I
read with interest Bob
Purdie's comments about my
article on Saor Eire. There is so little information
available about the group, so I thought it would
be useful to write about the history of the organisation.
It would be very worthwhile if Bob Purdie could
one day, as a professional historian, write about
Saor Eire.
The
source of most of my information about Saor Eire
comes from Roger Faligot. And it was Bob Purdie
who introduced Roger Faligot to Ireland in March
1972. (They actually spent a whole night drinking
and talking about the situation on the boat to Dublin.)
He was also in contact with Gerry Lawless. Faligot
had been sent by the French daily newspaper Liberation
to report on Saor Eire and the assassination of
Peter Graham. As far as I know, Faligot is the only
one to have written a history of the organisation,
though Bob gave some coverage to Saor Eire in his
1972 booklet Ireland Unfree (a publication
dedicated to Peter Graham). In Ireland Unfree,
Bob Purdie was already critical of the group. Tim
Pat Coogan, in his history of the IRA, also has
one or two lines about Saor Eire and the killing
of Larry White.
In
the meantime, the book 'Final Beat' (Dublin:
Gill and McMillan, 2001) by Liz Walsh has been brought
to my attention. The book has a chapter about the
killing of Garda Fallon by Saor Eire on 3 April
1970. According to Liz Walsh, in the two years period
1967-1969, 18 banks had been robbed in the South,
Saor Eire being behind the majority of those robberies.
In March 1969, it carried out the biggest robbery
in the country until then, when an eight men unit
simultaneously robbed two banks in Newry with military
precision. They escaped with £22,000, a fortune
in those days. In February 1970, Saor Eire carried
out its seventh raid in two years and most important
operation. The group took over the village of Rathdrum
in county Wicklow. Militants stopped all traffic
(including a Garda car), cut off all phone lines
to the village, and robbed the local bank. There
were also allegations of links between Saor Eire
and Neil Blaney. Neil Blaney was a friend of Liam
Walsh, who was killed on 13 October 1970 in a premature
explosion in Dublin. Also injured in that incident
was Martin Casey. In November 1969, Casey and a
member of Fianna Fail went to London to buy arms
in the context of the 'arms crisis'. There were
rumors that Garda Fallon had been killed with one
of those imported weapons.
It
was Ernest Mandel himself to told me in Brussels
in in May 1993 that he had met leaders of Saor Eire
during his November 1972 trip to Dublin. It is possible
that after twenty years he confused them with the
Officials. Mandel's group in Belgium, the Ligue
Revolutionnaire des Travailleurs, had a shaky knowledge
of Irish politics. For example, in January 1972,
they invited Gerry Lawless to a meeting in Brussels.
He was presented as a spokesperson of the IRA, which
he wasn't. A couple of weeks later, they published
a pamphlet in French called 'Irlande: Revolution
en Marche'. That publication (with essays by
Ernest Mandel, Bob Purdie, Nathan Weinstock and
others) is littered with factual mistakes, so it
is most likely that the United Secretariat of the
Fourth International was ill informed about Saor
Eire.
Finally,
the Saor Eire interview mentioned by Bob Purdie
was translated into a number of languages. This
gave the organisation probably more importance at
an international level than it had in Ireland.
