6 minute read
Danny Morrison
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.
By 1972, I was an internee in Long Kesh and wrote a few pieces for Republican News. After my release, and during the disastrous IRA ceasefire of 1975 when I worked in the Republican Press Centre, which doubled as a truce monitoring centre, I was invited by Billy McKee and Proinsias Mac Airt to become the editor of the paper. I was 22 and jumped at the challenge. With Tom Hartley as manager, we were later joined by former POW Danny Devenny as designer, Gerry Adams began writing a weekly column from the Kesh, Brian Moore contributed his inimitable Cormac cartoons, and we built up a fleet of We had also become delivery vans to expand distribution over about a major irritant to the twelve counties. We had also become a British – just as successive major irritant to the British Dublin governments – just as successive Dublin governments took great took great exception exception to An Phoblacht and attempted to disrupt to An Phoblacht it through arrests and prosecutions of editors. Many supporters bought the paper because of the War News column. We were regularly supplied exclusive details about IRA attacks or IRA interviews. However, in September 1976, with the introduction of criminalisation and with the criminal Roy Mason as British secretary of state presiding over torture in RUC barracks, we began coverage of a blanket protest by an 18-year-old from the Falls Road, Kieran Nugent - a protest which grew exponentially with hundreds joining in despite the scale of prison brutality which we would expose in our weekly paper. This coverage (just as much as War News), championing the political status campaign, resulted in the Brits concertedly trying to close the paper down between 1977 and 1979. Most of the staff were arrested and imprisoned. The case against us collapsed just as Republican News and An Phoblacht were merging. Having one unified national paper was a great development. While the prison struggle and the armed struggle dominated the front pages, we broadened much more substantially the coverage of such subjects as feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, trade union activism, international solidarity, and, of course, followed ongoing struggles in Palestine, South Africa, and positon of the British government, which aimed to depict in Nicaragua. the IRA as criminals overseen by godfathers who were AP/RN was the most always on the verge of being defeated! popular, most important, We printed it and it caused a storm, exposing the lies of most muscular left-wing the British. paper in Ireland. Glover said the IRA had the capacity and support to I remember in 1979 when continue its struggle for the foreseeable future and that the IRA gave us a copy of only a political settlement would end the conflict. In 1988, a secret assessment of the Glover said publicly what he had said privately: “In no way, organisation written by can or will the Provisional Irish Republican Army ever be Brigadier James Glover, the defeated militarily.” Commander of Land Forces In 1992, a senior British Army officer in the Times went in the North and distributed further: “the IRA is …better equipped, better resourced, to just fifty people, including better led, bolder and more secure against our penetration Thatcher. Our copy was than at any time before. They are an absolutely formidable No. 37, thus its name enemy. The essential attributes of their leaders are better Document 37. It completely than ever before. Some of their operations are brilliant.” contradicted the public AP/RN played a crucial role throughout the
• Tom Hartley and recently released Kieran Nugent addressing a Smash H Blocks rally in support of the blanket protest
• The stress, emotion, and anger experienced in the year 1981, didn’t stop the staff producing an incredible paper of record of
Seven Months That Changed Our World
struggle as the alternative media to the bullshit of RTE with its Section 31 censorship and to the facile propaganda espoused by most British journalists who were cheerleaders for their country’s wrongs – whether it was torture, shoot-to-kill, the killing of kids with plastic bullets, collusion.
But, of all the times I was editor of AP/RN, nothing could come close to the stress, emotion, and anger experienced in the year 1981 and our coverage of the hunger strikes. Our writers in our northern office on the Falls Road, which also housed the H-Block Information Centre, doubled up as Sinn Féin AP/RN played a crucial press officers, gave interviews, were out covering protests and role throughout the marches, or speaking at rallies, or canvassing the villages of struggle as the alternative Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The Falls Road office never closed from mid-March to early media to the bullshit of RTE with its Section October. During the hunger strike, staff slept on the floor 31 censorship; and to while other members of the AP/RN production team, who the facile propaganda travelled to Dublin to join their colleagues in 44 Parnell Square, espoused by most British worked for days on end without sleep as the 6am Thursday journalists deadline approached and they produced an incredible paper of record of Seven Months That Changed Our World.
An Phoblacht/Republicans News, in all its incarnations, all its editors, journalists, typesetters, photographers, distributors, and, of course, its frontline sellers, can be proud to have been a part of the republican struggle, and part of the invincible Republican Movement.
