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Britain ’ s Man in Maynooth Secret files discovered by Irish author, Ciarán MacAirt, reveal the
relationship between an Irish Monsignor and a covert British
propagandist
Ciarán MacAirt is author of the book, The McGurk’s Bar Bombing
web: www.mcgurksbar.com | email: [email protected] | 25 th June 2013
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Britain ’ s Man in Maynooth
Whilst studying previously secret files in Kew National Archives, London, as part of my on-
going research into my grandmother’s murder in the McGurk’s Bar Bombing of 4thDecember
1971, I came across a very interesting archive. At first glance it is a brief, quite non-descript
information report from one British civil servant in the Dublin embassy to another British
civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).
Looks can be deceiving though.
The Information Policy Report from the Republic of Ireland dated 23rd September
1971 (FCO 2/703) was prepared by Information Officer, PJC Evans, for DN Brinson, working
in the Guidance and Information Policy Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO). Evans’s report briefly outlines the objectives and methods of the small and
seemingly stretched Information Section a few weeks after internment. Nevertheless, it was
sent with a “Secret Annex on the IRD activity” which jumped out at me as it highlighted that
the post was run by the Information Research Department (IRD). The heartbeat flutters
when you track and find secret annexes like this.
Covert British Propagandists
The IRD was a deeply covert propaganda unit that was set up within the FCO primarily to
combat the communist threat during the Cold War. It was also brought into Northern Ireland
by British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, in the early 70s to be used against the IRA. It
features in my book , The McGurk’s Bar Bombing: Collusion, Cover -Up and a Campaign for
Truth, due to the covert management of information and dissemination of black propaganda
in the aftermath of the atrocity and death of my grandmother.
Here the IRD helped manage British information policy and reorganise the
information activity of agencies including Headquarters Northern Ireland, the office of the
UK Representative and the RUC Information Office. Whilst researching my book, I accessed a
file which proved that the IRD appointed Clifford Hill and Hugh Mooney to the office of
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Howard Smith, the UK Representative at Stormont who was Whitehall’s man on the ground
in Northern Ireland. Hugh Mooney l iaised closely with the British Army’s top -secret
Information Policy Unit which was run by expert propagandist Colonel Maurice Tugwell and
reported directly to the General Officer Commanding (GOC). Mooney’s post of Information
Adviser to the GOC was a “cov er appointment for the representative of the Information
Research Department” (Annex b to A/BR/180/MO4, section1). In Stormont circles, Hill was
simply known as “Cliff the Spy”.
Evans notes that his Dublin section was distributing “a variety of IRD written
material on aspects of world Communism” to contacts including the Irish Department of
Foreign Affairs (DFA). The DFA, Evans says, though, was “small and overworked” and
“scarcely able to digest IRD material” never mind put it to any propaganda use. These were
evidently overt channels of dissemination but Evans also relays that information was being
“passed in confidence to one or two trusted local journalists” who wrote about Communist
affairs. He also records that the:
“second category of IRD activity at this post concerns the ‘indoctrination’ – if that is
not too strong a word – of journalist contacts writing on Anglo/Irish affairs”
It is newsworthy and quite current to find record of a state –and a foreign state at that –
seeking to exert control over information that is placed in the Irish public domain via so-
called trusted media. Indeed, Evans writes that the stated “aim is to ind uce, as we frequently
can, reliable journalist contacts to publish articles in their own names which contains
substantial amounts of information provided by the Information Officer”.
Nevertheless, such journalistic contacts are the stock and trade of the Information
Officer’s job so I anticipated such IRD activities as these, no matter how shocking it may be
to contemplate that indigenous media would be so open to foreign propaganda.
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Furthermore, these are unnamed channels for the dissemination of material manufactured
by the British IRD.
There is a named source within this secret annex, though, and he was a man in a position of
great spiritual and civic influence.
Evans recorded that the very well-known, high-ranking Irish Catholic cleric was
a contact for the department and in receipt of “certain IRD material”. His name was
Monsignor Jeremiah Newman and he was the President of Maynooth College, “the training
centre for the Catholic Priesthood in Ireland” as Evans tells Brinson. Newman later became
Bishop of Limerick.
“Eastern European topics” seems to be the primary concern of this “selected
material” and it is unsurprising that the Catholic hierarchy would have an ear for anti -
communist propaganda due to the historical antagonism between the ideologies (1) .
Indeed Evans hints that it is an easy sell as he writes “With the priests in charge of
religious seminaries who send priests on missionary work abroad, we are preaching to the
convert”.
Internment and the War in the North
Nevertheless, a war was raging in the north east of the island at that time and the British
administration had recently ranged the highly discriminatory Special Power, internment
without trial, against its Roman Catholic population and its Roman Catholic population
alone. Indeed, when internment was introduced a few weeks beforehand on 9th August, the
British Army killed 11 Catholic civilians in Ballymurphy, West Belfast, over three days,
including the local parish priest. So for a high-ranking, influential Irish cleric to be in such
close contact with a clandestine unit of the British administration and in receipt of its
propaganda, is highly controversial. Nevertheless, stark questions regarding the relationship
between the IRD and Newman remain to be answered:
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Was this relationship sanctioned by the Catholic hierarchy?
Did the Irish Government know about the relationship?
What propaganda was promulgated – was it simply anti-Communist or did it expand to
include material on Northern Ireland?How long did the relationship last and were other
clerics targeted?
What did Newman and/or the Catholic Church get from the relationship?
Were the young Irish priests aware that the information being fed to them was provided
by the highly secret and classified agency of a foreign power (never mind the British
State)?
Newman’s Toxic Legacy
Jeremiah Newman (2) was a scholar of note who studied in Louvain and Oxford Universities
after Maynooth. He taught scholastic philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast (1951 -2)
before returning to teach at Maynooth, becoming President of the College in 1968. His
output as an author was prodigious with over 20 books on subjects ranging from regional
planning to post-modernism and the Church and State. Then in 1974 he was appointed as
Bishop of Limerick which dragged him from his closeted academic existence.
By this time Ireland was growing more prosperous and Irish society was changing
fast, becoming increasingly secular and liberal. Despite his intellectualism and, ironically,
considering his name, Newman’s pastoral leadership was suited for the generation be fore
Vatican II’s reforms of 1962. He stringently believed in the unassailable right of the Catholic
Church to influence the civil law of Ireland and he often intervened personally. He railed
against secularism and ecumenism and his dogmatic pronouncements at times caused
unease even amongst the Catholic hierarchy (3). The Irish Times recorded for posterity two
of his most “characteristically controversial interventions” in his obituary printed on 4th
April 1995. In May 1976, at a time when sectarian killings perpetrated by both sides in the
north east were once more peaking, Newman:
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‘Warned against the dangers to Irish society of “secularism, the strident propaganda
of minorities and the effort to conciliate the North”, and urged action to prevent the
incor poration of an “inordinate special position” for non -Catholic minorities in the
State’s laws.’
Then the following January, during a Christian Unity Week service of all things, he
reminded the cross-community flock that Catholics would still be the majority in a united
Ireland. The Protestant Dean of Limerick, rightly outraged, said that with such a statement
the bishop “might as well go North and load the guns of the UVF”. His views on sexual
morals, contraception, divorce and even disarmament were similarly dogmatic and
authoritarian.
Child Abuse Scandal
Nevertheless, Newman’s bitterest legacy will be felt by some of those who were vulnerable
children in his diocese. In September 2012, the National Board for Safeguarding Children in
the Catholic Church in Ireland, fingered Newman for inadequate handling of accusations of
child abuse by his clerics. In one instance, he knowingly allowed an abusive priest return
from England and minister in the Limerick diocese where that priest is believed to have
continued h is rape of children. Newman’s strict sexual moral code did not it seems stretch to
include the protection of children from his own priests.
It is not as if Newman’s toxic legacy did not need the further slur that he was a close
contact for a covert British propaganda unit and a willing conduit for its material.
Download the secret files
Read the Irish News article by Andrea McKernon
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References
(1) An example would be the Decree Against Communism by Pope Pius XII in 1949 which
excommunicated all Catholics who collaborated with Communist organisations and
effectively excommunicated millions of Catholics. The Sanctum Officium, the office which
oversees Roman Catholic doctrine, issued further condemnations of communism throughout
the 50s and 60s.
(2) Much of Newman’s history in the following 3 paragraphs is taken from variou s obituaries
especially the Irish Times, April 4 1995
(3) Irish Times, April 4 1995
Campaign for Truth | Visit
Web: www.mcgurksbar.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: The McGurk’s Bar Bombing
Author: Ciarán MacAirt
Kitty agus Johnny Irvine
Le grá go deo