The Irishmen were escorted up a staircase and into a book-lined drawing room. Then William Whitelaw, Her Majesty’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, walked in and offered the men a genial greeting. Whitelaw was smooth and polished. He made a show of pronouncing Seán Mac Stíofáin’s adopted name correctly – a touch that Mac Stíofáin could not help but appreciate. But as they shook hands, Adams noticed that Whitelaw’s palms were sweating.
Whitelaw began by saying that, in light of the long history between England and Ireland, he could understand why his guests might regard the British with suspicion, but that he hoped that ‘in me, you will see a British minister you can trust’. That was the high point of the meeting. Mac Stíofáin had prepared a statement, which he proceeded to read out loud. It consisted of a list of demands: the Provos wanted a public declaration from the British government acknowledging the right of all Irish people – in the North and the South – to self-determination. They also wanted the British to declare their intent to withdraw all forces from Irish soil by 1 January 1975.
One of the British participants, an intelligence officer named Frank Steele, watched this presentation with quiet dismay. Mac Stíofáin was laying down his demands as if the IRA had already fought the British to a standstill. When Steele was initially sent to Northern Ireland, the view of the British government had been that it didn’t want to talk to the IRA – they wanted to defeat it. After the massacre on Bloody Sunday, many British officials were forced to realise that they were unlikely to win the war through military might alone. Steele had been working, in great secrecy, with the IRA representatives in advance of the meeting. He regarded these men with a certain disdainful amusement, particularly for their insistence on adopting the lingo and trappings of a conventional military organisation. ‘It was all rather sweet, really,’ Steele later observed. ‘They wanted to depict themselves as representing an army and not a bunch of terrorists.’
When the men strode into the meeting with Whitelaw and laid down their hard line, Steele found their posture to be hopelessly naïve. In demanding that the British withdraw from Northern Ireland, they were asking that the government give up the guarantee that it would not abandon the Protestant population in the North, a concession that it simply could not make. As the meeting progressed, Whitelaw grew frustrated. In his memoirs, he described the encounter as ‘a non-event’, sabotaged by the ‘absurd ultimatums’ of the IRA.
Gerry Adams said little during the meeting, but Steele watched the rangy, thoughtful young rebel and was impressed. He had been told that Adams represented the IRA in the North and that he was a senior officer in the Belfast Brigade. Steele had expected some arrogant, streetwise ruffian. But when he initially encountered Adams, at a preliminary meeting before the trip, he found him to be personable, articulate and self-disciplined. These were appealing qualities in an interlocutor, Steele thought, but they also made Adams a dangerously effective adversary. As Adams was leaving one of the preliminary meetings, Steele took him aside. ‘You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British,’ he said. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to go to university and get a degree,’ Adams replied.
‘We’re not stopping you,’ Steele pointed out. ‘Renounce violence and you can go to university.’
Adams grinned and said, ‘I’ve got to help to get rid of you British first.’
When the ceasefire was first declared that June, it had seemed to Brendan Hughes as though the war might soon be over. For people who had been on the run, the abrupt cessation of hostilities meant that they could venture out of hiding, go home, and reconnect with family. Ordinary civilians emerged, tentatively, from behind the barricades. It would be the first peaceful summer since the outbreak of violence three years earlier. Shops reopened. There was a sense of tentative optimism in the air.
For Hughes, the ceasefire meant that he could spend time with his new wife. In early 1972, just before his twenty-fourth birthday, he had married a local girl named Lily, who was nineteen. By the time the truce began, Lily was pregnant. Brendan’s father had disapproved of the union, on the grounds that Brendan could never be a husband to Lily in any conventional way. Having a family could be dangerous for a man on the run. Gerry Adams had also recently married, and it was because he was married that the authorities had been able to capture him and lock him up on the Maidstone: they had targeted the house where his wife, Colette, was living, and raided it on a night when Adams had sneaked in for a visit. Brendan’s wife, Lily, grew accustomed to raids by British troops who were looking for her fugitive husband. It made her too anxious to sleep at night, fearful that the door might be kicked in at any moment.
The truce meant that Brendan could slow down and see Lily. They could pretend for a while that they had a normal relationship. But the peace lasted scarcely two weeks. After the inconclusive talks in London, the parties had agreed to meet a second time, but the meeting never happened. On the ninth of July, fighting broke out once more, on Lenadoon Avenue, after the army refused to allow Catholic refugees to take up residence in homes that had been abandoned by Protestants. Announcing an end to the truce, Seán Mac Stíofáin said that he had instructed his men to resume their campaign of violence with the ‘utmost ferocity’. An order was passed down the chain of command until it reached Brendan Hughes: Get back to work.
Hughes set about planning one of the Provos’ most ambitious operations. A key element of the IRA’s strategy had been to detonate bombs in commercial districts in Northern Ireland. Because most businesses were owned by unionist or British companies, and because the government controlled the infrastructure, an attack on commercial property was regarded as a direct hit at the enemy. These operations may have been staged in civilian areas, but Hughes and his fellow rebels insisted that they were not directed at civilians. The point was to destroy property, not to murder people. Warnings were called in to the police and the media in advance of the blasts so that civilians could (in theory) vacate the area. Of course, these warnings had an added propaganda value: a panicked news bulletin alerting shoppers that the city was about to blow up only magnified the spectacle of each bomb.
One Friday that July, an IRA team planted nearly two dozen bombs – an unprecedented number – in bus stations, railway depots and shopping areas all across Belfast. Shortly after 2 p.m., when the city was thronged with shoppers enjoying the midsummer afternoon, the devices began to detonate, and for the next hour, a new bomb would go off every few minutes. People screamed and scrambled, but in many cases they would flee a blast in one area only to run into an adjacent area just as a new bomb was about to explode. Several buses were ripped apart. Nine people were killed, including a fourteen-year-old boy; 130 were wounded. The city was totally unprepared for the carnage. As a pall of smoke hung over central Belfast, one woman staggered through the rubble and spotted a strange shape on the ground. She thought it looked like something that had fallen off a meat lorry. Then she realised it was a human torso. Police officers picked through the rubble, retrieving stray body parts and placing them gingerly in plastic bags.
‘This city has not experienced such a day of death and destruction since the German blitz of 1941,’ the Belfast Telegraph declared, citing the ‘callous lack of remorse now so typical of the Provos’. The Irish Times pointed out, in an editorial, that the main victims of the attack were not the British Army or even big business, but ‘the plain people of Belfast and Ireland’. The article went on to wonder, ‘Can anyone now believe that anything worthwhile can be established by these methods? That the country of anyone’s vision can live with more memories of this kind?’
As one of the key architects of the operation, Brendan Hughes had hoped it would be a ‘spectacular’ event. But when the bombs started going off, he was stationed on Leeson Street, holding an Armalite, and he could hear the pace of the explosions – boom, boom, boom. ‘There’s too much here,’ he thought to himself. Some of the volunteers in the Lower Falls area were
cheering as they heard the blasts, but Hughes shouted at them to get off the streets. They had planted too many bombs. They had overestimated the ability of the authorities to deal, in real time, with a calamity on this scale. Hughes would insist for years that his aim had not been to kill people, just to destroy property. Whatever the truth of his intentions, the episode filled him with guilt. At the time, however, he did not have much opportunity to dwell on it, because he was embroiled in a very different sort of crisis.
Hughes was in Belfast one night, just before the ceasefire, when one of his men told him that a Provo named Joe Russell had been shot. He immediately went to see Russell, and found him clutching a wound. He hadn’t gone to hospital – too risky – so there was still a bullet lodged in his gut. Hughes made arrangements to have Russell taken over the border, to a hospital in Dundalk that was known for offering treatment to wounded republicans, with ‘no questions asked’.
But a mystery remained: Who was the gunman? Russell had been at home at the time. A man came to his front door and, when Russell opened it, the man shot him and then ran off. Russell told Hughes that he thought his assailant was a member of the Stickies – the Official IRA. This theory was endorsed by Joe Lynskey, the soft-featured Provo intelligence officer whom people called the Mad Monk.
During the Troubles, unlicensed drinking clubs opened up in neighbourhoods all over Belfast. These establishments were known as ‘shebeens’. Many of the traditional pubs had been burned out or bombed, and in this notoriously thirsty city, such informal watering holes sprang up to meet a need. It had become so risky to venture outside one’s own safe ethnic enclave that when shebeens were established in residential neighbourhoods – often in former homes that had been abandoned – they provided a safe and convenient alternative to the pub. By the end of 1972, some two hundred shebeens were operating throughout Belfast. They were open seven days a week, with no fixed hours. The booze was often stolen from hijacked lorries, and the proceeds frequently went to whatever paramilitary group controlled the neighbourhood in question.
A number of these shebeens were operated by the Official IRA, and members of the Officials liked to congregate in them. One was called the Burning Embers (Brendan Hughes set fire to it once, and he liked to joke that he had burned the Burning Embers). Another Official shebeen was the Cracked Cup, an outfit on Leeson Street so named because it occupied a former shop that had sold second-hand crockery. The place was not much to look at. The floorboards were rotting, the lighting was dim, and patrons sat on rickety chairs, huddled around their pints. There were pictures of the Virgin Mary and Patrick Pearse on the wall.
Looking for the man who had shot Joe Russell, Hughes dispatched a posse of gunmen to the Cracked Cup. They strode in, weapons drawn, and barred the entrance. One of the patrons that night was a man named Desmond Mackin. He had come out to celebrate Father’s Day with his wife, Margaret, and his seventy-year-old mother. Mackin was not a member of the Official IRA; as it happened, he had a son who had recently joined the Provos. But as Hughes’s gunmen ordered the men to kneel on the floor and jostled Mackin’s wife and mother, Mackin made the mistake of resisting. A spurt of gunfire lit the gloom, and a bullet pierced Mackin’s thigh.
The gunman was a young Provo, barely out of his teens. It would later emerge that by the time the gunmen crashed into the Cracked Cup that night, they may have all been quite drunk. Mackin’s wife collapsed over his body, screaming. But the Provos would not let anyone summon an ambulance, for fear of attracting the authorities. For fifteen long minutes, they all stayed inside the Cracked Cup while Desmond Mackin bled to death on the floor.
The press would characterise the shooting that night as a ‘power struggle’ between the Officials and the Provos, and, at a glance, that certainly appeared to be the case. One newspaper suggested that the incident might spark an ‘all out war’. But, really, Desmond Mackin was just an innocent bystander, collateral damage in a badly botched operation. And when Hughes continued his enquiries into who it was that shot Joe Russell, he made an alarming discovery. It hadn’t been the Officials at all. On the contrary, it was one of his own men.
Of all the social conventions the Troubles upended, one that was seldom discussed was romantic relationships. With its combination of Catholic and Scots Presbyterian cultures, Belfast could be an oppressively prudish society. But as the violence warped everyday life, long-established social mores began to loosen. The omnipresence of mortal danger drove some people to live their lives with a newfound, and sometimes reckless, intensity.
The Mad Monk, Joe Lynskey, had entered the monastery when he was only sixteen years old. When he left the order, in his twenties, and returned to Belfast, he found a job at a silk and rayon factory in the Clonard area and began to reclaim the youth he had lost to his years of prayer and pious contemplation. He was, in the words of one relative, ‘very much into running after women and doing the normal things that young people would have done’. In the monastery, Lynskey had received a solid education. He studied history and, in particular, the matter of the injustices suffered by working-class Catholics in Ireland. He did not come from a republican family: his father was a timid man who would not have wanted his children to become involved in that sort of activity; his older brother was in the Royal Navy. But Lynskey eventually decided to join the IRA. He grew close to Dolours Price, who was fond of his awkward but gentle manner. ‘He was a mature man but he was in many ways immature in the ways of the world,’ she observed. Brendan Hughes had always seen Lynskey as ‘a strange fella’, an odd artefact of the older generation. He was smart and erudite, a chain smoker, and he carried in his pocket a book about his hero, the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. But he could be a bit aloof. What Hughes did not know about Joe Lynskey was that he was having an affair with Joe Russell’s wife.
After the shooting at the Cracked Cup, the Provos conducted an internal inquiry and discovered that Lynskey had ordered a younger IRA gunman to murder his fellow volunteer – his lover’s husband. The gunman undertook this mission assuming, because Lynskey told him so, that Joe Russell had become an informant to the authorities. But when Russell came to the door, the gunman, losing his nerve, shot him in the stomach, then ran off. In the initial hunt for the shooter, when Hughes and his men started asking around, they consulted the brigade intelligence officer, Joe Lynskey. Rather than confess that he had tried to murder his love rival, Lynskey placed the blame on the Stickies.
For a group with an alarming tendency to kill people by accident, the IRA had an elaborate internal mechanism for determining whether to kill people on purpose. Lynskey would have to face a court-martial for having endeavoured to murder one of his fellow volunteers, and for having sought to cover up his crime in such a manner that another innocent man lost his life. This was a choreographed process designed to provide a form of internal accountability that was putatively less arbitrary than a quick bullet in the back of the head. But IRA court-martials were not exactly known for acquitting people. And given the gravity of Lynskey’s crimes, his fate looked dire.
Inside the Provisionals, a new squad had recently been established. Like some black-ops government programme, it was a unit that ostensibly did not exist – a tiny, elite cell called the ‘Unknowns’. The commander of the Unknowns was a diminutive, serious-minded operator named Pat McClure, a man Brendan Hughes called ‘Wee Pat’. McClure was in his thirties, which made him fairly old by the standards of the Provos at the time. He had actual military experience (and an unusually intimate familiarity with the enemy), having served in the British Army prior to the outbreak of the Troubles. McClure kept a scrupulously low profile. But he was regarded by those who knew him as an exceedingly capable and dedicated soldier.
The Unknowns did not fit neatly into the regimented organisational chart of the Provos. Instead, they answered directly to Gerry Adams. Brendan Hughes came to think of them as ‘head hunters’, a handpicked team that did dangerous, secretive, sometimes unsavoury work. McClure was sof
t-spoken and enigmatic. He didn’t socialise with his soldiers; he had a family, and an air of responsibility about him, but he looked out for the people on his team. One winter night, a major gun battle broke out in Ballymurphy, and some of his young volunteers grabbed their weapons and announced that they were going to join the fight. ‘No, you’re not,’ McClure told them. The British soldiers had been trained to shoot at night, but the volunteers hadn’t, he pointed out. ‘You’ll be shooting at newspapers blowing in the street,’ he said. ‘If they take the gloves off, you have no idea. They’ll wipe you out.’ The members of the Unknowns were taken to the country for special training. They stayed in a remote farmhouse and did drills in which they clambered through a river while an instructor fired live rounds into the water around them.
The responsibility for transporting Joe Lynskey across the border to his court-martial and likely execution fell to the Unknowns, and to one member of the unit in particular: Dolours Price. She had joined the Unknowns with her friend Hugh Feeney, the bespectacled pub owner’s son. Marian Price joined, too. Though the ceasefire that summer had lasted only a couple of weeks, Dolours had enjoyed the respite from violence. There was a festive, giddy quality to those days: soldiers walked around without flak jackets; local children took rides in their Land Rovers. Dolours derived a certain mischievous satisfaction from flirting with the troops. Once, the soldiers, with their berets, asked her to pose for a photo with them, and she obliged. There was one British officer, Ian Corden-Lloyd, who would come to the house in Andersonstown and chat with her. He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was a member of the IRA, but they would argue amiably about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years’ time, ‘and we could all tell each other the whole truth’.
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