Saor Éire (1967-1975)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the earlier organisation of the same name, see Saor Éire.

Saor Éire was an armed, radical Irish Republican organisation composed of Trotskyists and IRA members. It took its name from a similar organisation of the 1930s.

Formed in 1967, its leaders included Peter Graham and Maureen Keegan of the Young Socialists, Gerry Lawless of the Irish Workers Group, and Frank Keane, former Commandant of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. Graham was a member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and Keegan was active in Paris in May 1968. Saor Éire was intended as an urban guerrilla group. Its leaders believed that the working class was key to the armed struggle.

Between 1967 and 1970, Saor Éire carried out a number of bank robberies, the proceeds being used to purchase arms. The group provided arms, training and funding to Nationalists in Northern Ireland after the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969. A raid on two banks in Newry in County Down in March 1969 netted £22,000, the biggest single haul from a robbery in the country at the time. In February 1970 the group took over the village of Rathdrum in County Wicklow, stopping traffic and cutting phone lines, and robbed the local bank.

On 3 April 1970, in the course of a bank robbery in Dublin, a police officer, Garda Richard Fallon, was shot and killed. He was the first member of the Irish security forces to die in the Troubles. Allegations of Irish Government connections with Saor Éire were made in the Dáil (Irish Parliament) immediately afterwards and over the following years.

Over thirty years after his death, the family of Garda Fallon accused the Irish Government of assisting members of Saor Éire in escaping after the murder. Previously secret Irish Government files made available in 2006 confirmed the sighting of Jock Haughey, brother of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, in the company of a member of Saor Éire in London during the period before the Arms Trial. The Irish Government has refused to hold a public inquiry into the matter and possible State collusion with members of the organisation.

On 13 October 1970 Liam Walsh, a member of Saor Éire, died in a premature bomb explosion on a railway embankment in Dublin.

Peter Graham was assassinated on 25 October 1971 in an internecine dispute. Among the mourners at his funeral, along with leading Republicans, were Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group and Charlie Bird, then a member of the Young Socialists, and later a news correspondent for RTÉ television. A photograph of the funeral shows Ali and Bird giving a clenched fist salute at the grave.

Maureen Keegan died of cancer in 1972. By then many of the members believed that the organisation had been taken over by gangsters and was losing sight of its original objectives. Saor Éire prisoners in Portlaoise Prison issued a statement on 18 May 1973 announcing their resignation from the organisation because of the actions of 'undesirable elements'.

Saor Éire was officially disbanded in 1975.