There was, on the other hand, one particular incident early in the Troubles occasionally cited as evidence of direct anarchist violence complicit with or sympathetic to the ‘war’ of republicans. The involuntary participation of at least one genuine anarchist and one who merely claimed for himself the label ‘anarchist’, has drawn the criticism of McGuffin himself, but remains an episode which needs clarification. The story of a bomb plot against Queen’s University hatched by a German anarchist, a New York photographer, a Belfast journalist and an unemployed salesman in the bar of the Wellington Park Hotel was, from the start, an unlikely tale. It did, however, prove a salacious one for a continually salivating media hungry for even a glimpse of the mad anarchist bomber bogeymen as a new angle on, or alternative to the grinding predictability of nationalist and sectarian violence. Step up James Joseph McCann, with a petty criminal past in Belfast and England, a slightly unhinged quality and a talent for invention. As a self-proclaimed ‘anarchist’, McCann had been hanging around the revolutionary tourist set based in the Wellington Park, close to Queen’s from around about 1970. This had included, most famously, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the American Yippies (Youth International Party), and the singer and poet, Phil Ochs. McGuffin and his comrades had also spent some time in the august company of these ‘friends of the revolution’, as McGuffin called them, and also knew McCann, of who he had a very poor opinion.(23) The basic bones of the story are that McCann in the company of Felix de Mendelssohn, Joseph Stevens and Peter McCartan, all working in one way or another as journalists, met him at Queen’s on the promise of an exclusive, or perhaps after some drinks and goading from McCann. They were then treated to the spectacle of a Molotov cocktail attack on Queen’s Common Room, a chase by a passing plainclothes RUC patrol and an armed standoff, before McCann surrendered his sawn-off shotgun and the unlikely quartet were arrested and remanded to Crumlin Road gaol. After some pre-trial theatrics and four months inside, McCann, who spent his term informing his Provo cellmate that the jail hadn’t been built which could hold him, he broke out of the prison by sawing through the cell bars. The escape was the first since December 1960 and gained McCann some, largely self- generated, notoriety as the ‘green’ or ‘shamrock pimpernel’ and the original ‘border fox’. McCann’s subsequent escapades are well-documented by dope dealer Howard Marks in his autobiography, Mr. Nice, but basically he took up cannabis-smuggling and re-used a proportion of the profits to send arms and explosives to the Provisional and/or Official IRA, and was allegedly involved in the bombing of a British Army barracks in Germany in 1973. None of this, of course, amounts to ‘anarchist’ activity and McCann was quite rightly seen as simply a fellow-traveller of the IRA who used libertarian ideas to justify a private business enterprise labelled criminal by the state.(24) His fellow-accused in 1971, Felix de Mendelssohn (who was acquitted with the others), had been a genuine anarchist involved with a group in Oxford in the early 1960s, and remembers Jim McCann as ‘anarchic’ but certainly no anarchist, merely ‘a psychopath who used political labels where they suited him’. De Mendelssohn is now a professional psychoanalyst so can speak with some expertise in the area of McCann’s mental make-up, and while he was impressed with McCann’s escape, this does not affect his overall assessment of him as ‘one of the craziest and most dangerous men I have ever met’.(25) After his arrest in 1979 and beating from the IRA prisoners in Portlaoise prison for the embarrassment of being caught with a large marijuana haul, McCann moved on to involvement in various capitalist ventures across the globe and has continued to evade conviction to the present day.(26) It is unclear how McCann became identified or associated with anarchism and in many ways it doesn’t really matter, but the appearance of such maverick characters claiming to be anarchists has occasionally occurred over the years and caused no little damage to anarchism. It may well yet occur, and although other crude adventurists and crackpot dictators have claimed the socialist mantle from time to time, anarchism often appears to be judged more harshly whenever freelance lunatics attach themselves to it. From: wsm.ie/c/belfast-anarchism-later-twentieth-century
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 08:47:02 +0000
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