Seán Mac Stíofáin

Seán Mac Stíofáin (born John Edward Drayton Stephenson; 17 February 1928 – 18 May 2001) was an English-born chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, a position he held between 1969 and 1972.

Although he used the Gaelicised version of name in later life, Mac Stíofáin was born John Edward Drayton Stephenson in Leytonstone, London, in 1928. An only child, his father was an English solicitor's clerk and his mother a Londoner of Ulster Protestant east Belfast descent. He stated his mother had left an impression on him at the age of seven with her instruction:

"I'm Irish, therefore you're Irish… Don't forget it."

His childhood was marred by his alcoholic father. His mother, who doted over her son, died when Mac Stíofáin was 10. Mac Stíofáin attended Catholic schools, where he came into contact with pro-Sinn Féin Irish students.^{[citation needed]}

He left school in 1944 at the age of 16 and worked in the building trade, before being conscripted into the Royal Air Force in 1945. He attained the rank of corporal. After leaving the RAF, he returned to London where he became increasingly involved with Irish organisations in Britain. He first joined Conradh na Gaeilge (Gaelic League), then the Irish Anti-Partition League, bought (and later sold) the United Irishman, joined Sinn Féin in London, and eventually in 1949 helped to organise a unit of the IRA. He first met his wife, Máire, who was from Castletownroche, County Cork. Mac Stíofáin then began work for British Rail.

On 25 July 1953, Mac Stíofáin took part in an IRA arms raid on the armoury of the Officers' Training Corps at Felsted School in Essex. The IRA obtained over 108 rifles, ten Bren and eight Sten guns, two mortars and dummy mortar bombs in the raid. The police seized the van carrying the stolen weapons some hours later, due to it being so overloaded that it was going at about 20 mph on the Braintree bypass with a queue of traffic behind it. On 19 August 1953, he was sentenced, along with Cathal Goulding and Manus Canning, to eight years' imprisonment by a court in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. It was in the run-up to the raid that Mac Stíofáin learned his first few words of Irish from Cathal Goulding. He later became fluent in the language.

While incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton prisons, he learned not only a smattering of Greek from the Cypriot EOKA prisoners (he befriended Nikos Sampson) but also "the realities of an anti-British rule guerrilla campaign".

Upon being granted parole in 1959, Mac Stíofáin went to the Republic of Ireland with his wife and young family and settled in Dublin, and later Navan, and became known under the Irish version of his name. This was not his first visit to the country, and he had been to Ireland a month before the Felsted raid in 1953. He worked as a salesman for an Irish-language organisation. He remained active in the IRA and gave the Bodenstown oration in 1959. He was uneasy with the left-wing political direction – under way from 1964 – his erstwhile friend and IRA chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, was bringing to the IRA. Appointed IRA Director of Intelligence in 1966, Mac Stíofáin continued to voice his opposition to the Goulding line and was gaining support among members. Despite his hostility to the left-wing direction, he was prominent in agitations in Midleton against ground-rent landlordism, the Dublin Housing Action Committee and against foreign buy-outs of Irish farmland in County Meath, where he moved with his family in 1966.