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

by Ed Moloney

  The recruits at rank-and-file level were a different matter:

  … most of us at that time did not have a great deal of political ideology. It wasn’t until later that we really began to learn what Republicanism meant. We were motivated by the fact that Catholic homes and streets had been burned down, [that] Catholics had been forced out of their homes. People like me, who joined what was later called the Provisional IRA, were the people who had been rioting for over a year, who burned lorries, who had come under fire from the Shankill Road, who had seen people shot. They had been fighting with petrol bombs and stones and whatever else they could lay their hands on. These were the people who were defending the areas, the people who were defending the Catholic Church, who were defending against the B Specials. They were like I was, the night —— fired his Thompson over the head of the Loyalist mob from the roof of St Comgall’s school; they would have wanted to fire into the crowd instead. So most of us would have been – reactionary might be the wrong word – but I mean, that would be close enough. The older Republicans, like McKee, MacAirt and the rest, saw all this as an opportunity for another war against England. The British were now on the streets, and this was an opportunity to take them on – on our terms, on Republican terms, on the Irish people’s terms. But, at the same time, for a lot of us, it was a big adventure.

  Hughes joined D Company of the IRA in Belfast, a unit that historically had played a central role in the city’s past disturbances and which it would again do during the modern Troubles. D Company’s operational area embraced most of the Lower Falls Road district which, until the construction of modern public-housing estates in Ballymurphy, Andersonstown and Turf Lodge in the post-war years, was where most of the city’s Catholic population had always lived. At first the Provisionals were dwarfed by the Official IRA and there were sufficient members and new recruits to fill only one battalion in the Brigade area. Only later, when Catholics flocked to its ranks, did the Provisionals expand to three, and at one point four, battalions in Belfast. D Company was eventually put under the control of the Second Battalion and became not just the largest single IRA unit in that area but in all of Belfast. Such was its record of ambushes and bombings that it was dubbed ‘the dogs of war’ or just ‘the dogs’. But at the start, and for many months, D Company was tiny – only twelve members – and it shared its base of operations with the headquarters of the Official IRA, a recipe for bloody rivalry. At the beginning there was training and very little military activity but efforts were made to demonstrate to ordinary Catholics that the protection that had been missing in August 1969 was now available.

  When I joined, the Official IRA was still the largest of the organisations. But, in saying that, we began training with whatever weapons there were, [mostly] Second World War weapons. A lot of these were old and rusted but they were sufficient to be trained on. We would be sent to a house, a secret location where someone, a training officer, would come along with a particular type of weapon, be it a Thompson sub-machine gun or a Garrand rifle, a .303, .45 automatics, .45 revolvers, that type of small-calibre weapon. And an hour or so of training, of getting the feel of the weapon, being able to strip the weapon blindfolded … the whole idea was to know the ins and outs of a weapon. These lectures would have taken place in kitchen houses and families would have left the house free for a couple of hours. Within a short period I became the Training Officer of D Company and … began giving these lectures myself. Occasionally, camps were organised where weapons could be fired [and] explosives set off. Most, in fact all, of these training camps were in the South, in the twenty-six counties … We would be picked up at a rendezvous, taken away in a minibus or [in] cars and met at a central point in Dublin. We were then escorted at night time to a location, usually a farm … and never did we know where we were, not even which part of the country we were in. We would stay there for maybe three days, possibly a week, sometimes ten days, and we were trained on revolvers, semi-automatics, rifles, explosives. Most of it was indoors initially, and then you were taken outdoors to the firing range. But very seldom was there much firing … You were restricted in the amount of ammunition that could be used because at that time it was very, very scarce. A lot of the ammunition and weapons … were not reliable … you would have misfires, or you would have damp ammunition or it was just burnt out, too rusty … But this [was] early 1970, and there wasn’t a great deal of operational activity.

  … the barricades were still up around where I lived, round the Grosvenor Road. When I say the barricades, the whole [of] what was known as the Lower Falls was sealed off by barricades, built by the people themselves to keep the British forces out and to protect ordinary Catholics from attacks by the B Specials and the RUC … the barricades were ten foot high, with ramps so we could walk across them … they were pretty extensive, solid structures. And in behind this particular barricade where I was stationed, there was an old paint factory, Garvey’s paint factory, which became almost the headquarters [of D Company, and was] known as the ‘Dirty Dozen area’, because there was twelve men in D Company at that period. In 1970–71, a lot of time was spent on standby, which meant that you were armed, you were sent to a particular house and told to wait there for further instructions – either an operation was going to take place or you were to patrol the streets with weapons to let the people of the area know that there was protection …

  The Provisional IRA was slow to get into gear. The strategy formulated by Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain was a three-stage one. In the first phase, the emphasis was on recruiting new units, training them and providing them with weapons, so that the IRA in Belfast would be strong enough to defend Catholic areas. The second stage was to be a mixture of defensive and retaliatory actions, to strike back against the Loyalists or the RUC when the circumstances seemed to demand it. When the IRA was strong enough, the third part of the strategy would be launched, an offensive campaign against the British Army and other security forces with the aim of forcing the British to negotiate their withdrawal from Northern Ireland. It was an unsophisticated strategy, rather like its authors, with little evidence of any consideration, or concern, about Protestant and Unionist reaction to all this. In D Company’s area, the first attacks were not against the British Army but were aimed at the area’s many RUC stations, or barracks as they were more properly called in Belfast. In those early days, IRA activists such as Brendan Hughes still socialised and mixed with British soldiers, and even drank with them in bars. The first troops to arrive in West Belfast had been welcomed as knights in shining armour by Catholics who fêted them with pots of tea, sandwiches and plates of food. IRA old-timers knew, or hoped, that eventually this amity would wither, that the IRA would wage war against the military, and new recruits such as Hughes were eager for that fight. But in the meantime, the infant Provisional IRA’s real enemy was the RUC, which in the view of Nationalists had allowed, or even assisted, the Loyalist mobs in burning down places such as Bombay Street. That would change though, very dramatically, in July 1970 during Belfast’s most violent week since the arrival of British troops, when the entire D-Company area would be placed under a British military curfew. From the time of the Falls curfew onwards, the war would be between the IRA and the British. During this phoney-war period, as far as British troops were concerned, the IRA was astonishingly open and public about many of its activities, in a way that would be unthinkable just a few months later.

  … the headquarters of the Belfast IRA was in Kane Street [in] MacAirt’s house. Everything happened around that house and everybody knew it – to the point that when the British Army moved in, they had a searchlight constantly [shining] on the house and we would [have to] use the back door. But it was always a hub of activity. There was always a group of people in the house. Old Jimmy Roe, Billy McKee, MacAirt, Liam Hannaway, all the old-timers, they were all there. And all the instructions came from that house … and everybody’s movements were watched.

  The Republican News was centred around that hou
se as well – and one of the first jobs that we were given was to sell Republican News … There was nothing in Derry at the time, no [Provisional IRA] structure in Derry, so we would travel up to Derry going door to door. I remember the hills in Derry, selling Republican News round the doors was frustrating; it was something that had to be done, but after being trained in weaponry, trained in explosives, we were busting to start taking action.

  McKee always said, ‘This is our opportunity, the Brits are here, the Brits are on the streets’, and the whole objective was [eventually] to take on the British Army … I saw myself as a soldier not a politician, naively so. And most of us did … we had been trained to be soldiers, we were trained to fight, and I wasn’t really concerned about ideology, about where we were going [politically]. As far as I was concerned, the Brits were on the streets and we were going to go to war with them … at that time the soldiers would have been coming into pubs, sitting in pubs, and I remember in Dan Lane’s pub, off Stanley Street, sitting in the pub and getting the British soldiers to give us a weapons lecture … how the SLR [self-loading rifle] worked, which they were quite happy to do … we mixed with them and it was quite normal to stand talking to a British soldier in the street, and here [we were] being told that we were going to go to war with them … They didn’t know this, but we knew that we would be shooting each other within a short period … And there wasn’t a great desire on our behalf to be shooting British soldiers. There was [for] people like McKee and MacAirt who had already fought a war with the British [and] the six-county state.

  … the war, when it started in 1970, was geared towards bringing down Stormont and taking on the RUC and the B Specials. Military activity was aimed at the RUC initially … there was an RUC station on the Springfield Road, one on Cullingtree Road, and one on Roden Street. The first operations that were carried out were against these stations. These [usually] consisted of a five-pound charge of gelignite strapped onto a butcher’s hook and four or five men, two men to give cover and two men to go to the barrack door with the charge; it was like a long sausage with cardboard wrapped around it and we’d walk up to the barrack door, which always had a big knocker; you rapped the door, hung the charge on the door, light the fuse and run like fuck! It was usually a ten-second fuse, so, you had that to get away. Roden Street was blown up maybe five, six times, in this way. Sometimes you’d walk round to the back of the station and throw the charge over the wall. One time there was a bit of a gun battle – we ran into an RUC man … he began to fire and [we’re] only ten, fifteen feet apart … the charge went off and there was a massive bang! Most of the houses in Roden Street had their windows smashed, the slates blown off or whatever. But the gun battle between two of us and the RUC man resulted in no casualties whatsoever. We both missed. No one was caught; we got away and the RUC man got away as well … It got to the point where they closed Roden Street RUC station and they closed Cullingtree RUC station. My father was involved in the 1940s, blowing up Cullingtree Road RUC station. When the troops moved in they took over an old mill on Drew Street, on the Grosvenor Road, and they took over another mill on Albert Street. So, when the RUC stations were closed down you had this massive military presence still in the area. We continued by targeting the [RUC] Special Branch. Some of the Special Branch men who had been there in the 1950s were still there in the 1970s. One famous cop was called Harry Taylor who was responsible for the round-up in the 1950s when internment was brought in – he was still there in the 1970s. He became a major target. Cecil Patterson,* who was shot, was another one of the old school.12 These people mixed freely during the 1950s and 1960s in Nationalist areas … for instance, Harry Taylor was into boxing in a big way and he used to drink on the Falls Road. A friend of mine who finished up in jail with me – Fra McCullough – his name was on a cup that Harry Taylor had won in the 1950s and Fra McCullough had won in the 1960s. So you had Fra McCullough who finished up being interned by Harry Taylor, their names on the same cup for boxing.

  In retrospect, 1970 was the year of the Provos, the year when they became a key player in the Troubles. Events played into their hands without them really having to try very hard. In late 1969, a British-appointed Commission, headed by Baron John Hunt, who had led the team that first conquered Mount Everest in 1953, recommended that the RUC should be disarmed and the B Specials disbanded. Unionist reaction at these measures, especially to the loss of the Specials, was violent. The ‘B men’ were regarded as the last and most reliable line of defence against Irish Republicanism; their disbandment was a disturbing portent. On the night that Hunt’s report was published Loyalist gunmen took on the British Army in the Shankill area of Belfast, losing two of their own but killing the first policeman of the Troubles. The political fallout was devastating. Terence O’Neill had been forced to resign earlier that year and was succeeded by his cousin, James Chichester-Clark, whose family, on both his and his wife’s side, could trace their lineage back to the plantation aristocracy. Chichester-Clark faced a grassroots Unionist revolt in the wake of the Specials’ disbandment. All this was grist to the mill of Ian Paisley, who had made it his speciality to sniff out the slightest odour of appeasement by the mainstream Unionist leadership. Desperate to fend off the Paisleyite challenge, which was echoed in his own party’s ranks, Chichester-Clark won British Army support for forcing Orange marchers through sensitive Catholic districts in Belfast and elsewhere during the early months of 1970. Common sense suggested these marches should have been banned to avoid serious trouble but Chichester-Clark’s political insecurity dictated otherwise. The result was major rioting, particularly in the mixed, but predominantly Catholic, Ballymurphy housing estate in West Belfast. None of this did Chichester-Clark much good, however. Ian Paisley romped home in a by-election to the Stormont parliament caused by Terence O’Neill’s retirement from politics. Rattled by Paisley’s victory, the Unionist government piled more and more pressure on the British Army to confront the IRA in its own backyard.

  On 18 June 1970 a British general election saw Ian Paisley win a seat at Westminster, the defeat of the Labour Party and a new Conservative government, headed by Edward Heath, put into power in London. Harold Wilson’s government had been sympathetic to the plight of Northern Nationalists and supported many of the reforms demanded by the civil rights movement. Unionists suspected, with good reason, that some in Wilson’s cabinet favoured Irish reunification and independence. The loss of such a friend to Nationalism, along with Paisley’s new stature, appears to have either emboldened the Unionist cabinet or terrified it into action. Pressure on the British Army to appease Protestant hardliners grew and, within a week of getting their way, Belfast was set ablaze.

  In North Belfast, the military forced an Orange march through part of the Catholic Ardoyne area and the result was fierce rioting during which the Provisional IRA shot dead three Protestants, alleged Loyalist rioters. The trouble spread across the River Lagan, to the small Catholic enclave of Short Strand in East Belfast where stone-throwing following the return of bands and lodges from the North Belfast Orange parade deteriorated into a gun battle that would enter Provisional mythology. The ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’ was, according to the IRA’s account, a determined effort by Loyalist mobs and gunmen to burn down the area’s sole Catholic church. All this, the version continues, was facilitated by the British Army, which stepped aside to give the Loyalists a free hand. Into the gap stepped a small group of IRA men led by Brigade Commander Billy McKee, who kept the mobs at bay and finally drove them off. Two Protestants and one Catholic were shot dead that night, and McKee was left badly wounded.

  Loyalists strongly denied this version, saying they had been the victims of an IRA set-up, while there have been claims recently that the Catholic fatality was caused by an accidental IRA shooting and not by a Protestant bullet.13 No matter what had really happened; there was little doubt that between the two incidents that weekend in Belfast, the Provisional IRA had convincingly validated its claim to be the Catholic defender
s.

  There was more to come. The following Friday, British troops raided a small cluster of homes in the Lower Falls Road area searching for weapons dumps. It was a puzzling raid for the troops had raided Official IRA homes and, since the split, the Officials had been reluctant to seek serious conflict with the British. The carnage of the previous weekend had left hardline Unionists angry, adding to the pressure on Chichester-Clark for a response. In those early days and for reasons more to do with British politics, the military regarded the Marxist Officials as the more dangerous of the two Republican groups, and that might have influenced the decision to mount the raid, or it might have been simply that the British knew more about the Officials who were the initial point of contact with areas such as the Lower Falls. Whatever the reason, the troops were stoned as they left; some were trapped and reinforcements were sent in to relieve them. Soon three thousand troops had occupied the district and the British Commander declared a curfew that lasted the weekend, during which scores of homes were searched, businesses wrecked and bars looted by soldiers. Four men were killed, three shot dead by troops and one deliberately run over by an armoured car. It was a turning point for the Provisionals, poisoning public opinion in this key Catholic area against the British Army and pushing sentiment towards the more militant Republican group. Brendan Hughes was in the thick of it.