Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2021. © Richard Kemp

Roy Greenslade, the former Guardian journalist, admitted this week that he supported the IRA terror campaign that killed hundreds of his country’s soldiers and police.

He wrote columns for An Phoblacht, Sinn Fein-IRA’s influential propaganda newspaper, which for decades was used to promote and justify Republican terrorism. He stood surety for John Downey, an IRA terrorist believed to have been involved in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing that killed four soldiers and seven horses. He was friends with Pat Doherty, a Sinn Fein politician accused of membership of the IRA Army Council.

I’ll let others question Mr Greenslade’s journalistic integrity, given that he effectively kept his allegiance secret for years while piously judging others on media ethics.

My concern, as a former British soldier who served in Northern Ireland, is what appears to be his attempt to rewrite the history of the Troubles, and to insult the memory of those who died trying to stop the violence.

In his article in the British Journalism Review, Mr Greenslade explains his conversion to republicanism took place in part on the basis of what he heard about ‘the security forces’ use of collusion, the deliberate failure by the authorities to act quickly enough in response to phone calls warning of bomb placements, and the willingness of the RUC and army to allow loyalist paramilitaries to bomb and kill with impunity’.

But what Mr Greenslade says he heard was a shocking distortion of (more…)