The editor and the IRA
“In 1990, Roy Greenslade was appointed editor of the Daily Mirror by the late Robert Maxwell,” said David Aaronovitch in The Times. That autumn the Provisional IRA adopted new tactics in their war to drive the British out of Northern Ireland. On 24 October, they forced Patsy Gillespie, a Catholic who worked at the Fort George Army base in Derry, into a van full of explosives, chained him to the seat and told him to drive to a checkpoint, where they blew him up, along with five soldiers. “I wonder how the newly promoted editor felt when he heard that story?” Because as Greenslade admitted in the latest edition of British Journalism Review, he was an IRA supporter – and has never recanted. He visited Northern Ireland, fell in love with an Irish woman, embraced Republicanism, and reached the conclusion that IRA tactics were “valid”, given its “unequal” struggle with the state. “In other words,” he writes, “I supported the use of physical force.” I wonder, said Aaronovitch, if even Greenslade himself can “avoid noticing what self-serving bullshit this is”. Valid tactics? Making a man into a human bomb?
Many won’t have heard of Greenslade, and “may be tempted to think his contemptible endorsement of terrorism is of no great consequence”, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. “I believe it is.” He was not just editor of the Mirror, but a senior executive at The Sunday Times when it mounted investigations into the IRA. Later, as a media columnist for The Guardian and honorary professor of journalism at City University in London, he “pontificated about media ethics”. Greenslade also wrote for the Sinn Féin’s propaganda newspaper, An Phoblacht, under a pseudonym, said Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He bought a home in Donegal and befriended various reputed IRA men, including John Downey, who was accused of carrying out the 1982 Hyde Park bombing. And he didn’t even have the courage of his “disgusting” beliefs. From the early 1970s, when he worked at The Sun, he began what he called his “long silence”, hiding his views because “I was on the verge of taking on a mortgage”. He “presents this as though it is the most understandable thing in the world”.
When I edited The Guardian, Greenslade worked for it as a columnist, said Alan Rusbridger in that newspaper. I knew he was a Republican, but I didn’t know he supported the armed struggle. In retrospect, that makes some of his work suspect. In 2014, Greenslade criticised a BBC documentary about the alleged rape of Maíria Cahill by an IRA member, for not questioning her supposed antiSinn Féin agenda. Given his own very clear agenda, that was quite wrong. In the “Voltairean spirit”, I acknowledge Greenslade’s “right to hold contrary opinions even while working for British newspapers”, said Peter Wilby in the New Statesman. But at the very least, he put himself in a highly dubious position – at risk of blackmail and of exposing colleagues who reported on the IRA. And yet, shockingly, he had the gall to lecture other journalists “on how to conduct themselves”.