When a Crackdown Involving the I.R.A. Backfired, Comically, in “The Ban”

Watch “The Ban”

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 lu