1. Early life

2. Irish Republican paramilitary activity

3. Post-paramilitary life

4. References

5. External links

Early life

Conway was born and spent his childhood in Dublin, Ireland. He came from a middle-class family, and received his formal education at Blackrock College,^[2] and was a Law undergraduate at University College Dublin in the late 1960's.^[3]

Irish Republican paramilitary activity

Whilst at university at the end of the 1960's Conway became caught up in the then cultural zeitgeist of Proletarian revolution off the back of the Paris riots, and was influenced by the activities the South American revolutionary Che Guevara. In 1969 an outbreak of communal violence in Northern Ireland broke out, and drawn to the conflict as a means of expression for his radical politics, Conway traveled to England in 1970 to join an Official IRA unit that was setting up paramilitary operations there to wage war against the British State's presence in the island of Ireland in the form of the Northern Ireland state. His first activities in London with the IRA consisted of taking part in a series of armed robberies of banks to raise finances for the organization. In the early 1970's he attended IRA training camps back in the Irish Republic, where he received instruction in firearms and bomb making, and became a full-time paramilitary, taking part in many gun attacks upon the British Army and bombings in Northern Ireland.^[4]

In November 1971 he was arrested in the town of Londonderry by the Royal Ulster Constabulary for illegal firearms possession, and imprisoned in Long Kesh prison until September 1974, where he took part in protest hunger strikes.^[5][6] On being released from imprisonment in 1974, Conway was appointed by the newly formed "Provisional Irish Republican Army" (which he had joined after the faction had split from the "Official IRA") to organize from scratch a strategic level intelligence capability based in Dublin to assist in its operations. However his brief period in this role was hampered by the inherent parochialism of the PIRA, with its different units preferring to rely on their own information gathering resources in their individual localities for their gun and bombing attacks, and resenting what they regarded as outside interference from Conway's role in this regard.^[7] On learning of the 1974 PIRA bombing attacks on public houses in the English Midlands city of Birmingham, that killed and injured over 200 non-combatant civilians, Conway was "horrified", and left the PIRA in 1975 in consequence. (Conway later stated that Dáithí Ó Conaill told him that the "early indications" of why civilians were killed was due to phone boxes not working so the warning that was to be sent to evacuate the area was delayed).^[8]

He rejoined the PIRA in 1981 during the Irish Republican prisoners' hunger strike, and was active in the organization in the 1980's. He left the Provisional IRA on 15 December 1993, with conflicting sentiments upon the acceptance by its leadership of the terms of the "Downing Street Declaration" (i.e. that the governmental status of Northern Ireland could only be altered by the democratic decision of its population). In part he regarded the ending of the campaign by the PIRA leadership as a "betrayal" of its political objective of the eradication of the state of Northern Ireland and the acquisition of its territory by an Irish Republican state, but at the same time he recognized that the PIRA was faced with imminent military defeat by the United Kingdom's security forces in the early 1990's, and that calling a formal cessation of its campaign and a disciplined disbandment of itself whilst it still retained the authority of command for the decision, was an act of realpolitik on its leadership's part.^[9][10]

In retrospect on his life in Irish Republican paramilitarism Conway has stated that, although personally still believing in the political objective of a United Ireland, the ultimate defeat of the PIRA's military campaign to achieve it by revolutionary violence carries the consequence that he "wasted" 25 years of his life engaged in it, and that Nationalism, Irish or otherwise, and the Marxist Revolutionary movement of the 1960s-1980's were temporary ideologies that are now of the past. He has also stated that although not renouncing his actions in Irish Republican paramilitarism when viewed from their contemporary perspective, he wouldn't have engaged in it if he had known at the time that it would end in political failure, and that a "United Ireland" is unachievable as long as the Ulster Scots people oppose it.^[11][12]

Post-paramilitary life

After leaving Irish Republican paramilitarism in the mid-1990's Conway studied Law in Dublin, and qualified as a solicitor in 2004, specializing in Criminal Law in the Irish Republic, and later qualified as a barrister. In 2014 he established a law practise in Dublin.^[13] He published a memoir of his early life in the IRA/PIRA entitled: Southside Provisional: From Freedom Fighter to the Four Courts (2014).

In March 2019 Conway gave evidence at a public inquest into the 1974 Provisional IRA Birmingham pub bombing attacks, during which he described it as a "disaster", and "an IRA operation gone wrong". He described how the attack had been "accidental" in catching so many civilians due to an out of order public telephone delaying a warning being issued to the Birmingham police to evacuate the locations where PIRA members had left bombs. He further stated that deliberate targeting of civilians was forbidden at that time by order of the PIRA's leadership.^[14] Aspects of Conway's testimony to the Inquest have been called into question by other ex-members of the Provisional IRA.^[15]

References

External links

• kieranconway.ie

• Andrew Soltis
• Andrew Southcott
• Andrews' Raid
• Andrews Raid
• Andrews Raiders
• Andrews, SC
• Andrews Sisters
• Andrews, South Carolina
• Andrew S. Tanenbaum
• Andrew Stanton
• Andrew Steane
• Andrew Sterett
• Andrew Sterling
• Andrew Stern
• Andrew Stevens
• Andrew Stevenson
• Andrews, Texas
• Andrew Stoddart
• Andrew Strath
• Andrew Strauss
• Andrew Strominger
• Andrew Stronach
• Andrew Stuart Mackinlay
• Andrew Stunell
• Andrews, TX