The Day Tehran Falls

Some in Ireland and Britain Will Have Explaining to Do

The odious regime in Tehran will fall.

The archives will open.

And when they do we will discover exactly who in the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland has been on the Islamic Republic’s payroll, taken its junkets, appeared on its propaganda channels or acted as its willing propagandists. Those individuals should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.

In 2020 MI5 and Irish authorities smashed a dangerous plot. Former Provisional IRA members had reached out to Hezbollah to arm and finance the New IRA. Their shopping list included advanced Iranian bomb-making technology from Lebanon, designed to turn Northern Ireland police armoured vehicles into Swiss cheese.Nine people were arrested, including two women and Palestinian doctor Issam Hijjawi Bassalat, who faced charges of preparatory acts of terrorism after allegedly briefing the group on Palestinian tactics.

Security sources revealed that at least two of those arrested had attended a ceremony at the Iranian embassy in Dublin honouring the slain IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani while also paying tribute to IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. A grim reminder of the long friendship between Iranian theocrats and Irish republicans.This was not a one-off.

The links go back to the 1980s. After the Iranian Revolution the regime helped create and train Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Some Provisional IRA members travelled there for training and tactical advice. Tehran has viewed Irish republican violence as a useful front against the West for over forty years.The same pattern is now playing out openly in France.

A detailed report by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security lays out Iran’s opaque strategy of entrism. Ideology is dressed up as anti-imperialism and Palestinian solidarity. Proxy violence is outsourced to criminals and terrorists. Political division is sown to weaken democracies. Iranian agents recruit through student unions, flood protest marches with regime flags, hire thugs for arson and assassinations, and even swap hostages for released agents. French security agencies call it the mécanique du chaos. Bringing chaos without waging open war.

MI5 has already tracked more than twenty potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the United Kingdom since 2022, many using criminal proxies to target dissidents, journalists and Jewish communities. The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee warned in 2025 that Iran poses a wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable threat. The same Great Game of influence is almost certainly being played on the streets of every western capital including Dublin and Belfast.

Why are so many Irish and British politicians, activists and public figures so willing to stand up for and defend a regime that is literally evil. A theocracy that hangs gay people from cranes, stones women for immodesty, executes dissidents, sponsors global terrorism and stands in complete opposition to the progressive, left-wing values these people claim to champion.

Take Seán Murray, the Belfast documentary filmmaker best known for Unquiet Graves. In May 2024 he was a special guest in Tehran alongside a sanctioned Wagner group figure. He refused to say whether Iran was paying him. By 2025 he had co-produced the three-part Press TV documentary The Emerald Resistance. Ireland’s Voice for Palestine with comedian Tadhg Hickey. Straight propaganda for the regime’s English-language channel.Tadhg Hickey himself jetted to Tehran for a regime-friendly film festival in 2024, chanted Death to Israel in Farsi on the streets and boasted about his anti-imperialist trip.

Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, the former MEPs and sitting TDs (The equivelent of MPs in the UK) famous for their hard-left anti-Western stance, have made repeated pilgrimages to Iran. In 2025 they flew to Yemen to meet the Iran-backed Houthis, accepted the Martyr Ismail Haniyeh Special Award in Tehran and enjoyed personal tours of Iranian military museums with IRGC generals, posing with missiles and drones while the regime’s human-rights abuses continued. Even Seán Ó Fearghaíl, long-serving Ceann Comhairle (Speaker of the Dáil), has praised Tehran’s cordial and historic relations with Ireland.

The pattern runs deeper with Sinn Féin, Ireland’s largest republican party and former political wing of the Provisional IRA. In 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, the party quietly deleted thousands of old press statements and policy documents from its website that had shown sympathetic or soft positions towards Putin and Russian narratives. The party claimed it was simply updating the site.

Sinn Féin MEPs have repeatedly abstained or voted against major EU financial support packages for Ukraine. Senior figures, including First Minister Michelle O’Neill, have criticised UK and US responses to Iranian aggression while expressing sympathy for Tehran.

An Phoblacht, the party’s newspaper, has a long record of soft coverage towards Iran and Hezbollah, framing them as fellow anti-imperialist fighters.Across the Irish Sea the same names keep appearing. Jeremy Corbyn received payments for appearances on Press TV between 2009 and 2012, long after Ofcom had sanctioned the channel for broadcasting forced confessions obtained under torture.

Ken Livingstone appeared on the same channel on Holocaust Memorial Day to debate whether the Holocaust had been exploited to oppress others. John McDonnell has spoken at rallies where Iranian flags and Supreme Leader banners were openly displayed and has repeatedly urged restraint against Tehran.

Then there is Franck Magennis, the Dublin-born barrister and self-described communist working at Garden Court Chambers in London. He was part of the legal team that applied to de-proscribe Hamas. In recent tweets he told a woman who lost family on 7 October you are an apologist for apartheid and genocide. The reckoning is coming. He warned Elbit Systems UK we are gonna fucking destroy you. Tiocfaidh ár lá (our day will come, a slogan used by the IRA during the Troubles), you Zionist scum. His chambers publicly distanced itself and condemned racism and antisemitism.

Even newer faces raise questions. Green Party leader Zack Polanski, a gay Jewish former Lib Dem, publicly backed the 2023 Woman Life Freedom protests in Iran. Yet this year his own deputy was photographed at a pro-regime demonstration in London.

In March 2023 he posted strongly in support of the Iranian people during the Woman Life Freedom protests. ‘‘The Iranian people in huge numbers are asking us to be our voice, he wrote. We must do far more to support fundamental rights in Iran. And the Iranian Regime must stop the arrests, detentions and executions’’. Polanski himself is a gay Jewish man who was once a Liberal Democrat councillor with pro-Israel views. He has never been a member of any traditional far-left group. No Marxist, Trotskyist or Maoist past. In a few short years he has moved from the Lib Dems to become the effective leader of Britain’s far left.

During the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election the Green campaign used Urdu-language videos and heavy Palestine messaging that critics said had little to do with the daily concerns of local constituents.

Then there is Zarah Sultana, the independent MP for Coventry South. Until recently she had very little to say publicly about Northern Ireland. In June 2025 she travelled to Derry, delivered a detailed lecture at the Museum of Free Derry to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Saville Report on Bloody Sunday, and met members of the Bloody Sunday Trust. Shortly afterwards she made a highly detailed speech in the House of Commons attacking the Ministry of Defence for funding legal defence in the Soldier F trial. She questioned whether it amounted to a two-tier justice system.

For decades British soldiers and police officers who served in Northern Ireland have been dragged through the courts under the Equality Act and human-rights legislation. The Troubles are being refought in the courtroom. The soldiers and police cannot fight back in the same way.

Compare that to real attempts at closure elsewhere. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission wrapped up its work in just seven years at a fraction of the cost. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders were completed in under a year. Yet the Northern Ireland legacy process has already rumbled on for nearly four decades. Public inquiries alone (Saville, Finucane and others) plus inquests, civil actions and the PSNI legacy unit have already cost the taxpayer well over one billion pounds, with independent estimates putting the total burden (past and future) at more than two billion pounds*. Mind-boggling sums for what often feels like selective justice aimed at one side only.

The inevitable outcome is clear. Young men will stop joining the armed forces. Why risk your life and your liberty when, thirty or forty years later, you could still face relentless legal pursuit? If a government cannot recruit an army, it cannot defend its borders or its citizens. At that point it is no longer a country.

Are there deeper connections running through all of this? The human-rights lawyers, the lawfare groups, the Corbyn circle, the McDonnells, the Franck Magennises, the republican networks, the Palestinian cause, the old Soviet sympathy (the Soviet Union publicly condemned Britain’s handling of the troubles relentlessly through state media like Pravda) and now the Iranian and Russian influence operations all seem to overlap. The Provisional IRA’s international web was highly sophisticated.

Brian Keenan, the man who personally met Gaddafi in Tripoli in 1972 to secure the first big Libyan arms shipments, also built contacts in East Germany. Libyan officials later admitted that initial IRA contact had been “arranged through the Soviet Union.” Many of the weapons that reached the IRA from Libya were in fact Soviet-made. Gaddafi may have been the front-man, but Moscow was never far from the picture.

Even the Workers’ Party, once the political wing of the Official IRA, acquired sophisticated printing equipment in Dublin in the 1980s. Gardaí later raided linked facilities and found counterfeit currency. Years afterwards the party’s leader Sean Garland faced US indictment for distributing North Korean “supernotes” – near-perfect fake $100 bills. Another group, another set of strange international connections.

As early as 1970 the IRA swapped weapons with the Basque Terror group ETA. By the 2000s the network had spread to Colombia, where IRA members were caught training FARC guerrillas in bomb-making. From Libya to Lebanon, from the Basque country to the jungles of South America, the same faces and the same causes kept reappearing.

Every archived An Phoblacht article, every deleted Sinn Féin statement, every Press TV appearance, every junket to Tehran, every court case funded against veterans; they all add up to a pattern.When the mullahs finally crumble, and crumble they will, the archives will spill their secrets.

The payments, the junkets, the private meetings, the propaganda tours, the whispered arrangements and the networks will come to light. The people of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom deserve to know who was really on which side all along.

Yes this is all wildly speculative, but Britain and the West have enemies and we should always remember that our enemies have agency of their own and birds of a feather will flock together.

The questions here are real, urgent and long overdue answers.

The day of reckoning may be closer than many in Dublin or Westminster realise. When it arrives, convenient amnesia and selective blindness will no longer be enough.

---

*[1] Policy Exchange, The £2 Billion+ Cost of Legacy in Northern Ireland (published 10 February 2025).
https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/the-2-billion-cost-of-legacy-in-northern-ireland/
[2] Ibid. (full breakdown on pages 4–6 of the PDF report).
Direct PDF download: https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/The-2-Billion-Cost-of-Legacy-in-Northern-Ireland.pdf