2025-12-30
9 分钟Hi there, it's Jason Palmer here,
co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
This is Editor's Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist, read aloud.
Enjoy.
Martin McAllister risked his life to kill British soldiers.
As an old man, he risks the wrath of his former comrades to help find the body of a British soldier.
When he joined the Irish Republican Army, the IRA,
he believed that he was part of a heroic struggle to drive the British out of Northern Ireland.
But the IRA's slaughter of ten young Protestant civilians in the 1976 Kingsmill massacre shook his belief that the IRA was romantic,
chivalric, holy.
After Mr.
McAllister was shot by British soldiers he was attacking,
he had an epiphany when a Royal Marine's medic saved his life.
It was that man's actions which he now viewed as chivalric.
In 1977 a Grenadier Guardsman attached to Britain's Special Forces,
Robert Nairak, was abducted, tortured and murdered by the IRA.
His death endures as one of the most infamous atrocities carried out during the thirty years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland,
known as the Troubles, in which more than 3,500 people were killed.
Nairak's body was disappeared by the IRA to instill fear.