Shane Paul O'Doherty: It is inconceivable to me that Pat Finucane would not have sworn the oath of allegiance to the IRA

The IRA was throwing lies about like confetti – the IRA’s 1972 Claudy bombings and 1974 Birmingham Pub bombings were horrific – so the IRA simply lied about them.

The IRA lied about the Abercorn restaurant bomb, the Anderson Street bomb, the murders of nine-year-old Gordon Gallagher, Jean McConville, 14-year-old Kathleen Feeney, Paddy Joe Crawford, Thomas Niedermayer, Kenneth Lennon and about all of the “disappeared” – lies were the IRA’s lubricant.

The IRA warned us 15-year-old new volunteers that if we ever told the truth to anyone, we could be executed.

In the early 1970s the IRA began murdering IRA volunteers and civilians who admitted under terrible torture to having informed the truth to authorities.

Maintaining secrecy about IRA murders and bombings became paramount – I regularly saw IRA supporters being unexpectedly “administered the oath of allegiance” to the IRA because they had witnessed IRA activities – this to leave them in no doubt that they were subject to IRA law and would face execution if they ever told of what they had just seen.

After a few boastful admissions in the early 1970s, IRA leaders began lying about being in the IRA.

The IRA’s internal security required everyone in possession of IRA secrets to be bound by an oath of allegiance with the attached deterrence of torture and execution on a border road – this without diluting the IRA’s ‘right’ to also torture and murder civilians who had not sworn any oath.

The IRA reserved a particular hatred for leading IRA members who changed their views – however many their murders and bombings - the moment IRA members dissented, they were to be undermined at every turn.

I was a temporary hero of IRA Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey in the summer 1973 when I was the IRA’s lone 18-year-old London bomber who got a letter bomb into No 10 and blew up Bloody Sunday Home Secretary Reginald Maudling and set off many other bombs.

When I resigned from the IRA in 1977 for reasons based on the gospels, I was erased, undermined and threatened – all for rejecting the armed struggle 20 years before the IRA did.

When leading IRA ‘operator’ Sean O’Callaghan – who had murdered and bombed for the IRA and was elected for Sinn Féin – turned against the IRA’s armed struggle, later detailing many truths about the IRA, the IRA and its supporters immediately began to undermine him.

O’Callaghan recorded that after murdering UDR greenfinch Eva Martin in May ’74, he murdered Catholic RUC Detective Inspector Peter Flanagan in an Omagh bar in August ’74, and that he and an accomplice were given a safe house overnight by a Catholic parish priest.

O’Callaghan recalled that when he attended an important IRA finance meeting in Letterkenny in 1980 with Tom Cahill and Gerry Fitzgerald, Gerry Adams arrived with solicitor Pat Finucane.

Beset by informers and facing into the imminent IRA ‘supergrass’ trials, the IRA volunteers at the Letterkenny meeting were entitled to the most basic security precaution, namely that all those present should be bound by the same oath of allegiance and by its attached threat of execution for betrayal.

It is inconceivable to me that Patrick Finucane – for all that his IRA volunteer brother John was ‘killed in action’ in 1972 and his brothers Seamus and Dermot were senior IRA volunteers and his mother had expressed pride in her dead IRA son – was not subject to the same security as everyone else present – to have ‘sworn the oath of allegiance’ to the IRA.

O’Callaghan noted that when he was much later in Belfast prison, Patrick Finucane – although not his solicitor – got in to see him to try to find out what he had said to police about the IRA.

IRA volunteer Vincent McKenna, cousin of IRA Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna, wrote that Pat Finucane – although not his solicitor – engineered a visit with him in Belfast prison:

“Pat Finucane and I swopped slip-on shoes under the visiting table (this was common practice for smuggling contraband - messages - explosives and so forth). Pat had on this occasion delivered the Provisional IRA Christmas message, written by Gerry Adams.”

The IRA celebrated repeatedly murdering magistrates, judges, solicitors and lawyers in front of their wives and children – indeed even murdering their wives and children as well.

Permit me as a former IRA volunteer who ‘operated’ alongside Martin McGuinness and who bombed England for IRA GHQ, serving 14 years in prison for my efforts, to view somewhat cynically the republican movement’s late concentration on Brit justice inquiries and Irish language street signs.

The IRA leadership through its Sinn Féin proxy has become a tool of British imperialism – enforcing British rule in Northern Ireland, supporting Britain’s Police Service of Northern Ireland, working with Britain’s MI5 security service, overseeing Britain’s prison service where ‘dissident’ IRA volunteers are caged, serving on policing boards and engaging with the Westminster Parliament in every way except for the fig leaf of refusing to sit in the House of Commons.

Ahern and Blair converted the defeated IRA into a trusted partner of both British imperialism and of Irish Free State partitionism.

In Northern Ireland – the name which Sinn Féin may now utter – the IRA movement has become just a bigger version of the SDLP – a party it for years called “Quislings” for participating in Stormont.

In the Republic of Ireland, the IRA movement has become a lesser version of Fianna Fáil.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s constituency manager recently sued a newspaper and journalist for an article allegedly linking his good name to the IRA which he described in court papers as a “criminal and terrorist” organisation.

There you have it.

The last Irish republican has deserted the stage and the lights of old defeated Irish republican ideals have been permanently extinguished.

But hey-ho, we have a Brit inquiry and some Irish language street signs.

l Shane O’Doherty joined the IRA at 15, was arrested when he was 20 and spent 14 years in prison for London bombings during which time he resigned from the IRA after he read the gospels for the first time. He wrote letters of apology to his victims from prison