British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s by Joseph Darlington

Author:Joseph Darlington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Even more appealing to Ink’s readers than McCann’s fictional revolutionary group was his indulgence in drugs, sex and other non-Catholic pastimes. Free Belfast seemed to confirm the idle daydreams of many countercultural theorists who imagined that Irish Republicanism was a revolutionary haven fighting the same forces of conservatism that they were. McCann would shortly after collaborate with Howard Marks running the largest cannabis smuggling operation in British history, using his fake stories of Republican connections to smuggle huge quantities of drugs through Dublin airport, pretending that the crates they were shipped in contained guns for “the struggle” (Marks 1998, 91). Either a psychopath, a brilliant con man, or both, McCann played upon the lack of real information available to the British public in order to sell a radically different view of the IRA as countercultural rebels. It is likely that these misconceptions, plus a general sympathy for those suffering across the channel, allowed more terrorists than just Jim McCann to operate in the squats and communes of the British underground.

Connections between the IRA and the British counterculture would develop for a number of years before being thrust into public eye following the Guildford Pub Bombings of October 1974. The bombing of two pubs popular with off-duty British soldiers was conducted by the Provisional IRA’s Active Service Unit, who were eventually arrested in December 1975 after a further campaign of violence. Immediately following the bombings, however, blame was placed on four Irish suspects, known as the “Guildford Four”, with loose connections to what Robert Kee describes as “a self-sufficient twilit subculture, housed often in squats and sustained by drugs and petty crime, in which immigrant Irish… played a notable role” (1986, 31). The press would report on the significant support for the Provisional IRA being expressed in these squats, although “the general tenor of such talk appears to have been basically a-political and averse to cruelty and violence” (1986, 32). The confessions of the Four were obtained by torture (McKee and Franey 1988, 426). Nevertheless, the story of the Guildford Pub Bombings would form the basis of a moral panic within the British mainstream media. The counterculture, awash with drugs and long linked to crime, was also now connected to terrorism. The fallout from this panic would result in the passing of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in November 1974; Britain’s first domestic policy permitting the suspension of habeas corpus for terrorism and terrorist groups, and forerunner of contemporary Terrorism Acts. Terrorism had come home, and the hippies were harbouring it.

It is against the backdrop of this media panic that Theroux was writing The Family Arsenal (1976). When reconsidered in light of the mainstream media’s connection of the Provisional IRA with countercultural squats and drug running operations, we can begin to see where Theroux’s unusual presentation of the IRA as a type of London Mafia gang came from. The sexual abuse of Mayo in order to “entertain the troops” ties into already established suspicions about liberated female sexuality, and the belief

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