by Ed Moloney
Notes – 6
53 Adams, Before the Dawn, pp. 231–2.
54 John McGuffin, Internment, chapter 8.
55 Ibid.
56 Robert W. White, Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretative History, p. 219.
57 Ibid., pp. 221–4.
58 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 445.
59 Ibid., pp. 487.
* A tough warder who was disliked by most IRA inmates.
† A large detached and expensive home in the affluent Malone area of South Belfast.
‡ Belfast Republican who met Protestant clergymen in December 1974 to arrange a ceasefire.
§ Founder member of the Provos and IRA representative at talks with British Intelligence in 1975.
¶ Constables Malcolm Ross and Brian Bell, shot dead at Finaghy, South Belfast, on 10 May 1974.
|| On the north-western edge of Belfast.
** Leader of the UVF murder gang, ‘the Shankill Butchers’.
†† Former British Intelligence operative Fred Holroyd has spoken of the loss of eight or so agents around this time, but otherwise this claim is unsubstantiated.
‡‡ Leader of Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
§§ IRA Prison Commander during the 1981 hunger strikes, convicted of bombing the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road, Belfast, in August 1975, killing five people.
¶¶ Close ally of Gerry Adams and future chairman of his think tank.
|||| An Ardoyne Republican and future Adams bodyguard, now deceased.
*** A South Armagh Republican.
7
The first signs that Gerry Adams had made good his promise to Brendan Hughes and Ivor Bell to oust the IRA leadership of 1975 came several months before Hughes was made Commander of IRA prisoners in the Maze prison. They came on one of the most revered days in the Republican calendar. On the Sunday nearest 20 June each year, Republicans gather at Bodenstown cemetery in County Kildare to celebrate the birth in 1763 of the founder of modern Irish separatism, Wolfe Tone. It is an occasion to meet old friends, to reaffirm core beliefs and to hear the IRA leadership’s take on the struggle to eject Britain from Ireland, and their analysis of how this will be achieved. The June 1977 Bodenstown ceremony was all of this and much, much more. The main speaker that day, the man chosen to pronounce the most radical shift in IRA policy since the Provisionals came into being, was none other than Jimmy Drumm, the same Jimmy Drumm whom Brendan Hughes had discovered was having secret meetings behind his back with either the British or their proxies in the spring of 1974. Drumm’s surreptitious rendezvous were part of the complex dance that led to the 1974/75 ceasefire, an event that Adams, Hughes and Ivor Bell had long regarded as a disaster for the IRA. They had determined in jail to remove those responsible and now Jimmy Drumm, once that leadership’s loyal water boy, climbed the platform beside Wolfe Tone’s grave to announce that the new regime had taken over.* It was an exercise designed to demonstrate that Gerry Adams and his allies now held sway at the highest levels of the IRA; but it was also staged to humiliate the deposed leaders.
Drumm’s speech said two significant things: first, the IRA no longer believed, as had the 1975 leadership, that the British had any plans to withdraw from the North; in fact the view now was that Britain was in for the long haul, determined to stabilise Northern Ireland and to defeat the IRA. Second, the IRA could come back from this setback only if the isolation of Republicans around the strategy of armed struggle was ended. Any struggle to achieve Irish independence that was confined to the North and based solely on ‘hatred and resentment of the [British] army’,60 as the speech composed for Drumm put it, could not succeed. The old leadership had gone or was going and so too had their ideas. The new leaders – Adams, Bell, who was released later in 1977, Martin McGuinness, Brian Keenan and others – were signalling ever so subtly that the IRA had shifted leftwards and was committed to a broader level of political activity in both parts of Ireland. At the time, the leftward lurch got the attention and before long the tag ‘Marxist’ would be attached to the Provos; but it was, arguably, the latter development that in the long term made the greater difference. The expansion of Sinn Fein and the demand that it make itself relevant to people’s normal needs, all implied in Drumm’s speech and soon official policy, led directly to eventual Republican involvement in electoral politics, out of which came the peace process. But, long before that, the IRA’s struggle against the British would once more be fought out in the prisons where Hughes would play a central role. The outcome of that battle would make the goals outlined in Jimmy Drumm’s speech so much more achievable.
A few months before Jimmy Drumm made his reluctant way to the podium at Bodenstown, Brendan Hughes had passed his twenty-ninth birthday. He had courted death – and inflicted it on others – in the tangled streets of the Lower Falls since he was nineteen, had spent nearly four years in Long Kesh and now faced the best part of another decade behind bars. He and his wife Lilly had agreed to separate when he was sentenced, their marriage of just six years a casualty of the Troubles like so many others and their two children, a boy called Brendan and a daughter, Josephine, would grow up seeing their father only on jail visits. To add to all this he had become O/C of Long Kesh at a time when the camp’s IRA prisoners were still deeply, even bitterly, divided. And he discovered alarming evidence of the cordial chumminess that had characterised the relationship between the prison authorities and the IRA camp staff during the Morley years.
Things were very much the same [after Morley stood down], you could cut the tension with a knife. It was almost two enemy camps. And there were people in Cage 11, people like Big Juice McMullan, Wee Ginty Lennon and lots of others who had suffered under the Morley regime. When my appointment came in … the tension got even greater because there were people here who were really scared. And there were others who were busting to get at their throats, those who ran [Morley’s] ruthless spying regime. The tension was even worse than before because … I heard the comments: ‘Hang them from the fucking barbed wire.’ A lot of these people had been interrogated, you know and beaten … by camp staff. The image I had once [my] appointment was made known was of these people scurrying into corners, waiting on the heavy hand coming down on them. There were two cases in particular; two of these people were actually caught in one of the tin wardrobes – listening to other people’s conversation. There were numerous occasions when people were suspended by informers in our cages. So there was a great deal of hatred there. The first thing I had to do was inform the prison authorities that I was the new O/C … It was quite friendly actually, on the face of things. [But] I believe, underneath it all, there was a great deal of resentment and fear on the part of the authorities … because I had a reputation of being totally disruptive in the Crumlin Road jail, when I was O/C there … I believe they were quite aware that the new leadership in the jail was subject to the advice and influence of a then-emerging, new Army [IRA] leadership on the outside. When I told the Governor and the Chief Prison Officer, Geordie Dixon, what the situation was, I sat down with them … I was called ‘Mr Hughes’ or ‘O/C’ by Geordie Dixon. Some of them called me ‘Dark’ or ‘Darkie’. It was always very pleasant and I was … offered a cup of coffee, which I refused. I was then shown the books of the camp staff and there was … I believe it was twenty-two thousand pounds in the ‘Jim Scullion Fund’ which had been transferred from the ‘Davy Morley Fund’. And I asked, ‘What is this for, what’s this about?’ He says, ‘Well, it’s, it’s the prisoners’ money.’ I says, ‘Well, where did it come from?’ He says, ‘It was part of the agreement that Morley and Jimmy Drumm came to with the camp committee.’ Apparently the UVF got money, the UDA got money and the IRA prisoners got money. When I asked him what was the money used for, he says, ‘Ah, well … it’s your discretion, it’s up to you now, it’s in the Brendan Hughes Fund, it’s for when prisoners are getting out on parole or if you have any needs …’ It was a fucking bribe. I immediately went to Scullion and had
a head-to-head with him: ‘Where the hell was this money from?’ And he couldn’t explain to me. I says, ‘Why weren’t the Volunteers informed of this if … it’s supposed to be there for their use? If prisoners’ wives had financial problems, should they not have been allowed to come and get this money, if it was their money?’ And I asked him, did he ever hand over any money to prisoners who were having difficulties, and he says, ‘No.’ There were never any suggestions that he was using it for his own ends, but certainly there was suggestions that Morley did. It was a large amount of money and I … told them to stick it, I wasn’t touching it, it was nothing to do with me, I didn’t want the money, which I think took them back a bit.
Realising that the festering divisions within the IRA prison community could be hugely self-destructive, Hughes set about defusing the quarrel.
I then concentrated on calming the situation because it was an explosive situation … I requested a tour of all the cages, which I proceeded to do. And the first cage I went to was Cage 12. And I called them all to attention, or someone called them all to attention and I gave them the talk I had planned. I tried to assure them as much as possible that my intention was to unify the camp and to stop this antagonism … and I asked every Volunteer in the place to try … to co-operate with me to try and bring about unity within the camp: ‘Forget about what happened in the past, we need unity here, there’s a new situation developing, the Army [IRA] needs people on the outside, the movement needs people on the outside …’ And to a large extent I was successful. I then went to the people who were the most angry and attempted to do that with them. And again I think I was largely successful. We made an attempt to make sure that this antagonism didn’t finish up in a split … I had to forget a lot of things as well – [like] people who had been out to get me. I had to put that to the back of my mind as well, which I was quite able to do. And then the camp went pretty well. Changes were made. For instance, staff were no longer immune from prison duties, from now on all staff had to do exactly what every other Volunteer in the place was doing. And so I think that went a long way as well to break down … animosities and tensions. I was always a great believer in bringing about discipline through comradeship and through showing a lead, whereas before the discipline was brought about through fear, intimidation and threats.
A lot of the people who were with the previous leadership moved into Cage 10 … As I say, there was a great deal of fear in their ranks, but after some months or weeks that was quietened. And we went about organising and radicalising and preparing people to go outside. On the outside Gerry was reorganising the movement, [rescuing it] from the disarray that it was in. I carried on. We organised debates about things like ‘What happened with the previous leadership?’ … A lot of people within the jail – including people like Bobby Sands – did not really accept what we had been preaching. A lot of people were very, very loyal to the [old] leadership. Whatever the leadership said, the leadership must be right, and of course that’s not always the case. The key words at that time were ‘a politically educated rank and file’ – a leadership that is controlled by the rank and file, an educated rank and file who were able to make their own decisions about what was right and what was wrong … The previous leadership was leadership led with little or no control or input from the rank and file. That was why we were in this mess. There weren’t enough people in the rank and file who would speak up with their opinions.
Days before the IRA leadership appointed him Camp Commander, Brendan Hughes’s life was changed in another way and the consequences for him and the course of Irish politics would be profound. It started when an IRA prisoner called Joe Barnes had what the prisoners usually called ‘a bad visit’, one that turned into a quarrel with a wife or girlfriend, and he took his irritation out on a warder, hitting him as he returned to the cage. He was detained at the front gate and as Hughes attempted to negotiate his release, other prisoners climbed the wire and began beating the warders holding Barnes with bed irons and fire extinguishers. Hughes ordered them to stop and went to the help of one warder who had been felled and was choking on his own blood. Hughes turned him round to the recovery position just as more warders arrived. Although he had helped to stop the attack and had assisted an injured warder, Hughes was charged with rioting and assault and given an extra five-year sentence. That meant he was transferred out of the cages and special-category status section of Long Kesh into the new H-blocks whose construction had begun during the 1975 ceasefire. It was well into 1978 when Hughes entered the H-blocks and by then a group of IRA prisoners had been refusing for some time to wear the prison uniform in protest at the loss of their status.
The ‘blanket protest’, as the prisoners’ campaign was called, was by no means a thought-out, well-planned action by the IRA but its consequences made it look as if it had been. British Secretary of State Merlyn Rees had scrapped special-category status on 1 March 1976 for any prisoner charged thereafter. Existing prisoners kept their political status but that too was removed in early 1980. The first prisoner convicted after Rees’s edict was a former D Company member by the name of Kieran Nugent, an eighteen-year-old who had been in the IRA for two years. Nugent was convicted of hijacking a car and sentenced to three years. When he was taken to the H-blocks, he refused to put on the prison-issue uniform, famously telling the warders they would have to ‘nail it to my back’. Nugent was placed naked in a cell and the next day was given a blanket which he used to cover himself, and so the protest was born. Sinn Fein figures discovered this only when, four weeks later, Nugent’s family contacted them because their son had gone missing.61 Through a lawyer, Sinn Fein and Nugent’s family learned that the blanket protest had begun. Slowly Nugent was joined by others; and by 1980 around 300 prisoners, perhaps a half of all Republican prisoners in the new Maze prison, were ‘on the blanket’, a figure that would eventually rise to 450. Those on the protest were punished. They were held in their cells twenty-four hours a day, lost the 50 per cent remission of sentence available to conforming prisoners, and were denied access to television, radio, newspapers, books – except the Bible – and to writing materials, letters and family parcels. They lost their once-a-month statutory visit unless they wore a uniform at the time and totally forfeited three other privileged visits available to other inmates.62
What happened in the Maze prison between 1976 and the winter of 1981 was much more than a battle of wills between the IRA inmates and the prison authorities. It was a struggle about the meaning of Irish history and an attempt to redefine the narrative of the Troubles. By saying that the Provos were mere criminals, devoid of any political motive, the British were implicitly placing previous Republican struggles in the same category. If Brendan Hughes and his comrades were common criminals, then what did that make Terence MacSwiney, or the 1916 rebels, Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen? That question resonated throughout Nationalist Ireland, way beyond the narrow confines of Long Kesh and in a way the British had failed to anticipate. It struck a sympathetic chord even among Nationalists who otherwise abhorred IRA violence. And for the Provos, it helped make the struggle in the H-blocks what Gerry Adams’s skilled propagandist, Danny Morrison, would call ‘Our 1916’.63
The battle in the H-blocks grew more violent and dirtier with the passage of time. When prisoners refused to take orders from the warders, they were beaten and such clashes often ended with serious injuries, mostly on the prisoners’ side. When they smashed their cell furniture in response, their cells were stripped of all but a mattress and a blanket. Since virtually all the IRA inmates were Catholic and Nationalist and most of the warders were Protestant and Unionist, that gave the confrontations a sharper, sectarian edge. There were, however, some Catholic prison officers in the Maze and they invariably fell into two categories: those who were as violent and hostile as their most Loyalist colleagues, and were thus hated by the prisoners with a special intensity, or those who treated them decently, and these the prisoners would leave alone. As the v
iolence intensified, the IRA outside intervened and began shooting prison staff dead. Those warders regarded as the most violent and bigoted were targeted and Brendan Hughes helped choose them. As the prisoners became better organised, the confrontations with prison staff intensified. The prisoners began a ‘no-wash protest’ when bathroom visits became an occasion for violence and humiliation. The prisoners’ refusal to shower or determination to wash only infrequently meant that they soon stank; their hair became manky, long and tangled and they grew wild straggly beards. Because they refused to leave their cells they had to use the chamber pots in their cells as toilets and confrontations over that led to a new and unprecedented escalation of the protest, one that would define events in the H-blocks during these years almost as much as the later deaths on hunger strike. The decision to begin smearing their cell walls and ceilings with their own excreta was something that had never happened before in the long history of Irish Republican prison protests and it was a disturbing, if stomach-turning harbinger of what was to come.
