Dangerous fantasist abandoned by Branch
Máirtín Ó Muilleoir
Andersonstown News
27/11/2006
Eighteen-and-a-half-years ago, Michael Stone was a very dangerous psychopath because he was acting in consort with the forces of law and order (yes, the same forces of law and order we’re supposed to respect and swear allegiance to).
In his role as Branch hitman, he was facilitated in his attack on mourners in Milltown Cemetery in March 1988 which left three dead and over 60 wounded. The grenades he threw that day were brought in from South Africa by British Intelligence agent within the UDA Brian Nelson.
The sinister forces who ferried him into the West of the city that fateful day knew that, for the first time in a decade, the RUC would pull back from a republican funeral. Never properly explained was the presence of an unmarked RUC van on the hard shoulder of the M1 which watched the entire cowardly attack on the funeral of the Gibraltrar Three, driving off rather than making an arrest of the loyalist killer as he fled through the cemetery to the motorway.
As with most loyalist paramilitaries, when acting with the support and resources of his handlers, Michael Stone was a formidable killing machine, butchering unarmed Catholics at every turn for the best part of ten years.
Today, having been cast to the side by the Special Branch and Brit Intelligence who no longer need his brutish services, he is still the same sick, dangerous fantasist he was in 1988 — though the irony is that now he’s more a danger to himself than to others.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands