British spy agency MI5 investigated Irish construction workers in England during the 1970s through a bogus consulting company and had them blacklisted with major employers as a result, the Irish Times has revealed.
The British Information Commissioner David Clancy told the House of Commons that a front organization called the Consulting Association was likely an MI5 front with the specific task of blacklisting Irish workers in Britain.
Members paid $5,000 for information from the Consulting Association which researched the background of workers for them.
Some of the major British construction companies were involved in the subsequent blacklisting, including Laing and McAlpine, who had many Irish workers seeking employment.
Clancy told the committee that the information on Irish workers was “highly personal” and included information about their wives, education, political leanings and even the cars they owned.
Unions were also involved in helping to screen Irish workers. There is evidence that one union sent names of Irish members to the Consulting Association “to screen out extremist elements operating without official union sanction.”
In July, nearly 90 workers launched a legal action against one firm listed, Robert McAlpine, alleging it had been involved in an unlawful conspiracy.
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.johnshiel | Oct 30, 2012, 09:44 AM EDT
submit to mind control in return for protected class status? Is that in the brochure about joining?
DanOLoingsigh | Oct 27, 2012, 04:26 AM EDT
Go Curtis!!! Those foreign peaceniks at Trafalgar (remembered as a square) and Waterloo (remembered as a rail station) really resent their portrayal as imperial stooges…no doubt you will find the real truth on youtube??
curtisjohnson | Oct 26, 2012, 09:28 PM EDT
@ToryTory "Shut up Curtis you bigoted racist." Yeah right - the whole ethos of your little terror state revolves around self congratulatory triumphalism celebrating your violence against predominantly non-combatants of other races/ethnicities. Your greatest hero, Churchill, was a vile racist/supremacist.
DanOLoingsigh | Oct 26, 2012, 06:30 PM EDT
IrelandNorth – Not sure what your complaint is re the pilgrims. Passengers travelling from and to most international airports will be ‘involuntarily photographed’ many times as they arrive or depart…same as mall shoppers and bank customers…and nearly all passports issued to the ICAO Standard (International Civil Aviation Organization) have an MRZ – Machine Readable Zone – which allows scanners to identify the holder, his nationality etc. Neither roman collars nor burkas afford any special exemptions to these minimal security standards these days.
ToryTory | Oct 26, 2012, 11:25 AM EDT
Who cares IrelandNorth - a singular incident, that's all.
DanOLoingsigh | Oct 26, 2012, 09:39 AM EDT
IrelandNorth – Not sure what your complaint is re the pilgrims. Passengers travelling from and to most international airports will be ‘involuntarily photographed’ many times as they arrive or depart…same as mall shoppers and bank customers…and nearly all passports issued to the ICAO Standard (International Civil Aviation Organization – a U.N. agency) have an MRZ – Machine Readable Zone – which allows scanners to identify the holder, his nationality etc. Neither roman collars nor burkas afford any special exemptions to these minimal security standards these days.
IrelandNorth | Oct 26, 2012, 07:03 AM EDT
In April 2009, approximately 32 Irish nationals returning to Ireland from pilgrimage to Holy Land, were involuntarily photographed, (having their Irish/EU passports bar code infra-red scanned into a British immigration database). This despite merely transiting through a UK airport on a British carrier. No satisfactory explantion from British Embassy in Dublin despite commitment to get back! A group of mainly senior citizens (including 2 RC priests)? Terrorist material?
ToryTory | Oct 26, 2012, 06:42 AM EDT
Shut up Curtis you bigoted racist.
IrelandNorth | Oct 26, 2012, 06:41 AM EDT
"The English are the most tolerant people on earth!" Even countenancing those ungrateful Paddies who had the temerity to decline their kind offer of enforced political union. A dubious onour not offered to just any old one - ya know! You've gotta be pretty special for old Anglo-Saxonia to covet the green and verdant plains of your old country. Besides, people are trying to move on by denying the past, emracing revisionist h[y]stery[ia], and it's middle classes actually having quasi-erotic fantasies of what it might have been like had we not left almost completely. Everyone should embrace vegetarianism.
curtisjohnson | Oct 25, 2012, 11:06 PM EDT
ancavker expresses pro-british sentiment exculpating the english from their innate and degenerate racism but this is still not good enough for the brit troll.
ToryTory | Oct 25, 2012, 05:51 PM EDT
Urgh, spare me your anecdotal drivel.
ancavker | Oct 25, 2012, 05:01 PM EDT
Tory Tory: Yes from family members living there, and from seeing it myself as I have been to England many, many times over the years including during the time of the bombing campaign.
aloistmartin | Oct 25, 2012, 04:37 PM EDT
How many Times do wee have to go though this ? Nigel Dodds calls them " Terrorists " But with the English ( And the Double Cream smearing Provisional Government at Dublin ) ready to send in the ever loving United States Marine Corp. And Barack Obama`s Lethal Weapons of Mutual Assured Destruction, in order to substantiate both Good Friday, and the filial, New Church, Recreant Pacifist, LGBT, Exploitationist Immigrant Economy; Isn`t it nice to know the I.R.A. is only One Pint of Double Stout, round the corner !
ToryTory | Oct 25, 2012, 12:54 PM EDT
Any evidence for that avcavker? The only backlash against the Irish in major cities - and Birmingham springs to mind - was on the back of IRA bombing campaigns, vividly illustrated in the anti-Irish demonstrations in the wake of the Birmingham Pub Bombings - quite understandable, if ill-directed, if you ask me.
ancavker | Oct 25, 2012, 12:16 PM EDT
The English people are very tolerant, the government as history has shown is another story. That siad the disastrous provo bombing campaign made lief very difficult for the Irish in England in those days. In fact they suffered more than the Irish in the 26 counties did.
YoungPike | Oct 25, 2012, 11:46 AM EDT
I can echo what brendan gillen has said.Having lived in England for most of my life, I can report that the majority of English people are open, tolerant and welcoming. Most of the anti- English bias on this site seems to come from Irish-Americans who have probably never visited the UK and are unlikely to ever do so. That's their loss!
Kilsally | Oct 25, 2012, 10:38 AM EDT
Of course they did - would be silly not to - the profile of an IRA bomber was 99.9% chance they were Irish (was a couple of others not Irish) and 99% chance they were Catholic (although not all Catholics supported the IRA, indeed many were Unionists)
puffin | Oct 25, 2012, 06:17 AM EDT
And I should hope so,probably saved lives too
ToryTory | Oct 25, 2012, 06:00 AM EDT
The English are incredibly tolerant - you ever been there, Curtis you little bigot?
anglo-norman | Oct 25, 2012, 05:12 AM EDT
It was a joke curtis about Iraq... chill out. Irony??
curtisjohnson | Oct 24, 2012, 10:57 PM EDT
Yes, you bombed Iraq which had absolutely no connection to the trade center attacks. In fact, the Iraqui government was vehemently opposed to the types of Saudi radicals that carried out the attack and frequenty executed them.
curtisjohnson | Oct 24, 2012, 10:55 PM EDT
Yes, you bombed Iraq which had absolutely no relation to the trade center attacks. In fact, Hussein was vehemently opposed to Islamic radicals and had them executed frequently.
anglo-norman | Oct 24, 2012, 10:13 PM EDT
Saudi Arabia? No we bombed Iraq instead.. Not all bombings in England were given advanced warnings "Warrington" etc
curtisjohnson | Oct 24, 2012, 09:22 PM EDT
"If it was the US instead of Britain back it the day Ireland would have been bombed off the map!! I wlived in England during those times & was ashamed at the targetting of innocent people. Plenty of Irish pubs blasting our rebel songs & holding fundraisers for the IRA." What a joke - you mean like Saudi Arabia was bombed off the map after Saudi hijackers orchestrated the trade center bombings? If the IRA targetted innocent people, why the warnings? Seems they could have done massive damage to innocents if they chose to. In contrast, the british terror state apparatus deliberately targetted non-combatants in the occupied 6 (and all over the world for that matter).
curtisjohnson | Oct 24, 2012, 09:18 PM EDT
"The English are the most tolerant people on the face of the earth" Comedy gold!!
seamus60 | Oct 24, 2012, 06:53 PM EDT
At least MI5 didn`t have any of their main intel centres based in the North of Ireland till SF got into power.
anglo-norman | Oct 24, 2012, 06:21 PM EDT
If it was the US instead of Britain back it the day Ireland would have been bombed off the map!! I wlived in England during those times & was ashamed at the targetting of innocent people. Plenty of Irish pubs blasting our rebel songs & holding fundraisers for the IRA.
anglo-norman | Oct 24, 2012, 06:10 PM EDT
Who should they have vetted the Welsh??
Towngate | Oct 24, 2012, 05:31 PM EDT
MI5 needn't have worried. The Irish construction overlords had their own sure-fire way of vetting their fellow-Irishmen before hiring them!
brendan gillen | Oct 24, 2012, 05:26 PM EDT
Forty years ago is a life time. I too worked in England and God Bless England for being there when I needed a job. I got well paid and the butcher shop I worked for were going to make me a rep. Meaning I would go around from store to store to make sure the meat was being cut correctly. Let's stop living in the past and get on with our lives.
ToryTory | Oct 24, 2012, 02:59 PM EDT
Well, understandable given the context; MI5 are, you know, an intelligence agency.
nanny2sorli | Oct 24, 2012, 01:01 PM EDT
My father never worked in construction, but we were visited by Special branch in 1972, and they repeated things that my parents had mentioned on the phone, we thought they were "tapping" it. (My parents, however, did belong to an Irish society that helped out Irish prisoners - in fact, the person who introduced my parents to this society was later murdered and there was suspicion that it was by the Special branch). We lived in a middle-size town in England, and I know of people my age (teenagers) who were refused jobs because they had an Irish back-ground. I learnt to hide it, and had assimilated so much that when I went to college in the 1990's and dressed in green for St Patrick's Day, a few people took me to task because I wasn't Irish!
Sparklet | Oct 24, 2012, 11:59 AM EDT
Forty years ago! People are trying to move on - why keep fanning the flames with these provocative articles. Is there some not so hidden agenda that's still trying to derail the peace process.
Sparklet | Oct 24, 2012, 10:48 AM EDT
This must be the dumbest article ever written. If there were car bombs being exploded in your back yard you bet you would look into the backyards to those who might be involved. Duh
Nicoletta | Oct 24, 2012, 10:28 AM EDT
I lived and worked thro the troubles, like many Irish, in London, when bombings were a regular occurrence. The store I worked in on Oxford Street (staffed largely by Irish btw) was often targeted for bomb threats (at least weekly). Of course MI5 ran checks on Irish people, it would be naive to assume anything else. We cancelled the Irish papers and kept our heads down and never encountered any prejudice. The English are the most tolerant people on the face of the earth - as my dad would often say.
cillowen | Oct 24, 2012, 10:12 AM EDT
would'nt u - can't allow their charges to go unnoticed - ur land is their land - proof offered, the fervor of the pouplace with the queen's visit this year. Similar to Victoria's in the height of the famine.
Murph46 | Oct 24, 2012, 09:56 AM EDT
This is freakin news?