Greenslade pours oil on Troubles waters

After resigning as a visiting professor at City University in March after admitting to supporting IRA terrorists in the 1970s, Roy Greenslade has now popped up again in the institute’s student magazine XCITY. In an interview with budding hacks, published this month, the former Guardian media commentator claims that ‘given that it was more than 20 years since the end of the IRA’s military campaign, it didn’t strike me as being unduly controversial.’

Greenslade’s original confession was revealed in February in an article for the British Journalism Review (BJR) in which he said he was ‘in complete agreement about the right of the Irish people to engage in armed struggle’ and that ‘the fight between the forces of the state and a group of insurgents was unequal and therefore could not be fought on conventional terms… I supported the use of physical force.’ He provided bail surety for an IRA man accused of involvement in the 1982 Hyde Park bombing and also admitted engaging in ‘subterfuge’ while he was a senior executive on The Sunday Times to try to influence its coverage of the ‘murders of three IRA volunteers’ who were shot by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.