Word: macstiof
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...Dublin before instructing it to halt. Then, as they let their coats swing open to reveal their sidearms, the plainclothesmen ordered the tall, burly driver from his car. At Dublin's central police station, they demanded that he explain his connection with the illegal Irish Republican Army. Sean MacStiofáin, 44, chief of staff of the I.R.A.'s militant "Provisional" wing, replied, "Tada" (Nothing to say). The dramatic arrest marked the strongest action yet taken by the Dublin government against the terrorist organization since the current period of turmoil began in Northern Ireland three years...
...bloody well belong?" The Bogside Community Association charged that residents were being "interned" in their own neighborhoods, and demanded to know "the duration of our sentence." The only immediate reaction from the I.R.A. Provisionals was a cry of defiance. The Proves' Dublin-based chief of staff, Sean MacStiofáin, bragged that I.R.A. tactics had always been to "step aside when they try to hit us with a sledgehammer," and in Belfast the Provos vowed that they would continue their struggle "in accordance with the principles of guerrilla warfare...
Minister Jack Lynch increased the pressure on the I.R.A. by arresting three top Provo leaders based in the South (Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofáin, however, managed to escape). Lynch explained that he had decided to crack down on the Proves because "peace initiatives have not been given a chance...
Nonetheless, for the first time in several months, the I.R.A. had to justify itself to Northern Ireland's Catholics. Sean MacStiofáin, leader of the militant Provisionals in Dublin, slipped over the border to an I.R.A. meeting in Londonderry's Bogside and declared: "I hope to God that nationally minded women in the North will stand behind their men who are carrying on the fight...
...momentum was gaining on the other side. William Cardinal Conway, Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, said in a radio broadcast that he would like to ask MacStiofáin, "What right have you to say, against the manifest feeling of the Irish people as a whole, that this [violence] should go on?" Londonderry M.P. John Hume, a leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, judged that "a solution can be negotiated now without shedding another drop of Irish blood." Derry units of the I.R.A. felt compelled to call a "Tell-the-People" meeting to explain their policies...