A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Cochrane was on his way to work at Glennane linen mill that morning when the IRA struck. The police later found his motorbike in a hedge. His crash helmet, and gloves and the club used to fell him were found nearby. There were also signs of a violent struggle. Although the facts surrounding his fate have never been definitively determined, Cochrane was almost certainly overpowered and then bundled into a car and driven deep into South Armagh, an area the British media had long since christened Bandit Country.

  In its first statement the IRA said it had abducted Cochrane and was holding him for “interrogation because of his crimes against the Nationalist community.”1 This was an unusual thing for the IRA to do; normally the IRA killed UDR members whenever and wherever they could. Targeting members of this locally recruited, mostly Protestant, and overwhelmingly part-time force for death was an integral part of IRA strategy; such killings kept ordinary unionists angry and in no mind to seek a political settlement with their nationalist neighbors. In the unfortunate case of Tommy Cochrane it seemed that the IRA had decided to exploit a chance to gather some possibly valuable information about the security forces. Cochrane’s motorbike journeys along a regular and predictable route provided the IRA with an ideal opportunity to kidnap and question him about his colleagues in the UDR and any other intelligence in his head. If such was the case, then the terrors that Cochrane went through can only be imagined. Members of the South Armagh IRA had a name for ill treating and even torturing those they questioned, but the truth was that they mostly didn’t need to; their terrifying reputation loosened most tongues almost immediately. Tommy Cochrane could not even have guessed at that, but he did know with stomach-churning certainty that he was going to die; the only question was when.

  The knowledge that Cochrane was suffering an almost indescribable ordeal reverberated around Northern Ireland. Most Catholics knew instinctively that there would be retaliations for his kidnapping, and the fear in that community was almost palpable, heightened by a communal memory of the scores of co-religionists kidnapped and killed by loyalist paramilitaries in the terrible mid-1970s. In all likelihood the loyalists would take an eye for eye, and soon some innocent, uninvolved Catholic would die a terrible death in revenge. That afternoon, Cochrane’s wife, Lilly, and their grown-up son, Glen, made an impassioned appeal for his release. The plea was ignored by the IRA in South Armagh, but it was heard in West Belfast, by a Redemptorist priest based in the congregation’s huge Clonard Monastery, which sprouted amid the tiny terraced streets that formed the heart of the Falls Road.

  That afternoon Tipperary-born Father Alec Reid decided he would journey the short distance from Clonard to talk to the president of Sinn Fein and the newly elected Assembly member for West Belfast, Gerry Adams, to argue for Cochrane’s freedom. An active mediator during some of the worst years of the Troubles, Reid had employed his negotiating skills to help end vicious republican feuds and had often intervened between the worlds of the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries. He would say himself that he operated mostly at street level and had built up a unique relationship with the Adams leadership. “Al’s power in the peace process,” confided one fellow participant, “derived from the trust that he had built up with Adams. I know he believed that no one else, certainly no other priest, had more close and continual contact with him than he had, and because of that he was able to sense the opportunity and the time to move.”2 But Father Reid, then in his late forties, was not a well man. He had suffered a nervous breakdown two years before and only now was beginning to function normally again. His mission to Adams, a man whom everyone knew to be a major power in the IRA, was his first significant expedition since his illness. His plea was to get the IRA to release Tommy Cochrane or at the very least to tell his family what his fate had been. The Redemptorist priest knew enough about the IRA’s affairs to know that Adams carried sufficient clout to do that.

  Protestants reacted with horror and anger to the news of Cochrane’s abduction—horror because they could imagine with awful clarity what the UDR man was going through, and anger because it was their old enemy the IRA that had kidnapped him. Like their Catholic neighbors, Protestants knew there would be retaliation. Around midnight on that Friday night one of the most cold-blooded loyalist killers ever spawned by the Irish Troubles briefed his gang members at a drinking club deep in the Shankill Road in the heart of Protestant North Belfast. They were going to kidnap a Catholic and hold him for Cochrane’s release, he told them. A handsome man with a fondness for fast women and the high life, thirty-year-old Lennie Murphy was the leader of a gang of loyalist killers that had struck terror into Catholic Belfast in the mid-1970s. Known as the Shankill Butchers, Murphy’s gang had earned its terrifying name because of a series of almost ritual torture-murders during a sixteen-month period between 1975 and 1977 when they dispatched a number of randomly kidnapped Catholic victims with axes, cleavers, and butcher’s knives. In one killing, a man was almost decapitated, in another all but three of the victim’s teeth had been ripped out with pliers; three died when their throats were slit open. Murphy himself was regarded by the police as “a psychopath”3 and was suspected of involvement in up to eighteen murders. He had killed with gun, poison, and knife; he consigned four Catholics to eternity in one single incident and wielded a sharp cleaver during the Butchers’ throat-slitting killings.

  It was just after midnight that Friday when Joe Donegan finally left the Pound Loney drinking club in the Lower Falls Road. An unemployed carpenter, forty-eight-year-old Donegan lived with his wife and their seven children in the Brittain’s Parade district of Ballymurphy, but he had been born and spent most of his life in the Lower Falls. Only when the violence got just too bad did he decide to move his family the two miles or so out of the area to the relative safety of Ballymurphy, but he still spent a lot of time in his old haunts, where he would meet friends for a drink and a game of pool. When that night’s drinking was done, he made his way by foot onto the main Falls Road, meaning to hail one of the many black London-style taxis that ferried people to and from the city center. The black taxis had been imported to Belfast in the early days of the Troubles when riots and barricade burning meant that the regular Corporation bus services were suspended, sometimes for days at a time. The black taxis were operated mostly by former IRA prisoners, and soon the loyalist Shankill Road copied the idea. The UVF ran the service in most Protestant districts of the city.

  Joe Donegan must have realized almost immediately what a terrible mistake he had made when he clambered into the back of the taxi that answered his hail. Within moments Lennie Murphy was battering him so viciously that by the time the taxi arrived at its destination on the Shankill Road, its back windows were spattered with Donegan’s blood.4 Like Tommy Cochrane, Joe Donegan must have guessed that he was about to die, and his end too must have been unimaginably awful. The taxi had been stolen on the Shankill by Murphy’s gang with the intention of duping the first vulnerable Catholic they encountered. The ploy worked with terrifying simplicity. By two in the morning Donegan was dead. Dragged semiconscious into a house once used by Murphy as his home, he was tortured and beaten repeatedly by the loyalist leader and his associates; he was finally finished off with a series of blows to the head with a garden spade. These blows were so violent that the wooden shaft snapped.

  Joe Donegan was dead, but Murphy kept up the cruel pretense that he was still alive. Over the weekend the UVF killer made a series of calls to nationalist politicians and Catholic clerics, threatening to kill him if the IRA didn’t release Tommy Cochrane. The fate of the UDR man was still not known. One account suggests that the IRA held him for several days and that he may still have been alive when Murphy made his calls.5 But the truth remains unknown. The pretense ended, however, on the Monday morning when Joe Donegan’s battered corpse was found, wrapped in a blanket and dumped in an alley off the Shankill Road. Later that night the IRA phoned the nationalist newspaper Irish News to say that it had killed Cochrane and that his body would be
returned “when security allows.”6

  Father Reid’s effort to get Gerry Adams to arrange Tommy Cochrane’s freedom had failed, but it seemed that the Sinn Fein leader had tried to intervene in some way. At least that is what he said he had done. On the Sunday, Adams released a press statement claiming that “since Friday evening, Sinn Fein have attempted to get clarification on the condition of UDR Sgt Cochrane and of the IRA intentions towards him.” But this had been made impossible, he went on, by the heavy security presence on either side of the Border. As soon as it was possible, Sinn Fein would urge the IRA to make a public statement. Later, after it had admitted that the UDR man had been killed, the IRA attempted to persuade nationalists that it would have spared Cochrane’s life if the offer to exchange him for Joe Donegan had been genuine. In an off-the-record briefing the IRA told the Irish News that its GHQ in Dublin had ordered South Armagh to release the UDR man but that the message “was not received in time.”7

  The weeks after the deaths of Tom Cochrane and Joe Donegan were the most violent of the year as the full significance of Sinn Fein’s election victories sank in. Despite more than a decade of killing, shooting, and bombing, the IRA’s political wing had won significant support among the Catholic population, and for many, not least loyalist paramilitaries, that was a message of despair, a signal that violence could pay off. A further 39 people were killed between then and Christmas, bringing the death toll for the twelve months to 112. There were to be many more years of bloodshed before the IRA declared its first cease-fire, but never again would the numbers of deaths reach the level of 1982.

  Republicans reveled in the election successes, and when three policemen were killed in a huge IRA land mine explosion near Lurgan, County Armagh, a few days after the Assembly elections, An Phoblacht–Republican News hailed the deaths as evidence that the Armalite and ballot box really did complement each other despite what the skeptics might say. The police deaths set off another round of retaliations, this time carried out by specially trained RUC units in which six people, five Republican activists and a Catholic civilian, were shot dead in circumstances that poisoned relations between the nationalist community and the RUC for years afterward.

  On November 16, the IRA wreaked revenge for Joe Donegan’s death when Lennie Murphy was cut down in a hail of automatic IRA gunfire as he drove up to his girlfriend’s house. The carefully planned assassination had been arranged by a double agent in the rival Ulster Defence Association, a notorious racketeer called Jim Craig, who was working for his own side and the Provisional IRA at the same time.8 Then, on December 7, came one of those incidents that will be remembered as a sort of gruesome high-water mark of the Troubles. That night as crowds of young people flirted and danced at a disco in the Droppin’ Well public house near Ballykelly, not far from Derry, a bomb placed near the dance floor by the Irish National Liberation Army exploded without warning. The blast killed seventeen people, eleven of whom were off-duty soldiers based in the garrison town. The remaining six dead were civilians, five of them women.

  In between all this slaughter there were, by the standards of the Northern Ireland of that day, the routine killings of policemen and off-duty UDR soldiers by republicans and loyalist killings of uninvolved Catholics. On the same day that Lennie Murphy died, his UVF colleagues in East Belfast singled out a sixty-four-year-old Catholic shopkeeper for death. A lone gunman walked into Patrick Murphy’s greengrocers and opened fire with a handgun, fatally wounding the father of six three times. He was the fourth victim of violence that day. Four days later the UVF in East Belfast claimed another Catholic life when twenty-five-year-old Michael Fay was abducted as he made his way to the hospital to visit his young daughter. He was taken to a nearby loyalist housing estate and shot in the head. The UVF claimed he had been killed in retaliation for Lennie Murphy’s death.

  The bloody violence of the autumn of 1982 was to leave its mark on Northern Ireland in unexpected ways. The killing of Patrick Murphy and Michael Fay had roused a group of liberal Protestant clergymen to action. Some forty of them, including three former Presbyterian moderators, decided to attend their funerals as a mark of solidarity. Their spokesman was another Presbyterian cleric, the Reverend Kenneth Newell, a former Orange chaplain turned ecumenist whose community in Fitzroy Avenue in South Belfast had the year before forged links with Father Reid’s Redemptorist colleagues in Clonard. Asked to explain what had motivated the group, Newell had answered, “We want to show that people still have the ability to scream out at murder.”9

  The Protestant initiative was to be a short-lived one that fell victim to Northern Ireland’s unrelenting sectarian politics. But the trip to Gerry Adams made by Father Alec Reid was, by contrast, to have much more long-lasting consequences. A few years later the Redemptorist cleric was to tell friends that the kidnapping of Tommy Cochrane was the event that had persuaded him to play a more active and effective role in trying to end the violence. As a result, he would say, he decided to take up peace work again.10 From that decision flowed the often highly secret and protracted dialogue and interaction with Gerry Adams that ultimately led to the Provisional IRA’s decision to quit armed struggle. In a very real sense the IRA’s decision to kidnap Tommy Cochrane was the moment at which the peace process could be said to have been born.

  TO SAY THAT Father Alec Reid is the unrecognized inspiration of the Irish peace process would be an understatement. Long known as a confidant of the Sinn Fein leader, Reid is accorded in most accounts the role of message carrier for Adams during the odyssey to peace, but the full story reveals him to be a much more substantial figure, who initiated, devised, and nurtured many of the ideological innovations that made Gerry Adams’s journey possible. Passionate about his project, secretive, trustworthy, but at times gullible and naïve, Reid persisted at times when others in the British and Irish governments were close to giving up—his reward was the IRA cease-fires and the political settlement that eventually came more than a decade after his bid to save Tommy Cochrane’s life. To those who supported his efforts, he is the unsung and largely unrewarded hero of the peace process; to those who do not, he is the crafty Wolsey to Adams’s Henry VIII.

  To the British civil servants who had secret dealings with Reid in later years, the Catholic priest seemed a curious choice for a go-between for Adams. “When I first met him, I thought he was a strange intermediary, with his black leather jacket and, if I’m right, I recall his nose was dripping,” remembered one.11 For his work as a mediator, Reid dispensed with the standard Redemptorist garb—a black cotton gown circled by a thick leather belt, garlanded with heavy rosary beads—and dressed in jeans and bomber jacket like many of the people, especially republicans, he was dealing with.

  But it was not this that made him such a valuable intermediary for Adams. His years of work intervening between squabbling republicans or trying to calm IRA-loyalist tensions had created a bond of trust between him and the West Belfast republican leader. Posted to Belfast in 1967, a year after Gusty Spence’s UVF had spilled the first blood of the Troubles, Reid emerged as a serious peacemaker at the time of the 1975 feud between the Provisional and Official IRAs and first got close to Adams in 1977 when again he mediated between the two groups during the bloody dispute that saw Billy McKee meet his nemesis. The relationship blossomed, and soon the word was out among Belfast Provos that they should regard Reid as Gerry Adams’s friend. “You could say anything you liked to the Provos, but if you criticized Alec Reid their backs went up,” recalled a member of the rival INLA in the city.12

  Reid was also discreet to the point of reticence and avoided the media assiduously, both qualities that Adams valued. When, in early 1989, the author heard rumors of Reid’s part in secret peace talks and wrote to him asking for an interview, he replied, politely declining. “… I trust that what I have already mentioned about the relationship which every pastor must observe towards the media will explain why it would not be feasible for me to accept [your request for a meeting]. The past
or must be above suspicion in these matters and, for that reason, over the past twenty years or so, I have continually refused to appear on the media or to give interviews in circumstances that might give rise to such suspicion or the appearance of it.”13

  After the IRA declared its 1994 cease-fire, Reid went into virtual hiding. When the author tried to contact him at Clonard Monastery, a secretary would say only that he was not in Belfast and that she did not know where he was. He had left a simple message on her typewriter that read, “Father Reid is not and will not be speaking to members of the press or media.”14 Whatever clandestine comings and goings the Redemptorist priest got involved in on his behalf, Adams could be sure that Father Reid would keep them secret.

  Illness had laid Reid low in 1980 at a crucial moment in the IRA’s prison protest. When delicate mediation between the Catholic Church and the Thatcher government broke down, Reid blamed himself for the hunger strike that followed, according to those who knew him then. He believed, they said, that he had wrongly raised the prisoners’ expectations of a settlement and that this had dangerously exacerbated their disappointment and anger, possibly propelling them into a death fast. Reid’s brief from his superiors in the Redemptorist Congregation allowed him to engage in peace and reconciliation work, and it was natural, given the gravity of the prison protest, that he would find himself visiting IRA prisoners, especially their leaders in the years 1979 and 1980.