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

by Ed Moloney

  Towards the end of 1978 the screws were brutalising prisoners, and they decided to introduce compulsory haircuts and forced washing for all the blanket prisoners … I sent an order round at the time telling the prisoners to fight physically and to resist this. Well, the first person who was force-washed and shaved was a guy called Muffles Trainor who was in the cell with me. He went on a visit one day with the long beard, dirty and filthy. And I remember him being a bit late coming back from the visit. And he came back from the visit and he was thrown into the cell, spotlessly clean … I remember one particular screw, Girvan, a big fat screw who loved his job, who loved doing this, standing laughing. Muffles was a wee bit slow, and when I say ‘slow’, he wasn’t backward, but he never spoke to me the whole time in the cell. He just lay on his back and shook his head from side to side, and he would laugh to himself. I never knew what he was laughing at. He was that type of a character. He was the least violent type of person, so he was an easy target. And it was a message to me … that this was going to happen [everywhere]. But when they started to move in to H3 to do the forced washing and the shavings, myself and Bobby – by this time Tom McFeely had been moved somewhere else, and it was just myself and Bobby. Bobby was always in the next cell, for some reason … If he wasn’t in the next cell to me, he was very, very close by … Whether it was pure luck or … intentional, I don’t know, but he was always there. So when they started this forced washing we had a long discussion [that lasted] most of the night. They had already force-washed some of the boys in H3. Bobby and I believed that if we didn’t find some way of stopping this, then the whole protest would be … in major trouble. I knew there were going to be casualties; I knew people were going to get hurt and possibly killed. But I knew if that happened that the prison administration would be in trouble. I knew we were taking a great risk. And it was the second … hardest decision that I took during the whole prison situation, to send an order over telling naked men to fight these screws who were coming in with batons, helmets, all the protective gear. It was a really agonising decision to make. But the order was given and I remember the silence. It was shouted over that night to Joe Barnes to fight back. Bobby shouted over the order in Gaelic and there was total disbelief. I don’t know if there was any great understanding of the real danger, [that] this whole protest could fall apart. Men were going to be hurt anyway by getting trailed out and thrown into a bath and scrubbed with hard brushes and shaved in a most violent way. So we discussed all this, as I say, for most of the night before the order was sent over … it took five or six times for Bobby to shout that over before it sank in. I know how hard it was for people to accept this. And I don’t think people really know how hard it was for me to give the order. Me and Bobby … certainly discussed the possibility that men could squeaky-boot** the next morning, that they could not face having to fight these people. We discussed all that, and decided that we had to take the chance. I don’t believe anyone squeaky-booted the next morning. There were casualties … two men taken to hospital … Tom Boy Louden and Martin Hurson.†† I remember it well, the squeals and the shouting the next morning. About 8 a.m., they came in, implemented it and the men resisted. I think it did work … the screws got so frightened that somebody was going to get killed that they stopped the forced washing. I remember talking to Kevin Lappin afterwards – and Kevin Lappin was the Principal Officer – that was his reasoning … they, or Stormont was afraid … that somebody was going to get killed and they stopped the forced washing. So as far as I’m concerned the tactic worked.

  The increasingly violent battles between the prisoners and the warders drew the IRA outside the jail into the conflict, especially as the dirty protest spread and intensified during 1979. Brendan Hughes put pressure on the IRA to target the warders and names were sent out, with prison officers regarded as the most brutal or bigoted at the top of the lists. Warders who were, in the prisoners’ words, ‘decent’ were spared. One prison officer, a Principal Officer called Paddy Joe Kerr, a Catholic warder who was in charge of one of the first H-blocks to go on the protest, was so hated by the prisoners that even four years after the protest ended the IRA singled him out for assassination. Between early 1978, when Brendan Hughes began organising and co-ordinating the blanket protest and December 1980, thirteen prison warders were killed by the IRA, nearly half of all prison officers killed in the Troubles. The most senior was Albert Miles, a Governor at the Maze who was shot dead in his home in North Belfast.

  A Principal Officer called Kevin Lappin was in charge of H5. Paddy Joe Kerr – actually they were two Catholics – was in charge of H3. Paddy Joe Kerr was a bully, but Lappin was … not as aggressive or as brutal. After saying that, Kevin Lappin was not always there. People like Paddy Joe Kerr took great enjoyment in beating prisoners and [he] was quite proud of the fact – he was a major target. The IRA eventually caught up with him coming out of Mass on a Sunday morning and he was shot dead.‡‡ We took great satisfaction out of that … there was one less brutal screw who was going to brutalise anybody … the type of prison officer that went into the H-blocks at that time were mostly … bigots and hated everything that Repub licans stood for; not just Republicans, hated everything Catholics stood for. Once the protest was stepped up, I certainly put pressure on the outside to take some action … And that entailed the shooting of screws and specifically the shooting of administrators, governors, chief screws – screws who were particularly brutal towards the prisoners. Names were sent out … names of the prison governors were sent out … people like Kevin Lappin, who were not a bit brutal and found themselves in a situation that they had no control over, I would have tried to protect. I remember sending his name out [so that he wouldn’t be harmed]. He came into my cell one time … and told me that he was warned by the prison administration to check his car when leaving work, not because of the IRA but because of his own colleagues. People like him were under threat, not from the IRA, but from his own. I don’t know how effective it was, but certainly when we got news of [a shooting] we were quite pleased … that the people on the outside were taking action on our behalf. [After the shootings began] the half-decent prison officers [were] pulled out of the blocks and you … were left with the hard core of bigots and the Catholic and Republican haters …

  In early 1979, the prison authorities changed tack. They moved all the senior figures in each wing and block to a separate block, H6, separating them from the rank-and-file IRA prisoners. A tough prison officer was put in charge and it seemed the authorities hoped to break the protest by breaking the leaders. They would stay in H6 until September 1979 when they were moved back. During their time there, not long after the move, Hughes and Bobby Sands decided that it was time to use the ultimate weapon, the hunger strike. Hughes sent a ‘comm.’ out to Gerry Adams telling him of the decision and an alarmed Adams wrote back saying a hunger strike would be suicidal, that Margaret Thatcher would let the prisoners die.

  Well, the time they moved us to H6, the intention was to break up the leadership. They took most of the O/Cs of the wings and of the blocks themselves and transferred them all … I think there were twenty, twenty-three, twenty-four people in all. They put what they believed to be one of their strong-arm prison officers, a man called Davy Long, in charge of the block. It was an … attempt to break the leadership … That was the first time that myself and Bobby … spoke about the possibility of a hunger strike … The decision for the hunger strike was taken in H6 … A communication was sent to the leadership on the outside. A few days later I received a communication back advising us against [it] … from Gerry to me [saying] that Thatcher would allow us all to die. [His] recommendation was that we should not go on hunger strike; [it] was a personal letter from Gerry advising me that it would be ‘suicidal’ – that was the word. It was left to us – we were not ordered not to go on hunger strike, we were not ordered onto it – but strongly advised not to partake in hunger strike at that time. So we took the advice of the leadership … You see, no one
was arguing for a hunger strike and no one was arguing against a hunger strike … There wasn’t a great debate amongst us in H6; by and large it was left with myself and Bobby. I can’t recall any great arguments against hunger strike apart from Gerry ‘Bloot’ McDonnell. Bloot was opposed to any form of hunger strike. Obviously there were other people there who would have been opposed … but I can’t recall anyone voicing that to any great degree. There were obviously other people there with an input into suggestions … but it was by and large down to myself and Bobby. Brendan McFarlane, or Bik, at that time was going through a bad time. He was … in and out of depressions. There were times when he never spoke to anyone at all. So he didn’t have a great input at that stage. It wasn’t until later on that Bik came into his own at any sort of leadership level. It became clear that the [prison authorities’] tactic of moving the leadership away from the bulk of the prisoners had not worked and we were reintegrated with the rest of the prisoners … The talk of hunger strike intensified. We began to discuss it again after we got back into the blocks, where the level of brutality had been stepped up …

  When Hughes and Sands were moved back to the H3, a number of issues were clearer to them: the regime in the blocks had not softened, quite the reverse; the protesting IRA prisoners were edging closer to a hunger strike and without a resolution, the protest was certainly going to end in disaster. The Provisional IRA and constitutional Nationalists were divided on many matters but on this there was accord: no one wanted to see a hunger strike. The Provos were terrified it might fail, while the fear that deaths would inflame Republican sentiment to the IRA’s benefit alarmed the Irish government, the SDLP and the Catholic Church. The growing possibility of a hunger strike was enough to activate Ireland’s senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal O Fiaich, and with Bishop Eddie Daly beside him, he was soon talking to Mrs Thatcher and Humphrey Atkins, her Northern Ireland Secretary, about a settlement that would bring peace to the jail.

  The exercise on the Nationalist side was an early preview of a central feature of the later peace process: pan-nationalism in action. Bishop Daly represented the SDLP’s view of the world, and therefore Dublin’s [the SDLP leader John Hume was a good friend] while Cardinal O Fiaich was the voice of mainstream Republicanism, albeit of the non-violent sort. To demonstrate its desire for a negotiated settlement, the IRA agreed to suspend the campaign against prison officers while the talking went on. Graham Cox, a thirty-five-year-old prison officer stationed at Magilligan prison in County Derry, who was shot dead on 18 January 1980 as he drove home from work, was the last warder or prison official killed by the IRA during the blanket and dirty protests. O Fiaich and Hughes arranged to keep in touch and the channel they used was a Redempterist priest from Clonard monastery in the heart of West Belfast, Father Alex Reid, a friend and confidant of Gerry Adams and a long-time mediator in intra-Republican disputes.

  There was one person [who] was a line of communication from me and the leadership on the outside, actually me and Gerry, and that was Father Alex Reid. I had a line of communication through him, a straight communication to Gerry. Cardinal O Fiaich visited me in my cell … He was deeply affected by what he had seen in the H-blocks – I know that. He was very emotional about the whole thing and very angry … but that was the only time we met in the jail … my contact with him after that was through Father Reid. He [Reid] would visit me in the cell, I would speak to him after Mass every Sunday and he would visit me on normal clerical visits … for a long period the O Fiaich thing looked promising … a way for us to get the five demands. I was pretty hopeful through this contact and through Father Reid. Reid would build our hopes up, not for a devious reason, but he would keep trying to persuade me not to go on hunger strike. After the experience in H6 the hunger-strike option was discussed quite openly and I talked about it to Reid. He would tell me, ‘There are things happening behind the scenes.’ Thus his nickname, ‘Behind The Scenes’.

  Hughes had used Father Reid as a courier before this, to carry messages to Gerry Adams and to bring his replies back into the jail. As a result he would sometimes be searched by prison staff. Not all priests were so obliging. Father Denis Faul would smuggle in tobacco and writing materials but drew the line at carrying messages. One of a small group of priests who were regarded by the authorities as pro-IRA, Father Faul would turn against the IRA leadership, and Adams in particular, before the prison protest was over. Father Reid went on to play a crucial enabling role in the later peace process, a role made possible by his relationship with Gerry Adams.

  With Father Faul, initially the relationship was pretty good and I had a fair bit of time for him. He was not involved in any way with O Fiaich except in an advisory way. Obviously he would have met O Fiaich but he was not involved in the contact between myself, Father Reid, the Cardinal and the [IRA] leadership. Faul was very supportive of the blanket protest, right up until the hunger strike and he would bring in pens, sometimes tobacco and news and everybody liked going to the Mass when Faul was there … But other than that most of the contact I had with O Fiaich, after the the initial visit, was through Father Reid. He was always trying to give some hope and encouragement. There was a naïveté about him though. I remember him coming into me with his story about the American Embassy [actually Consulate]. Father Reid came in and said to me that he was making progress, that he was at the American Embassy in Queen Street in Belfast and he had met these British and American politicians. He came out of that meeting with great hope; he was bubbling actually when he came to visit me in the cell … But when I asked Father Reid who were these people, he told me one of them was the American Consulate [Consul] but he didn’t know who the other Americans were. And the British one, I asked him what was his name, and he replied, ‘Maurice something’ … I said, ‘Maurice Oldfield?’ He says, ‘Yeah, that’s him, that’s him’, Maurice Oldfield being the Head of British Intelligence.§§ Thatcher’s man. That was him, the same man. It shows his naïveté … and I asked Reid, ‘What, what did he ask you? Did he ask you any questions?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, he asked me about … you [Hughes], Kevin Hannaway, Gerry Adams.’ And what actually was happening was that Reid was getting debriefed by British Intelligence; he was giving background information on us to British Intelligence and he hadn’t a clue what he was doing. I’ve also no doubt that Gerry was informed by Reid of exactly what took place in the American Consulate, because as far back as 1970, Father Reid has been a close associate of Gerry. Anything that was going on at that time [like that], I’ve no doubt that Gerry knew about it and was informed … by Father Reid, even though I was not informed by the leadership, by Gerry or anyone else …

  … the Adamses were very involved in Clonard monastery. Gerry’s uncle, Liam Hannaway¶¶ and another Adams, Gerry’s father’s brother, were pillars of Clonard monastery. There was a group of priests in Clonard, headed by Father Reid, who were involved in settling disputes between the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. If a feud broke out, Clonard monastery would mediate between the two groups. So there was always a connection there between Clonard monastery and the Republican movement … and contact between Reid and the leadership of the movement. When Gerry became the leader of Belfast [in 1972] that communication with Clonard monastery was stepped up obviously. Reid was there from a very early stage. He knew every member of the leadership in the movement. So it would have been quite intelligent and proper for British Intelligence to get hold of someone like Reid who knew so much. But I also believe that at any given time, if the leadership had wanted Reid out of the way, he would have been stopped. This could not have happened without the OK of the leadership of the movement, specifically Gerry at that time. He’s been there right from the start; he has a great deal of information and knows most of the individuals in the leadership of the movement, and he would be under the sway, I believe, of Gerry.

  Behind the scenes, the O Fiaich–Daly initiative was heading for the rocks. The clerics had suggested that a concession on prison clothes could settle
the dispute but Thatcher and Atkins responded with smoke and mirrors, offering a promising proposal to allow prisoners to wear ‘civilian-style clothes’ that on closer inspection was merely the old prison uniform redesigned. It was seen by Nationalists as a piece of bad-faith negotiations by the British, an insult to the Church, and it settled many minds about what sort of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was going to be, certainly as regards Ireland. With the collapse of the talks, a hunger strike seemed unavoidable. But there was another factor at work: violence meted out to the prisoners by the warders had driven the dispute over the edge. At one point Hughes had to order the protesters to stop resisting mirror searches, because those who did were being beaten terribly. Hughes heard that the O Fiaich initiative had failed during a visit with Sinn Fein’s publicist, Danny Morrison, and returned to his cell knowing that between events outside and inside the jail, the die had been cast.