Inside the IRA

An inside track on the war between UK mainland police and the Provisional IRA. Two Story Files and seven individual stories.

You are viewing the category Inside the IRA. This category contains 7 articles and the sub-categories: GB Brigade series and Brian Keenan.

The bungle that halted the extradition of 36 terrorists

The Observer, November 1984

Intelligence services in Britain believe they have traced 36 terrorist suspects who have taken refuge in the Irish Republic to escape being brought back to trial by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and mainland police.

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The Special Branch foul-up which allowed IRA team to escape

The Observer, March 1985

This photograph is the first ever published of IRA terrorists in action in Britain. It was taken at Northampton railway station at 9.20 a.m. on January 17 last year by a Special Branch undercover officer.
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Seven charged over IRA plot to bomb seaside towns

The Observer, June 1985

A Belfast man, Patrick Joseph Magee, was charged last night with causing the explosion at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, last October and murdering five people who died in the blast.

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Marxist revolutionaries who joined the Irish republican cause

The Observer, February 1986

Peter Jordan lived a 'sad and lonely life', according to those who knew him. For years, he shared a house in frosty silence with his wife, never exchanging a word. A retired teacher, he rarely drank, played no sport and had no hobbies. He was arthritic and rather deaf. But he had one passion: revolution.
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Portrait of an IRA active service unit

The Observer, June 1986

Patrick Magee is a quiet man. He is married with two children, does not smoke and hardly drinks, plays chess and is an accomplished artist. He is fond of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry and also writes verse himself.
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The priest who worked for the IRA

The Scotsman, July 1988

It was just before eleven o'clock in the morning on July 20 1982 when a group of Horse Guards riding through Hyde Park in central London were torn apart by a blizzard of six-inch nails hurled from a car bomb which had been planted on their route. Four soldiers and seven of their horses were killed.

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The IRA show up on the edge of a tantalising murder mystery

The Guardian, June 1992

Real mysteries are rare, but there are occasions when ordinary life is violated by an incident which is so bizarre and so unexpected that even when time has passed and all the little fragments of fact have been swept up and fitted together, the truth still defies the most ingenious imagination. And it is invariably the most ordinary of lives which produce the most baffling mysteries.

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