‘armed struggle’, lacing his self-regarding apologia with metaphors of ‘war’ and ‘insurgency’ that are put to work in some heavy lifting in the village of Belleek and its locality. While Greenslade was holidaying with top ranking republicans on the coast and drinking the Kool Aid of its futile death cult, just a few miles inland the reality was rather different.
Greenslade wrote of the terror of ‘dodging imaginary bullets’ in nearby Derry city. This was an escape denied to many of the local IRA units’ victims operating from his newly adopted county. In 1988, William Hazard and Fred Love were driving their work van out of Belleek after working on repairs at the local police station.
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