Africa. As the Dublin review Hibernia put it, "he displayed an impressive grasp of the Irish political situation, and though he had not met Miss Maguire at the time, reportedly was able to inform one of her relatives of her whereabouts and the reason for her trip to the Continent, two days before the Amsterdam affair broke in the English press". Surprisingly, then, the story broke not in his paper but in the rival Telegraph. During his long sojourn in Ireland he has written very little... for the Observer. When the Observer announced their forthcoming scoop, Mr Smith got prominent notice in all the blurb. But next day when the revelations were published, Colin Smith had vanished he had become a ghost.
Maria Maguire, too, is not quite what she seems. As Hibernia pointed out, her "crie de coeur might have sounded more convincing if her statement had appeared in an Irish paper, if it had concerned itself with policies rather than personalities, and if it had not followed her own personal demotion. And the abhorrence she expresses at the continuation of the bombing campaign might have rung more true if she had not in this paper last June supported that very campaign and praised the political achieve. ment which it had wrought". It is significant that Maguire did not mention in the Observer that she had recently been disciplined by the Provos, ordered to stay away from their Kevin Street office, and in effect "relegated to being one of the rank-and-file members she so despised", as Hibernia puts it.
The first part of Maguire's "revelations" named what she claims to be the present membership of the Army Council of the Provisional IRA, just in time for Heath to de mand their imprisonment when he met Lynch in Munich.
The following week, Ivan "m a Marxist myself" Rowan did his Telegraph piece for Queen and country, dredging, with a full research team and the usual expense account, through the tomes in Somerset House, digging back as far as the 1850s in order to "prove" that Mac Stoifain's family was English at least back to that Catc All this would be amusing if it did not serve an extremely serious purpose. That purpose is an attempt to split and isolate the IRA as a means towards "destroying the military capability of the IRA" At least in Miss Maguire's case the prompter pays well. The bosom of the Observer is a well padded one. Maguire has not so far replied to a challenge made by Gery Lawless at an Anti-Internment League meeting in Brighton which was reported extensively in the Irish papers on 6 September, He invited her to deny: 1. That she has received a four-figure sum from the Observer for her disclosures to date. 2. That her disclosures have been circulated throughout the world by the Observer Foreign News Service, the editor of which, Ronald Harker, admitted in a letter to the Irish Press on 30 November of last year that it receives a subsidy from the British Foreign Office. 3. That the firm handling the placement of her forthcoming book is headed by the former head of British Intelligence in North Africe, France and Spain, the man indeed who replaced Philby as head of British Intelligence in the Middle East. 4. That' her agents are negotiating for her to receive a five-figure sum for the publication of a book.
NOT OVER This campaign of vilification is not over yet. It is absolutely necessary that all supporters of the Irish struggle throughout the world refuse to take part in the British splitting game by retailing any of these slanders, and refute them by pointing out their source and purpose.
Another lesson to be learnt is that all British bourgeois newspapers, no matter how liberal, or how "left" the individual journalist claims to be, will at best defend their society when they see it threatened by the IRA, and at worst, the special correspondent is more and more the special agent of British imperialism.
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tillings in Ulster dictated OBSERVER EXCLUSIVE