Word: macstiofain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Irish Republic, thereby forcing Dublin to crack down on terrorist sanctuaries. Littlejohn, who is still at large, said that he had been ordered by the British to commit the bank robbery. He added that he had worked with an assassination squad in an unsuccessful attempt to murder Sean MacStiofain, chief of the extremist and sometimes murderous Provisional I.R.A...
...comedy and ended in fiasco. In Amsterdam their cover was blown, their planeload of Czech bazookas, rocket launchers and hand grenades was impounded, and Maria and Dave lammed out just ahead of the cops. She returned to Dublin a celebrity-too much so for the taste of Sean MacStiofain, the transplanted Englishman who was then the Provisional I.R.A.'s chief of staff. Maria McGuire hated the dour, puritanical MacStiofain (who since has been replaced as the Proves' top military man). His Roman Catholic scruples would not even let him bring back from the Protestant North...
Meanwhile, the Irish government | has turned on the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional wing, to which it once gave refiuge. Sean MacStiofain, the Proves' former chief of staff, is in military detention, discredited for having broken his hunger and thirst strike. Martin McGuinness, the Proves' 22-year-old Derry brigade commander who used to receive reporters in the Bogside gasworks (Any regrets for the shootings? "Certainly not," he would snap), has also been arrested. Other captured leaders include a strategist who used to explain, coolly and lucidly, the lessons in terror that the I.R.A. had learned from...
...politician, "on the pig's back." They, more than any other group, held the key to peace or war. Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, was dealing with them as a major power, flying them to London in an R.A.F. plane for secret political talks. MacStiofain even got the British to release an internee from prison camp to join the I.R.A. delegation. But they blundered by breaking a truce they had arranged themselves. As Bogside Catholic M.P. John Hume put it: "The Provos bombed themselves to the conference table, and then they bombed themselves away again...
...interned without trial last summer, and ordered the British army to adopt a lower profile in the Catholic ghettos. Now, many of Ulster's Catholics had begun to sign peace petitions, and the I.R.A. was losing support. Last week the Provisionals' fugitive chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain, called reporters to a rendezvous behind the Londonderry barricades. If Whitelaw would agree within 48 hours to meet the I.R.A. to discuss their peace terms, he said, the I.R.A. would declare a seven-day bombing halt. Bluntly, Whitelaw refused to respond to "an ultimatum from terrorists...