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

by Ed Moloney

  Brendan Hughes was deeply involved in the affair – he handled McConville’s initial questioning by the IRA and took the first decisions on how to deal with her case. When the IRA was told that Jean McConville had a radio transmitter in her apartment, they searched her flat and discovered it. Hughes said he confiscated the transmitter – given to her by a British Army handler – and she was taken away to be interrogated. Hughes said that she had admitted working for the Army but, because she was a woman, she was set free with a warning not to do it again. Shortly afterwards, the IRA in the area discovered she had resumed working for the military and this time she was taken away and killed. On the vexed questions of who decided to disappear her and why, Hughes confirmed there was a dispute between Adams and his deputy, Ivor Bell, about whether to hide her body or to leave it in a public place, with Adams advocating her disappearance. The reason for hiding her body, he said, was because she was a woman – the same reason Hughes gave for releasing her the first time. Adams prevailed and, Hughes alleged, gave the order for her to be taken away and buried. It is evident that Hughes decided to reveal what he knew about the Jean McConville affair because of his anger at Adams’s own efforts to distance himself from the IRA and the various decisions that caused the loss of human life. When the Jean McConville scandal worsened in the peace-process years, Hughes confirmed, Gerry Adams attempted internally to place the blame for her disappearance on Bell. Hughes’s testimony from the grave brings the Jean McConville case to a new level.

  At that time Divis Flats still existed¶ and it was a major source of recruitment and activity by the IRA … I’m not sure how it originally started, how she became … an informer [but] she was an informer; she had a transmitter in her house. The British supplied the transmitter into her flat. ——, watching the movements of IRA volunteers around Divis Flats at that time … the unit that was in … Divis Flats at the time was a pretty active unit. A few of them, one of them in particular, young ——, received information from —— that —— had something in the house. I sent … a squad over to the house to check it out and there was a transmitter in the house. We retrieved the transmitter, arrested her, took her away, interrogated her, and she told [us] what she was doing. We actually knew what she was doing because we had the transmitter … if I can get the hold of this other wee man he can tell you more about it because I wasn’t actually on the scene at the time. And because she was a woman … we let her go with a warning [and] confiscated the transmitter. A few weeks later, I’m not sure again how the information came about … another transmitter was put into her house … she was still co-operating with the British; she was getting paid by the British to pass on information. That information came to our attention. The special squad was brought into operation then. And she was arrested again and taken away …

  Q. Arrested by the IRA?

  A. By the IRA.

  Q. For the second time?

  A. Yeah. Second time, and that was as much as I knew. I knew she was being executed. I didn’t know she was going to be buried … or ‘disappeared’ as they call it now. I know one particular person on the Belfast Brigade at the time, Ivor [Bell], argued for [her] to be shot, yes, but to be left on the street. Because to take her away and bury her … would serve no purpose, people wouldn’t know. So looking back on it now, what happened to her … was wrong. I mean, she deserved to be executed, I believe, because she was an informer and she put other people’s lives at risk … There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed. That … man is now the head of Sinn Fein. He went to this family’s house and promised an investigation into the woman’s disappearance. That man is the man who gave the … order for that woman to be executed. Now tell me the morality in that … I wasn’t involved in the execution of the woman … but she was an informer, and … I warned her the first time. I took a device out of her house … and warned her. She’d a load of kids. She carried on doing it. I did not give the order to execute that woman – he did. And yet he went to see them kids – they are not kids any more, they are grown up – to promise an investigation into her death … [Ivor Bell] argued, ‘If you are going to kill her, put her on the street. What’s the sense of killing her and burying her if no one knows what she was killed for? It’s pure revenge if you kill someone and bury them. What’s the point of it?’

  Q. And he, Adams, rejected this logic?

  A. He rejected it.

  Q. And ordered her to be disappeared?

  A. To be buried. She was an informer.

  Q. … with all her kids and the way the family was left, in hindsight, do you still feel as strongly about executing her?

  A. Not really, no, not now … at that time, certainly … but not now because as everything has turned out, not one death was worth it.

  Q. … after the event, did you never discuss the issue with Gerry as to why it happened, what was the purpose of it, given that you had a different attitude?

  A. … there was a never great deal of [that sort of] conversation; certainly we talked about it but the war was so intense and, I mean, you might have had twelve, fourteen operations taking place on the one day, and I never got a great deal of time to sit down and think about [anything] except organising operations and getting operations out and getting kills and getting bombs in the town and so forth … you never thought about it too much because you were so intent on carrying out the war. I lived from operation to operation … you were robbing banks, robbing post offices, robbing trains, planting bombs, shooting Brits, trying to stay alive yourself, trying not to be arrested.

  Q. Well, you know in recent years that Gerry has been trying to blame Ivor?

  A. Hmm.

  Q. And has actually been telling people like Bobby Storey to go and ask Ivor Bell questions because Ivor Bell would know the circumstances of Jean McConville. And Ivor Bell when asked is obviously denying it, and saying, ‘Well, go and ask Gerry, coz he’s the man.’

  A. Hmm.

  Q. It seems very machiavellian, I mean, you worked with all these people.

  A. … I just can’t believe, well, I do believe but I find it so difficult to come to terms [with] the fact that this man has turned his back on everything that we ever did … I never carried out a major operation without the OK or the order from Gerry. And for him to sit in his plush office in Westminster or Stormont or wherever and deny it, I mean, it’s like Hitler denying that there was ever a Holocaust … I don’t know where it ends, once you get onto [a] position where you … start denying that you ever were what you were. It’s a lie and … to continue telling lies and to deny his whole life. I just cannot accept that it’s so, I mean, did he not go and talk to Willie Whitelaw as an IRA representative? Of course he did.

  Q. So was he lying when he denied any involvement in ‘Bloody Friday’; was he lying when he denied any involvement in the killing and disappearing of Jean McConville?

  A. He was lying.

  Q. Does he just lie about his whole life in the IRA?

  A. It … appears that way, that he has just denied and lied about everything that ever took place. And to do that gives me the impression that the man cannot be trusted.

  Q. Although you agreed with the informer executions, do you think the reason for the disappeared was that there was an element of embarrassment at the Belfast Brigade – which was supposed to be a lean, mean, fighting machine, striking terror and fear into the heart of the enemy [but] had actually itself been extensively penetrated, and he didn’t want this known?

  A. I don’t believe that is the case … As regards McConville … I think the reason why she [was] disappeared was because she was a woman. The reason why Seamy Wright [was] disappeared is because of the Republican family that Seamy Wright came from … McKee was the same … he came from a Republican family and that was the reason there … to protect the family … that was the reason as well for Eamon Molloy’s|| disappearance, because of the Republican family connection, because of his wife, Kate. I don’t know where the logic
came from. I don’t, well, obviously it came from Adams; he was the person that was largely responsible for the disappeared … But looking back on it now … it was totally, totally wrong.

  * * *

  On Sunday, 3 June 1973, IRA internees housed in Cage 5 of Long Kesh made a gruesome discovery: from a wall heater in the woodworking room of the hut used for recreation hung the lifeless body of one of their comrades, twenty-two-year-old Patrick Crawford from West Belfast, known to everyone as Paddy Joe. His death was regarded then, and ever since, as a suicide, thanks in no small way to the prison authorities’ speedy assertion, issued that same afternoon, that ‘foul play was not suspected’37 in the death. That Sunday, IRA internees had taken part in a march and parade to commemorate comrades who had been killed in the Troubles, and so the huts in Cage 5 had seemingly been emptied of their occupants at the time of Crawford’s death. When the parade ended, Crawford’s body was discovered by other internees, or at least that is what the story was. One of the first on the scene, within ‘five or ten minutes’ 38 of the grim find, was Father Denis Faul, the Dungannon-based priest who celebrated Mass weekly in the camp for IRA detainees and was a popular figure with the prisoners, thanks to his staunch critique of British security policy and his sympathy for the Republican cause. Some two weeks later, the IRA staff at Long Kesh issued a statement that said that the dead man had been found by two internees immediately after the parade and attempts to revive him were made by prisoners, prison officers and Father Faul. After twenty or thirty minutes these were abandoned and Crawford was declared dead. Paddy Joe, the statement said, was ‘one of the most liked [internees] by all men’.39

  The suicide theory was widely accepted and Nationalist politicians lined up to blame prison conditions, internment and the British for Crawford’s untimely end. A group of nine priests, led by Father Faul, said the ‘inhuman and degrading conditions of Long Kesh’ had driven Crawford to suicide, adding, ‘Death was his hopeless protest against the whole situation of which Long Kesh is the symbol.’40 SDLP leader Gerry Fitt and his colleague Paddy Devlin called on the International Red Cross to investigate the reasons for his ‘suicide’ – although later Fitt, alone of all the Nationalists, would accuse the IRA of hounding Crawford to death – while the Mid-Ulster MP, Bernadette McAliskey, called for the closure of the prison.41 The Fermanagh-South Tyrone MP, Frank McManus, said of Long Kesh, ‘The entire camp is a torture chamber.’42

  But Paddy Joe Crawford did not take his own life. In his interviews with Boston College, Brendan Hughes revealed that the IRA killed Crawford by hanging him, supposedly because he was working as an informer for the British. But Hughes was convinced that his only crime was to break during police interrogation, like countless other young IRA activists who were never punished as harshly. It was, he said, ‘a brutal, brutal murder’.

  Hughes’s belief was that the order to kill Crawford had come into the jail from Gerry Adams, who was still Belfast Commander at the time. Hughes was not present, he admitted, at the Brigade staff meeting that discussed Crawford’s fate and at the time of the hanging he believed that Ivor Bell had sent in the order. But when he discussed the matter with Bell some years later Bell told him that it was Adams who had issued the order, not him. Boston College’s researcher, Anthony McIntyre, interviewed former IRA internees held in Long Kesh at this time in an effort to confirm Hughes’s account and they corroborate his claim that Crawford was hanged. But they say that Adams’s role in the affair was to refer Crawford’s case to GHQ in Dublin which then ordered his death. If true this would mean that, ultimately, permission for the killing was probably given by the then Chief of Staff, Seamus Twomey, the most senior figure on GHQ.

  According to this account, the usual IRA procedures for handling accusations of informing were ignored both inside and outside Long Kesh. Although the IRA’s justice system was inherently flawed, Crawford should none the less have been court-martialled and given a chance to defend himself from charges that, inter alia, alleged that he had led British troops to arms dumps and IRA safe houses, and had identified fellow IRA members, admissions he had purportedly made when he was debriefed in Long Kesh by IRA intelligence officers. But he was not court-martialled; instead his life was ended on an improvised gallows by fiat of an IRA leader, whether in Belfast or Dublin it is not certain, and the decision made to lie about what had happened. Whatever the truth about who ordered Paddy Joe Crawford’s execution, it is clear that the Belfast Brigade leadership and the IRA’s GHQ were both fully complicit in his wretched death.

  The former IRA members interviewed by McIntyre, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added disconcerting detail to the story. The hanging was accompanied by a macabre ceremonial: a black cloth was draped over the improvised steps from which young Crawford was pitched into eternity and his wrists were taped behind his back. Afterwards the cloth, a vital piece of evidence, was removed. They also say that he went meekly to his death. Paddy Joe Crawford was a strong young man and could have fought his executioners – and by so doing could have created enough forensic evidence to cast doubt on the suicide theory – but for reasons still unfathomable, he chose not to resist. Four men helped to hang Crawford. One of them was Harry Burns, known as ‘Big Harry’ to his friends, a prominent Belfast IRA man who was related by marriage to Gerry Adams. During the hanging a group of internees inadvertently burst into the hut and saw everything. Afterwards the word spread among other inmates. ‘Prisoners were simply told he had taken his own life. But people knew, although they did not talk,’43 one of the sources told McIntyre.

  Paddy Joe Crawford’s death was in one essential respect no different from the deaths of those who had been disappeared before him by the Belfast IRA: Joe Linskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee and Jean McConville. While his body, unlike theirs, was not hidden in a secret grave, the truth about his death was buried just as securely. And he has been disappeared from the death lists of the Troubles as well, made a non-victim by those who ordered and arranged his hanging. Neither Lost Lives nor the Sutton Index of Deaths,44 the two most extensive and reliable records of Northern Ireland’s death toll, list him among those who were killed in the conflict. Paddy Joe Crawford has simply been forgotten, his story erased from the narrative of the Troubles and, for over three decades, lies told about why and how he died.

  Paddy Joe Crawford rightly belongs in the list of the IRA’s disappeared victims because, other than wreaking vengeance on him for his alleged treachery, his death, like theirs, was pointless. Fabricating his suicide meant that killing him could never have a deterrent effect on other IRA members who might have been tempted to work for the British, since only a very small number of people would know the real facts of his death.

  It is difficult not to wonder if the reason why Patrick Crawford was chosen to die, rather than other IRA members who had broken during interrogation, was that no one would kick up a fuss afterwards, or ask awkward questions about what had happened, much less campaign for years for the truth. Others who were disappeared, such as Jean McConville, left behind relatives to fight for them and, eventually, they persuaded powerful politicians to back their efforts. Apart from one childhood friend, Paddy Joe Crawford really had no one to fight for him afterwards; he was an ideal candidate to be disappeared in the way he was.

  Paddy Joe Crawford was an orphan, brought up by nuns in Nazareth House in South Belfast after he was abandoned by his mother. According to records kept by the orphanage, Crawford was born on 5 March 1951 and admitted into care just eleven days later, on 16 March.45 The Poor Sisters of Nazareth, to give them their formal title, no longer look after children. Nowadays they care for the elderly but in the Belfast of the 1950s and 1960s their convent on the Ravenhill Road was home to scores of rejected waifs. Founded in Hammersmith in London in the mid-nineteenth century, the Poor Sisters built a veritable empire of children’s homes in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Order spread to America, to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where more homes were built. Pa
ddy Joe Crawford stayed with the Poor Sisters until he reached the age of eleven, when he was transferred to the De La Salle boys’ home run by the Christian Brothers at Kircubbin on the picturesque eastern shore of Strangford Lough in County Down. He stayed at Kircubbin until he was fifteen years old, the school-leaving age, when he was transferred to digs in West Belfast and a job found for him. He lived with a family in Broadway in the heart of the Falls Road and became a builder’s labourer. He and other orphans from the Nazareth and De La Salle homes were members of St Augustine’s Boys Club, run since the early 1970s by Father Matt Wallace, a Wexford-born priest and one of the most loved and popular clerics in West Belfast. Father Wallace helped Paddy Joe Crawford get a job, gave him the last rites an hour after he died and officiated at his funeral, during which his coffin was carried by members of the youth club. To this day Father Wallace tends his grave in Milltown cemetery and that of other Nazareth and De La Salle boys killed in the Troubles.