Background
Murphy was an active Irish republican paramilitary from his late teens. In March 1972 he was arrested in Dundalk regarding an assault, and was sentenced to two years in prison after the Gardaí found a loaded revolver in his car. Murphy was imprisoned in the Curragh military jail but escaped in October 1972, and was not recaptured until May 1973. In June 1976 he was imprisoned again, receiving a three-year sentence for firearms offences and a one-year sentence for Provisional Irish Republican Army membership, both sentences to run concurrently. In July 1983 Murphy was arrested in the US, after attempting to buy a consignment of M60 machine guns to be shipped to Ireland for use by the Irish National Liberation Army. He received a five-year prison sentence, but returned to Ireland in December 1985 after being released early.
In the late 1980s Murphy began investing in property, and formed a company named Emerald Enterprises in 1990. He bought the Emerald Bar public house in Dundalk for IR£100,000, and it later became a meeting place for dissident republicans. Other investments included 30 acres (120,000 m2) of land in Drogheda bought for IR£52,000 in 1995, and his company won contracts for an IR£11m development at Dublin City University and the multi-million pound International Financial Services Centre in Dublin's docklands.
Read more about this topic: Colm Murphy
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)