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

by Ed Moloney

  Notes – 8

  66An Phoblacht–Republican News, 31 October 1981.

  67 See Moloney, A Secret History, 2nd edn, chapters 8 and 9.

  68 Hansard, 26 March 2002, column 715.

  69 http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.com/pa/cm199798/ cmselect/cmniaf/316ii/nis208.htm

  70 Ibid.

  71 Independent, 30 April 1997.

  72 Irish Independent, 31 March 2002.

  73 Adams, Before the Dawn (US edn), pp. 212–13.

  74 The information in this section about the IRA’s Security Department is taken from Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre, The Security Department: IRA Counter Intelligence in a 30-year War Against the British (unpublished).

  * According to former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe the same offer from the British or better had been accepted by the prison leadership in July 1981, when just four hunger strikers had died. He claims that the Prison Commander, Brendan McFarlane, changed his mind and rejected the offer on the urging of Gerry Adams.

  † In January 2005, a Unionist MP, David Burnside, named Storey in the House of Commons as the IRA’s Director of Intelligence and accused him of organising the Northern Bank raid.

  ‡ Shot dead by the IRA in November 1982.

  § ‘Basher’ Bates was shot dead in June 1997, eight months after his release from jail, by a member of the rival UDA whose father was killed by Bates in the mid-1970s.

  ¶ Known within the Provos as ‘Smiler’, Glasgow-born Pat Doherty, whose family hailed from County Donegal, was elected West Tyrone MP in June 2001. In 2002, Unionist MP David Burnside named him in the Westminster parliament as a member of the IRA’s Army Council.

  || Tyrone Republican and IRA member since the 1956–62 campaign when he was convicted of murdering an RUC sergeant.

  ** Sinn Fein headquarters in Andersonstown, West Belfast.

  †† See p. 110.

  ‡‡ IRA Director of Engineering, killed while mixing home-made explosives in his garage in Swords, County Dublin, 30 December 1971.

  §§ Former comrade of Hughes in the ‘Dogs’, D Company from the Lower Falls area

  ¶¶ A term used in the IRA, mostly in jail, to describe a leadership snitch.

  |||| IRA activist from Ardoyne in North Belfast, from a family of active Republicans. He was one of Gerry Adams’s bodyguards in the 1990s. Died of cancer in 2003.

  *** Former hunger striker and long-time IRA member who subsequently was appointed to the Army Council when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness resigned. He resigned in protest at their continued efforts to control the organisation from behind the scenes. He is now a member of the independent Republican group Eirigi.

  9

  In his much praised biography of Michael Collins, Tim Pat Coogan described Collins and Harry Boland, two of the most influential Irish revolutionaries of their time, as ‘partners in crime’.75 It might be difficult to find a more apt phrase to describe the alliance between Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes during the years when their lives were most closely intertwined. A committed Republican long before they met, Boland introduced Collins to the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, the IRB, from where the two friends and comrades together plotted and schemed their domination of the IRA in the coming decade. They fought together in the Easter Rising in 1916 and in the subsequent war with Britain but with the Treaty of 1921 came the parting of the ways. Boland took de Valera’s side against Collins, denouncing the deal with Lloyd George as a betrayal of the Republic for which they had both fought and their long friendship ended. When Boland died, shot dead near Dublin in disputed circumstances by troops of the new Irish Army, just three weeks after the shelling of the Four Courts, he and Collins were confirmed adversaries. Within three weeks Collins was also dead, shot in unclear circumstances at Beal na mBlath in County Cork.

  Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes did not meet until after their war had started but when they came together their influence on the direction and growth of the Provisional IRA in the city was decisive. They were different in key ways but dovetailed perfectly, albeit that the product of their partnership was invariably more death and destruction. Adams was the strategist and thinker, Hughes the man of action and organiser. If Adams was the one who knew how to make the best snowballs, Hughes was far better at throwing them. Together, in the Belfast of 1970 to 1973, they made a formidable team. The partner ship deepened when both were imprisoned in Long Kesh, strengthened by their joint detestation of an IRA leadership they viewed as naive and dishonestly defeatist. When Adams was freed and set about restoring the IRA to what it had once been, Hughes committed himself to advancing Adams’s cause inside the jail. As he happily admits in his interviews with Boston College, many of the tragic events inside the Maze prison between 1977 and 1981 happened in consequence of that mission. As with Collins and Boland, their break came when the time arrived for compromise, although what is striking with Hughes is that he was affected as much, if not more, by how it was all done as what was done: the deliberate running down of the IRA that he saw, the tolerance of informers and corruption, the lies, stealth and deception that he detected and, most of all, Gerry Adams’s own denial of IRA membership.

  Nothing better captures the special closeness between Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams in the early days than the photograph of them as prisoners in Long Kesh, Hughes wearing a ‘Melbourne Irish Club’ T-shirt, his arm wrapped around the neck of a taller, hairier Gerry Adams, a little like an older and a younger brother. These were two men who shared a tiny cubicle in a small hut, who conspired nightly on ways to confound their common enemies and intimate enough that Hughes was let in on the secret meaning of the ‘Brownie’ byline that Adams used to promote his subversive views to the wider Provo audience. Hughes would nail that photograph to the wall of the small flat in Divis Tower where he spent his last days, as a memoir of the special comradeship he had with Adams and to remind him that it had ended in disappointment, at least for him. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge his own IRA history was, in Hughes’s mind, the ultimate disavowal of their friendship and he spent a considerable portion of his interviews with Boston College putting the record straight in that regard. Hughes doesn’t give that as the reason for breaking the IRA’s rule of omertà and agreeing to tell the story of his life in the IRA to American academics but it is clear that it was never far from his mind, a metaphor that conjoined personal and political betrayal. When Gerry Adams first publicly denied his membership of the IRA, in June 1983, instructing his solicitor to protest in writing to the editor of the Irish Times when the paper described him as the Vice-President of the IRA rather than of Sinn Fein, Brendan Hughes believed Adams must be telling the truth in some way. Boston College’s researcher, Anthony McIntyre, was in jail with Hughes at the time and later wrote about an exchange they had about the matter. Hughes, he wrote, ‘expressed the view that Adams might have stepped down from the Army to take up a party role given his very public discourse on the issue. The Dark felt his old comrade was too straight a guy to mislead people.’76 Did the time to tell his story arrive when finally he came to reject all that he once believed about his old friend, when his god grew feet of clay?

  I believed 100 per cent in Adams: I believed in his leadership, I believed in his direction, I believed almost everything that he would have said to me. I went along with it and believed in it. And you have to remember this as well, that I was one of these non-political Volunteers. I always saw myself, up until [I served a] few years in prison, as a soldier, not a politician, naively so but that’s the way I saw it. I eventually learned. And I believed in the direction that Adams was taking. I remember when he left Cage 11, when he was released, him saying to me that I had the easy job, he was going out to the hard job. I believed that we needed to take control of the leadership of the IRA and of Sinn Fein [and] I believed that the two organisations needed to combine …

  I don’t think anyone can take away from Gerry that he is an intelligent man and a very shrewd operator. I don’t know
anyone else in the whole Republican movement, during the history of my involvement, who could have brought this movement to the position that it’s in today … I was one of those, and I wouldn’t class myself as being stupid, who went along with Gerry for so many years without realising what direction he was taking us … Thanks to the loyalty factor in the IRA, Gerry was able to control and manipulate people like myself and many others. Obviously there were other people who would give him encouragement and would welcome the direction that the movement moved to. But I don’t believe it could have been done without him … There’s no one else in the Republican movement with the intelligence, the shrewdness and the ruthlessness that was needed to bring the movement to the position that it’s in today. Gerry was the only person, to my knowledge, who would have been capable of doing that.

  I don’t condemn him for it. I criticise him for the devious way that it was all brought about. There were people still dying when they were talking and these people who were dying – fair enough the war has to carry on – should have known the talks were going on.

  I would have died for him; I would have jumped in front of him to save him from being shot and took the bullet myself. I would have done that because I believed, really believed what he was saying in his writings, in his talks … I believed him and I feel betrayed by him; I feel really betrayed. I feel it personally …

  Where I differ now is that what the IRA and Sinn Fein have done is [that] they’ve just upstaged the SDLP. The revolutionary socialist direction that … I was fighting for has been dropped. And all Sinn Fein have done, all the IRA have done is just to become another SDLP … all the things that were important to me, that we fought and died for, mainly the … betterment of the working-class people in Ireland, have been dropped … There’s a sectarian thing here as well and Sinn Fein have been very good at manipulating and bringing bigots along with them … The sort of people who have come into Sinn Fein are not the sort of people that I would have associated with during the IRA struggle. They’re middle-class, career politicians. I came down the Falls Road yesterday to see Fra McCann* because I lost my income-support book … and he was standing talking to Tom Hartley.† People like that who never fired a shot … but hung onto the aprons of dead Volunteers. Not that I wanted to talk to him but he made a point of ignoring me … he’s [Hartley] the type of person that was always there waiting on the sidelines, the type of people like Caoimhghín O’Caoláin,‡ career politicians …

  To me now, it’s all about getting into positions of power. I go back to Liam Mellows again – people will go into positions of power and hold onto them because of the privileges that power brings. I see so many of them people about now within Sinn Fein, within the movement. And you have the other poor fools that run about with the badge of IRA written across their chests and the British government sitting back and laughing. They eventually got the IRA into the position they’ve always wanted. They tried it in 1972, they tried it in 1975, and failed both times. They’ve now succeeded in turning a revolutionary movement into a conservative organisation, one that they can deal with and are quite happy to deal with … This is the crime that I see: they have left behind kids, young people, Republicans that are not going away, you know. All the contradictions, I think, will begin to emerge because they haven’t brought about a solution here. All they’ve done is to guarantee that this is going to last for another generation and that basically is where my objections arise to this settlement. I agree eventually there has to be negotiations but I believe negotiations need to be fair and just, and a guarantee that they will not move onto another generation. Sinn Fein and the IRA have not done that. They sentenced young people, young Republicans and young working-class people to another generation of fighting.

  … a few months ago I found a bug in this apartment that we’re sitting in now. I don’t believe it was … planted by British Intelligence [but] by someone else. I don’t know who, because loads of people have come through this flat. It could have been a journalist; it could have been someone working for some other agency. But the fact remains is that it could have been a Sinn Fein person … the thought is always there. The reason why I’m doing these interviews is because of my trust in you, no one else. I don’t believe there’s anyone else in this country could talk to you [in] the way I’m talking to you. I’ve never done it before, not in this detail … It’s not going to do me any good but I believe it’s important for later generations when I’m dead and gone … I have absolutely no reason to tell any lies about my involvement … I have never admitted publicly to being a member of the IRA because to do so would land me straight back in prison. If I stood up on a platform or gave an interview with a journalist, I would always refer to myself as a member of the Republican movement. I think it’s important for future generations to know that I was a member of the IRA, a high-ranking member of the IRA and here I am, fifty-three years old, for the first time in my life, admitting it publicly … History is written by the victors. In this particular case, the defeated have a chance to put on record their role and their perspective of this so-called victory. And therefore I think it’s of absolute importance. There is still doubt about who killed Michael Collins, who killed President Kennedy, and I see an opportunity here of having something for future generations so people can say who killed [our] President Kennedy, who killed [our] Michael Collins. I don’t find [the interviews] easy; I find them quite difficult sometimes because it’s always in the back of your head – who the hell else is listening to this? I’m at the point now where I really don’t care who else is listening … the important thing about this is that my war is over. I’ve lived over thirty years sitting in dark rooms, sitting in houses, organising operations, organising the war … maybe it’s because I’m getting old and I just don’t care any more …

  * * *

  Not long after Brendan Hughes gave his last interview to Boston College, in August 2002, he began the long mental and physical decline that would end less than six years later in his death. After his return to Belfast from Dublin in 1991 or thereabouts, the drift away from the IRA was well under way. One of his last jousts with the IRA leadership came in 1994 when he opposed efforts to block released prisoners from rejoining the IRA because they included figures sceptical of the peace process. He worked where he could, mostly in low-paid building jobs; for a while he and some friends ran a small business but that failed, coinciding with the break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend, Marguerite. ‘After that the downfall came,’ his brother Terry explained. One of his last jobs was as a part-time barman in Andersonstown but for the last seven or so years of his life he was unemployed and, according to his sister Moya, increasingly gripped by a clinical depression caused in large measure, she believes, by the political situation. By 2002, the IRA had begun decommissioning its weapons and Sinn Fein was edging closer to accepting all that he and Gerry Adams had fought against in their youth: the existence of Northern Ireland, the policing system, Stormont and so on. He lived alone in a flat in Divis Tower, visited by his sister and daughter, Josephine, and by journalists eager to hear a Republican take on the peace process at variance with the Sinn Fein orthodoxy. He was particularly exercised by the neglect shown towards ageing IRA veterans by the Provo leadership. There were hundreds of men, he told one reporter, ‘carrying around problems from that time. If not physical problems, there are men with mental problems, alcohol problems, depression, trouble holding a job or relationship.’77 He was especially angry about the death of Kieran Nugent, whose refusal to wear a prison uniform in the H-blocks in 1976 had begun the IRA prison protest. ‘They called him a “river rat” because he spent his last days drinking by the river in Poleglass. Why didn’t someone in the movement not see he’d problems and help him? He was the bravest of the brave.’78 His other concern was Sinn Fein’s close relationship with a certain building firm which employed a lot of IRA veterans at low wages, people who would have trouble getting work elsewhere and in defiance of labour laws, paid t
hem in a bar they owned, retrieving a slice of their money when drink was bought. It reminded him of his trip to Cape Town as a young merchant seaman where the black dock workers drank their wages in the boss’s drinking club. But as time went on, he ventured out less and less. ‘He felt secure in his wee flat,’ recalled Moya Hughes.79 His brother Terry, a former internee, believes the IRA’s political journey sapped his will to live: ‘He hurt too much and he felt isolated. When he lost the [Republican] movement, he lost everything. I think he lived for that movement.’80 Increasingly his health became a problem, a possible legacy of his fifty-three-day hunger strike in 1980. He had a heart attack and then bypass surgery but continued to deteriorate. ‘He was in and out of hospital all the time,’ remembered Moya. In early February 2008 he developed a chest infection and contracted influenza. Although his condition was worsening, he wouldn’t go to hospital. Moya Hughes eventually sent for a doctor who ordered him admitted to the City hospital where he soon fell into unconsciousness. A week later, on Saturday, 16 February, he died.