I received a long-winded and rambling email the other day from someone I have crossed paths with on a number of occasions over the years, the documentary film-maker Sean Murray.
Sean was anxious to know whether I knew Clifford Peeples, popularly known to tabloid readers in Northern Ireland as the “pipe bomb pastor“. It seems he’s making another documentary on his muse and wanted to know the nature of my dealings with him.
Like many journalists and academics who have worked on the Northern Ireland conflict, I do indeed know Clifford Peeples.
And he has – like a lot of other people I know back home – ‘a past’.
Peeples’ involvement in loyalist political activism and militancy over several decades is well-known and documented.
He has always been an unapologetic opponent of the Provisional IRA and the process by which they were brought in from the cold by the British government in the 1990s.
Clifford’s extreme opposition to what he called the “sell out and surrender” of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) led to him being arrested and convicted of possessing two grenades and an pipebomb in suspicious circumstances in late October 1999.
Peeples was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in 2001.
The judge accepted Peeples and his co-accused were transporting the bombs but had no intent to use them.
These days, like a number of rehabilitated ex-political prisoners, Clifford has become an accredited journalist and researcher who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of our troubled past.
He has worked with many other journalists, academics and researchers in Northern Ireland and beyond and shares his contacts and knowledge generously.
That does not mean he is universally popular.
Some journalists dislike him so much they have reportedly engaged in threats and intimidation towards him.
In 2013 Peeples was attacked in Belfast city centre by another journalist.
The veteran Irish Times and Sunday Tribune correspondent Ed Moloney was so incensed by the incident he wrote a piece on his Broken Elbow blog rebuking Clifford’s assailant.
Moloney said he would have no problem entertaining Clifford as a dinner guest, acknowledging, like most of us in the writing profession, that journalism and politics go together ‘like fish and chips’.
“I have spent much of my professional life breaking bread or ingesting stronger substances with greater and more mendacious blackguards than he, and while I have never met Mr Peeples, he strikes me from a distance as an honest type” – Ed Moloney on Clifford Peeples (2013)
Peeples is also well-known to republicans.
Some see him as a loyalist bogeyman; others, including dissident republicans, regard him as a loyalist hard-liner and, remarkably, have engaged with him.
In August 2020 he was a guest speaker at the Republican Sinn Féin conference at Conway Mill in west Belfast where he joined a panel to talk about Éire Nua.
According to one of my friends who was involved in the organisation of the conference, Clifford reportedly told the audience how Éire Nua died when the Provos massacred ordinary Protestants during the Troubles.
He reminded them they all shared the same blood and genetic makeup as those they regarded as planters.
It was a bold play considering some in the audience had been in Maghaberry with him in the early 2000s and were painfully reminded of his reputation when they clashed with him in Bann House.
Nevertheless, I’m reliably informed by one of the organisers that all members of the organising committee – bar one – agreed to him speaking and they were genuinely amazed he came along.
Peeples hit the news headlines in 2023 when it was reported that he went to Ukraine in what he described to journalist Hugh Jordan as a ‘humanitarian aid mission‘.
Peeples was in the news again in 2024 when he was arrested at his home on suspicion of fomenting unrest in the wake of the Southport riots.
Cynically the arrest took place on the 53rd anniversary of the launch of internment without trial when loyalists and republicans were detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, some for several years.
On that day in August 2024 it must have seemed to local loyalists like a rerun of that infamous day decades earlier, with some reports saying it took 27 police officers and a dozen land rovers from the PSNI’s Tactical Support Group to take him into custody. He was subsequently released without charge, with the Public Prosecutions Service informing him he had no case to answer.
Peeples told The Times afterwards, he had been questioned for two days “over four social media posts”. He said one related to the Southport attacks “expressed concern for the safety of police officers” and claims that police did not explain how it was incendiary. The one social media post that apparently offended the person who reported him was a YouTube video (now removed) fronted by that well-known purveyor of alternative thinking at the Spectator Douglas Murray! Intriguingly another post by Peeples expressed his concern for police officers having to deal with the deteriorating situation across the UK.
In July 2025 Peeples’s home was fire-bombed and he was nearly killed. One line of enquiry about the motive was he had angered associates of the Provisional IRA because of his advocacy on behalf of families who had their loved ones murdered by the group during the Troubles.
In true Peeples style he told Hugh Jordan it is this work that has exposed him to danger, not only from those associated with Provo death squads but also ‘elements within loyalism who have become embedded with republicans’.
To say Clifford Peeples is an implacable opponent of the Provisionals and their political wing Sinn Féin is probably an understatement.
I was first introduced to him over a decade ago by my dear friend, the late journalist Lyra McKee. I remember how, at first, I refused to even entertain the notion. It quickly dawned on me how I was once given advice about having to talk to those we do not agree with so as to get a better understanding of where they were coming from that I agreed.
In a blog post I published last December, I explained how around that time I asked Clifford to assist me with my research into the murder of UVF commander John Bingham on 14 September 1986.
Bingham was killed by a Provisional IRA death squad from Ardoyne.
Clifford had contact with Bingham’s daughter Elizabeth and I helped her to get access to her father’s inquest file.
She then asked him to write a narrative of what happened to her father, subsequently published as The Bingham Report.
It was the first of several reports Clifford would compile on the murder of loyalists that uncovered suspected collusion between the Provos and the British state.
Peeples’ work was – and is – based on a rigorous academic methodology tempered with good old-fashioned investigative journalism. Coincidentally, it even preempted the conclusions reached in the final report of Operation Kenova.
I think it is fair to say Clifford Peeples and I do not share the same politics or views about the peace process. He is on the right of the political spectrum and opposed the Agreement. I am the complete opposite.
Readers of this blog and my work will know that I was an early proponent of the Belfast Agreement and the peace process.
I worked alongside prominent PUP members Billy Mitchell, Billy Hutchinson, Dawn Purvis and David Ervine, among many others, in their attempts to engage the UVF and RHC in dialogue to transform these terror groups beyond violence.
It’s how I cut my teeth in terms of the peace-building work I did in my twenties and, later, when I assisted the PUP in terms of policy development and political education.
I have written unashamedly about my involvement in this work and of my left-leaning politics at the time.
Guilty by Association?
In the course of my peacebuilding and academic work I was introduced to former members of the Official and Provisional IRAs and other republican groups and have maintained good working relations with them over the past 25 years.
Two of my oldest friends were members of the Officials imprisoned in Long Kesh compounds in the 1970s.
Among those who I have also interviewed or interacted with in the course of my work are two well-known figures from the (Provisional) Republican Movement, Danny Morrison and Sean ‘Spike’ Murray.
As you can see from the photograph below, taken in 2015, I have occasionally joined them on social occasions.
Spike Murray was convicted on explosives charges in March 1982. His IRA ‘bombing team’ were caught in possession of two beer keg bombs, which was traced back to a massive bomb-making factory containing over two tonnes of explosives. I know from my own historical research that the intelligence agencies were on his trail for several years prior to his arrest.
My sources have confirmed to me over the years that after his release Murray allegedly worked his way up the ranks of the IRA’s Northern Command, serving as Second in Command to Martin McGuinness in the 1990s.
Spike later became a key proponent of the Sinn Féin peace strategy and remains a central figure in the Republican Movement to this day.
I remember Spike telling me over a decade ago that the peace process was ‘the only show in town’ when we spoke about community tensions and dynamics.
Although my recollection of our conversation then is a little hazy, he may even have offered to speak to my students to communicate his political views. I’ll leave the reader to judge whether this was said in jest.
What I do know is he was always helpful, for as long as I have known him. The first time I met him was in 2005 when I stepped in for my friend Stephen Bloomer for a few weeks at Interaction Belfast. My job was to act as the lead on a special “research project” for Roisin McGlone and Spike who were attempting to manage issues connected to the Whiterock parade. It was a particularly tense time and the talks collapsed into the worst violence the city had seen in years.
I learned a lot about the failure of conflict mediation when trust is lost.
As a senior academic at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for almost twenty years I have continued to build and maintain a wide and diverse range of contacts for my research.
Any casual reader of my work will see I rely on oral testimonies of those involved in paramilitary violence to a considerable extent.
Sometimes that has meant interacting with people who have been involved in some horrendous things.
I know many people reading this will be abhorred that I have no qualms interacting with former gunmen and bombers but sometimes, in order to gain insight into the thoughts and actions of people involved in terrorism and extremism, you have to talk to them.
That doesn’t mean you agree with what they did – or are alleged to have done – it simply means you are unafraid to ‘look them in the whites of their eyes’ to borrow a phrase from my late friend Billy Mitchell, all in the pursuit of the truth.
As I have said on countless occasions in multiple fora, academic researchers do not seek to excuse but explain so that we can get a firmer understanding of radicalisation, extremism and terrorism and take steps to stop it.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
An old friend of mine who was a fairly senior member of the Provisional IRA’s GHQ once jokingly called me “the man who knew too much.” I would qualify this by arguing that I am probably the man who knew too many people!
Readers will be able to see the reality of my ability to access and speak to a wide range of people when they come to read my next book, Enemies Within, a major study of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair and his infamous C Company paramilitary gang.
It has been said that Adair, who is rarely out of the news headlines, was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of people in the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet, I was able to look at his role from a complete 360 degree perspective.
Deciding I wouldn’t talk to anyone because of who they were or what they were suspected of doing or had done would have meant being unable to answer so many questions for those who lost loved ones at the hands of Adair’s gang.
On the other hand, the book I am currently working on is about the Provisional IRA’s abduction, torture, murder and disappearance of Captain Robert Nairac GC. It has meant accessing a wide range of interviewees, including those from the republican community. They have brought me into their confidence so that I can tell a more rounded story of their experiences of South Armagh in the 1970s.
If a lifetime of interacting with a broad range of people who played a part in our Troubles means I am guilty by association then so be it.
Presumably that also includes Sean’s father?
