AN INCREDIBLE PAPER OF RECORD Danny Morrison was editor of Republican News from 1975-79 and of An Phoblacht/Republican News from the merger in January 1979 until October 1982 when he was elected to the northern Assembly for Mid-Ulster
As a teenager, I’d sold Republican News surreptitiously from under my coat outside mass at St Paul’s Chapel, not long after the Falls Curfew. In the 1940s, it had been a small underground publication, but, in 1970, the re-established paper was navigating its way through the astonishing and daunting circumstances that northern nationalists found themselves in while republicans were processing a major split in the IRA and Sinn Féin. Within a short period - from the RUC attack on civil rights marchers in Derry’s Duke Street, to the pogroms against largely unprotected nationalist areas in Belfast, the brutal curfew of the Falls and the gassing of thousands of people in their homes - the Ulster Unionist Party had been given use of the British Army for free, not as peace-keepers or protectors, but as defenders of the status quo, the Orange State.
anphoblacht UIMHIR EISIÚNA 4 - 2020 - ISSUE NUMBER 4
17
