BY VARIOUS CONTRIBUTORS
Just as some optimists began to believe that there may have been a form of principle, albeit misguided, behind the current government’s determination to repeal the 2023 Northern Ireland Legacy Act — and the protections it afforded to soldiers and police officers who risked all to fight the terrorists to a standstill — we see some truly scandalous measures included in the replacement legislation.
The Conservative Shadow Minister for Defence Mark Francois MP spoke for many observers during an interview on November 3rd 2025 with Peter Cardwell of Talk TV. The Rt Hon Mr Francois MP openly accused the Starmer government of questionable dealings with the Irish government and with Sinn Féin (SF) — viewed by many as the political wing of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) — which currently runs Northern Ireland.
Referring to the prosecutions of former British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland, Mr Francois said: “This is lawfare and this is an attempt by Sinn Féin to rewrite history, to make the British Army the aggressors and the IRA paramilitaries, somehow, into freedom fighters. That’s what they are trying to achieve.” This much is patently obvious; it is what Mr Francois said next that could explain the Starmer government’s betrayal of military veterans: “Unfortunately, this Labour government has done a sordid backstairs deal with the Irish government in the Republic to facilitate this process”.
The Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, Minister for Northern Ireland, met with the Irish Republic’s Deputy Prime Minister Simon Harris TD last September to discuss details of a document entitled The Legacy of The Troubles: A Joint Framework between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of Ireland. Mr Harris TD also serves as the Irish Republic’s Defence Minister as well as the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade.
What did Mr Francois mean by “sordid backstairs deal”? Did he mean a sell-out, which is more than the government of the Irish Republic could ever have hoped for in the past from any London government committed to the loyal governance of the British people, who include the long-suffering inhabitants of Northern Ireland? As we approach Remembrance Sunday, when we pay tribute to those who died defending the parliamentary democracy that was once the envy of the World, this needs to be examined, especially in the light of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s claims to be genuinely interested in veterans.
Notwithstanding inconsistencies with the United Kingdom’s constitution, the situation is deadly serious in terms of both sovereignty and principle. Without sovereignty a nation is nothing. Without principle, its people are lost. The authors of this highly unpopular repeal of the 2023 Northern Ireland Legacy Act are quite clearly unprincipled but have they given a foreign government sovereignty over British affairs?
The Rt Hon Danny Kruger MBE MP asked a question about the Republic of Ireland’s involvement in Parliament this week. Secretary of State Hilary Benn MP’s response was hardly reassuring but it indicated that, as far as Mr Benn was concerned, the involvement of the Irish Republic’s government in UK sovereign affairs was an achievement rather than a surrender and a sell-out of British military veterans.
The History
History is very important in Ireland; it comes in multiple versions and dates back eight centuries or more in terms of significant interactions with the British mainland, starting with Anglo-Norman knight Willian Marshal ,1st Earl of Pembroke and Lord of the eastern Irish province of Leinster.
In more recent times, we have all come across local people when out on patrol in Northern Ireland — protecting them from republican and loyalist gangsters and paramilitaries — who knew someone who was at The Battle of the Boyne in 1690 or the Easter Uprising in 1916. They usually had a drink or three taken. However, we shall for the purposes of this article confine ourselves to documented facts and objective analysis of the ‘Troubles’.
The Concept Proposed by the Government
Mr Benn MP seemed quite pleased with himself when he announced the measures which include the establishment jointly with the Irish Government of an Independent Commission for Information Retrieval (ICIR). The ICIR will not have powers to investigate; its purpose will be to privately receive information about individual cases on behalf of families. This is presented as being consistent with the Stormont House Agreement in 2014 but is it another example of a British government abrogating yet more powers away from Parliament to yet another quango, whose agents and employees will subsequently prove unaccountable to anyone except themselves?
So, let us unpack this. It is worth recalling the O’Connell dictum: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”, Then we may look at how the then Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar made real mischief over Brexit and meddled consistently to make it difficult for the UK and, especially, for Northern Ireland. This is just the most recent example of this dictum being followed and indeed enjoyed.
So, let us stray from political games into harsh reality. The majority of the 2000-plus killings perpetrated by the IRA and other Republican terrorists, especially in border areas, were prepared and launched from the Irish Republic. The perpetrators then returned to their safe havens in the Republic where they lived and operated quite openly. With all due respect to brave and honest members of the Irish security forces, successive Dublin governments did nothing to stop any of this and were guilty at the least of turning a blind eye.
The Dublin politicians even overlooked terrorist actions in the Republic. In 1978, there was almost a bank robbery every other day in the South to finance terror. It is beyond belief that such a run of criminality could not be stopped. Either the Irish security forces were completely incompetent — which was not the case as any terrorist who pushed his luck too far quickly found out — or they were complicit to a greater or lesser extent.
A lot of the Provisional IRA gunmen active in Northern Ireland were trained across the border in Ireland. All PIRA training camps were in the Republic and weapons manufacture took place under the direction of the ‘IRA Engineering Department’. Firearms training is not something that can be carried out without anyone noticing, especially in gossipy Ireland, yet nobody did notice the automatic and high velocity gunfire echoing through the valleys – apparently. Let us look at three events in Northern Ireland and then atrocities in Mainland Britain. We shall do this chronologically.
Kingsmill Massacre 1976
The 1976 Kingsmills Massacre in South Armagh seems to have hit everyone’s ‘convenient amnesia button’ but it should not. Eleven workmen were stopped in their minibus in a dark lane on an evening in January 1976 by PIRA gunmen. Ten of the workmen were Protestants. The single Catholic was told to run and his ten workmates were all shot by the PIRA death squad, who then escaped back across the border to safety. The PIRA death squad had violated the organisation’s own ceasefire. They also had given themselves the cover name of the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’ and claimed that the execution was a reprisal for the recent murders of Catholics by loyalist killers, who had shot six Catholics the previous night.
As the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Historical Enquiries Team observed in 2011: “The murderous attacks on the Reavey and O’Dowd families were simply the catalyst for the premeditated and calculated slaughter of these innocent and defenceless men […]. These dreadful murders were carried out by the Provisional IRA and none other.” A total of 136 rounds were fired in less than a minute. The workmen were shot at waist height and fell to the ground; some fell on top of each other, either dead or wounded.
When the initial burst of gunfire ceased, the gunmen reloaded their weapons. The order was given to “Finish them off“, and another burst of gunfire was fired into the heaped bodies of the workmen. One of the gunmen also walked amongst the dying men and shot them each in the head with a pistol as they lay on the ground.
Five months later three PIRA gunmen were captured in Northern Ireland whilst on a murder mission. Another had been wounded and was spirited across the border to hospital in Dundalk. The weapons recovered had all been used in the Kingsmills Massacre. When questioned on where they had trained and prepared, the gunmen replied: “With Brian Hearty in Ravensdale”, which is in the Republic.
To date, no-one has been charged on either side of the border with any crime linked to this outrage. Of course, the families of the murdered workmen do not have Sinn Féin politicians, lawyers and prosecutors to help them and they probably would not have any success in persuading the London or Dublin judiciaries to bring the killers of their menfolk to justice because they are all dancing Sinn Féin’s tune and Sinn Féin is sometimes described as the political wing of the Provisional IRA. Of course, the PIRA does not exist anymore. Apparently.
Mountbatten and Warrenpoint 1979
On August 27th 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten went fishing with family and friends in his boat Shadow V off the coast of County Sligo near his home in Mullaghmore in the Irish Republic. Lord Mountbatten had always been supportive of the idea of a United Ireland and was well-liked and respected by many Irish people. He was a fairly easy target for the murderous fanatics of the Provisional IRA.
PIRA member Thomas McMahon had the previous night attached a radio-controlled bomb weighing fifty pounds to Mountbatten’s boat. When Mountbatten and his party had taken the boat a few hundred yards from the shore, the bomb was detonated. The PIRA claimed “responsibility for the execution of Lord Louis Mountbatten. This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country”. This was an attack that would have involved many planners and bombmakers in the Republic, yet only McMahon faced justice.
The same day a cross-border attack on the Army at Warrenpoint killed eighteen soldiers with two IEDs triggered from County Louth in the Republic. Very shortly after the ambush, PIRA volunteers Brendan Burns and Joe Brennan were arrested by the Gardaí while riding a motorbike on a road across the loch Narrow Water Castle. They were later released on bail due to lack of evidence. The Gardaí prevented RUC officers from examining the site of the firing point of the bombs until the following day when all the forensic evidence had gone. The motorcycle referred to above was being ridden around the police station by a Gardaí man.
Burns died in 1988 when a bomb he was handling exploded prematurely. In 1998, former IRA member Eamonn Collins claimed that Burns had been one of those who carried out the Warrenpoint ambush. Martin McGuinness attended Burns’ funeral. No one has ever faced criminal charges over Warrenpoint.
Enniskillen 1987
On November 8th 1987, Remembrance Sunday, a PIRA bomb exploded at the Enniskillen War Memorial. Eleven people — ten civilians and one police officer — were killed, many of them elderly. A twelfth man was fatally wounded, entering a coma from which he would later die, and sixty-three men, women and children were injured. The PIRA said it had made a mistake and that its target had been the British soldiers parading at the memorial.
The bombing was thought by the British and Irish security forces to have involved at least two PIRA units, from both sides of the border. Denzil McDaniel, author of Enniskillen: The Remembrance Sunday Bombing, later interviewed Security Forces and PIRA contacts and put together an account of the bombers’ movements. McDaniel wrote that the forty-pound bomb was made in Ballinamore, County Leitrim and brought to Enniskillen by up to thirty PIRA volunteers from across the Irish Republic.
The same day, a 150-pound bomb was found in Tullyhommon, twenty miles from Enniskillen. It was defused by the army and the firing point located to the Republican side of the border. At the time there was inter-governmental negotiation on a cross-border administrative protocol to facilitate the extradition of terrorist suspects from the Republic but this never amounted to anything.
Birmingham 1974 and Warrington 1993
Warrington was far from the first or the last bomb attack on the British Mainland. In 1974 the PIRA’s two Birmingham pub bombs had killed twenty-one young people. It is worth noting that although Hilary Benn is happy for British taxpayers to finance yet another inquiry into the shooting of a PIRA gunman, his Government has refused an inquest into the mass-murder of these twenty-one innocent people.
It was subsequently revealed that the decision was taken by Security Minister Dan Jarvis MP, a former Parachute Regiment officer because of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood MP’s position as Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood. The Rt Hon Mr Jarvis MP said while he had deep sympathy with the families ,“after careful consideration” the Government would not commit to an inquiry, because it feels an ongoing Independent Commission investigation will be effective”. Mr Jarvis’ full statement can be read here.
By “Independent Commission investigation”, does Mr Jarvis mean an investigation by the Independent Commission for Information Retrieval quango operated jointly by the London and Dublin governments, which only seem to have ears for Sinn Féin complaints and lawfare? Does the Right Honourable Gentleman mean what Marc Francois described as the “sordid backstairs deal”? It will be interesting to hear what Birmingham MPs may have to say on this decision.
The Warrington attack took place in March 1993. Two Semtex bombs were detonated in the High Street, killing 3-year old Jonathan Ball and 12-year old Tim Parry and seriously injuring fifty-six other people. The Semtex came from Libya, delivered through the Irish Republic, with the initiation units probably made there as well. Tim Parry’s father would tell a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee:
“Tim sustained such serious head, face and brain injuries on the day of the bombing, March 20 that, although he was not killed immediately by the bomb, his fight for life ended 5 days later. Doctors in the Neurosurgical Unit at Walton Hospital in Liverpool, to where he had been transferred from Warrington General Hospital, declared there was no hope of survival for Tim when, on Day 4, the tests they conducted to establish Tim’s brain activity, revealed there was none.
“On Day Five (March 25), my wife Wendy, our two other children, Dominic and Abigail, my father, Wendy’s parents, her sister, brother in law, her brother and sister in law, all came to the hospital to spend personal time with Tim before his life support machine was switched off.
“Despite being advised by the Doctor in charge of Tim’s treatment, that at the moment his life support machine was switched off, Tim’s body might literally lift off the bed, I chose to stay with my son as he died (as a matter of record, the Doctor’s advice so terrified my wife that she could not stay with Tim in these final moments…something which she has deeply regretted ever since).
I held Tim in my arms and said my final goodbyes to him, before signalling to the Nurse / Attendant to switch off the machine. Describing the final moments of your child’s life is beyond words… because, as a parent, there is no greater pain or loss than the death of your child. However, as well as the pain that such a sudden and unthinkable killing brought, there was the immediate challenge that I and my family faced in becoming a family of four and not five.”
The attack was clearly intended to cause maximum casualties to innocent civilians. The bombs had been placed in cast iron rubbish bins about a hundred yards apart to maximise the shrapnel effect. They were also detonated in a sequence that would make people flee the site of the first bomb straight into the lethal area of the second. This was a tactic sometimes employed by the PIRA and it worked only too well. With their usual self-serving hypocrisy, the PIRA tried to blame the police for not acting on their vague warning and then tried to pretend a rogue unit was responsible. However, nobody has ever been brought to account for these murders.
The Republic of Ireland — Complicit in Terrorism?
The involvement, either actively or passively, of the Republic of Ireland in a significant number of PIRA murders cannot be denied. Terrorist killers lived and operated with impunity in counties like Monaghan and town like Dundalk. There were PIRA training camps in various places, conducting shooting and bombing training with no interference from the police. There were bomb factories throughout the Republic, again operating with impunity.
Politicians in London and Dublin talk about collaboration. There could have been more collaboration to prevent many of the deaths but there was not. Maybe the Irish political establishment feels that it now has what it wants so will play nice. This is telling. Quite what the general Irish populace, who have never been lovers of the PIRA or Sinn Féin, think of these machinations remains to be seen.
It is worth noting the statistics relating to extradition. Extradition is only applied for when a case is deemed ready on the basis of proof. The RUC applied for 111 extraditions and got less than ten. Hardly exemplary of a neighbour “playing a full part”. British governments were not much better in taking a hard line; they simply accepted this lack of cooperation on the part of Dublin. In so doing, they let down those they had deployed to stop the terrorists. And London politicians are still letting us down.
Why?
What are the motives for the totally unreasonable attitude of the Starmer government? Hilary Benn drones on incessantly about “the families”, but we have shown this to be a mere platitude, a smoke-and-mirrors routine. The 2023 Legacy Act was imperfect but it was reasonable. It was also better than what is proposed. The 2023 Act had balance and provided some protections for veterans.
However, the new plan is that the men and women deployed by government to maintain the rule of law and to fight the various gangsters and terrorists posing as freedom fighters or loyalists will have the same “provisions” as these terrorists. The politicians behind the treachery and the apologia facilitating lucrative pro-terrorist lawfare try to dress this up as some form of good deal in self-serving, disingenuous utterances on social media and elsewhere.
Evasiveness, servility to a foreign state with pro-PIRA ‘form’, undermining the British Military and its morale… What is really going on here? What is the agenda and what is its ulterior motive? On November 6th 2025, Sinn Fein MP Dáire Hughes, who represents Newry and Armagh in the House of Commons, said that preparations for a referendum on Irish unity must begin without delay. This came after Sinn Fein pushed a motion through the Dublin Parliament calling on the Irish Government to begin planning for reunification. Could there be any connection?
Republished from Hermes,the digital magazine of The Parachute Regimental Association