who travelled with the IRA's top bomb-maker to meet the left-wing terror group, Farc, in Colombia.
Up to the mid-Nineties, the Mail called for sanctions against Ireland for IRA terrorism. Columnists like Paul Johnson and Ian Wooldridge led the charge. For good measure, Johnson even called for a ban on Irish horses in the Grand National.
The present list of columnists - including royal watcher and friend of the late Princess Diana, Richard Kay;enemy of the liberal left, Richard Littlejohn; Keith Waterhouse and high Tory thinkers like Stephen Glover, Peter McKay and Peter Oborne - are now joined in the Mail stable by Frank Connolly, the man who has yet to explain why he travelled to Colombia using a false Irish passport, in the company of Padraig Wilson, one of the IRA's top bomb-makers.
Connolly was in Colombia shortly before his brother Niall was arrested at Bogota airport with two other IRA bomb-makers, James 'Mortar' Monaghan and Martin McCauley, in August 2001. The IRA's role in Colombia was to train Farc in the use of ordnance that included multiple mortar launchers.
Farc, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars from the cocaine trade and has imprisoned the population of large part of the country through vicious acts of terror, is said to have paid the IRA €2m for its work.
Connolly is now writing for the Irish Mail on Sunday and is leading the charge against the Taoiseach and Fianna Fail, using information about Ahern's house purchase, conveniently timed for the general election campaign.
Connolly's visit to Colombia was first exposed in the Sunday Independent in 2002 after he was questioned in March that year by two senior detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation. No charges have been brought. However, despite subsequent articles about his journey using a fake passport issued in November 2000 in the name of John Francis Johnston, he has never issued libel proceedings.
The Mail's right-wing history extends to the darkest days of the 20th Century when it sided with Hitler's Nazi Party and Mussolini's Fascists. The proprietor, Lord Rothermere, was sympathetic to Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. In 1934, Rothermere wrote an article for his paper headed: 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts'.
Rothermere visited Hitler on a number of occasions and corresponded regularly, actually sending a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938, expressing the hope that the German annexation would make "Adolf the Great" popular with the British public.
In March 2005, Frank Connolly set up the Centre for Public Inquiry, whose remit was "to independently promote the highest standards of integrity, ethics and accountability across Irish public and business life, and to investigate and publicise breaches of those standards where they arise".
It received a $4m funding package from the charitable organisation tlantic Philanthropies, founded by the Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney, who has himself provided millions of dollars for Sinn Fein and "ex-IRA prisoner" groups. One of the "ex-prisoner" groups he funded employed James 'Mortar' Monaghan as a full-time organiser at the time of his arrest in Bogota.
The Centre for Public Inquiry was based on the highly respected Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit organisation set up in Washington to promote investigative journalism by one of America's most famous journalists, Charles 'Chuck' Lewis. In 2005, Connolly asked Lewis to endorse his organisation. Lewis refused to do so. There are further traces in Connolly's background which make his employment by the Mail - which has lost millions of euros promoting its products in Ireland - even more remarkable, given its hard stance on terrorism.
Connolly has refused to answer questions delivered to him by the Sunday Independent about other information in the hands of the Garda and the Government, relating to his questioning about the shooting of the director of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Geoffrey Armstrong, who was giving a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1981.
Connolly was arrested and questioned by detectives investigating the shooting of Mr Armstrong, who was then chairman of the car manufacturer British Leyland.
During the lecture, three men wearing combat jackets and balaclavas burst in, two of them pulled handguns from their jackets and one shouted: "Everybody freeze, nobody move, this action is in support of the H-Blocks." They then shot Mr Armstrong three times in the legs.
Connolly, who was associated with an extreme left-wing group in TCD at the time, known as Revolutionary Struggle, was not one of the gunmen, but he was subsequently arrested and questioned by gardai.
In the summer of 2005, after revelations printed in the Sunday Independent, about Connolly and the fact that his organisation had been shunned by the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, the Government approached Chuck Feeney.
He hired a private security firm to examine the allegations and Atlantic Philanthropies subsequently withdrew its funding. The Centre for Public Inquiry folded and Connolly subsequently went to work for the
SF-backed Daily Ireland, which collapsed in February last year, and for Vincent Browne's Village magazine, which last year reverted from weekly publication to monthly.
The Mail group's decision to rehire him after the very public exposure of his activities in the company of some of the world's most deadly terrorists has raised eyebrows here and in Britain.
What do Britain's most traditionally and strident right-wing newspaper and one of Ireland's most controversially republican-linked journalists have in common, other than attempts to attack Ireland's leading constitutional political party, Fianna Fail, and - by almost necessary consequence - promote one of Fianna Fail's bitterest opponents, Sinn Fein?
Jim Cusack
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Originally Posted by saratoga
