Hey everyone Jody Avigan here on Sundays over the course of the summer July and August

We're going to be bringing you some of our favorite episodes from the Archives

You're still going to get brand new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we're giving ourselves a little bit of a break on Sundays running a previous episode.

It's still from around the same date, so it will still hook in in that way.

But look, we've done about 450 of these.

There's a good chance you haven't heard this one or haven't heard

it in a while and might want to re-listen. So here we go with a Sunday favorite from the

Archives. Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

This day, August 11th, 1973, Justice William Douglas of the Supreme Court grants bail to the so-called Fort Worth 5, a group of Irish-born New Yorkers jailed in Texas since January for refusing to answer a federal grand jury's

questions about illegal gun purchases. Their case had risen through the legal

ranks and gained a fair amount of press because the group had steadfastly refused to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries into gun shipments from America to Ireland.

These weapons were intended to help the IRA and the ongoing fight for Irish

independence. So here we have the Nixon administration going after American

citizens, run through the lens of the Irish independence movement, and I will say

that, you know, if you thought that the

decades long centuries long fight for Irish independence was a little confusing

with all the factions and splits and so forth now we get to throw on all sorts of

freedom fighters in the US and other sort of

factions and so forth so it is quite a interesting web but luckily someone has

done a fantastic job of reporting on that web there's a new podcast called

foreign agent reported and hosted by Nate

...