MICHAEL TATLOW - Australian writer & author

Michael Tatlow's ancestors came to Australia's island state of Tasmania from Ireland in the 1820s. 
Family circumstances, his father's death, caused Michael to leave school aged 15. He earned a living trapping rabbits and snaring wallabies. He crewed a boat catching sharks in the Southern Ocean before becoming a newspaper reporter in Tasmania.  He became News Editor and Acting Editor of Sydney's Sunday Telegraph, Chief-of-Staff and Pictorial Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a Chief-of-Staff of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television news team.

Now an historian, Michael has written five other books: Bloodhouse, A Walk in Old Sydney, A Tour of Old Tasmania, A Walk in Old Hobart and A Walk in Old Launceston. Michael, who lives in Hobart, Tasmania, has a son and daughter and six grandchildren. He has spent some time in Ireland.

The Irish Republican Army became involved in murderous attacks and bombings, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland exploded into outright armed rebellion. The year was 1969. 

A watching world was sickened as acts of depravity played out on their television screens. The conflict soon spilled into England, and support for the Republicans spread around the world to countries where the Irish had emigrated or been despatched as convicts. The IRA became infected by criminality. Money was raised by robbery and extortion. Bombing and shooting innocents in England, and torturing and killing defectors in its own ranks became the norm. Britain sent soldiers to Northern Ireland to stop the excesses on both sides that killed thousands and injured many thousands more. That much is history...

In August 1970, Britain's MI6 thrust into the bloody fray a young former commando, the ideologue Maurice Tansey, born in Britain to Irish Catholic supporters of the Cause. This is the true story of his amazing, life-threatening years as Britain’s first and only spy in the Provisional IRA which personified Ireland’s horrors. 

To maintain his cover, Tansey claims he was forced to participate in bombings, and murder with his then friend and senior IRA figure. 

Narrowly escaping death many times while saving lives with his alerts to MI6, his motivation was to minimise the number of both Catholic and Protestant innocents being killed, injured or anguished by the Troubles. He considers that If London had been less negligent and responded to more of his warnings of imminent atrocities, his life-saving total might have been greatly increased. The Secret Service had simply to telephone the British Army in Belfast and pass on Tansey’s information. Sadly, it seemed to Tansey that MI6 was more preoccupied with its then current game of outwitting the Soviet’s KGB. 

PUBLISHED USA
13 September 2014 
ISBN 978-1501085154
Limited Release
March 2015

PRINT Format:153 x 229 mm 
Extent 199pp 
HISTORICAL TRUE LIFE