Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Going to sea with the Merchant Navy was the next major influence on Brendan Hughes’s political journey. In South Africa he witnessed the cruel consequences of apartheid for that country’s black population and it hardened his hatred of injustice. His travels away from Belfast also brought his first brush with the British Army, albeit in very different circumstances than would be the case a few years later – although the reason for that encounter, his swarthy looks, would later give him his IRA nickname, ‘The Dark’. British troops first gave him that soubriquet, and it was later adopted by all who knew him, because they had no photographs of him, just an idea of what he looked like and the nickname stuck. His father had destroyed any pictures there were and even earlier, when Hughes went to sea, he seemed to anticipate the turn his son’s life would take when he told him never to get a tattoo because it was a sure way of identifying someone.

  My first job was bringing a ship from Belfast to Southampton. It was a scrap ship, and it was probably the best job I ever had because there was no cleaning … and it was pretty basic and simple. I then signed on to a British Petroleum boat, British Courage, a tanker going to the Middle East for oil. I sailed out of Belfast on that and it’s probably [the source of] some of my fondest memories, although the fondest of all was sailing back … after three or four months at sea with a brilliant tan, well dressed, plenty of money in my pocket, looking forward to getting home. On that trip, we went to a place called Aden in the Persian Gulf and, at the time, the British occupied Aden. We were not allowed to go into the town, so, if we wanted a drink, we had to go to a British Army camp, which we all did. And me being the only Irish one there! But there was no hostility between the people I went to sea with; most of them were English and Scottish … We had been drinking all night in this British Army camp. I got detached from the crowd I was with, and was walking across an open field outside the camp when I was attacked and pushed to the ground and a rifle put to my head. It was the British Army. Luckily, I had a Merchant Navy ID card with my photograph and name in it. I was thrown into the back of a jeep and roughly treated, initially, until they found out that I wasn’t an Arab terrorist. At that time I was very, very dark and could easily have been mistaken for an Arab … But I was brought back to the ship [and let go].

  The British Army in Belfast [later] … called me ‘Darkie’. They didn’t have any photographs of me, but they knew of me … and the reason they never had a photograph is, when I went on the run in 1970, my father destroyed every photograph of me in the house, so any time the British Army raided my home, which was often, there was never a photograph of me there to be found. For all the years I was on the run, the British Army never had a photograph of me. There were times when I was one of the most wanted men in the North, walking past a British Army foot patrol … I don’t know whether my father had a premonition of this, but when I joined the Merchant Navy, my father insisted that I didn’t get any tattoos. It was a common thing for seamen to have tattoos and many a time I sat in a tattooist’s in Europe or the Far East, with other people [but] I never ever got one because I always remembered my father telling me, ‘Never get a tattoo, because it’s an identifiable mark’, and this is long before I went on the run. That’s why I’m saying he must have had a premonition that I was going to be on the run. And I don’t know where that came from, whether my father knew the road I was going to be taking or he suspected I was going to be taking. But anyway I never got tattoos, and they never had a photograph of me until I was arrested in 1973.

  After the British tanker, I came back to Belfast, was at home for six weeks and then re-signed on to a fruit boat, the Carrigan Head, which went to South Africa. We sailed from Southampton to South Africa, down to Durban, and that was the first time that I saw the deprivation and the squalor and the slavery [of apartheid]. When we [sailed] into Durban, to load with oranges, there was possibly a hundred and fifty men or so, black men, all labouring, all [the loading] done by hand … I worked in the galley at that time and I remember looking out the porthole at lunchtime, all these guys sat along at the deck of the ship with milk bottles full of cold tea and whatever food they had; it was mostly bread and cold tea. And I remember feeling angry, the way these people were treated … if I was never a socialist [before] I certainly became a socialist during that period in South Africa. I went to the galley and I got milk, cheese and whatever else out of the freezer and brought it out, and the first guy I went to, a black guy sitting there, drinking a bottle of cold tea, he says, ‘No.’ He wouldn’t take it, he was so proud, and I suppose I was being naively charitable, but I felt compassion for them and, in my naive way, I was trying to help. I was told to go away, which was good. These people … didn’t want my charity. It affected me so much. And as soon as these guys finished work, the beer was there, in a massive big barn. And … as soon as they got paid, [they went] into the beer hall, and I’ve no doubt, the people that owned the fruit going on that boat also owned the beer hall. And they wondered where the drink problem in Cape Town [came from]? You were allowed ashore, obviously when you were in dock, especially me being a deck hand. We were all lined up and told that there were certain areas that we were not allowed to go to. One of these areas was called District Six in Cape Town. We were told to stay away from it or we’d be killed … But being curious, as I was, I went to District Six. Cape Town was a sprawling big city, all the amenities were there for the white man. I searched out District Six which was a massive area of cardboard-box houses. I remember the cornflake boxes, vividly, in this field where people were living and I was really affected by that … in the city centre of Cape Town, where there was anything you wanted there [and] just a mile or so outside the city here was a sprawling slum, where people survived, didn’t live! They survived there. This had a bigger impact on my thinking as a socialist than reading books, or studying revolutionary tactics. That had a deep effect on me as regards fair play and socialism. When we left there and went to Mozambique, and it was even worse. The Portuguese were there at the time, in a place called Lourenço Marques [now Maputo]. I’m not sure if the conditions have changed in Mozambique, but then it was total and utter depravity, poverty and oppression. Going back onto the ship you realised just how lucky you were. Yet we weren’t supposed to experience that; we were to stay in our wee cosy, white shells, in the city, where we were safe. I just didn’t become a rebel in 1970. I didn’t become a gunman in 1970. I didn’t become a revolutionary in 1970. That process was being built up over the years, and years of seeing privation, years of seeing exploitation, years of hunger and sadness and love.

  Notes – 2

  4 Tim Pat Coogan, Ireland in the Twentieth Century, pp. 299–300.

  5 Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State, p. 91.

  6 Ibid., p. 92.

  7 David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams, pp. 5–21.

  8 Peter McDermott, Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms, 1920–1922, pp. 99–103; Dorothy McArdle, The Irish Republic, p. 478.

  9 http://buckalecrobinson.rushlightmagazine.com

  * A local fish-and-chip takeaway.

  † Former editor of the Irish Press and author.

  3

  The IRA’s failure or inability to defend Nationalist Belfast from Loyalist assaults in August 1969 was only part of the story why, in the winter of 1969–70, the organisation fractured into two rival, bitterly divided factions. A more comprehensive explanation can be found in the twists and turns that the IRA’s journey took in the two decades or so that followed the end of the war in Europe. After the debacle of the English campaign of 1939 and the Northern IRA’s disastrous outing in 1942, the IRA had painfully and slowly reorganised. By 1956, it was ready once again to resume armed struggle against the Northern Ireland state but the campaign that followed was largely confined to the border counties and, for reasons that have yet to be adequately explained, never took off in Belfast. The absence of IRA activity in
Northern Ireland’s major city was a fatal weakness, but what really doomed the Border Campaign, as it was called, was the Northern Catholic population’s lack of enthusiasm for the IRA’s methods and war aims. Politically isolated and geographically confined, the IRA was easily suppressed by the Belfast and Dublin governments, which interned scores of activists on either side of the border. By 1962, after six years of desultory, often bungled attacks, which had barely dented the Northern security forces, the campaign fizzled to halt.

  In the 1960s the Republican pendulum swung once again towards political and constitutional methods. Under the leadership of a new Chief of Staff, a Dublin veteran and contemporary of Brendan Behan called Cathal Goulding, the policies of the organisation moved distinctly leftwards, with the goal now a republic that was socialist in nature. Economic and social agitation replaced armed struggle as the favoured modus operandi and the military side of the IRA was run down. The organisation also moved towards accepting the hated Dublin and Belfast parliaments, which traditional Republicans had deemed to be illegal, and pressure grew, mostly from the top, to abandon the policy of refusing to take seats in the two assemblies if elected – an unlikely eventuality but one to which the Goulding leadership aspired. Ending abstentionism was the logical outcome of broadening the movement’s support base, but for traditional and doctrinaire Republicans this was the road to hell. The IRA leadership also modified its stance on partition, or rather how to end it. While once the accepted goal was to force British withdrawal, now the aim was to reform the North, to democratise it in preparation for the sort of working-class unity necessary for the transition to socialism.10 Again this was anathema to conventional Republicans even if many of them happily participated in the civil rights marches and demonstrations that were the principal manifestation of the change in emphasis.

  The IRA leadership, based almost entirely in or near Dublin, badly misjudged the North’s capacity for reform. For as long as most people could remember, the Unionist establishment had resisted any rapprochement with Catholics and Nationalists, viewing them as a fifth column in league with the Irish government or the IRA to end Northern Ireland’s link to Britain. The Nationalist rejection of the IRA’s 1956–62 campaign was an opportunity to reach out to Catholics but it seems not even to have been considered by the government of the day. Nevertheless, social, political and economic changes were under way that demanded that a different, more cordial approach be taken to the Catholic minority. The crusty, unbending Brookeborough had been replaced as prime minister by Captain Terence O’Neill, who inherited an economy whose best years were behind it. The decline of traditional industries such as shipbuilding and linen created a need for foreign investent but luring such companies to Belfast and Derry required more than generous grants and tax breaks; any shortfall in political stability could be a great deterrent and so O’Neill extended a hand of friendship, albeit tentatively, to Catholics. He was a mildly reforming, if sometimes patronising, moderniser, whose modest overtures to Nationalists and diplomacy with the government in Dublin drove O’Neill’s hardliners from a state of unease to alarm and then to virtual rebellion. When impatient Nationalists launched the civil rights agitation in late 1968, up stepped a figure from another century, the Reverend Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist preacher and determined foe of all and any religious or political ecumenism, to lead and voice opposition to all this. As 1969 unfolded, the opposition to civil rights became increasingly violent; slowly but surely, O’Neill’s political base crumbled and the North inched towards the edge.

  So it was that by the time the Orange marching season reached its climax in July and August 1969, Northern Ireland was set to explode. The IRA leadership in Dublin, its faith in the theory of working-class unity unfazed by the growing sectarian reality on the streets, had failed to prepare for the eruption. When it came, and the Loyalist mobs, B Specials and RUC went on the rampage in Catholic Belfast, there was little or no resistance. The IRA had few weapons and minimal planning had been made for such an eventuality. This for sure was the catalyst for the split in the IRA that followed but Goulding’s real mistake was that he had made one more enemy than he and his allies could handle. Goulding’s move to the left made sense in Dublin and one or two other urban areas where there was a recognisable working class but not in the rural heartlands of Republicanism. In those areas, the West and South-West in particular, the IRA’s activists and supporters were more likely to be small farmers, shopkeepers, small businessmen, schoolteachers and the like. The leadership’s Marxism, the accompanying dismantling of the IRA’s essentially Catholic rituals, the threat to ditch abstentionism and the gradual abandonment of armed struggle were not just an abomination to such people. Together they spelled another impending betrayal, just like that of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. The Southern conservatives had support in Belfast for sure, but essentially the group that emerged from the split, the Provisional IRA, was an alliance of rural, Southern conservatives and Northerners, angry and ashamed at the failure of August 1969.

  The events of that summer persuaded a group of former IRA stalwarts to mobilise against the Goulding leadership. They were men who had been involved in the 1940s and the 1956–62 campaign but who had quit in disgust over the direction Goulding had taken or had been expelled when they protested. In the autumn of 1969 they rejoined the IRA and then met to discuss what should be done about the Belfast Command, then headed by Goulding acolytes Billy McMillen and Jim Sullivan, and to formulate a plan of action. They were led by Brendan Hughes’s boyhood hero Billy McKee and included figures whose names had been legend in bygone years: Jimmy Steele, Joe Cahill, John and Billy Kelly, Jimmy Drumm and Seamus Twomey. They were joined by a Southern Republican, Daithi O Connail (Dave O’Connell), who had been imprisoned in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail during the Border Campaign and had got to know many of the Belfast men, and by Gerry Adams junior, the only serving member of the Belfast IRA at the meeting. Adams had a foot in both camps; he admired Goulding’s politics and favoured dropping abstentionism but disagreed with the leadership’s sanguine view of Unionism. Although he took part in the rebels’ meeting, it would be quite a while before Adams decisively plumped for the anti-Goulding side.11

  A month later, the dissidents forced McMillen to separate the Belfast IRA from the parent body until the larger argument was settled. The various divisions in the IRA were distilled into a single issue: whether or not to recognise and participate in the parliaments established by the Treaty settlement. An IRA Convention, a delegate conference of the IRA’s grassroots, was called for December 1969 to discuss the matter and as is often the case with such events, the leadership had ensured beforehand that the bulk of the chosen delegates would be on their side of the argument. The dissenting minority, led by another veteran of the 1956–62 campaign, Sean MacStiofain, walked out to form a separate, rival IRA. The legal niceties dictated that the new IRA’s ruling bodies, an Executive and an Army Council appointed by the Executive, could be chosen only at a Convention and until the new IRA convened one of its own Conventions, a provisional Executive and Army Council would fill the gap. When news of the split was leaked, the Irish media, searching for something to call the rebels, seized on the term ‘provisional’ and so the Provisional IRA was born. The IRA from which they had parted became known, just as predictably, as the Official IRA.

  The Provisional IRA was conceived in the angry, charred back streets of Catholic Belfast and that bestowed on the new group a puissance that had been denied its predecessor during the Border Campaign. But it would mean that the engine of the IRA, which would drive it for the next three decades or so, was the city’s unrelenting sectarian politics, itself a metaphor for the state. Right from the outset, the North’s politics would shape and colour the Provisionals’ violence and ideological direction until, eventually, the North and Northerners would dominate the entire organisation. From its Belfast core, the Provisionals would expand outwards, outgrowing and replacing the Officials in Counties Armagh and
Tyrone and in Derry City, areas that would be among the IRA’s key battlegrounds in the coming years. But what is striking from Brendan Hughes’s account of these first months is just how fragile the infant Provisional movement was and how it could easily have been swallowed up and destroyed by the much larger Official IRA, had the cards fallen the other way. To describe the politics and motivation of its founder members as undeveloped and unsophisticated would be an understatement, while another key feature of the early IRA was that its leadership, North and South, was drawn overwhelmingly from the IRA of the late 1930s through to the 1956–62 campaign. It was older, more conservative or Catholic in social outlook, was wedded completely to the primacy of the gun and had an immovable view that politics, that is parliamentary and electoral politics, were the refuge of the scoundrel and the traitor.

  The first Belfast Commander was Billy McKee, a veteran and former Commander of the Belfast Brigade’s D Company in the 1940s. He was famous for his Catholic piety and was said to attend Mass daily. A contemporary once joked that in those early days he would allow only ‘altar boys’ into the IRA, an exaggeration for sure, but a comment that captured the centrality of his Catholic faith in all aspects of his life. His deputy, the Belfast Adjutant, was Proinsias MacAirt, or Frank Card as the British Army insisted on calling him, a veteran of the 1940s and the Border Campaign. Alongside them in the city were other famous names, people such as Jimmy Steele who had escaped from Belfast jail in 1943 and would soon launch the Belfast Brigade weekly newspaper, Republican News, the Drumms, Jimmy and Maire, the politically active members of the Hannaway and Burns families, activists who had drifted away or been purged during the Goulding years. The first Provisional Army Council was peppered with similar figures. Three stood out: MacStiofain, who was the new IRA’s first Chief of Staff, had been arrested and jailed along with Goulding during an ill-fated arms raid at Felsted, Essex, in 1953; Ruairi O Bradaigh, a County Roscommon schoolteacher who had been Chief of Staff during part of the Border Campaign and was interned at the Curragh Camp, in County Kildare; and Daithi O Connail, a County Cork schoolteacher, who had taken part in a famous raid on Brookeborough RUC station during that campaign and was later shot and wounded in County Fermanagh by the RUC.