SF’s gay marriage backing in contrast to past ‘intolerance of homosexuality’

That is the view of former IRA man Anthony McIntyre, who was speaking to the News Letter about the contents of the Green Book – the de facto operating guide of the Provisional movement, which set out at length how the “war” was to be waged.

Today Sinn Fein has hailed the recent moves to introduce gay marriage to the Province, and declares it has a “longstanding position of support for LGBT equality in all dimensions of life and law”. In addition, its gay rights wing (Sinn Fein LGBT) boasts that it is “Ireland’s largest LGBT+ political organisation”.

However, this paper recently came across references to homosexuality in the IRA manual which stand in stark contrast with the party’s progressive rhetoric of today.

In addition, both ex-IRA bomber Shane Paul O’Doherty and gay campaigner Jeff Dudgeon both said they believe the Provisionals have sanctioned punishment attacks against homosexuals in the past.

A copy of the Green Book can be found on the University of Ulster-maintained website CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet).

It offers advice on what IRA members could expect in police custody (among other things).

It says officers would try to humiliate them by making “derogatory remarks about the volunteer’s sexual organs” – a practice the book claims was rife through the British Isles.

It reads: “Volunteers should attempt to understand the mentality which underlies this act and so be better prepared to meet this angle if and when it happens to them,” adding that such humiliation “has deeper undertones than one would guess”.

It continues: “Volunteers should understand that from a psychological point of view this act is called a penis complex.

“This complex is inherent in the homosexual and although the interrogators themselves may be married men with a family it indicates suppressed homosexual tendencies.

“When the volunteer realises and understands this proven fact he should not have great difficulty in triumphing over his interrogators.

“He should look upon them as homosexuals with the immunity of the establishment, as people who become sadistic from the homosexual tendencies, which underlie them.”

Mr McIntyre, who served time for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary in the mid-1970s, said: “It’s bizarre by today’s standards, but it was probably flavour of the time then. Like much else in the Green Book, it flies in the face of everything Sinn Fein stands for today.

“The Green Book was expressing sentiments which were very anti-gay, or if not anti-gay then at least contemptuous of gays, describing RUC members as somehow deviant.”

He said IRA men were products largely of Catholic upbringings, and “the influence of religion has to a large extent shaped that animosity or antipathy towards the gay community”.

“There’s many a time people would’ve been called ‘queer’ or ‘fruit’ or slagged off. It was used as a put-down term,” he said.

“These guys in the IRA came off the streets, and they were a product of the streets they lived in. There was no real tolerance towards gays then. There was an attitude of disdain, because the IRA – like most military organisations – have a macho culture. I’m sure you probably had the same in the RUC.”

Meanwhile Mr O’Doherty, a bomb-maker who later turned his back on violence, said he knew of two republicans who he suspected of having been beaten in prison by supposed comrades for having gay liaisons – something which was “thought at that time to be unthinkably unrepublican”.

He said: “Volunteers with homosexual proclivities would have been regarded as extreme security risks, open to blackmail by security forces and liable to become informers.

“There was total intolerance of homosexuals and homosexuality, with the nomenclature common of the time being ‘nancy boys’, ‘sissies’ and so on...

“The IRA and Sinn Fein are in full ‘history re-write mode’ these days. You’d nearly think the IRA never knew about child abuse or rape by volunteers, never mind homosexuality.”

Mr Dudgeon likewise said he believed the IRA had attacked people for “sexual misdemeanours” including being gay – but that this was hard to find proof for since the IRA “held no trials and kept no records”.

In more general terms he said: “When we were campaigning for decriminalisation in the 1970s we received no support from any political party.”

He also pointed to “the adamant refusal to accept it was possible that Roger Casement was gay or that his diaries were not forged by the Brits remains fairly universal in republican circles”.

He added: “Kincora was often used by nationalists in an anti-gay way suggesting that politicians and British establishment figures were using the boys there – Judge Hart said there was no evidence of this but the implication was put about that every gay person pre-1970 in Northern Ireland was involved in some sort of sordid ring because that was what gays did.”

It should be noted that it is not only republicans whose modern-day position on homosexuality contrasts with past paramilitary actions.

The UVF-linked PUP now campaigns on a strong gay rights ticket. But in 1997 David Templeton, a Presbyterian minister who had recently been caught in possession of gay pornography by airport security, was fatally attacked at home in Newtownabbey by men with spike-studded bats.

The CAIN website lists his killers as a “non-specific loyalist group”, but some media attribute it to the UVF. The crime remains officially unsolved.

The Green Book’s take on homosexuality, and the claims that the IRA sometimes attacked men for being gay, were put to Sinn Fein. It has given no reply.