by Ed Moloney
The recruits began to flood in as well. Soon D Company’s numbers were around the hundred-and-twenty mark, making it the largest single unit in the Belfast Brigade.16 As for the Officials, their days of dominance in the Lower Falls were over and with D Company triumphant, the last obstacle in the way of the Provisionals achieving supremacy in Belfast, and subsequently throughout Republican areas in the North, had been removed. The surge of support that followed Charlie Hughes’s death also cemented the ties between the IRA in the Lower Falls and the local people, making the Provisionals an organic part of the Nationalist community and therefore much, much harder for the British to defeat. After the defeats of the 1940s and the 1956–62 campaign, the IRA in Belfast had turned in on itself, becoming an inbred, inter-married and diminishing clique which most Catholics shunned out of fear of official punishment or reprisal. Those days were ending.
… after Charlie Hughes’s death there was a major influx of younger recruits coming in … you had the Fianna at this time, young kids, from twelve to sixteen, [but] they had to be over fifteen to be trained in weapons, both Fianna and the Cumann na gCailini [girls’ version]. They were potential recruits [to the adult IRA]; they did scouting work, for instance … on their way to school. We had call houses throughout the area, some abandoned houses, others occupied by supporters … Volunteers would meet at a different call house each day … weapons would have passed through the call house, explosives, men and women and plans. People would wait for instructions for whatever operation was coming next. And every area had two or three different call houses. You also had billets where volunteers could rest and sleep, and pretty often the house was occupied by civilians … many a time I would see myself going into a call house maybe late at night after a long standby or after an operation, and kids would be taken out of their beds to make room for you. You were dependent on people feeding you and a lot did. In most of the call houses we absolutely depended on the locals for our survival, for our food. I remember one particular week we had a call house in Sultan Street; it was a house occupied by a Volunteer, a female Volunteer. That house was used extensively, almost twenty-four hours a day. And other people in the street brought us food. One particular week we lived off tins of pilchards because the guy in the house worked in a factory producing the stuff and that’s what he brought home for us every night. There were other houses where you were really well fed. People were poor. People didn’t have much to give, but what they had they shared. And unfortunately sometimes, while we didn’t abuse it, we began to take people for granted. For instance, there was one house in Theodore Street, which we used constantly, morning, noon and night, far too often really; the woman of the house was a Republican herself, Annie Walsh … the mother of Roy Walsh, one of the people convicted of bombing London [in 1973]. Ninety-eight per cent of the doors [in the Lower Falls] were left open at nights; people did not feel in danger of being robbed, they did not feel in danger of being assassinated because they knew we were there. So most people co-operated with the IRA; they left their back doors open, or if they saw you jumping over the yard wall, they’d open the back door if it was closed. So you had that sort of relationship; we were the fish and the water was our local community.
I always had a very strict regime based on giving respect to the residents because I knew without them we wouldn’t survive. I’ll give you an example. One time we got a report of a British Army patrol in this particular backyard, and grenades were thrown into it. But there were no soldiers there and the back windows of the house had all been blown out. We had a system whereby any damage was immediately paid for and people were compensated … it happened pretty regularly. When the Brits raided a street, sealed off a whole street, we would have thrown blast bombs and nail bombs into the centre of the street, intending to kill and wound British soldiers … we were probably a wee bit too complacent doing that, and we took our own people for granted sometimes. I think it was youthful enthusiasm, but if I had to do it all over again, there are certain things I would not do and that would be one of them, putting our own supporters and civilians at risk. We did do it, and I admit it and I regret it. It’s hard to explain what this was like; this was a liberated area, where people like me would walk past a door and some old lady would come out and throw holy water around you, or say prayers for you. At that period you would have times when women would say the rosary at street corners for peace. A lot of these people were our supporters or had houses that we stayed and slept in; they were people who held weapons for us and they were standing at street corners at night saying the rosary for peace. And that night we’d go to their houses and they’d make tea for us. The Brits and the media tried to put it across that these people were actively opposed to the IRA, and they were not. They wanted peace but, as I say, a lot of them were our supporters. I mean, auld Annie Walsh and auld Ma Hickey used to say the rosary at nights but we used their houses more than most.
We were all pretty much on the same level … we didn’t have anything. There were no rich people in the IRA then; a massive difference nowadays from the way things were then. We were all working class, we were all pretty poor … There may have been one or two who would be seen as well off, like Hugh Feeney,|| whose father owned a pub … but that was as wide as the wealth gap went. A pub owner would not be seen as a rich person any more and even then, they were still working people. There was no gap; we were all from the same working-class background, which is totally different from today. Most of us were out of work; and if you had no work, you were paid. For instance, if you were on the run, you got £5 a week to live on, which obviously you couldn’t do. You therefore depended on people for food or cigarettes … there was a comradeship – I sometimes compare it to what it must have been like for the English people during the Blitz, you know, when they were getting bombed, this sense of neighbourliness, a bonding of comradeship. I experienced it again during the blanket and hunger-strike periods, that bonding, that comradeship and that love, that’s there when you’re all going through a hard time. You get exceptional sacrifices from unexceptional people during situations like that. And a lot of the people that I knew then were just ordinary people like myself. When they were thrown into a situation like that, they produced exceptional performances.
Notes – 3
10 Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 52–60.
11 Ibid., pp. 70–73.
12 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, pp. 67–8.
13 The Sunday Times, 24 May 2009.
14 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 1983.
15 Ibid., pp. 64–5.
16 Moloney, A Secret History, p. 103.
* Detective Inspector Cecil Patterson, shot dead by IRA, 27 February 1971.
† Guildford pub bombings, October 1974, later admitted by Balcombe Street IRA unit. Giuseppe Conlon was convicted of supplying nitroglycerine to the IRA along with six other people, the ‘Maguire Seven’, mostly his in-laws. He died in jail in January 1980. The ‘Guildford Four’ and ‘Maguire Seven’ were cleared on appeal in 1989 and 1991 respectively. The Conlon story was the subject of the 1993 movie In the Name of the Father.
‡ Eamon Kerr, killed by an unknown gunman in March 1983.
§ The Official IRA was popularly known as the ‘Sticks’ in Nationalist areas, after the paper Easter lilies they wore on their jacket lapels to commemorate the 1916 Rising. The paper had a special adhesive backing that stuck to cloth.
¶ A former member of the IRA in the 1940s who was interned, Devlin joined the Northern Ireland Labour Party in the 1960s and won a Stormont seat in West Belfast. He later was a founder member of the SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) and a minister in the 1974 power-sharing government. He died in 1999.
|| Convicted for 1973 IRA bombing of London.
4
It had taken Gerry Adams some time to make up his mind finally about which side to join when the IRA split in December 1969 and the new Provisional IRA came into being. Although he had attended meetings prior to
the split at which critics of the Goulding leadership had aired their grievances and began plotting a takeover of the Belfast Brigade, he clearly had divided loyalties; while sympathetic to much of the Goulding ideology and tactics, both his mother’s and father’s families and many of his and their friends had quickly switched over to the Provisionals. After all, his parents’ generation and background were the same as Billy McKee’s and it was no surprise that they saw the world, especially that little bit of it in the north of Ireland, through a similar lens.
In early January, Sinn Fein split on the same issue, abstentionism, as the IRA had two weeks earlier, but confusion surrounds Adams’s disposition that weekend. He would later claim that he was barred entry to the Sinn Fein conference, or ard-fheis, because he didn’t have the correct credentials, thus missing the divisive debate on abstentionism, and instead went off to join an anti-apartheid demonstration at the Ireland versus South African Springboks rugby international. But that version is undermined by the fact that the abstentionism debate happened on a Sunday while the rugby match was the day before.
One eyewitness, Official IRA Belfast Adjutant Jim Sullivan, an ardent supporter of the Goulding wing and admittedly a hostile witness, claims that Adams was in the hall, seated beside him when the crucial vote came and that he stayed in his seat when the anti-Goulding faction walked out in protest to set up Provisional Sinn Fein. The first President of Provisional Sinn Fein, Ruairi O Bradaigh, recalls that Adams was not at the meeting afterwards that formally launched the new party, which is where he would likely have been had he been part of the walk-out. While reluctance to break from what was once the mainstream IRA was fairly commonplace at the time – units in County Tyrone, for instance, who later provided some of the most militant Provisional activists, did not change sides until well into 1971 – all this was enough to feed speculation in the intervening years that Adams was waiting to see which of the two IRAs got most support in Belfast before casting his lot. Whatever the truth, the bulk of pre-split IRA units in Belfast, with the exception of the Lower Falls, had aligned with the Provisionals by the spring of 1970, fifteen out of sixteen companies according to one count, and by that time Adams had thrown his hat into the Provo ring.17
Brendan Hughes remembers meeting Gerry Adams for the first time in early 1970 and again shortly afterwards, and both times was impressed with what he saw.
I met Gerry for the first time in Osman Street [in the Lower Falls area] during rioting and Gerry was at the corner of Osman Street directing the rioters … At that time, I didn’t know who he was, but he certainly stuck out as a leader because he was able to control and he was able to direct. I can’t remember if he threw anything but he certainly directed everybody else to do it. That was my first contact with Gerry. A few weeks later there were riots taking place in Ballymurphy and Billy McKee sent us up there with guns. We took a few short arms, a rifle, and we walked up the Falls Road into Ballymurphy. —— was with me and we were there to give back-up power [to the rioters] with weapons. But Gerry directed us to this house … and he ordered us not to leave it. So we sat there all night while the riots were going on. We were wearing holsters and, you know, we were busting to get into the action, to shoot British soldiers. But Gerry’s attitude at that time was he wanted to keep the rioting going. He didn’t want any gunfire. It was the first sign of conflict between Adams and McKee. Billy [McKee] was Belfast Commander and had ordered us to go there but Adams was the O/C in Ballymurphy … If there had been any sort of contact there between McKee and Adams, we wouldn’t have been sent into Ballymurphy in the first place.
That incident took place in April 1970, after British troops had bowed to pressure from the Unionist government and forced an Orange parade through part of Ballymurphy. The estate, which is quite close at one spot to the strongly Loyalist Shankill Road area, had once been mixed, but since the violence of August 1969, Protestants had been moving out in growing numbers, some because of intimidation, others because they expected it. Orangemen believed that even though the area was no longer a Protestant district, they still had the right to march along what once had been a traditional route. Local Catholics objected and when troops escorted the Orangemen into the estate, there was intense rioting that lasted several days.
Eight weeks or so later, in June, Ballymurphy was caught up in the city-wide disturbances that had followed the ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’ and the Ardoyne gun battles. This time, however, the rioting in the estate lasted six months. Not once during that time, however, did the Ballymurphy IRA fire a shot. Instead there were long nights of fierce hand-to-hand fighting between locals and British riot squads whose cumulative effect was to radicalise the whole community and entice scores of young men and women into the ranks of the IRA. The decision to stop Brendan Hughes and his squad firing on the British military during the April riots was part of the thinking that would, by the end of 1970, make the IRA an integral, organic part of life in Ballymurphy and the IRA units among the strongest in the North. It was an early example of Gerry Adams’s strategic talents, a characteristic that eventually would make him the Provisional movement’s dominating figure.
After a few months as a lowly Volunteer, Brendan Hughes began climbing the ranks of D Company. First he was made its Training Officer, or T/O, and by early 1971 he was promoted to Quarter Master, or QM, which meant he had to source weapons and explosives, provide them for operations and then locate hiding places for the weaponry when it was not in use. No issue was more divisive in the IRA than weapons, the lack of them especially – and that did not change after the split. Inadequate weaponry had created decisive tensions between Belfast IRA activists and the Dublin leadership forcing a nasty split to the surface and it was much the same afterwards. The belief that the Dublin leaders never properly understood the military needs of the Northern units, and of Belfast in particular, persisted inside the Provos and deepened as the fighting in the North intensified, a reflection of a deeper resentment of all things Southern that had its roots in the belief that the North had been forsaken in the years after partition. Eventually this sentiment produced what was effectively a Northern takeover of the IRA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the Provisionals’ early days, this grudge against the Dublin leadership sent Brendan Hughes on two missions abroad to find the guns that the Belfast IRA wanted and that Dublin either couldn’t or wouldn’t supply; one was a miserable failure, the other a spectacular, transformative success.
… it was very rare for someone like me, a QM, to travel abroad to engage in arms procurement, but what I think needs to be made clear here is that even in the early days, 1970, 1971, there was a sort of resentment towards the Dublin leadership … we believed that they could have been doing a whole lot more in procuring weapons and stuff for us. We were quite prepared and willing to carry out the operations but we were very, very badly armed. Anyway, one time I got a contact in Glasgow, a person who told me that they could get explosives. So I travelled to Glasgow, this was in 1971, and I met this little old man in a pub. He was a peterman, a safe blower. He was introduced to me as: ‘This wee man is the best peterman in Glasgow.’ I was there for three or four days waiting for this meeting that we arranged, and eventually word came back that it was set up, so I bought a car in Glasgow to transport the stuff. I got into the car with the peterman. I was driving, and we drove to this estate in Glasgow. I’d been given this address but I hadn’t told the peterman where we were going. The other contact, one of the family members, brought me. And as soon as we got to the street, the peterman says, ‘Get the fuck out of here’; apparently we had been dealing with Loyalists. The peterman actually knew the house that we were going to, and he believed it was a set-up. I got the hell out of the place, got rid of the car and back to Belfast … a few weeks later, the pub that I had met the peterman in was blown away.
Using the contacts he had made as a merchant seaman, Hughes had also set up an arms-smuggling route from New York, using the Cunard Line’s famous luxury flagship
, the Queen Elizabeth 2, to ferry weapons from the United States. The QE2 had just begun service between Southampton in England and New York in May 1969, only seven months before the Provisionals came into being. The ship’s crew was over a thousand strong and, thanks to West Belfast’s links to the Merchant Navy, quite a few of them had strong ties to the IRA.
