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

by Ed Moloney

  … they were two young lads sent in on an undercover operation against D Company, in one of the most hostile areas you could send soldiers into, and yet it happened. And they were both caught … they weren’t going to do any damage to the IRA, trying to gather information in the early hours of the morning. And they were spotted by a local resident coming into the area, as most activity in the area at the time was … everyone passed on information. Even the Official IRA at this stage would have passed on information if they thought your life was in danger or if they thought there was a chance of you getting arrested; at least some of them would. Most residents would have done the same. There were times when [British Army] foot patrols would have come in – one from one end of the area, one from the other end of the area – and within seconds you knew exactly where they were; it would be passed from one resident to another: ‘If you see any of the boys, tell them there’s a foot patrol there, a foot patrol here.’

  Brendan Hughes’s assertion that the IRA in the Lower Falls, D Company, exerted such a degree of control over the area during this time seems borne out by the security statistics. Only three IRA members were killed by the British Army in the Lower Falls between February 1971, when the IRA in Belfast took the offensive against the British, until Hughes’s arrest in July 1973. As many were killed by their own bombs, which in those days were crude affairs, unequipped with the safety devices built into bombs in later years. In contrast twenty-two soldiers died in bomb and gun attacks mounted by D Company members during the same time.

  Predictably, Hughes was in the thick of it when two of those IRA members were killed. The first was in late September 1972 and, not untypically of the time, one killing sparked many more. The first to die was a forty-eight-year-old Catholic waiter, Daniel McErlean, who was killed in a UVF bombing of a Nationalist social club in North Belfast, a random, no-warning attack which Loyalist paramilitary groups were at the time making their speciality.20 Two days later, McErlean’s funeral cortège was due to travel across North Belfast towards Milltown cemetery in the heart of West Belfast and the route would take it up Divis Street, at the very bottom of the Falls Road, into the heart of D Company’s territory. It was not unusual on such occasions for the Provisional IRA to stake out the area in case of trouble. Loyalist snipers had in the past attacked funerals in this area, which is adjacent to the Shankill Road, and even without that threat funerals in those days were unpredictable events and often the cue for more violence, as it was that day. As the cortège made its way up the Falls Road, British soldiers opened fire and killed an eighteen-year-old youth, a member of D Company. The troops reported that they had seen him, armed with a rifle on the roof of a chemist’s shop at the junction of Servia and Albert Streets, and shot him dead. Their target was Jimmy Quigley, one of D Company’s youngest members who, local people later claimed, had not opened fire on the troops, although his subsequent inquest was told a Garrand rifle had been found near his body.21 Local eyewitnesses claimed that the troops had tossed his lifeless body from an upstairs window on to the street, and this sent angry D Company members racing for their weapons, eager to avenge their fallen comrade. Soon a major gun battle was raging, as Hughes recalled: ‘We brought the place to a standstill.’ Almost immediately, the IRA drew blood. A member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, Ian Burt from Essex, with eighteen years’ service, was shot dead by one of an estimated twelve IRA gunmen attacking the troops.22 But the soldier was not the last person to die.

  … there was a wee girl, a wee Sticky girl, a member of the Official IRA, Patricia McKay you called her. She actually had an Armalite that the Officials had stolen from us, but the wee girl was only a kid. She was only nineteen and she was nervous. They were firing from all over the place and I took the Armalite off her. So I had two Armalites, one over my shoulder and one on my arm, and we were coming under fire from all over the place … and I ran out, and just fired like hell and got away but I told Patricia to stay where she was. Her daddy and mummy have asked me so many times about this. I just told her to stay, but she was scared, the child was scared. I said, ‘Don’t fucking move from here, stay here where you are.’ And I went down the street and carried on with the gun battle which went on for the rest of the day. Obviously the Brits had seen me firing from the house and they pinpointed it … if only she had listened to what I had told her … well, anyway, she came out of the house and they shot her dead. A child. Lovely child. I know her mammy and daddy. And, I remember going the next day to her home; I was on the run, and she lived in Divis Flats, and they put a big military funeral on for her, the Official IRA did. A Tricolour over her coffin and all the rest. I remember walking through them all. And it wasn’t easy to do, you know, [walking] through the Sticks, right? And her mummy and daddy kept asking me, ‘What happened?’ What do you say? I took the weapon off the wee girl. And she just came out; they just pinpointed the house where the firing was coming from. She was game enough to come out and do it. I mean, I was used to gun battles at that time but not her … it was like going to work for me, right, going into a gun battle in the Falls, you know.

  The second D Company loss during Hughes’s days in charge took place seven months later and the account he gave of the death of twenty-seven-year-old Edward O’Rawe, known as ‘Mundo’, is sharply at variance with the official version of events. The British Army’s story was that O’Rawe was shot dead after firing at a patrol that was pursuing him and another man as he was climbing over an entry wall in Garnet Street in the Lower Falls. His inquest was told, however, that no weapons were found at the scene and that there was no forensic evidence to support the claim that he had been using a weapon.23 Hughes’s version is that his death was a cold-blooded execution, a fate he might have missed himself by just a few minutes.

  I remember when Mundo was killed, we were in a house off Raglan Street … It was the same house that we had organised the London bombs from. There was a whole crowd of us there, Lucas Quigley and all … he and myself had just left when the Brits hit the house. Big Mundo O’Rawe was still inside. Mundo tried to get over the backyard, that was always your escape but they were waiting for him. And I got out of the house, Lucas and me, just two fucking minutes before they hit the house. So I went and organised the boys and we started to hit back with Armalites. I was in Raglan Street where the 1920s ambush had taken place, and I actually saw Mundo against the wall, and then I next saw him on the floor in an entry. I believe he was executed in the entry of Garnet Street … and then a major gun battle followed. At that time Mundo was QM for D Company and he had a group of people around him, one in particular, a girl called Moya. She and Mundo were very close and after the gun battle had settled down and the British troops had pulled out, we assembled back in the call house in Sultan Street. Moya was really upset; she was crying uncontrollably, and I took her by the shoulder, gave her a rifle – a Garrand rifle it was – and brought her outside. And there was a helicopter hovering above and I just ordered her to fire at the helicopter and while she was doing this she was crying uncontrollably, but she kept firing at the helicopter. Not that it was going to do any good, she wasn’t going to bring the helicopter down, but it helped her to control her emotions …

  While D Company fatalities were relatively few during Brendan Hughes’s time, IRA members were often wounded or injured during attacks, sometimes badly. Taking such casualties to a local hospital such as the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital risked the victims being arrested and so, unless the injuries were life-threatening and required urgent treatment, the IRA preferred to spirit such people across the border to a hospital in the Republic. One early attack on a British Army base in Mulhouse Street Mill in the Grosvenor Road area would set the pattern for the future.

  We organised an ambush, throwing blast bombs and nail bombs over [the walls] trying to pinpoint Brits coming out on patrols. So five or six nail bombs were thrown. Bang! Bang! And ——, his nail bomb bounced off the corrugated-iron wall onto the Grosvenor Road, blew up, and one of the nails
went into his spine. He was lying in the middle of the Grosvenor Road but we had all bolted off. Big Fra McCullough was driving one of the cars, he did a U-turn, a handbraker, pulled up in the middle of the Grosvenor Road; the Brits were firing at us now, and he pulls —— into the passenger seat and we get him into the call house in Gibson Street. We put him on a mattress on the floor, under the windowsill; he couldn’t move, he was in agony. Everything was quiet. The Brits were patrolling the areas. We could hear their voices over the radio. And ——’s lying under the windowsill in agony, and we’re trying to keep him quiet. I went over the yard wall, over to Divis, made contact with his da. I thought he was going to die and I told him the situation. We kept him all night. There was a doctor’s surgery at the corner of the street and the next morning I went in, held a gun to the doctor’s head, and said, ‘We need you down here’, and the doctor says, ‘There’s no need for the gun, I’ll come.’ So I put the gun back in my belt and brought him down to ——. This is only a couple of hundred yards from the barracks we tried to blow up. The doctor examined him and said, ‘If you move him, he’s dead; get him to the Royal, phone an ambulance and get him there.’ I said, ‘What chance has he if we try to move him?’ He replied, ‘You’re risking his life cause that nail can kill him.’ So I sent for his da and I said to him, ‘We can get him to the Royal, it’s only across the street, or we can get him across the border. If we move him we may kill him, but if we send him to the Royal, he’s going to jail for twenty years’, and his father said he’d leave it up to me to make the decision. It was the last thing I wanted. So, I decided, ‘Fuck it, I’m not giving the man up’, and I organised a van with a mattress in the back and a medic out of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade who was prepared to travel, and fair play to him, he did. So, the Brits had pulled out of the area by this time and remember we were only forty yards away at most from the place we tried to blow up. The van pulled up and we got a stretcher in and got —— onto the stretcher. I explained to —— what was happening and he agreed to go along with whatever I said. We’d already made contact with the South Armagh people, and they arranged a route for us. And we got him across the border and into Dundalk Hospital. I’d a contact in the hospital. —— was there for a year. And to this day he’s in terrible agony most of the time. He lives now with his mother, he looks after her. It’s only him and his mother in the house together now. He was only a kid, only a Fianna boy when I got to know him, then he came into the IRA. And he was a good Volunteer. He was a real good kid, a good wee operator.

  The British Army knew about Brendan Hughes from early on, but thanks to his father’s foresight, it would be some time before Military Intelligence was able to acquire his photograph, to put a face on the IRA leader they knew only as ‘Darkie’. They knew he was a leader of D Company, an organiser of many of the attacks that had claimed the lives of their soldiers, and that his elimination would badly hurt the IRA. He was a thorn in the flesh of the British Army and a priority target. One undercover effort mounted by the military very nearly succeeded in removing the thorn. It failed, only just, but it brought Hughes and Gerry Adams closer, helping to cement one of the IRA’s most famous partnerships.

  One day, I was standing on the corner of Varna Gap; two or three other people were with me – we hadn’t arranged a call house that day – and a van drove down Leeson Street. As the van passed I noticed there was something wrong with the driver – he was nervous. He drove past me and down McDonnell Street onto the Grosvenor Road. I crossed over to the other corner and saw the van going up the Grosvenor Road away from me. Five minutes later it came back down. At that time I always carried a weapon, a .45 automatic, but I’d given it to another Volunteer that morning to go and steal a car we needed, so I sent one of the runners to get a weapon. As the van approached, my eyes were on the driver the whole time, and the guy was really shitting himself. He drove about twenty yards past me, past Varna Gap, and the back doors flew open. Three guys with rifles jumped out and they immediately started firing at me. One had two .45s in his hands. They were wearing baseball boots and tracksuits … The bullets went whizzing off the wall, all over the place and there was nothing I could do, only run along Varna Gap, and they came after me firing. I turned round at Varna Gap into Cyprus Street and then I took a shortcut into Sultan Street which was where the call house and our weapons were. I ran the whole length of that street, and they were running and firing after me. Later I worked it out that they knew who I was. There was a derelict house directly facing Varna Gap that the Brits had been using as an observation post and they had obviously identified me, whether it was a photograph or description I don’t know, but they identified me obviously because they were trying to kill me. There was a baker’s van delivering bread – it was early-morning time – to Willie Dark’s shop at the corner of Sultan Street and the van was shot to pieces. I almost ran past the call house I was going so fast, so I grabbed the door as I was running and the momentum carried me right through the living-room window. But the weapons were there, and I grabbed an Armalite and I came out fucking firing. The next thing Saracens came from all over the place and the soldiers in the observation post, in the derelict house, were picked up; it pulled up outside and the two Brits jumped out onto the roof of the Saracen and into the back of it and the other ones who had been chasing me were picked up in another Saracen. They had been there all night. Why the Brits in the derelict house didn’t fire I do not know. I was a sitting target for them; they didn’t have to send the van down, I mean, they could have shot me from that window. The operation was aimed at assassinating me and whoever else I was with.

  I didn’t realise I was bleeding until afterwards and then I thought I had been hit but I had been badly cut in the arm by the glass when I crashed through the living-room window. I was taken to a house, my cousin’s house, just a couple of hundred yards down the street. And the next thing Gerry [Adams] came into the district. The artery had been severed. But it was the ‘Big Effort’, Gerry, who organised the doctor, brought him into the area, fair play to him. I have to give that to him. It was ——, the heart surgeon. But he had no equipment with him so my cousin got a needle and thread and —— sewed me up. There’s a wee lump still there where he inserted tweezers, pulled the artery down, tied it in a knot to stop the bleeding, and then he got a needle and thread and sewed it up. I didn’t realise how much blood I had lost but it was an awful lot. Gerry may well have saved my life by bringing the surgeon in because the blood was pumping out. The Brits were still driving round, and I remember the doctor sewing it up while the Saracen was passing the door. You know, Gerry did that but he didn’t have to. We were close at that time and I think there was a genuine thing there. He didn’t have to come into the area, he could have sent someone else in, but he did come in. I didn’t want to leave town – you know, ‘the true soldier’ – I didn’t want to leave Belfast but Gerry insisted, he ordered me out. And I went to Dundalk and booked into a bed-and-breakfast for a week but I just couldn’t wait to get back.

  Gerry Adams had talent-spotted Brendan Hughes, realising that he had great skills conceiving and planning operations. When Adams was made Commander of the Second Battalion, he persuaded Hughes to join him on the Battalion staff as his Operations Officer, and it was after this that the Second Battalion took the lead role in Belfast. Hughes didn’t want to leave D Company, but he did. And he came to regret the close ties he was to forge with Gerry Adams.

  I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to be promoted. I didn’t want to leave the Dogs, no, I was quite happy there, I was content there. Every day there was something going on … three or four operations, maybe we were robbing a bank or putting a snipe out, putting a float out, planting bombs in the town. You were at that every day, seven days a week, you were on standby. It wasn’t a romantic lifestyle, adventurous more than anything else, I would say … the D Company that I was O/C of was a very, very young crowd; there were kids there, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, in the Fianna. They could
n’t get into the IRA but they wanted into the IRA, really, really keen. And every one of them were used to their full potential. This was a rundown area. Try and picture it – derelict houses all over the place. We had to use different call houses but there were houses we did constantly use, 39 Theodore Street, for example, Annie Walsh’s house; 9 Gibson Street, Mrs Maguire’s house, both constantly used. Twenty-four hours a day we were in and out of their houses. They were cooking for us, feeding us, letting us sleep there and moving out when we needed them to. And many a time the houses were raided. I remember one time, 9 Gibson Street, Mrs Maguire’s house, the Brits raided and the two twins were there, big George and Frank Gillen, both twenty-seven, twenty-eight stone. Frank’s dead; George is still alive. The usual escape was out the back, over the yard wall. This particular time, George couldn’t get over the yard wall and I was helping him – everybody else was gone and I was helping George and he’s up and away and over. A Brit charged into the backyard armed with his SLR; he was an ordinary wee guy, only eighteen or something, and he had the rifle pointed at me, just on his own. And I was caught; I put my hands up and he came towards me. He was really nervous and he knew who I was. I mean by that stage they all had my photo and he was shitting himself, shouting, ‘Sarge, sarge, sarge, sarge!’ and he was really shaking. So I tried to calm him down. I made a move towards him and I pushed him, pushed the rifle and made a dash for the yard wall. Mrs Maguire was there and the wee lad was in total panic. And he could have, he should have shot me. Mrs Maguire jumped on him, lay on top of him and saved my life and I was away again. Years later, after I got out of prison, Annie Walsh died, and I gave the oration at the funeral – the family asked me to do it. Same thing with Mrs Maguire. I gave the oration at her funeral as well. I can’t remember what I said, but I probably said what I’m saying now, that I have a deep appreciation of people like her. There’s one clear image I have of Annie Walsh before she died. She was on an oxygen tank in her bedroom. And I went in along with Gerry Adams to see her. I could never understand where she was coming from, what she was thinking of because she threw Gerry Adams out of the house, asked him to leave, and called him all sorts of names – ‘Waster!’ This is in 1986 just after my release. She had absolutely no time for him. And I didn’t know why. [But] I go back to a story that an old Republican told me about relying on a woman’s instinct. It might sound sexist but I believe it. John Joe McGirl‡ told me this. We used to be in and out of John Joe’s house in County Leitrim and John Joe always relied on his wife’s intuition, that if someone came into the house that she didn’t like, John Joe had no time for them. And every time I think of that image of us standing in Annie Walsh’s bedroom and her telling Gerry Adams to leave, I think of that.