Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Reid may have assisted the Provos by playing messenger, but that did not mean he condoned their activities. On the contrary, he was deeply unsettled by the violence that had torn his community apart. Reid was a quiet man, and his fellow priests would often see him pacing the monastery garden, clutching a cigarette, deep in thought. His job, he felt, was to speak for the victims – to represent the next person who might be killed in the conflict. He had no particular party; his only allegiance was to those who had been (and would be) cut down. Reid believed that there were opportunities, even in the darkest times, for grace; that in the direst scenarios, one could still follow the example of Jesus; that war could call forth the very worst qualities of humankind, but also the best. ‘You meet God in the midst of the Troubles,’ he would say.

  At IRA funerals, one perpetual source of tension was the presence of British security forces. With so many known IRA members out on the street, the RUC and the army rarely missed an opportunity to monitor these occasions, taking pictures and gathering intelligence. But to the mourners, this intrusion could feel disrespectful and intimidating, even smug – particularly when the people being buried had been felled by a British bullet. As the coffins of Mairéad Farrell and her two accomplices were carried through the streets of West Belfast, however, there was not a policeman or soldier in sight. Evidently, the authorities had been instructed to stay away. Amid a forest of Celtic crosses at Milltown Cemetery, in West Belfast, Gerry Adams and other notable republicans gathered around a freshly dug grave, surrounded by thousands of mourners, as the first coffin was lowered into the ground. Having been elected to Westminster five years earlier, Adams was now a Member of Parliament. He often presided at republican funerals.

  Father Reid began to intone a prayer. But as he spoke, he looked up and saw movement on the edge of the stationary crowd. A man, in the distance. A burly man dressed in a dark anorak. He was walking towards the mourners with unsettling purpose. Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out an object that looked like a smooth black egg. Reid thought immediately that it must be a stone – people were forever throwing stones in Belfast. Now, it seemed, this man had the nerve to transgress the sacred ritual of a funeral and throw one here. Sure enough, the man wound up and hurled the object. Then Reid heard the sharp crack of an explosion. It wasn’t a rock; it was a hand grenade.

  People flew into a panic, scrambling in every direction, diving behind the headstones, sliding in the mud of the freshly dug grave. Sensing the possibility of a stampede, Adams seized a megaphone and bellowed, ‘Will people please stay calm!’ Boom! A second grenade exploded. Several mourners started to sprint towards the man, to take him down. But before they could reach him, he pulled out a pistol and began shooting.

  A slow-motion chase ensued as the gunman backed out of the cemetery, firing shots and chucking grenades, down a sloping hill towards the M1 motorway, and dozens of mourners pursued him, weaving among the tombstones for cover, advancing cautiously. By the time he reached the M1, where cars whizzed by, the gunman had run out of ammunition. His pursuers converged on him and beat him unconscious. He was arrested, and identified as Michael Stone, an East Belfast loyalist who was a member of the Ulster Defence Association. He had gone to the funeral that day hoping to kill Gerry Adams and other top republicans. Stone did not succeed in hitting Adams, but he did kill three other mourners and wound more than sixty.

  And so a second giant funeral was arranged, in order to bury the three victims of this attack. Tensions could scarcely have run higher. Adams had darkly suggested, following the cemetery murders, that it was no accident that the authorities had chosen to steer clear of the funeral – that they may have done so in collusion with the loyalist gunman, quite aware of his designs.

  The following Saturday, Father Reid attended the funeral Mass of Kevin Brady, one of the dead mourners, at St Agnes’s Church. When he walked out of the church, a huge funeral cortège was making its way along Andersonstown Road to the cemetery. Brady had been a taxi driver, so, in addition to the usual mourners, there was a small fleet of black cabs inching along as a guard of honour. The victims would be buried in the same ground upon which they had been killed just days earlier. People were massed in the streets, angry and embittered. Gerry Adams was among the mourners. Father Reid walked out of the church and joined the procession, seeking out Brady’s family, who were walking just behind his coffin.

  But just as Reid was reaching the family, there was a commotion. A car appeared, a squat silver Volkswagen, on the road at the edge of the crowd. The vehicle accelerated out of nowhere, then came to an abrupt stop, halted by the phalanx of black taxis that were leading the procession. A surge of anxiety radiated through the crowd. Was this another attack? The Volkswagen suddenly reversed, scooting backward at a dangerous clip, then it stopped and was immediately engulfed by people. There were two men inside the vehicle. As hundreds of mourners swarmed the little car, one of the men flashed something. ‘He’s got a gun!’ somebody cried. ‘It’s the peelers!’ – the cops – someone else shouted. One of the men had indeed waved a pistol and, in a panic, fired a shot in the air. But even as the mob immobilised the car and several men climbed on top of it and someone else kicked in the window and the mourners began to drag the men out of the car and pummel them and tear at their clothes, they never fired on the crowd.

  They weren’t police officers. They were soldiers: two British corporals, Derek Wood and David Howes, who had been driving in the area when they took what would prove to be a lethally misguided wrong turn. Upon realising that they had driven into the path of the funeral, Howes and Wood had panicked and tried to escape. But by that time they were hemmed in by black taxis and consumed by the crowd.

  Somebody arrived with a wheel brace to smash the windscreen. Father Reid saw the men being pulled out of the car, then dragged and shoved into a nearby park. There, the mob stripped their clothes off, so that the corporals were dressed only in their underwear and socks, then forced them onto the ground and beat them. There was a madness in the air – you could taste it – and Reid knew as he approached the scene that these men were about to be shot. Scrambling down onto the ground between the two soldiers, he wrapped one arm around each of them and lay there, hoping that this would prevent the attackers from pulling the trigger. ‘Would somebody get an ambulance!’ he cried.

  But a voice above him growled, ‘Get up or I’ll fucking well shoot you,’ and a pair of rough hands heaved Reid off the ground.

  The soldiers were thrown into a black taxi and driven to a vacant site near Penny Lane, about two hundred yards away. Reid was running towards the area when he heard the crack of gunshots. David Howes was twenty-three; he had just arrived in Northern Ireland to begin his tour. Derek Wood, who was twenty-four, was scheduled to go home soon. The two men were left there, sprawled in the rubble, their limbs akimbo, pale and stranded like beached whales. In the sky above, a helicopter slowly circled. But nobody intervened.

  Father Reid ran to the men. One of them was clearly dead, but the other stirred; when Reid leaned close, he could hear the sound of breathing. Reid looked up frantically at the people standing around and asked if anybody knew how to resuscitate someone. Nobody responded. They just stood there, watching. Reid crouched over the body and placed his mouth on the soldier’s mouth, trying to breathe the life back into him. But eventually the breathing stopped, and someone said, ‘Father, that man is dead.’

  Reid looked up, and as he did, a photographer standing some distance away took a picture that would become perhaps the most indelible image of the Troubles: a priest, clad in black, on his knees, ministering to a man who has just died, lying with his arms splayed, like Christ, on the ground before him. Reid looks directly at the camera, a witness to the horror, his own thin lips smeared dark with the dead man’s blood. Reid did not know if either of the soldiers was Catholic, but he anointed them both, as he had anointed the bodies of the slain mourners at Milltown Cemetery several days earlier, and delivered the last ri
tes.

  Father Alec Reid administering the last rites to Corporal David Howes (REX/Shutterstock)

  It had been two decades since the violence began in the late 1960s, and Reid wore the weight of all that bloodshed heavily. ‘People have had enough,’ he said in an interview hours after the shooting. ‘What people have to do is listen to each other. People haven’t been doing that.’ He added, ‘Physical force is a sign of the desperation of the poor.’ But as it happened, even while Reid defied the mob and ministered to the murdered soldiers that day, he was up to something behind the scenes. He was nurturing a plan: a clandestine, audacious plan to end the conflict.

  Before he left the requiem Mass at St Agnes’s Church that morning, Father Reid had taken possession of a secret document. For years, he had tried to discourage paramilitaries and ordinary citizens on both sides of the sectarian divide from resorting to violence. But he had come to believe that the surest way to end the conflict would be to persuade the IRA to stop fighting. Reid broached the issue with Gerry Adams and discovered that he was prepared to entertain the idea. Perhaps Adams had a different vision for the future; perhaps he had found that the ballot and the bullet were not mutually reinforcing but were actually at cross-purposes; perhaps he was simply exhausted. Whatever the case, Reid found that when he made his initial appeal to Adams, he was ‘pushing an open door’. Later, Reid would receive credit for having coaxed Adams onto the path of peace. But to Brendan Hughes, who knew both men intimately, it never seemed that Adams was being handled by the priest. Rather, Hughes recalled, ‘I believe it was, right from the start, Gerry handling him.’

  Adams saw in the priest an unimpeachable convener. ‘The only organisation that can do anything is the Church,’ he told Reid. Only the Church had the status, the credibility, and the lines of communication with the relevant parties to achieve peace. The one conceivable scenario in which the IRA might willingly lay down its arms would be if there were a joint peace strategy that brought together the republicans, the non-violent nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and the government of the Republic of Ireland.

  This might sound appealing in theory, but it would pose major challenges in practice. The leader of the SDLP was John Hume, a rumpled but shrewd Derry politician who was eleven years older than Adams. Hume was a hero to moderate Catholics and had repeatedly condemned the violence of the IRA. ‘They bomb factories and shout about unemployment,’ he said in 1985. ‘They shoot a teacher in a classroom, kill school bus drivers, kill people on campuses and then lecture us about education. They kill, maim and injure and they carry out attacks in hospitals, and then they tell us about protecting the National Health Service. They rob post offices, leaving people without benefit payments and then they preach to us about defending the poor.’ To Hume, the hypocrisy of the republican movement – the cynical shell game of the ballot and the bullet – seemed all too calculated. ‘The real strategy and objectives are clear,’ he said. ‘Have the military wing create as much discontent and deprivation as possible, the more unemployment the better. Then have your political wing feed off the people’s discontent. One of these days, Sinn Féin will disappear up their own contradiction.’

  Six months after Hume made these remarks, Father Reid sat down and wrote Hume a long letter. ‘My only aim is to help those who, if the present situation continues, will be killed,’ the priest suggested. Because of his years of quiet work in the republican community, Reid noted, he enjoyed the trust of the IRA. ‘I am certain that if the situation is handled properly, the IRA can be persuaded to end their campaign,’ he wrote.

  At the time Reid sent his letter, Hume was publicly committed to the idea that no dialogue with Sinn Féin would be acceptable as long as the IRA’s campaign of violence continued. Hume had always said that he was prepared to talk with anyone, so long as the objective was peace. But the IRA did little to encourage such magnanimity. In the autumn of 1987 the IRA detonated a powerful bomb at a Remembrance Day commemoration in the town of Enniskillen, killing ten civilians and one British soldier and wounding more than sixty others. The IRA announced afterwards that the bombing had been a mistake: the intended target was actually a ceremony involving British soldiers nearby. Adams apologised for the attack, disassociating himself from it. But the bombing was roundly condemned, and it underlined the pariah status of the Provos. Hume criticised the attack as ‘an act of sheer savagery’. It could be hazardous to antagonise the Provos in such a manner: several months earlier, the IRA had firebombed Hume’s home. He was not in the house at the time, but his wife and youngest daughter were, and they only narrowly escaped.

  Nevertheless, on 11 January 1988, Hume met Gerry Adams at Clonard Monastery. They had spoken on several prior occasions – but in secret. It would be politically dangerous for Hume to be seen engaging with Adams. But it was just as dangerous – possibly more so – for Adams to be seen talking with a moderate like Hume. Adams had always walked a fine line within the ranks of the Provos, as a strategist rather than an operational man. If people suspected that he was initiating any sort of ceasefire negotiations, it might give rise to a perception that he had sold out the armed struggle. In 1988, that was the sort of perception that could get a person killed.

  But Father Reid’s faith in dialogue was not misplaced. The two adversaries got along. Hume experienced the same dissonance that the British negotiators had back in 1972: after all the frightening tales they had heard about Gerry Adams, when he actually walked into the room, he seemed nothing like the hot-blooded hobgoblin of lore. He was personable, tweedy and straightforward, a man one could find a way to work with. A politician. Initially, Adams and Hume agreed to an exchange of documents, in which they would lay out the positions of their respective organisations in order to establish the parameters for a possible peace deal. In claustrophobic Belfast, the secrecy of this exchange necessitated a degree of spycraft. On the day the British corporals were killed, Father Reid had been instructed to attend the funeral Mass for Kevin Brady – where someone would slip him a document. At the requiem Mass, he took possession of a brown envelope containing a position paper from Sinn Féin. Reid was carrying the paper when he left the church, and it was in his pocket when he tended to the two murdered soldiers. As Reid ministered to the men and delivered mouth-to-mouth, he got fresh blood on his hands, and the blood smudged the envelope. After leaving the bodies, Reid returned to Clonard Monastery, where he transferred the documents into a clean envelope. Then he made his way to Derry with this fragile, precious seed of peace and delivered it personally to John Hume.

  When Gerry Adams was first elected to Parliament, in 1983, the British government lifted a ban that had prevented him from travelling to the mainland, so that he would be able to take his seat at Westminster. But Adams had no intention of actually participating in Parliament in any case. Throughout the 1980s, Adams played a delicate game. He was elected president of Sinn Féin in 1983. Yet he had become convinced that there would eventually have to be peace: a united Ireland could not be won through armed force alone.

  He could not simply spring this new thesis on the rank and file of the IRA, because if the volunteers knew his intentions, they might oust him from the party, or just kill him. At the same time, as Adams grew more invested in the political side of the struggle, he faced a separate challenge: the IRA remained an illegal organisation. Traditionally, when volunteers were asked if they were in the IRA, they would refuse to answer, because to acknowledge membership would be enough to put them in prison. But as Adams refashioned his persona from guerrilla leader to statesman, he took this gambit one step further: he began to tell people that he had always been a purely political figure, an ardent republican and a Sinn Féin leader – but not a volunteer, not someone who was in any way directly involved or implicated in the armed struggle. ‘I am not a member of the IRA, and have never been in the IRA,’ he would say.

  Of course, to anyone who had been paying attention, this was a laughable assertion. Adams
had long been known to be not just a member, but one of the foremost leaders, of the IRA. As a young man, he had been photographed at funerals, standing at attention and wearing the black beret of the IRA. He was released from Long Kesh in 1972 and travelled to London to negotiate with the British government as part of an IRA delegation. (When Seán Mac Stíofáin was asked, years later, whether the delegation represented Sinn Féin or the IRA, he replied that they were IRA. Pressed on whether this included Adams, Mac Stíofáin growled, ‘All of them.’) The media, dating back to the early 1970s, had characterised Adams as an IRA member. British security and intelligence forces had also long considered him to be a major figure in the IRA.

  On the sixtieth anniversary of the Easter Uprising, in 1976, Adams had published an article in Republican News. Writing under his pseudonym, Brownie, he described an encounter with a priest who had come to see him in prison. Adams defended the morality of violence to the priest, arguing that paramilitarism was not a role IRA members had sought out but, rather, one that had been thrust upon them. ‘Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer,’ Adams wrote. ‘The course I take involves the use of physical force, but only if I achieve the situation where my people can genuinely prosper can my course of action be seen, by me, to have been justified.’

  A few years after writing those lines, Adams would start asserting that he had never been a member of the IRA. Thus, even as he emerged as an ever more prominent face of the armed struggle in Northern Ireland, he denied having been a part of that struggle himself. Sinn Féin’s headquarters occupied a ramshackle building on the Falls Road. The space operated as a political office, a location where Adams could grant interviews to the press and meet constituents. Opponents joked that the upstart political party had accounts at every bank in the country, which they regularly drew upon, at gunpoint. Asked about such allegations, Adams protested that Sinn Féin’s community activities and electoral campaigns were funded not by paramilitary action but by raffles, donations and ‘cake fairs’. Yet the walls outside the headquarters featured colourful murals of masked IRA gunmen hoisting assault rifles. This paradox would become a signature of Adams’s emerging persona: homespun whimsy mingled with armed insurrection, cake fairs with a dash of bloodshed.