A Sort of 1970’s Quiz

Here’s a very welcome quiz from Brian Hanley. Answers to be posted up – well, by you, but the full set by the end of the week.

1) In August 1969 which political leader reacted to the arrival of British soldiers in Belfast by stating that ‘the reintroduction of British troops is a step backwards that can never be welcomed here’ and that ‘all the present unrest and tragic loss of life…is directly traceable to the British designed and enacted partition of Ireland’ which could be ‘remedied by granting to Ireland the unity to which her people are intended.’?

2) Which Irish trade union’s general secretary was a former soldier in the British Army’s Parachute regiment?

3) Which journalist resigned from RTE in 1972 in protest at Section 31 of the broadcasting act?

4) Which RTE producer promised that there would be ‘strong and persistent resistance’ to Section 31 and that ‘there are many of us who feel that it would be better to transmit no programmes than to transmit programmes that were censored.’

5) Who wrote in 1975 that ‘an organization like the IRA attracts all the drop-outs and misfits that one would expect. The small-minded bigot, the petty intriguer, the low-sized and the low intellect trying to make themselves large with a gun. The neurotic that has failed in business or marriage through drink or instability and who loudly trumpets up ‘the cause’ and torrentially drowns whoever would oppose it. The fringe element which takes advantage of the disorders of the time to acquire some of the organization’s illicit skills and goes in for freelance robberies.’

6) Which party leader said about a ‘united Ireland’ during 1976: ‘We don’t use that term because of what it has come to mean for the Loyalist in the North-being submerged in a Catholic-type state of the South. Anyhow we are not looking for a unitary nation state. So to avoid misunderstanding we don’t use that phrase any more.’

7) What movement did An Phoblacht describe as being ‘in the Wolfe Tone tradition’ during 1974?

8) Which three Gaelic footballers were accused of manhandling hunger-strike protesters at Croke Park in April 1977?

9) Which newspaper carried an exclusive interview with several members of the Provisional IRA Army Council in September 1976?

10) Who wrote about Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1978 that ‘like all politically-inspired interpretations of history (his) revisionism involved not a little distortion as well as compromise with intellectual honesty…the logical outcome of this set of attitudes was the articulation of something like a neo-Unionist position…in short, whatever he perceives the nuances of his own thinking on Northern Ireland to be, his stance in practice is indistinguishable from that of Tory spokesmen like Mr. Airey Neave and, indeed, from the fatuities of the ‘two nations’ thesis, as enunciated by the British and Irish Communist Organization.’