Danny Morrison IRA Sinn Fein

Morrison is a former internee who later went on the run. He has, in common with other Sinn Feiners, believing in the political and "armed struggle" going together, something which he encapsulated in the declaration that the movement will advance "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other." (Sunday Times 8.5.83), in the same way that IRA bombings and shootings are designed to do.

Danny Morrison was born in Belfast in 1953. He was interned in Long Kesh in 1972 and after his release became editor of the Sinn Fein newspaper, 'Republican News', at the age of 22, during an IRA ceasefire in 1975. In 1978 he was charged with IRA membership and conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice. He defended himself in court and was granted bail. The charges were withdrawn in February 1979. In 1982 he was elected in Mid-Ulster to the Northern Ireland Assembly on an abstentionist ticket. He was national director of publicity for Sinn Fein from 1979 until his arrest in January 1990 in connection with the abduction of Sandy Lynch, an IRA informer for which he was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment. During the 1981 hunger strikes he was a spokesperson for IRA Volunteer Bobby Sands MP and later that year during a crucial debate at Sinn Fein's annual conference (the árd fheis) called for the party to embrace electoral politics, coining the phrase which was to sum up the Republican Movement's strategy of going forward with "an armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other."

Two of Morrison's sisters married British soldiers.

A good source has alleged Morrison's uncle, Harry White, was IC of IRA "Northern Command" in the 1940s, and that Morrison has said that his uncle had a pistol in Belfast in 1969.

Apart from his activities as scibe for SFIRA, Morrison is also allege to have been involved in the torture and murder of Republicans suspected of cooperating with the authorities.(Army, RUC)

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