Patrick Walsh’s letter to the editor in the April issue of Chronicles resurrects a long-discredited lie about the “left-wing Marxist” IRA. For 15 years, that smear kept many Americans, including me, from supporting democracy for the occupied Irish. Then, on July 5, 1987, the London Observer reported that the lie had been fabricated in the 1970’s by then British Army Information Captain Colin Wallace. The British news media promptly and permanently ceased to refer to the “Marxist IRA,” but the more brazen Chicago news editors, to whom we had provided the Observer‘s story, continued to refer to the “Marxist IRA” until 1989, when they stopped without explanation. Wallace later described how he and MI6 had succeeded in turning America against the IRA by getting U.S. news editors to believe his lie.

Wallace paid dearly for his recantation and his refusal to participate in state terrorism: his bosses framed him for a murder, and he served some six years before he was completely exonerated and freed.

Were Wallace’s Big Lie not so destructive of democracy, it would be comical to see Mr. Walsh attempt to revive it a decade after a stake was driven through its heart.


        —Mary O’Sullivan
Chicago, IL