The New Yorker:

In 1988, when the British government declared that the voices of Sinn Féin or I.R.A. leaders were not to be heard, broadcasters soon discovered a loophole.

Film by Roisin Agnew

In Dublin in 1981, at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis—an annual convention for what was widely regarded as the Irish Republican Army’s political wing—Danny Morrison, who had become Sinn Féin’s director of publicity two years earlier, set out a challenge: “Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”

It is easy to imagine how Margaret Thatcher, who became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, must have felt watching this. Her displeasure could only have increased in October, 1984, when the I.R.A. planted a bomb in a Brighton hotel that narrowly missed her. The I.R.A.’s statement in the aftermath—“Remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always”—made clear that she was dealing with a powerful enemy, as skilled at pithy and memorable statements as in the use of explosives. In a speech the following year, Thatcher said, “We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.” She called on the British media to self-regulate in order to prevent the kind of situation in which a spokesman for Sinn Féin could appear on television after an I.R.A. outrage and calmly claim that it was all in the name of Irish freedom. What happened next is the subject of Roisin Agnew’s incisive and sharply edited documentary film “The Ban.”

Go to link