Gavin’s Blog suggests that a website should be established to keep track of Michael McDowell’s actions. Yet given the spate of revelations about his past, it is arguable that there’s enough material to fuel a site chronicling the doings, past and present, of Frank Connolly. For example, The Sunday Independent (seen in some quarters as mouthpiece for the State’s “security apparatus”) reported on Connolly’s involvement in a groupuscule with the faintly ludicrous name of “Revolutionary Struggle”. This would seem a pretty innocuous example of a student playing Wolfie Smith if it were not for the fact that this group was linked to a bizarre and sinister incident that occurred in 1981 when a British Leyland executive, Geoffrey Armstrong, was shot three times in the leg while addressing “the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Trinity’s arts block.”The Indo recounts that three men wearing balaclavas entered the room while Mr. Armstrong was speaking:

“According to reports, a gunman shouted: “Everybody freeze, nobody move, this action is in support of the H-Blocks.” Mr Armstrong was shot three times in the leg.A far-left organisation, known as Revolutionary Struggle – in which Mr Connolly was involved – was blamed for the shooting. Mr Connolly, then aged 27, was among several members of the extremist group to be arrested and questioned about the shooting.

Whoever was behind the shooting, one wonders what they hoped to achieve by inflicting such a cruel punishment on the apparently blameless executive of a car company. Perhaps, from their fevered reading of Gramsci, the gunmen thought that striking at Britain’s economic structure would destabilise the superstruture of British colonialism as manifested in Northern Ireland. But if they really wanted to damage the British economy, wouldn’t it actually have made more sense to allow a executive of British Leyland–a company that more than any other blackened the name of British manufacturing–to go about their business unharmed?Such a convoluted argument, however, would most likely have been lost on characters itching to play out their childhood Starsky-and-Hutch fantasies by walking into a room and shouting “Everybody freeze, nobody move.”