Word: macstiof
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Perhaps an even more important catch was Joe Cahill, 53, onetime Provo chief in Belfast and No. 2 man in the movement, who had dropped out of sight following the imprisonment of Provo Chief Sean MacStiofáin. Cahill and five other smugglers were unloading the arms from the coaster Claudia onto a fishing smack when the Irish warships fired warning shots across the Claudia's bow and then sent out a boarding party. All six Provos were later charged with conspiracy to import arms unlawfully; Cahill and two others were held without bail...
...republic. The referendum took place last week at a time when public opinion was aroused against the illegal Irish Republican Army for extending its campaign of terrorism from Northern Ireland to the Republic (TIME, Dec. 11). The man who leads the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional wing, Sean MacStiofáin, whom the government apprehended and jailed two weeks ago, remained weak from a hunger strike, though he had begun to accept liquids. In the days before the referendum, the government refrained from taking further action against the I.R.A. leadership...
Clumsy Rescue. Slipping through the security net disguised as priests and hospital orderlies, the gunmen grabbed a nun and, using her as a shield, advanced down the hallway toward MacStiofáin's room. There, as two of the gunmen dropped to their knees and threatened to kill the hospital attendants present, detectives closed in shooting. In the pandemonium, two I.R.A. men were wounded and four others were caught later, but the clumsy rescue attempt had been too close for comfort. The following day, MacStiofáin was bundled off by helicopter to the Curragh, the Irish army...
...that time MacStiofáin, in the tenth day of his strike, was described by his wife Mary as a "dying man." MacStiofáin, boasted Provisional leaders, would become a martyr, like Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, who was arrested at an I.R.A. meeting in 1920 and died in a British prison in the 74th day of a hunger strike. In MacStiofáin's place, they predicted, "a hundred other MacStiofáins" would rise...
Then came the deflating anticlimax. As he prepared to receive Communion from a priest, MacStiofáin broke his thirst strike. The Rev. Sean McManus, an old friend who had flown in from Baltimore after MacStiofáin was arrested, said he found the I.R.A. leader "shaking, on the point of death" from a heart seizure and crying deliriously, "I love Ireland, I belong to Ireland, God give us freedom!" McManus pleaded with MacStiofáin to relent. "If you die tonight," said the priest, "I am convinced there will be serious trouble in the South of Ireland." A moment...