In the article Captain Kelly: Posthumous Revenge, Angela Clifford mentions Liam Ó Comain, (whose web-autobiography is called Memoirs And Thoughts). Ó Comain seems eager to agree with the smearing of Captain James Kelly by former OC (Officer Commanding, IRA) Johnnie White and former IO (Intelligence Officer) Peter Collins (of the Derry Brigade [Official] IRA). In the interview with The Starry Plough (formerly their 'own' paper) White and Collins claimed that, in 1969, the Dublin Government wanted to physically "eliminate" the Left in the Republican Movement, and that Captain Kelly offered them £50,000 to do the job. This would have led to the formation of a "right wing and Catholic leadership that would have been willing to dance to the tune of the Dublin regime".

The implication of this interview is that the "Dublin regime" got its way without any assassinations. This is something with which the IRSP (now publishers of Starry Plough, and in many ways still a 'splinter' group of the Stickies) probably agree. The 'Provisional Alliance' (according to the Officials' strange designation of the early 1970s) in its personnel was not especially "right wing". Insofar as the Hannaway and Shannon families (main founders of the Provisionals in Belfast) were concerned their 'politics' were geographically, so to speak, fairly sharply Left (Labourite as opposed to fancy stuff like the ideological gibberish introduced by Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston).

The Coughlan / Johnston / CPGB (Communist Party of GB) infusion led Official SF, and its various aliases, to oppose entry into (then continued membership of) the 'Common Market' for essentially Soviet strategic reasons. (The Provisonals also opposed the EEC for essentially the same reason, until they actually applied some thought to the matter, and gave it guarded support.) The self-conscious left-wingery indulged in by elements in the Stickies and the Erps (the IRSP's nickname; Divis Flats were known in the mid-1970s as 'Planet of the Erps') looks a bit sick now that Sinn Féin is an effective party of the working class on an all-Ireland basis. Sinn Féin is capable of doing the things the WPI and IRSP could only fantasise about.

This ideological fantasy-trip is the major reason (apart from Johnnie White's macho self-image) why the Official IRA killed Ranger Best. It also explains why their response to the working class women who went to their offices to complain about the shooting, was to describe them as "slobbering liberals". In a sense it is satisfying that these people are reduced to scandalising the name of Captain Kelly. They are on the proper side in this campaign: the wrong side.

Seán McGouran