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

by Ed Moloney

  Unsurprisingly, Brendan Hughes’s funeral in Belfast was a major Republican event. Several thousand mourners from all over Ireland and beyond, many of them former IRA comrades or fellow prisoners, journeyed to the Lower Falls to pay their tributes. His coffin, draped with a Tricolour and with the black beret and gloves that constitute the trappings of IRA membership, was taken from his sister’s home to St Peter’s Cathedral for Requiem Mass. Afterwards it was carried through the Lower Falls, along some of the streets where he and D Company had fought gun battles with the British, to the memorial erected on the front of the Falls Road by D Company veterans to their fallen comrades. Then a hearse transported the remains to Roselawn cemetery in East Belfast for cremation. If the media coverage of the funeral zeroed in on the Sinn Fein presence, that was only to be expected since there was great curiosity about what stance the Provo leadership, Gerry Adams in particular, would take towards the obsequies for their foremost critic. The Sinn Fein leader was accompanied to the ceremonies by some heavyweight colleagues, all of whom had crossed Hughes’s path, not always happily, in jail: Bobby Storey, Adams’s right-hand man and a senior figure in the IRA prison command staff after the 1981 hunger strikes; Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, the prison leader during that protest, and Danny Morrison who brought him the news in jail that launched the first hunger strike.

  Gerry Adams had twice visited Brendan Hughes in hospital, the last time just before he died. Ivor Bell was there at the same time and so, briefly, the trio that had terrorised the British Army and much of Belfast in the early 1970s was reunited, physically if not in spirit, and with just two of them, Adams and Bell, conscious. When Hughes died, Adams released a statement full of praise for his critic, calling him ‘my very good friend’ and ‘a sincere and committed Republican who was very proud of his working-class roots’.81 His hospital visits had fuelled speculation of a deathbed reconciliation and when he and fellow Sinn Fein member Fra McCann helped shoulder Hughes’s coffin into the church that, or something like it, seemed to be confirmed. Photographs of the moment accompanied reports in the next day’s newspapers of the reconciliation between the Sinn Fein leader and former friend. The Daily Mail ran a story with a headline that captured the media consensus, ‘Sinn Fein makes its peace with The Dark’, quoting a Sinn Fein source as saying, ‘There was still a lot of respect and fondness for Brendan, despite all the things he said in recent years. Mr Adams’s decision to carry the coffin is seen as a sign that any rift had been healed.’82

  If that was the impression, it was what Brendan Hughes had not only not intended, it was what he feared might happen. Some time before his death he had contacted Paddy Joe Rice, a leader of the D Company veterans’ group with instructions for his funeral. ‘We do that a lot, make arrangements for D Company funerals,’ explained Rice. ‘He came to me a few months before his death – he must have had a feeling something was going to happen – to say that if anything did happen that Adams, Sinn Fein members or Provisional IRA were not to have anything to do with the ceremonials, that they weren’t allowed to speak at it. He was very adamant that none of them should have anything to do with it. He was afraid they would use his funeral to try to say that he ended up agreeing with Adams, that the breach had been healed when, if anything, it had grown wider.’83 As the funeral approached, Adams contacted D Company with a request to give the oration but Paddy Joe Rice turned him down. Ivor Bell had agreed to speak and when Adams heard that he withdrew his request, although as it turned out Bell became ill and couldn’t give the speech. An effort to have Francie Brolly sing the H-blocks anthem during Mass was also blocked since Brolly was a Sinn Fein Assembly member and a fan of Gerry Adams. But when the Sinn Fein leader asked to carry the coffin for a while, Rice relented and the photograph duly appeared, visible evidence, it seemed, of a frendship restored. While Sinn Fein was doubtless content to see the story covered in this way, there is no evidence that Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes ever exchanged a word in the City hospital, much less settled their differences. ‘He was unconscious [during Adams’s visits] and not lucid at all,’ recalled Terry Hughes. ‘When he went into that coma he never came out of it.’84

  In accordance with Brendan Hughes’s wishes, his ashes were buried or scattered in three places in Ireland: at his parents’ grave; at the ruins of his grandfather’s home in the Cooley mountains in County Louth, and at the D Company memorial on the Falls Road in West Belfast – but not at the IRA plot in Milltown cemetery in West Belfast. Every June, the month of his birth, friends and former IRA colleagues gather in the Cooley mountains to remember him and to discuss the latest twists and turns in the journey taken by Sinn Fein and what remains of the IRA. People who go there report that this year the gathering was larger than it had been the year before.

  When the funeral ceremonies in West Belfast had ended, a much smaller group, family and close friends, travelled out to the crematorium in the far-off Castlereagh hills, beyond East Belfast. Among them, with no camera crews around to capture the moment, went Gerry Adams. Terry Hughes remembers the scene vividly: ‘He stood there looking so forlorn. He actually walked over to talk to me; no one was speaking to him. He didn’t seem to know where he should be; he was sort of a lost soul.’

  Notes – 9

  75 Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins: A Biography, p. 70.

  76 The Pensive Quill (http://the pensivequill. am), 5 March 2009.

  77 Irish News, 18 February 2008.

  78 Ibid.

  79 Telephone interview, 20 July 2009.

  80 Telephone interview, 21 July 2009.

  81 An Phoblacht–Republican News, 21 February 2008.

  82 Daily Mail, 20 February 2008.

  83 Interview, Belfast, May 2009.

  84 Telephone interview, 21 July 2009.

  * Sinn Fein Assembly member for West Belfast and former member of D Company.

  † A key member of Gerry Adams’s think tank, a former Sinn Fein General-Secretary and Belfast Lord Mayor in 2008.

  ‡ Sinn Fein TD (Teachta Dala, member of the Dail Eireann, the Irish parliament) for Cavan–Monaghan. A former banker, he joined Sinn Fein in a full-time capacity in 1982.

  DAVID ERVINE

  1

  Of all the twenty or so bombs that shattered Belfast in just over an hour on the afternoon of Friday, 21 July 1972 – ‘Bloody Friday’ – none was more destructive or deadly than the one hidden in a Volkswagen estate car driven into the Ulsterbus station at Oxford Street. The bus station, situated where the city centre abuts the River Lagan, was well placed for those heading to or from the downtown shopping districts, and always a busy spot, especially so on a Friday afternoon when rural visitors and out-of-towners began to make their way home after a day working or shopping in the city. That Friday was no exception. The IRA had picked out five public transport termini as targets that day – two bus stations, two railway stations and the Belfast-to-Liverpool ferry terminal – and since these were all places that attracted large numbers of people, the chances of civilian casualties and deaths were always going to be high. As much as stretching the resources of the British Army and the RUC by exploding so many bombs in such a short space of time, this feature of the IRA plan guaranteed that ‘Bloody Friday’ was going to be a disaster.

  The various accounts of ‘Bloody Friday’ differ in important detail. Some say nineteen bombs detonated that day; others twenty or twenty-one. One account has the Oxford Street bomb being the tenth to explode, at 3.10 p.m.1 but the Northern Ireland Office, in a news sheet hurriedly published shortly after, said it was the fifth to explode and the device exploded at 2.48 p.m. The consequences were beyond doubt, however. Six men were killed in the explosion, two of them British soldiers and four employees of Ulsterbus, a public company responsible for all bus services outside Belfast. The Irish Times report described what happened:

  The bomb was left in a car driven into the station which was at the time crowded with travellers. Two men left the car and ran away. The crowd in the bus station at th
e time took cover because of the suspicion of a bomb on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge near by. There was panic when the bomb went off. The two soldiers had driven in to give a warning but were killed almost immediately as they jumped out of their car. The civilians died instantly too. Women and children were among the frightened victims here and even as rescue work went on more bombs could be heard going off in the city. A large fire broke out after the explosion and again as at the Smithfield [bus station] blast, buses were severely damaged.2

  As Belfast’s major bus station dissolved into broken bodies, shattered buildings and burning buses, bombs were exploding all over the city. At the same moment that the Volkswagen estate crumpled into flames and deadly, flying shards of metal and glass, a van bomb detonated in the car park of the railway station in Great Victoria Street, destroying four buses and damaging forty others. Two minutes later, a car bomb exploded outside a bank on the Limestone Road in the north of the city while at the same time a bomb hidden in a bread van blew up the York Hotel in Botanic Avenue in the south of the city. The bombs kept exploding, one after the other, until 3.15 p.m. when the last device, a car bomb, blew up outside shops on the Cavehill Road, again in the north of the city, killing two women and a fourteen-year-old boy, Stephen Parker. By the end of the day IRA bombs had killed nine people and injured a hundred and thirty, seventy-seven of them women and girls.

  Kevin Myers was a reporter for Radio Telefis Éireann (RTE) on ‘Bloody Friday’, based on the top floor of Fanum House, a modern and famously ugly office building on Great Victoria Street, but one of the tallest structures in the city. Myers raced up to the roof with a camera crew and, as plumes of smoke from successive explosions rose over his shoulders, gave one of the more dramatic and memorable broadcasts of the Troubles. Many years later, on the thirtieth anniversary, he described how he saw the day:

  It seemed as if a malevolent god was showering bombs on the hapless, cowering citizens beneath him. The statistics – twenty bombs, nine people dead, a hundred and thirty injured within an hour – do not even begin to tell the true horror of the day. As the bombings started, thousands of panic-stricken shoppers began to stumble backwards and forwards, seeking safety. The endless explosions, the columns of smoke rising everywhere, the crowds stampeding into one other, declared this simple, inescapable truth: there was no such thing as safety. Long after the last bomb had exploded, terrified people skulked in clusters, paralysed, not knowing where to go, with hundreds of children screaming amid the acres of broken glass.3

  Oxford Street was the ground zero of ‘Bloody Friday’. At first the authorities thought eight people had been killed in the explosion there, such was the extent of human debris at the scene. Only when the dismembered body parts were reassembled was it realised that the death toll was lower by two. When people who were alive at the time think of ‘Bloody Friday’, they remember the television pictures of a fireman shovelling into a plastic bag the blackened, butchered remains of a torso, virtually all that was left of one of the Oxford Street victims. ‘Bloody Friday’ was a catastrophe for Belfast but it was also one of those turning-point days of the Troubles, when the IRA balanced the books for Britain’s ‘Bloody Sunday’, turned constitutional Irish Nationalists against them with a fury and put themselves for ever more on the military defensive. Ten days later the British Army, taking advantage of the IRA’s new political weakness, launched Operation Motorman to retake the IRA enclaves in Derry and Belfast from which the organisation launched its violent attacks. History may judge it to be the day that the IRA began to lose the war. But that is not how it was seen then.

  ‘Bloody Friday’ was also the day when the lives of Brendan Hughes and David Ervine intersected. As Hughes crouched at a street corner on the Falls Road, an Armalite rifle in his hands to give cover to the returning bombing teams, nineteen-year-old David Ervine was making his mind up to join Northern Ireland’s most violent Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. One of those killed at Oxford Street was an eighteen-year-old East Belfast Protestant called William Hull Irvine, who lived in a street near the Ervine household. For a while anxious relatives and friends believed that it had been their David Ervine who had been killed and it was this, as he told Boston College, that pushed him ‘over the edge’. As it turned out, William Irvine was a member of another, newer Loyalist outfit, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and he was given a full paramilitary funeral, complete with a uniformed guard of honour, all wearing dark glasses, which accompanied the cortège from a funeral home on the Newtownards Road towards Roselawn cemetery.4 All of which makes Ervine’s decision to follow a similar path a choice that was full of tragic irony.

  David Ervine had been weighing whether or not to join one of the Loyalist groups and if so, which one, for a while. In that respect he was little different from many working-class Protestants in places like East Belfast at that time. The three years since August 1969, when British troops were first deployed on the streets of Derry and Belfast, had changed Northern Ireland beyond the recognition of most Unionists and Loyalists and the unsettling effect was profound. A Catholic civil rights campaign had begun the turmoil and not only had the result been an upsurge in violence but the Unionists had been cast – by the entire world, it sometimes seemed – as the baddies, the Bull Connors of Ireland enforcing Jim Crow against their Catholic neighbours. Sympathy was on the side of the Nationalists and there were voices in Britain calling their homeland a political slum. As the IRA and the forces of Irish Nationalism made advances, it seemed that Unionists could only retreat, virtually powerless to control events. The civil rights agitation had become, in their eyes, a Republican insurgency, the B Specials had been disbanded, the RUC disarmed and all the while the IRA grew in strength and audacity, seemingly beyond the reach or the will of the authorities to curb them. Worst of all, the Stormont parliament had been suspended and Direct Rule imposed by a British government that at heart many Protestants did not trust. Betty Magee, the sister of one of Ulsterbus victims, Thomas Killops, wrote an angry letter to British Prime Minister Edward Heath that caught well the mood of Northern Protestants in the wake of ‘Bloody Friday’. Northern Ireland was being torn apart, she wrote, by terrorists ‘who can openly flaunt [sic] the law and the British Army and walk in the streets of Belfast scot-free, and who are allowed to appear on television and openly boast about what they are going to do’. She issued a challenge to Heath: ‘If you were man enough to come to Belfast and visit all the hospitals yourself, maybe then you would be a bit more concerned for the people of Ulster … You can go to bed at night and be sure of a good night’s sleep. But the people of Belfast and other Ulster towns do not know what it is like to get a good night’s sleep because of the IRA campaign.’5

  Their power taken away and fearful of worse to come, convinced the police and Army were unable or unwilling to take on the IRA and distrustful of their new masters in London, more and more Protestants such as David Ervine were doing what their forebears had done: banding together to defend and to strike back. Since the autumn of 1971, in the wake of the communal violence that greeted the introduction of internment, Protestant vigilante groups had mushroomed, especially in Belfast, and then amalgamated into one body, which they called the Ulster Defence Association. The UDA was a large organisation, boasting at its peak some forty thousand members who would don camouflage and dark glasses to march through Belfast and other towns in shows of Protestant strength. If, in 1972, the UDA specialised in mobilising bodies onto the streets, then the UVF offered angry Protestants a chance to meet violence with violence, often paying the Catholic community back with interest. It was this that drew David Ervine to its ranks.

  There had been a couple of attempts to recruit me by various organisations, and I didn’t move towards any, [although] I was increasingly getting fed up with attacks on my community … That culminated on the day of my nineteenth birthday, witnessing ‘Bloody Friday’. The following Sunday I joined the UVF. I made a judgement that the UVF were more l
ikely to do the business. Around that time you had the growth of the UDA, and this is not to be pejorative about individuals in the UDA, but they did a lot of marching, they did a lot of drilling, they did all of that, and that looked great … but I wanted to sort of hit back, I wanted to hit back with an absolute ruthlessness and I perceived that the UVF was the vehicle that I was most likely to do that with … When I try to look back at what happened with me, all of that was clearly significant and painful … I think I was inching in the direction of having to do something about [the situation] but it was only the moment of ‘Bloody Friday’ when there was a lad killed with the same name as me. He lived close by and people thought it was me, and it could have been me. At that point I went over the edge, I suppose … Maybe we’d need to do statistics on that to find out how many people became embroiled because they had grand ideological spirit, how many because this is the duty of a community, and how many because … they’ve had an experience of some trauma.

  Not long before this, in one of those intriguing ‘what if?’ moments of the Troubles, Ervine had tried to join the RUC as a way of standing up for and defending his community, but a minor boyhood misdemeanour over a stolen bicycle barred him from membership. But for that, Northern Ireland’s recent history might have been quite different.

  I did try to join the police, but they wouldn’t allow me in … I remember when I was ten or eleven buying a bicycle off someone for ten bob, which is [now] fifty pence, and it turned out the bike was stolen. The next thing there was a rap at the door and I ended up in court; it was a misdemeanour, but later in life when [I was] about nineteen or twenty, I actually explored the idea of … joining the police and was told that this huge criminal conviction was a barrier to me joining the police, so they said. Whether I would have ever gone through with it or not I don’t know, but that was an interesting barrier. I was more or less told by the desk sergeant at Mount pottinger police station, ‘We don’t need the likes of you.’