Dublin or Quits?

OUT: PAUL MURPHY, Socialist MEP.  And setback for prospect of left unity.

GOOD CANDIDATE BUT WRONG CONTEST.  Why did SWP decide Brid Smith should stand?

 UNLIKE Britain, where Socialists to the Left of the Labour Party are used to coming nowhere when they decide to stand under their own colours in elections, Ireland's capital Dublin had a sitting member of the European parliament until the weekend.

When Irish Socialist Joe Higgins relinquished the seat he had held since 2009 to take his place in the Irish Parliament, the Dail, to which he was elected in 2011, he was able to hand it over to the man who had been his adviser, Paul Murphy.

Both of them belong to the Irish Socialist Party, a sister party of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, indeed almost like a twin, notwithstanding the different history ad conditions in the two countries. Higgins and a dozen other members of the 'Militant Tendency' in the Irish Labour Party were expelled in 1989, and decided to form Militant Labour, which went on to become the Socialist Party. Like its namesake in Britain it belongs to the Committee for a Workers International (CWI).

Both men have taken part in a number of campaigns on community and wider issues, Joe Higgins earning respect fighting for the rights of Turkish migrant workers as well as opposing the breach of Irish neutrality by US military using Shannon airport on their way to the Middle East.

During one Dail debate Justice Minister Michael McDowell declared "I do not take lectures on democracy from a Trotskyite communist like Deputy Joe Higgins." That's an accolade worth having!

Unlike UKIP MEPs and others who have gone to Brussels to collect their salaries and expenses while doing nothing in return, Paul Murphy sat as a full member on the European Parliament Committee on International Trade and as a substitute on the European Parliament Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, and Committee on Petitions. He was also a full member of the South Asia Delegation and a substitute on the Central Asia delegation.

Outside parliament, in 2011 Paul participated in Freedom Flotilla II which attempted to breach the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. In August 2011, he visited the "No TAV" Italian campaign against the Turin-Lyon High Speed railway. A supporter of the Shell to Sea campaign, in August 2011 he and others were forcibly removed from Erris by Gardaí.

In early November 2011, the Dublin MEP was taking part in another humanitarian aid flotilla when  Israeli forces boarded the ship on 4 November and imprisoned him and others. Undaunted by this experience, in June 2013, he travelled to Istanbul to speak with Turkish freedom and environmental activists taking part in the occupation of Taksim square. 

Although I've not met Paul Murphy, he sounds like my idea of a socialist MEP!. I did hear Joe Higgins when he was guest speaker at the National Shop Stewards Network conference a few years ago, and I think it is fair to say having these two voices raised has been a boost to left-wing morale whatever one's particular shade of leftism.

However, seems the possibility of left unity in Dublin was too good to last.  As one commentator informed us towards the end of last year,

"In an act of blatant sectarianism the SWP in Ireland have decided to run a candidate in Dublin in the European Elections against sitting Socialist Party / CWI MEP Paul Murphy.

Paul Murphy is in a four way fight for three seats in Dublin with Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. The SWP candidate Brid Smith (who will stand under the SWP front name of People Before Profit) has no hope of winning a seat.

This act is clearly part of the SWP engaging in a wrecking ball strategy - take enough votes from Paul Murphy to ensure he doesn't retain the seat - raise the profile of Brid Smith and then run Brid Smith as a general election candidate against socialist Member of Parliament, Joan Collins, in the hope of unseating her and winning the seat for the SWP.

 Despite this intervention Paul Murphy will likely still be in a position to fight it out for a seat in the European Parliament - but this action demonstrates that the SWP have no interest in 'left' unity' unless they can dictate and control the 'left'. Furthermore they are likely to dumb down their political programme further in an attempt to engage in populism in order to win extra votes.

Others suggested the aim was just to hit the Socialist Party by depriving it of the funds brought in by its MEP, which help to maintain full time workers.

In response some SWP or People Before Profit supporters argued that the Socialist Party and Paul Murphy "do not own the seat", that it was only handed over to Murphy by Joe Higgins, that they had as much right to stand as anyone else, and that anyway, their Brid Smith was the better candidate. Anyway there were three seats to be won, so maybe both of them could get in?

Brid Smith, it must be said, has an impressive record of campaigning, on issues from prisoners' rights to housing, and her election leaflet from People Before Profit gave full details, though curiously it does not mention the Socialist Workers Party.


Polls were said to show electors favouring Brid Smith over the sitting MEP.  Supporters argued therefore that Paul Murphy was taking away her votes, rather than her stealing votes from him.

But what was it all about? Were the SWP's differences with the Socialist Party, for instance supporting reform of the upper house in parliament, the Seanad, which the SP wants abolished, that important or relevant to a Europoll?  Surely it has not got anything to with past theoretical disagreements over the class nature of the now bygone Soviet state? If there were serious political issues that had to be raised, how come Brid Smith's party affiliation was not mentioned, but just People Before Profit?

Whatever the reasons, the outcome of the election was that on the first count, Paul Murphy got 29,953 vote, or 8.5 per cent, well below the Sinn Fein candidate who topped the poll, but ahead of Labour. Brid Smith got 23,875,  that's 6.8 per cent.

So neither of them made it into the first three, and Dublin no longer has a Socialist MEP, nor does it offer any encouragement for the hope that the Left can get its act together, aven to confront the looming menace of the far Right in Europe.

Whatever the point was, comrades of the SWP (whether in Ireland or here in Britain) was your effort really worth it? 

And what do you have in mind next?

  http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/left-unity-how-are-you/

http://socialistparty.ie/2014/03/dublin-winning-mep-seat-left-working-class-movement/

http://irishelectionliterature.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/leaflet-introducing-brid-smith-people-before-profit-alliance-2014-euro-elections-dublin/

Irish Connections

CHARLES DONNELLY
born Co.Tyrone 1914, died Jarama, Spain, February 27, 1937

HAVING had to do a bit of walking on the way to Sunday's Cable Street commemoration I was glad the marching part was mercifully short, but I was put to shame in pleading my age when I saw veteran Max Levitas, 96 if he's a day, striding forth in the unseasonable sunny heat, before holding forth from the platform about the need to fight modern-day fascism and unite working people in struggle.

A participant in the events of October 4, 1936 and long-serving Communist Party councillor, elected in Stepney for his stand on housing and rent issues as much as against fascism, Max deserves respect for his stamina - political as much as physical - whatever differences we might have (not that these were uppermost on the day, to the chagrin apparently of some mean-spirited sectarians who came along but were disappointed nobody noticed them) .

As though being outpaced by a nonagenarian was not enough, I'd just managed to find a seat within earshot of the speakers when a friend from Newham came over asking if anybody had seen the 106-year old woman who had been marching with them! She was exagerrating of course. Hetty Bower's 106-year old birthday was not due until today, the exact anniversary of the battle in which she participated.

Anyway, later when a friend and I were debating whether the accent which Max Levitas has miraculously kept through all his London years owed more to his Dublin childhood or his Litvak roots, it occurred to me that discussing the Jewish and Irish components allied at Cable Street, the Levitas family embodied both.

Parents Harry Levitas and Leah Rick emigrated to Ireland from Lithuania and Latvia in 1912, and were married in the Camden Street Synagogue in Dublin. Harry Levitas was a member of the Tailors and Pressers Union, known in Dublin as the Jewish Union. In 1927, driven by hard times and poverty in Dublin the family emigrated to Britain, first to Glasgow then to London.

Max was working as a tailor's presser in Commercial Street when the threat of fascism in the shape of Mosley's blackshirts loomed in the East End. He had become secretary of the Young Communist League in Mile End. His younger brother Maurice worked in an upholstery shop then went out working on the building sites, later becoming a plumber.

All three Levitas brothers were involved in the fight against the fascists in east London but it was Maurice "Morrie" Levitas who went to fight them in Spain, joining the Connolly Column formed by Irish volunteers as part of the International Brigade. Captured in 1938 he was tortured by the Spanish fascists and the Gestapo, but released as part of a prisoner exchange. After serving in the British Army in World War II, Maurice Levitas took up his tools as a plumber again, but in 1948 he got the chance to train as a teacher, later going on to obtain an honours degree in Sociology, and becoming a senior lecturer in the Sociology of Education at the University of Durham.

In 1985, Maurice Levitas went to teach English in East Germany, returning to Britain in 1989. In 1991 and again in 1997 he attended events in Dublin to honour the Irish participants in the International Brigade.

Another Irishman whose activities had a bearing on the struggle in east London before he went off to fight in Spain was born Charles Patrick Donnelly in Killybrackey, near Dungannon in County Tyrone on 10 July 1914 into a family of cattle breeders. His father, Joseph Donnelly sold his farm in 1917 and the family moved to Dundalk and opened a greengrocer's shop. Joseph Donnelly became quite prosperous, running his shop, dealing cattle and buying and selling property in the Dundalk area. But Charles' mother, Rose, died when he was 13 in 1927.

Charles Donnelly received his early education in the Christian Brothers school in Dundalk, but when he was 14 in 1928, the family moved again, to Dublin, and there young Charlie managed to get himself expelled from school, and spent some months wandering the streets of Dublin during school time before his father discovered what had happened. During this time the young fellow met and befriended Republican and left-wing activists. Found an apprenticeship with a carpenter, he gave this up to enroll at University College, Dublin in 1931. He studied studied Logic, English, History and the Irish language. But his true passions were poetry, which he began to have published, and politics.

Having failed his exams, probably because he was more concerned with bigger questions, Charlie Donnelly dropped out of university in 1934, and became involved in the Republican Congress, a turn by IRA men and former IRA men towards left-wing politics. He also became romantically involved with a republican activist, Cora Hughes.

At this time police brutality in the North against the unemployed had pushed Protestant and Catholic workers together, but those who tried to break from the Loyalist sectarians were rebuffed by equally diehard Catholic nationalism. In the South many Republicans began to see their more conservative leaders as a dead-end, and looked to unite their aims with the labour movement. There were divisions in the new Congress, with Nora Connolly reviving her father's call for a Workers Republc, while others, partly coming under Communist Party influence, preferred the idea of a workers and small farmers' alliance.

The young Donnelly was elected to the National Executive of the Republican Congress, alongside experienced leaders like Frank Ryan, George Gilmour and Peadar O'Donnell. In July 1934 he was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks for his role in picketing a Dublin bakery with other Congress members. After this, his father expelled him from the family home and he spent a period sleeping rough in parks around Dublin. In January 1935, Donnelly, not a physically strong young man by some accounts, was again arrested for assaulting a Garda (policeman) at a Congress demonstration and imprisoned for a month. In February 1935, he left Ireland for London.

Here the promising poet found work washing dishes in pubs and restaurants, also managing to work for the Republican Congress London branch and writing for Imprecor, a Communist international news agency, though he may have been too independent-minded to fit party 'lines'. Together with a Dublin Jewish writer called Leslie Daikin, Donnelly also began producing a magazine called Irish Front. At a time when Roman Catholic bishops, British Tories and even some East London Labour councillors were inclined to root for Franco, and when Oswald Mosley was trying hard to woo London Irish, this radical little magazine was one of the obstacles to the reactionary tide. (see p.157 in David Rosenberg's Battle for the East End.)

From the outbreak of the war in Spain, in July 1936, Charles Donnelly argued that Irish Republicans should send fighters to aid the Spanish republic. This offered a cause to overcome their divisions and draw socialists from the Protestant north. The knowledge that arch-enemy Eoin O'Duffy was enlisting his Blueshirts to fight on Franco's side also made it a matter of pride. After returning to Dublin to raise support, Donnelly came back to London at the end of 1936, and was in Spain by January 7, 1937, meeting Frank Ryan and others in the Connolly Column at Albacete. Rather than be subsumed in the British battalion, this Irish unit attached themselves to the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion.

On February 15, the Abraham Lincoln battalion was thrown into the battle of Jarama, near Madrid. Donnelly reached the front on February 23, and was promoted to the rank of field commander. On February 27 his unit was ordered to make a frontal assault on the Nationalist positions on a hill named Pingarron. They were pinned down by machine gun fire all day. In the evening, the Nationalists launched a counter-attack.A Canadian veteran recalled, "We ran for cover, Charlie Donnelly, the commander of an Irish company is crouched behind an olive tree. He has picked up a bunch of olives from the ground and is squeezing them. I hear him say something quietly between a lull in machine gun fire: Even the olives are bleeding (quoted in Joseph O'Connor, Even the Olives are Bleeding - the life and times of Charles Donnelly, p.105).

A few minutes later, as his unit retreated, Donnelly was caught in a burst of gunfire. He was struck three times, in the right arm, the right side and the head. He collapsed and died instantly. His body lay on the battlefield until it was recovered by fellow Irish Brigader Peter O'Connor on 10 March. He was buried at Jarama in an unmarked grave with several of his comrades.

Charles Donnelly remains mourned not only by family and friends, but as the poet and principled political leader that might have been. His short life continues to inspire new genrations. . On the eve of the 71st anniversary of his death, 26 February 2008, Charles was commemorated with the unveiling of a plaque in his alma mater, UCD, attended by 150 people. The commemoration, organised jointly by a group of UCD students and the Donnelly family, was hosted by the School of English and also included a lecture by Gerald Dawe on Charlie's life and poetry. In April 2008, the UCD Branch of the Labour Party was renamed the Charlie Donnelly Branch in his honour.

Some articles on Maurice Levitas:

http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/mar2001/levitas.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/mar/07/guardianobituaries1
http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=348:maurice-qmorryq-levitas-moishe-ben-hillel&catid=12:l&Itemid=113


A collection of Charles Donnelly's work, The Life and Poems, was published in 1987
A biography, Joseph O'Connor, Even the Olives are Bleeding - the life and times of Charles Donnelly, New Island Books, Dublin 1992, ISBN 1-874597-15-4



Articles on Donnelly
http://web.archive.org/web/20091028150614/http://geocities.com/irelandscw/ibvol-CollectedCD.htm
3 articles by Donnelly on Irish politics, 1935-6
Photoset of the UCD Commemoration in February 2008

Ballymurphy to Bogside; extra ghosts at the Saville inquiry

THE Saville Inquiry into the events of 'Bloody Sunday' in Derry has finally published its findings.

On January 30, 1972, twenty-seven people were shot by soldiers of the British Army's Parachute Regiment ordered to stop a civil rights demonstration in the Bogside area. Thirteen men, seven of them teenagers, died immediately. Another man died four and a half months later. The Army claimed at the time that its men were fired upon and returned the fire.

The Saville Inquiry, which has been accepted by the British government, found that all of those shot were unarmed, and that the killings were "unjustified and unjustifiable." Five of those wounded were shot in the back.

Rather than try to separate stone-throwing youth from the main, peaceful crowd, troops opened fire on all, chasing people through a housing estate. Jack Duddy, 17, was killed by a single bullet to the chest in the courtyard of Rossville Flats. Witnesses said that he was unarmed and running away from soldiers. Pat Doherty, 31, was shot from behind while trying to crawl to safety in the vicinity of the flats' forecourt, between the building and Joseph Place. He was killed with a single bullet. Photographs show that he was not armed.

Barney McGuigan was going to the aid of Patrick Doherty while signalling with a white handkerchief when he was killed by a bullet fired through the back of his head. He died where he fell near the corner of the flats between Rossville Street and Joseph Place. He was41.

So it went on. The inquiry goes into detail to try and identify which soldiers fired which shots, and and in what circumstances. It rejects the claim that the soldiers were returning fire or were even under threat from the demonstrators.

• "None of the casualties shot by soldiers of Support Company was armed with a firearm or (with the probable exception of Gerald Donaghey) a bomb of any description. None was posing any threat of causing death or serious injury. In no case was any warning given before soldiers opened fire," the report said.

• Evidence from soldiers to the inquiry that they had fired after coming under attack was rejected. "We have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers. No one threw or threatened to throw a nail or petrol bomb at the soldiers on Bloody Sunday."

• The credibility of the accounts given by the soldiers was "materially undermined" because all soldiers bar one who were responsible for the casualties "insisted that they had shot at gunmen or bombers, which they had not". Saville said: "Many of these soldiers have knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing".

Saville points not only to lies by soldiers but failings by the officers, who unleashed their men without regard for whether they were chasing innocent civilians and not "terrorists", and then sought to justify the shootings by claiming they had been under attack.

Politicians and top brass are expressing horror now at any suggestion there might be prosecutions in the wake of the Saville inquiry. It would be unfair now that IRA men have been released they say, forgetting that the IRA has decommissioned its weapons, something that is taking Loyalist groups a little longer. It would have a bad effect on the morale of our boys in Afghanistan, is another argument I've heard. Why, are they getting orders to massacring people there? Forgetting, incidentally, that the Derry massacre shocked people here because, whatever the IRA might have said, we were told the city was Londonderry, and British soil. So the people killed were British citizens. And if the army could do that there, why not in Dundee or Doncaster, Birmingham or Bristol?

So the British government has held not one, but two inquiries, the first under Lord Widgery being seen as a whitewash and now this one, setting blame, but long years after. And while it blames soldiers and even officers, its finger seems to stop at a certain level. Saville has rejected the contention that the state had authorised the troops to use "unwarranted lethal force" or sanctioned them "with reckless disregard as to whether such force was used". It also rejected the idea that the government had more generally "tolerated, if not encouraged" the use of unjustified lethal force in Northern Ireland, thereby creating the conditions which led to the Bloody Sunday attacks.

So are the politicians really concerned about protecting soldiers, or anxious to avoid questions being asked of themselves?

Why was it decided, and by whom, that a peaceful civil rights march should not be allowed that Sunday? Why was a combat unit, like the Parachute Regiment, put into what should have been a policing role, and apparently psyched up to believe they were under attack, then let loose on civilians? Did it never occur to those in charge of "law and order" that if you treat people, particularly the young, as dangerous "terrorists", they may decide to become just that, throwing away their placards and even stones for the chance to take up an armalite, and even up the score a little?

Saville's rejection of the accusation that the British government "tolerated if not encouraged" the use of unjustified lethal force may have been easier because his inquiry forbade the mention of one name, that of a district in West Belfast, called Ballymurphy.

What happened there on three days in August, 1971, five months before Bloody Sunday, might suggest a different light on matters. It was on Monday, August 9 that year that the British government introduced internment without trial in northern Ireland. That morning, a number of women in Ballymurphy went to the police and army posts to ask where their menfolk were being taken, but they were turned away. Some youths started rioting, and there was some trouble with Protestants nearby who were allegedly driving Catholic families from their homes.

In Springfield Park, a local man who was trying to lift children to safety was shot and wounded. People who tried to go to his aid were deterred by army gunfire. Parish priest Father Hugh Mullen took out a white cloth to wave as he tried to reach the wounded man. As he knelt to assist him he was shot. Another man, Frank Quinn, who came out to help Father Mullen was shot dead.

About the same time, troops opened fire on some people gathered on waste ground, wounding a young man called Noel Philips. Mrs.Joan Conolly, who saw him go down, tried to reach him, and an army sniper took off the side of her face. The following day Eddie Doherty was shot in the back as he made his way home. Two more men were shot on August 11. The Army claimed they had been armed and firing at soldiers. No evidence was found that they or anyone else killed in Ballymurphy - 11 in those three days -was carrying weapons or had used them. Paddy McCarthy, a community worker, was trying to deliver bread and milk to families afraid to leave their homes when he was wounded. Later he died of a heart attack while in army hands.

The British Army unit involved in the Ballymurphy shootings was the Parachute Regiment. Some of the soldiers were later identified as being on duty in Derry, in the Bloody Sunday massacre. The Ballymurphy killings were scarcely reported at the time, and the official version was that soldiers had exchanged fire with gunmen - even though no soldiers were injured, and no guns were found by the victims. Some of the children orphaned by the shootings were given refuge in the South, but had to endure gibes that "your daddy was a terrorist".

At the annual conference of trades union councils in Blackpool last month, a delegation of women from Ballymurphy, led by Joan Connolly's daughter, who had only been a little girl when she saw her mother killed, spoke about their fight for truth and justice. They told us that when someone tried to say something about Ballymurphy during the Bloody Sunday inquiry they were warned that if it was mentioned again the inquiry would be halted.

The Ballymurphy relatives are seeking an independent, international enquiry. They also want the British government to acknowledge that those killed were innocent.

See:

www.relativesforjustice. com

Did the state kill Dr.Kelly?

DR.DAVID KELLY answering questions. His death has raised more.


DID Britain's secret state kill government scientist Dr.David Kelly because he had blown the gaff on Tony Blair's lies about the reasons for invading Iraq? . A report in yesterday's Morning Star says over a dozen doctors have alleged that the scientist was "assassinated", and they are demanding a proper investigation into his death.
.
Dr Kelly, a Ministry of Defence biological warfare expert, had been seconded to the UN to work as a weapons inspector in Iraq in 2002 and 2003, when. Tony Blair and US president George W Bush were plotting their war. .Concerned about government exagerations of Saddam Hussein's military threat, he confided to a BBC reporter that ministers "probably knew" that their notorious claim that Iraq could attack Britain with missiles within 45 minutes was a lie.

Ministry of Defence bosses were angry and questioned Dr.Kelly about what he had told the BBC.
His body was found in a field, soon after he was exposed as the source for the critical programme about the war..

An official inquiry, led by Tony Blair's close friend Lord Hutton claimed that the scientist had taken his own life by cutting his wrist after overdosing on painkillers. Many people refused to believe the "suicide" story. Now a group of 13 sceptical doctors - led by retired orthopaedic and trauma surgery consultant David Halpin - have mounted a legal challenge to overturn Lord Hutton's conclusion.

Pointing out that, unusually, no coroner's inquest had been held into the scientist's death, Mr Halpin explained that "Lord Hutton's inquiry did not have the same legal standards as a coroner's inquest. As a result, due process has been subverted, and the group of doctors that I am part of is not prepared to let that go," he stressed. The doctors have drawn up a dosssier on the case.

"Such a cut to the ulnar artery, which is small and difficult to access, could not have caused death. The bleeding from Dr Kelly's wrist is unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death," he insisted. "There is evidence of a cover-up and I think it is highly likely that Dr Kelly was assassinated," Mr Halpin asserted unequivocally.

David Halpin will be known to Middle East peace activists for combining his professional background as a specialist and keenness as mariner in pioneering humanitarian aid voyages to break the siege of Gaza. He says "Dr. Kelly was a skilled and courageous man and he deserves a proper inquest." .

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, convinced after his investigation that Dr.Kelly was killed, is suporting the call for a proper inquiry.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/britain/iraq_wmd_expert_was_assassinated

The Hutton report was severely critical of the BBC, and led to director general Greg Dyke's resignation. He claimed to have been let down by Pauline Neville-Jones, a BBC governor who was a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, before working with Lord Hurd both at the Foreign Office and NatWest Markets. Baronness Neville-Jones has since done well at QinetiQ, the defence research establishment taken over by American interests, before becoming Tory David Cameron's adviser on security issues.

There was a time when few people would have believed the British security services could killanyone, or for that matter, thought a prime minister could lie to parliament to justify war. Nowadays there are all kinds of "conspiracy theories", about events from the death of Princess Diana to the 7/7 bombings, and they are not just held by charlatans and cranks. Trying to explain everything by a huge and ever-more elaborate conspiracy may say more about the believers than the events they try to explain. But conspiracies do happen, otherwise governments would not need Official Secrets Acts, and those entrusted with maintaining secrets and cover-ups can get into the habit of thinking they are above the rest of us, and that the laws they are meant to uphold do not apply to them.

When I heard that the body of Dr. David Kelly had been found in a field I automatically thought of another uninvestigated death, that of a man called Kenneth Lennon, whose body was found in a Surrey ditch in 1974. Lennon had told the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL., now Liberty) that Special Branch had used knowledge about his family tp press him into spying on an Irish group in Luton.

When Lennon reported to his handlers that the group which met over a Luton pub were only discussing history, and not engaged in any illegal activity, they told him he had to get something more. Eventually he had become a provocateur, always clamouring in the group for "action". But after three members were jailed for a raid on a gunshop he felt guilty. And more than a little afraid.

One night he wandered into Ronnie Scott's jazz club, in Soho, the worse for wear, and over a drink he poured out his story to blues singer and writer George Melly. It was Melly who suggested that he take his story to the NCCL..Lennon left with what might have just seemed bar talk, Melly recalled. "He told me that if I read in the papers that he had been found face down in a puddle, or maybe it was a ditch, I would know he was speaking the truth
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,911221,00.html

A few days later, after he had spoken to the NCCL, that was what happened. Lennon had been shot twice in the head. We are supposed to believe this was an IRA 'hit', punishing Lennon as an informer.

But police had told the press that Lennon's story was a clever IRA plot to discredit the police and security services. If that was the case, surely the IRA would have wanted to produce Kenneth Lennon at a press conference and have him going around lecturing, rather than leaving him dead in a ditch? Whereas those who dragooned him into acting as an informer, and setting up his friends, would certainly take a dim view of his deciding to tell his story, and his death might serve as a health warning to others thinking of telling tales.

But things like that don't happen in this country. Do they?