When a Crackdown Involving the I.R.A. Backfired, Comically, in "The Ban"

""Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?""

"It is easy to imagine how Margaret Thatcher, who became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, must have felt watching this. Her displeasure could only have increased in October, 1984, when the I.R.A. planted a bomb in a Brighton hotel that narrowly missed her. The I.R.A.'s statement in the aftermath-"Remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always"-made clear that she was dealing with a powerful enemy, as skilled at pithy and memorable statements as in the use of explosives. In a speech the following year, Thatcher said, "We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend." She called on the British media to self-regulate in order to prevent the kind of situation in which a spokesman for Sinn Féin could appear on television after an I.R.A. outrage and calmly claim that it was all in the name of Irish freedom. What happened next is the subject of Roisin Agnew's incisive and sharply edited documentary film "The Ban.""

"Morrison was one of a generation of activists who took over the Sinn Féin leadership in the early nineteen-eighties, as was Gerry Adams, who became president of the Party in 1983. Along with Martin McGuinness, Adams's deputy in Derry, they were a formidable group-articulate and brilliant media performers. If you wanted a quick sound bite, Morrison could always provide one. If you wanted a more thoughtful and Jesuitical set of arguments for the Republican cause,"

Sinn Féin leaders in the early 1980s blended electoral strategy with explicit armed rhetoric, exemplified by Danny Morrison's pledge to hold a ballot paper and an Armalite. The IRA planted a bomb at the Brighton hotel in October 1984 that narrowly missed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and issued a warning about needing only to be lucky once. Thatcher called on the British media to self-regulate and to deny terrorists publicity, saying the press should help "starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity." Roisin Agnew directed the documentary film "The Ban."

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