Danny Morrison

Daniel Gerard Morrison (born 9 January 1953) is an Irish former Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer, author and activist who played a crucial role in public events during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. An Irish republican, Morrison is also a former Sinn Féin publicity director and editor of Republican News and An Phoblacht. He is the secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust and current chairman of Féile an Phobail, the largest community arts festival in Ireland. Biography Early life Morrison was born in staunchly Irish nationalist Andersonstown, Belfast, on 9 January 1953, to Daniel and Susan Morrison. His father worked as a painter at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in East Belfast. The Morrisons were a strongly republican family originally from Massereene Street in West Belfast. His uncles had been jailed for their part in the IRA's Northern Campaign in the 1940s; one of his uncles was Harry White, a prominent IRA member from a previous generation. Morrison joined Sinn Féin in 1966 and helped to organise 50th anniversary commemorations of the Easter Rising in Belfast. At this time, he later recalled, "as far as we were concerned, there was absolutely no chance of the IRA appearing again. They were something in history books". Provisional IRA After the 1969 Northern Ireland riots, in which nationalist areas of Belfast were attacked and burned, he joined the newly formed Provisional IRA. He believed that, "the IRA had been deliberately run down, so that when August 1969 came, there was little or no defence [of nationalist areas]'...[so] a new IRA was built to ensure that nationalists were never left defenceless again". After this, he was engaged in clandestine republican activities, but as late as 1971, was still attending Belfast College of Business Studies and editing a student magazine there. Morrison was interned in Long Kesh in 1972.