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Biography:Francis Stuart had a gun. The location was Liberty Hall. The occasion was a staged reading of his play, Who Fears to Speak, which had been accepted, then rejected, by the Abbey Theatre because of its "propogandist outlook on modern Ireland".

The reason for the rejection was made plain when Stuart strode on to the stage and produced the gun. The audience applauded what was plainly a symbolic gesture: a reaffirmation by a writer with a revolutionary past of the validity of the gun in contemporary politics. The date, December 1st, 1970, was significant: exactly a fortnight earlier the Provisional IRA had gunned down two Catholic men in Belfast. According to Lost Lives by David McKittrick et al, it was the first time the IRA had murdered civilians "alleged to have been involved in criminality". The wife of one victim said of the murderer: "I think that person must be very sick."