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

by Ed Moloney

  We had people working on the QE2, and we had people in America. The Lower Falls is well known [as] a catchment area for seamen; a fair percentage of men from that area went to sea [and] I knew a good few of them. Some were actually in the IRA, one or two of them worked on the QE2. I went to Southampton, put together a wee squad, all Belfast men. They weren’t all members of the IRA but supporters. Belfast men practically controlled Southampton [docks] at the time. Gabriel Megahey* was one of the main people there at the time. He was later done for smuggling missiles from America.18 We had a line of communication from New York to Southampton and Belfast via one phone. Phones were not common then in houses in the Falls; very few people had one and the particular phone that we used was Governor Ward’s; the family [was] a notoriously hard-fighting family. The messages were always in code, so, when we got word from America to the Guv’s house, that the stuff was on board, I would then go to Southampton and arrange for transport. I would drive into the docks, all pre-arranged through contacts in Southampton … and I would actually get onto the boat to take the weapons off. Normally the shipments would have been five, six, eight or ten weapons at the most, maybe a couple of hand grenades, that sort of stuff. You’re talking about seamen going ashore in New York, carrying the stuff on board, hiding it in their lockers, or on the boat somewhere, and then having it ready for us [to hide in] … the panels of cars. We would have hired cars out of McCauslands (a Belfast rental agency) … what’s important here as well is that D Company always had a special relationship with Belfast Brigade. You might wonder how was D Company getting away with all this? Well, D Company was the heart of things in Belfast; it was not on a solo run. No, it was all above board, because it had to be financed. But it was outside of the realm of GHQ [in Dublin]. Belfast was attempting to up the war and GHQ were lagging well behind.

  It was unusual for a section of the IRA such the Belfast Brigade to seek weapons in such an autonomous fashion. Opportunistic acquisition of weapons was one thing, but well-planned and resourced operations such as that set up in Southampton were a different matter. Acquiring and supplying the IRA with weapons and explosives was the responsibility of the Quarter Master General, a member of the IRA’s General Headquarters staff (GHQ), which was answerable to the organisation’s military commander, the Chief of Staff, who in turn reported to the policy-making, seven-man Army Council. The GHQ also consisted of other departments, such as Intelligence, Engineering, Operations and so on, each one of which co-ordinated activity in their speciality downwards to the grassroots. So, once the QMG had acquired weapons they would be distributed, via Brigade, Battalion and Company Quarter Masters such as Brendan Hughes, to the units on the ground and hiding places found for them. That is the way it was supposed to work and so the Southampton and Glasgow operations represented a usurping of GHQ functions, effectively an act of defiance of the national leadership.

  That such bravado was, by the middle of 1971, part of the way the Belfast Brigade behaved was due in no small measure to the removal of Billy McKee as Belfast Commander and his replacement by figures who would foreshadow the rise of Gerry Adams and his allies, first to the Belfast leadership and then to the national leadership of the IRA.

  The sequence of events that led to this began with one of the most merciless and controversial killings of the Troubles. In March 1971 three young, off-duty Scottish soldiers, two of them brothers, were lured from a downtown Belfast bar, taken to a lonely hillside road overlooking the city and shot dead. The killings were so ruthless and cold-blooded that the IRA actually denied responsibility, a sense of shame that was also evident in its own official account of the campaign between 1970 and 1973, Freedom Struggle, which makes absolutely no mention of the incident. But there was little doubt in the public mind that the IRA had been responsible and the following days saw such an upsurge in Loyalist anger – at one point thousands of Protestant shipyard workers downed tools to march to Belfast City Hall to demand the internment of IRA suspects – that the Unionist Prime Minister, James Chichester-Clark, was obliged to resign.

  With Unionists now demanding tough action against the IRA, the British moved against its Belfast leadership. McKee and his Adjutant, Proinsias MacAirt, were stopped by British soldiers, their car searched and a handgun found. The two men claimed, with some credibility, that they had been framed, that they would never have been so foolish as to carry weapons around so openly. Whatever the truth, they were jailed and Joe Cahill, the man who had sworn Hughes into the IRA, took over. Cahill had been Commander of the Second Battalion, effectively covering most of the Falls Road area, and Gerry Adams, previously Cahill’s deputy, became the the new head of the Battalion. Seamus Twomey was made Cahill’s Adjutant, or second in command, while Adams brought Hughes onto his Battalion staff, as Operations Officer (OO), and made Ivor Bell his deputy. Bell was a veteran of the 1956–62 campaign and had been interned in Crumlin Road jail for much of that time. He was one of those who rejoined the IRA after the violence of August 1969 and went with the Provisionals at the split. A Commander of C Company in the Second Battalion area, the district that encompasses Clonard and Bombay Street, Bell was a left-wing Republican and well read, unusual qualities in the IRA of those years, and was equipped with strategic talents to match those of Gerry Adams. Hughes’s rise through D Company had been meteoric, a reflection of his skills and enthusiasm as an IRA activist; after a spell as Quarter Master, he was made Adjutant, or deputy commander, and then the Officer Commanding D Company before Adams transferred him to the Second Battalion staff. The trifecta of Adams, Bell and Hughes – two strategists and an operational specialist – would forge the Provisional IRA in Belfast into a fearsome killing machine.

  The resolve of the Belfast Brigade to bypass GHQ in the search for modern weaponry strengthened in line with the three men’s grip on the Belfast IRA. The next sortie for guns would involve a difficult mission to New York for Brendan Hughes – a mission that was ordered by Gerry Adams – and it would bring to the IRA a weapon with which it would become synonymous: the Armalite rifle.

  … before Charlie Hughes’s death, it must have been late 1970, a seaman came off the QE2 with this booklet. It was about this weapon called the Armalite – the AR15. It folded, it could be dumped in water, and we were fascinated by this weapon. The AR15 came in first and then the AR18, the 18 had the folding butt. We all fell in love with this weapon. We were sitting in the [call] house [talking about this] and we decided that, ‘We need to get these guns.’ We pushed – or I certainly pushed – that this was the weapon we needed. We needed the Armalite because we were using Garrand rifles, M1 carbines and Thompsons … a lot of the ammunition and weapons came from the 1940s era and they’d been lying in dumps all the years … I remember getting a big consignment of.303 bullets. And they were soaking wet. We got biscuit tins and put a layer of sand in the biscuit tin, a layer of ammunition, layer of sand, layer of ammunition, and put it in the oven to dry out the rounds. We would be sitting in a wee kitchen house and the oven full of biscuit tins drying out .303 ammunition or .45 ammunition or whatever. I mean, weapons were so scarce. You had to be careful that you didn’t overheat them or they very easily could have exploded. The other problem was that very often you hit a dud round maybe in the middle of a gun battle, and you’re constantly re-cocking … It was a daunting thought at the time … that we were going to take on the might of the British Army with the antiquated weapons that we had …

  From my point of view, all I was concerned about was arming my Volunteers with the best weapons I could get. The problem and it’s something I was never able to work out, was why the hell [the] people in GHQ were not doing their job right. Did they not know about Armalites or RPG rocket launchers? Why were they still supplying us with Garrand rifles, M1, M2 carbines, which were not the weapons we needed? The Armalite was much superior for street fighting than any of those weapons. The Garrand was a great weapon for heavy combat, but for the type of operations that we were talking about, for street fig
hting, the Armalite was perfect. And yet it took us from Belfast, not GHQ in Dublin, to get them in. I don’t believe they had a clue, and that’s the most innocent explanation I can come up with. The other explanation is that they didn’t want us armed in Belfast, in D Company … I think we did push the war forward more than anyone else. And I think Gerry Adams was largely responsible for that … it was Gerry who sent me to America to get Armalites. To escalate the war. Same reason for the London bombings, to escalate the war, to bring the war to the British. The Gerry Adams I’m talking about then and the Gerry Adams I’m talking about now are two different people … [but] at that time, the most important thing was the war, keep the war going. I went to Gerry, who was my O/C … [and] it was Gerry who sent me [to New York]. We had people in D Company who were on the QE2; we had the American connection. I left Belfast to make arrangements to go to the States and I stayed in Dublin with a guy called Harry White who was an old 1940s man who had been in jail with my father. And he was a pretty prominent guy, an uncle of Danny Morrison. He arranged for me to get … a bum passport, the plane ticket and the contact when I got to New York to pick me up – all the arrangements.

  The Second Battalion decided I would be the best man to go because I was regarded as a good operator. So I went, as I said, down to Dublin … and eventually I got to New York. In New York, I met this contact called ‘Bob’, an ex-Vietnam War vet and he was to help me get the Armalites. We set up a meeting with Noraid; a guy called Martin Lyons [who] was head of Noraid at the time who lived in this big house, [with a] massive conference table. We sat around the table, and I said, ‘We need these Armalites’, and Martin Lyons replied, ‘But we were told by Dublin that you want Garrands and m1 carbines’, and I said back, ‘Listen, I come from Belfast and we’re fighting the war there, we want Armalites.’ And then I was brought to this other house, to this other top Noraid man, and I went to sit in this chair and he told me, ‘You can’t sit there, that’s Joe Cahill’s chair.’ I says, ‘Right, right’, so I moved. Again I had the same message: ‘We want Armalites’, and again he said, ‘We have instructions from GHQ to send you back to Belfast.’ Without the Armalites. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Well, we’re under instructions from Joe Cahill [who was then Chief of Staff] that you have to go back to Belfast, that you’re here unofficially.’ I says, ‘I’m here on the direction of the Belfast Brigade’, and he says, ‘But you’re not here under the directions of the GHQ.’ I replied, ‘Well, I’m not fucking going without Armalites.’ The Noraid people were so conservative, they had no understanding what the war was like in Belfast and they were controlled totally by Dublin … and Dublin thinking, to me, was very conservative, restrictive, and very: ‘The war’s OK but don’t let it get out of hand; don’t give them weapons that were too sophisticated.’ That was my opinion of Dublin, that was my opinion of America, that was my opinion of Noraid. The Noraid contact I had, the ex-Vietnam vet, talked about ‘gooks’ … which I had a problem with, but at that time my main concern was getting Armalites, so I’d have dealt with anybody … So, I was ordered to leave New York. I refused and myself and Bob organised a group of people to buy Armalites for us. At that time you could go into a gun shop, and if you had a driving licence you could buy guns, so that’s what we did. We set the group up, and … I think [we acquired] something like twenty-six or twenty-seven Armalites. You know the old John Wayne film about the Winchester rifle? Bob had a Winchester in his house and I said, ‘Could I get that sent over as well?’ ‘No problem,’ he said. So along with the Armalites came a Winchester rifle.

  … this is where the Southampton thing and the QE2 came in again. We sent the cars over, some [with] a woman and a child, to pick up the stuff; it was hidden into the panels and sent back to Belfast. Whenever a car arrived, we would leave it sitting for an hour or so, and watch it to see if anybody else was watching and then drive it into the Falls, strip the car and get the weapons out. I remember the first time all the Armalites came in. They had just arrived the day before, and we were involved in a gun battle in the Falls, and actually the Sticks were still operating at that time, and I drove into Balkan Street; the Brits were at the top of Raglan Street and I had sixteen Armalites in the boot. I opened it and started handing out Armalites and I remember the Sticks looking at us … That was the start of the Armalites.

  The Sticks got night sights in and that’s what we needed badly. They got them in and there was a wee man who was a Stick who jumped over to the Provos, wee ——, who told us where the night sights were. So, we went and robbed their dumps and then we became effective at nights. The night sights fitted onto the Armalites lovely. The Armalites made all the difference, not just in the Lower Falls, but in Belfast, and I loved them. I loved the Armalite. They were so compact, so easy to fire, so easy to maintain, not like the old rifles like the Garrand, the .303 – they had to be oiled all the time. Armalites were much easier to handle.

  Between them, the Armalite and growing support for the IRA in Catholic working-class Belfast combined to give the Provisionals in the Lower Falls almost unfettered control of their area during the early 1970s. The British Army was now facing a well-armed and determined force that had roots in a community whose alienation from established authority was on the rise. These were ideal circumstances for guerrilla warfare and difficult ones for the British; and occasionally British naïveté would make things worse for themselves.

  I remember that they used to drive down in Saracens with a Sacred Heart picture tied to the front … thinking that we wouldn’t fire at it. I mean, that’s silly. I wasn’t one of those who went to Mass, even though I was brought up in a strict Catholic household. We said the rosary every night, went to Mass every Sunday morning and you’d be asked the colour of the vestments when you got back in for your break fast! But these people obviously thought that we were such devout Catholics that we wouldn’t fire on a Saracen with a holy picture on the front of it. They were sadly mistaken. It was only a picture.

  … there was constant activity from the different call houses that we had. Every day there would be a different call house, every day the weapons were being used, every day there were Volunteers out in what was called the ‘float’ which meant you had a driver – you had to steal a car – possibly one or two men in the back seat, just driving around looking for targets. While that was taking place, it was quite normal for another squad of men – and women – to go and rob a bank, or carry out a bombing mission in the city centre … D Company was very active there as well … my only agenda in that period in the 1970s was to fight the war, to plant as many bombs as I could, to rob as many banks as I could, to kill as many Brits and RUC as I could, to develop the war to a higher level than it was …

  … there wasn’t a [British] regiment that came into the Falls area that didn’t go out with casualties, and the reason for that was that we were on standby twenty-four hours a day. There was one particular day, we were all sitting in the call house and, for some strange reason, an open-back jeep came in through McDonnell Street, across Leeson Street and up Cyprus Street – now they [had] pulled open-back jeeps off the streets a year before. Whether it was an act of bravado or an act of stupidity I still do not know. At this time the British Army would never come in unless they [were] heavily armed and in armoured cars. This particular day we weren’t expecting anything like this; we were in an area that was practically liberated. I had been over every yard wall in the Lower Falls area, through every back door, through most people’s houses, everybody knew who we were. Here was something that just came out of the blue … It was a crazy fucking thing to do, because we walked round the area with weapons over our shoulders, just walking through the streets … I mean, it would be like sending an American open-back jeep into Viet Cong territory in Vietnam. It was just so unbelievable [that] actually we thought this could be a set-up. But we were so confident and in such control of the area at that time that instinct took over: ‘There’s a target’ and ‘Hit it.’ By the time th
e jeep had got to Varna Gap, we had an ambush set up. I often wonder what the hell happened; were they doing it for a bet or was it a mistake? When I think back on it now, it frightens the life out of me. And them poor Brits, whoever they were, and for whatever the reason drove into Varna Gap and they were just wiped out!† You know. There were three dead. I think one survived, but the jeep was just cut to pieces.19

  I’d gone from Volunteer to Quarter Master, to Adjutant and at this stage I was O/C, and it was just an opportunity that could not be missed … but then it wasn’t the first time that this had happened. Some months before, two soldiers had been sent into the area in the middle of the night under cover, and they were caught. The Official IRA got one and D Company got the other one. The one D Company got was shot in Sorella Street, just facing the Royal Victoria Hospital. The other one the Official IRA allowed to go free. I believed that the Official IRA were in contact at all times with the British Army, and that this had started back in 1969, 1970, when the British Army was based in Mulhouse Street Mill … they used to have meetings [with the British] in the Bush Bar and I believed that the Officials held their man there that night, and were in contact with the British in Mulhouse Street. Whether there was a deal or not, that they got something for releasing him, I do not know, but it would not surprise me. In the case of the soldier caught by D Company, he wasn’t unarmed, he was armed, he was the enemy, and was seen as that. They were easily spotted and two IRA Volunteers apprehended them. The Sticks, the Officials, appeared at the same time and there was a bit of an argument between the Volunteers and the Officials but everyone backed off. The soldiers didn’t offer any resistance at all, the Officials took one away and the one held by D Company was executed. I’m actually not 100 per cent sure but I think he might have survived, that he crawled to the Royal Victoria Hospital, but later he died. The Volunteers took his notebook from him, which had names and addresses; mine was one of the names he had in his book. He had photographs as well … but none of me.