Brian Hanley

speaker

1,140 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 16 Sep

Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Irish History Podcast · The Rise of the Provisional IRA: Conspiracy vs Reality · 16 Sep 2026 podcast

And it's held to as kind of an article of faith.

I mean the fact is that a lot of the people who say that don't care about the documentary evidence.

They say we just know it wouldn't have happened otherwise.

They wouldn't have got the the the boost they did without this support from the Finafall government.

I'll have to give you about three answers to that.

One, what happens is firstly, the the worst violence, you know, since essentially almost the foundation of Northern Ireland produces a huge crisis.

And the nationalist population by the late nineteen sixties were more or less united around the idea that they they deserve civil rights and they weren't going to back down in the way that it happened in previous years.

The British government makes a series of decisions to prop up the Unionists, which creates the conditions for

an armed campaign to emerge.

Now

The provisional IRA also makes decisions in in the summer of nineteen seventy, which makes war more likely, and that's another question.

But they believe from their point of view that their their job is to drive the British out of Ireland.

So people shouldn't be surprised that they actually start to try and and and do that.

But you then also have a huge popular upheaval.

You know, for most of the time since nineteen twenty two, people in the South were sorry for northern nationalists.

And northern nationalists sometimes underestimate the extent to which the North was talked about in the South.

It was talked about a lot.

Particularly at elections, because most Southern politicians swore that they would do something about partition at various stages.

But that never seemed, you know, very likely to to happen.

But what happened in the late nineteen sixties was one, the South begins to see the civil rights movement is very sympathetic towards it.

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