By Dave Burke
croydontoday.co.uk
**Via Newshound
Friday, December 05, 2008

In September 1971 Maria McGuire was one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.

Armed with a .38 automatic weapon and carrying £20,000 in cash, she was being pursued by security forces from several countries over her role in a huge arms deal.

More than 160 crates containing bazookas, rocket launchers and hand-grenades had been seized at an airport in Amsterdam, and a warrant had been issued for her arrest.

McGuire found herself on the run with a member of the Provisional IRA’s ruling council – with whom she was having an affair.

In Ireland, plans were afoot to kidnap the Dutch ambassador if she and David O’Connell were arrested.

But despite a massive media frenzy, she and O’Connell were able to escape the Netherlands through Belgium and France before returning to Ireland to a hero’s welcome.

Even though their mission had failed, the pair became – for a brief period – the golden couple of the Irish Republican movement.

In her book To Take Arms: My Year With The IRA Provisionals, published in 1973, McGuire wrote candidly: “The press had made great play of the fact that we had escaped the British secret service; we had achieved another glorious failure.

“It was better even than if we had been successful, because then the public would have had to confront reality.

“Why did we want the guns? To kill people.”

She learnt two months later that she faced three years in prison if she re-entered Switzerland, where she had exchanged currency.

In the space of just one year, McGuire became a close confidante of many of the Provisional IRA’s top leaders, before disillusionment set in over the group’s methods.

She had signed up after seeing the Provisionals’ publicity officer, Sean O Bradaigh, on Irish television.

So keen was McGuire to talk to him that she rang the TV studio straight away and left a message.

Within weeks she was put forward to the British press as an example of the new middle-class membership the movement was attracting.

But as violence escalated in Belfast following a failed ceasefire in July 1972, McGuire decided she could not support the sectarian killing, and fled to England.

There she gave extensive interviews in the British press and published her book hoping to lift the lid on IRA brutality.

Her defection prompted the Provisional IRA’s chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain – who she described as “narrow minded” – to warn that if she ever returned to Ireland she would face a court martial and possibly execution.

Her book – which caused a storm on its publication – revealed her thoughts on one of the most intensive bombing campaigns ever carried out.

Following an IRA bomb in Donegall Street, Belfast, which killed six men and injured 146 in March 1972, she wrote: “I admit that at the time I did not connect with the people who were killed or injured in such explosions.

“I always judged such deaths in terms of the effect they would have on our support – and I felt that this in turn depended on how many people accepted our explanation.”

*Maria McGuire on her affair with Provisional IRA ruling council member David O’Connell, which started in Amsterdam…

“It just happened, and seemed perfectly natural, even though our situation was very unnatural.

We were under considerable stress together, and became very close, depended on one another, because of that.

Possibly it meant more to Dave than it did to me; but when we managed not to worry about the outcome of our mission and our own chances of escaping, we were very happy.”

*Maria McGuire on meeting the Provisional IRA chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain…

“He seemed short and squat, and lacked Dave’s physical presence: only later did I realise he was in fact over six feet tall.

He appeared a little taken aback by me too; I knew he had heard about me, but possibly he wasn’t expecting someone wearing hot pants to be interested in the Provisional IRA.”

*Maria McGuire on the IRA’s bombing campaign in Northern Ireland….

“The intention behind the bombing campaign was to cause confusion and terror.

In 1971 bomb explosions averaged three a day throughout the six counties, and it was very easy to create confusion in the centre of Belfast ….

Sometimes the Belfast Provisionals would give a succession of false alarms, and then just as the city was enjoying the lull, plant half a dozen bombs on the same day.

We believed that the bombing campaign had a greater psychological effect in this way.

By causing such terror we demonstrated that whatever steps the army took, the Provisionals could continue the military campaign; half a million people in Belfast would be kept wondering where the Provisionals would strike next, and would be forced to tell the British to make peace with us.”

*Maria McGuire on killing British soldiers….

“I agreed with the shooting of British soldiers and believed that the more who were killed the better.

I remember occasions where we heard late at night that a British soldier had been shot and seriously wounded in Belfast or Derry – and we would hope that by the morning he would be dead.”

*Maria McGuire on killing civilians…

“I accepted too the bombing of Belfast, and when civilians were accidentally blown to pieces dismissed this as one of the unfortunate hazards of urban guerrilla war.”

*Maria McGuire on being banned from entering Switzerland…

“I happened to hear a television news item that two Irish citizens had been excluded from Switzerland – Dave O’Connell and myself.

We had done nothing illegal in Switzerland that I could recall…

Then the Swiss Embassy in Dublin telephoned Dave and asked us to call at the embassy to collect our exclusion orders.

We naturally refused.”

*Maria McGuire on becoming disillusioned in the face of escalating violence….

“I could not avoid the conclusion that the probability of civilian casualties had been accepted, and perhaps even planned.

Whenever such casualties had occurred before, there had always been the pressure of events to take my mind off them.

But now, almost for the first time, I wondered about the crippled and the widowed and the lives that had been changed forever.”

dave.burke@essnmedia.co.uk