Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  ‘Victory is within the grasp of the Irish Nation!’ exclaimed Hugh Feeney. ‘She will not bend the knee!’

  Roisin McNearney was hustled away, surrounded by a retinue of armed guards. Arrangements were made to create a new identity for her. She was given a name and new documents and told that she could never return to Northern Ireland. Her belongings were taken from her family home in Andersonstown and put into storage, to be shipped to her once she had started her new life. ‘Make no mistake about it,’ one provisional leader in Belfast told the press. ‘There is no hiding place for her.’ But the Provos never caught McNearney. She vanished from the courtroom, became another person, and has never been heard from since.

  Before they were removed from Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian Price made an announcement: they were going on a hunger strike. They would refuse food until they were granted status as political prisoners and returned to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences. The sisters were taken to Brixton Prison. It was an all-male facility, but they were perceived as so dangerous that housing them there would represent a justifiable exception. From prison, Dolours wrote a letter to her mother, Chrissie, in which she suggested that either the British government would accede to their demands and send them back home to serve their sentences there or they would die of starvation and their bodies would be shipped to Belfast for burial: ‘We will be back in Northern Ireland one way or the other by the New Year.’

  13

  The Toy Salesman

  Arthur McAllister was a toy salesman. He rented a flat on the ground floor of an elegant brick home on Myrtlefield Park, in a middle-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Belfast. Even at the height of the Troubles, it could occasionally seem, in the leafier suburbs, that sectarian strife and paramilitary gun battles were chiefly a working-class phenomenon, one that seldom touched the area’s more stable, well-heeled precincts. McAllister’s flat was fronted by a lattice of ivy and surrounded by old trees and a gracious lawn. Each morning, he would leave the house carrying a case full of toy samples and catalogues. He would climb into his car and crisscross the greater Belfast area, popping into shops to see if he might interest the proprietors in his wares. He was a small, punctilious man, always clean-shaven, his hair carefully trimmed. He dressed in a manner that might have seemed unnecessarily formal for his chosen line of work: McAllister was ultimately just a door-to-door salesman, but when he made his rounds, he looked like a banker, attired in a three-piece suit.

  One morning in the spring of 1974, the quiet of the suburban neighbourhood was ruptured when a convoy of police cars and armoured vehicles coursed through the streets and came to an abrupt halt right outside the house on Myrtlefield Park. The British Army had been staking out the property. In fact, a soldier dressed in camouflage had spent the previous night hiding in a rhododendron bush in the front garden. The lookout was in position so long that his fellow soldiers worried he might not have enough to eat. An effort to subtly resupply him had gone awry when someone walked by with an order of fish and chips but accidentally threw the food into the wrong bush.

  The target of this surveillance, and of the morning raid, was the toy salesman himself. As the vehicles screeched into place, soldiers and police stormed the house, where they found McAllister and shoved him against a wall. With great indignation, he protested his innocence and expressed his outrage that the authorities might barge into the home of a blameless civilian. But the officials did not appear to believe that he was actually a toy salesman, or even that his name was McAllister.

  ‘Come on, Darkie,’ one of the officers said. ‘You’ve had a long enough run.’

  After he escaped from Long Kesh in the rubbish lorry, Brendan Hughes had eventually managed to hitch a ride from a vanful of gypsies, and then another from a driver who turned out to be English. Sitting in the passenger seat, it occurred to Hughes that the Englishman might be an off-duty guard from the very prison from which he happened to have just escaped. But if the man was a Long Kesh employee, he never figured out the identity of his hitchhiker. Hughes got as far as Newry, where he was able to access some money that he had stashed away for this type of eventuality. From there, he took a taxi across the border to Dundalk.

  As soon as he was safe in the Republic, Hughes started to feel the tug of Belfast. Having lost months behind the wire at Long Kesh, he was eager to get back to running operations, but he knew that he could not return to his old patch of West Belfast. It was too hot, and he was too known. If his arrest with Adams the previous summer had marked a colossal success for the authorities, his escape was an even more colossal embarrassment. The only way for Hughes to safely return to Belfast would be to go incognito. So he decided to forge a new identity. He rented the property on Myrtlefield Park and began to construct an alter ego, adopting the name Arthur McAllister, shaving off his trademark moustache, cutting and dyeing his hair, and endeavouring to appear the very opposite of the scruffy lout the police had photographed after his arrest with Adams in the Falls. Arthur McAllister was a real person, or had been – he had died as an infant but would have been about Brendan’s age. By using this name and constructing a personality around it, Hughes had created what spies call a ‘legend’ – a coherent double identity. (He would later suggest that this cloak-and-dagger tradecraft had been inspired by the thriller The Day of the Jackal, the film of which which was released in 1973.)

  Becoming Arthur McAllister, middle-class toy salesman from Myrtlefield Park, meant that he could return to Belfast. What’s more, it opened the city up to him: suddenly he could traverse the sectarian lines, toting his briefcase full of toys, conducting clandestine meetings wherever he wanted. Sometimes he would be stopped on his travels by British troops, but they always bought his story – after all, he had his case of toys and a driver’s licence that said ‘Arthur McAllister’. The Provos knew that it would madden the British to think of Hughes out on the streets, at large, and they occasionally tempted fate by boasting publicly after he made appearances in disguise. At one point, following an Easter commemoration at Milltown Cemetery, which the authorities would have been monitoring closely, the IRA announced that Hughes had been in attendance, ‘under the noses of the British Army’.

  ‘My job at that time was to bring the war to the Brits,’ Hughes said later. ‘I was good at what I done and I done it.’ In the guise of Arthur McAllister, he was planning a number of ambitious operations. But his most audacious scheme during that period was a successful effort to wiretap army headquarters. The British were not the only ones with a taste for espionage. Hughes had appealed to republican technical experts to see if there was some way to penetrate the army’s communications. A local telephone engineer visited army headquarters at Thiepval Barracks, in Lisburn, to install a new backup exchange. The engineer was not an IRA member, but a supporter, and he secretly installed a tap on the telephone of the army’s intelligence cell, attaching a voice-activated recorder to the line. Because army intelligence liaised regularly with Special Branch, this would, at least in theory, provide Hughes with precious insight into the internal operations of both organisations.

  The same technician who put the bug in place began to visit the house in Myrtlefield Park every few days, dropping off a fresh batch of tapes. But there was a problem: the tapes were garbled, unintelligible. They sounded, to Hughes, like Mickey Mouse. It appeared that, as an added precaution, the army had scrambled its calls. There was a device that could be used to unscramble such calls, but it was not the sort of thing you could walk into a consumer electronics shop and purchase. In fact, the only place where such a piece of equipment could be found was back at army headquarters. So Hughes ordered the technician to return to Lisburn, with instructions to steal an unscrambling device from the army. And he did.

  Hughes may have been spying on the authorities, but he failed to realise that, at a certain point, the authorities were also spying on him. They had somehow got wind of his hideout and established that the dapper toy merchant, in his ivy
-covered home, was in fact the escaped IRA commander Brendan Hughes. It was not at all clear how the police and the army might have come by such a compromising piece of information, but for observers at the time, it raised an obvious possibility. As one report noted after Hughes was taken into custody, ‘The Provisionals are certain to launch an intensive inquiry into whether they have a big-time informer in their midst.’

  When the police raided the house where Hughes was staying, they discovered four rifles, a sub-machine gun, and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition, as well as half a dozen tapes of tapped phone calls from army headquarters. They also found a cache of materials that outlined a contingency scenario that would become known as the IRA’s ‘doomsday plan’. The situation envisaged by the documents was one of all-out sectarian war, in which Hughes and his colleagues would be forced to defend Catholic areas. There were maps showing evacuation routes, and a prepared statement that read, ‘An Emergency has been forced upon us and the IRA has no alternative to defend its people. It may be necessary to impose harsh measures to ensure that this succeeds militarily.’ The documents predicted a kind of apocalypse. They indicated that an IRA radio station would broadcast information about food supplies.

  The first time Hughes was arrested, his captors had beaten him and taken trophy photographs while they posed alongside him. This time was different. What they wanted to do now was recruit him, just as they had recruited Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. When they had him in custody, Special Branch officers told Hughes that, in his role as the nerve centre for operations in Belfast, he was ideally situated to help them. They were just trying to stop the conflict – he could play a vital role in putting an end to all this bloodshed. Hughes told them that he was not interested. Perhaps he might be induced in some other fashion? The men offered him a suitcase full of money. But he declined. ‘I was offered fifty thousand pounds to become an informer,’ Hughes later recalled. ‘I told them fifty million wouldn’t sway me.’

  14

  The Ultimate Weapon

  Brixton Prison was a grim colossus surrounded by a high brick wall. For a period in the nineteenth century it had housed female convicts, but by the time Dolours and Marian Price became residents there, shortly after their conviction at Winchester Castle, they were the only women held in the whole facility, and the atmosphere was overwhelmingly and oppressively male: the prison was overcrowded, and there were men everywhere, pacing their cells, loitering in the recreation areas in vests and brown prison uniforms, walking to the showers with towels slung over their shoulders. Dolours and Marian were segregated in their own individual cells, but as they took exercise in the yard for half an hour each day or were escorted through Brixton’s endless corridors, they attracted a stream of verbal commentary from their fellow inmates. A rumour went around that men in the prison were selling seats at their windows overlooking the exercise yard during the time when the sisters were let out. It seemed to Dolours that Brixton even smelled like men. Every inch of the place was redolent of cooped-up males. The cells were adorned with collages of pornography.

  ‘You didn’t go anywhere without a screw beside you every step of the way,’ Dolours later recalled. The sisters were given numbers – Dolours was Prisoner No. 286185 – a new institutional identity that they would wear, in theory, for the next twenty years. Except that neither sister had any intention of remaining behind bars for anywhere near that long. They had already stopped eating by the time they entered Brixton, refusing to take anything but water. Some of the other convicted members of their bombing crew dabbled with short-term hunger strikes, but Dolours and Marian intended to strike until death if necessary. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, who were being held at different prisons, both joined them. Their demand was simple: that they be repatriated to serve out their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland.

  Marian and Dolours in prison (Belfast Exposed Archive)

  By electing this particular mode of protest, the Price sisters were invoking a long-standing tradition of Irish resistance. Dating back to the Middle Ages, fasting had been used by the Irish to express dissent or rebuke. It was a quintessential weapon of passive aggression. In a 1903 play about a poet in seventh-century Ireland who launched a hunger strike at the gates of the royal palace, W. B. Yeats described

  An old and foolish custom, that if a man

  Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve

  Upon another’s threshold till he die,

  The common people, for all time to come,

  Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold.

  In 1920, an Irish republican poet and politician named Terence MacSwiney, who had been imprisoned in Brixton on charges of sedition, refused food for seventy-four days, demanding that he be released. The British would not let him go, and he perished. MacSwiney’s death sparked an international furore, and before he was buried, in the uniform of the IRA, tens of thousands of people filed past his coffin to pay their respects, and thousands more rallied in protest in cities around the world. He had eloquently articulated a philosophy of self-sacrifice that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish republican martyrdom. ‘It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer,’ MacSwiney declared. When somebody dies on a hunger strike, the moral calculus of causation can be tricky. It may have been MacSwiney who, in the strictest sense, chose to take his own life, but by announcing that he would eat again only if the British acceded to his demands, he seemed to transfer the responsibility for whether he lived or died into the hands of his captors. His coffin bore an inscription in Gaelic: MURDERED BY THE FOREIGNER IN BRIXTON PRISON.

  When the Price sisters stopped eating, prison officers would leave a tray of food in their cells, to tempt them. The sisters would not touch it. Eventually the officers stopped leaving the food. A kindly Polish nurse still brought a jug of orange juice every morning.

  ‘Water only, sister,’ Dolours would say.

  ‘I leave, anyway,’ the nurse would reply.

  The sisters had been strapping and healthy when they went into prison. As they started shedding weight, Dolours made light of it. ‘My chubby cheeks have gone,’ she wrote in a letter to her family that January. ‘I must be growing up, losing my “puppy fat”!!’ She joked that Marian’s big brown eyes now took up half her face. But Dolours had always enjoyed a little gallows humour, and she recognised from the outset that a hunger strike is ultimately a contest of wills – the will of the striker to carry on starving, and the will of her opponent to continue refusing her demands. Terence MacSwiney may have lost his life, but he won his stand-off with the British: his death generated unprecedented publicity and international support for the cause of Irish independence. ‘He who blinks first is lost,’ Dolours later observed. ‘I knew that at a very early age.’

  The notion that two young Irishwomen might die on hunger strike in the very prison where MacSwiney met his fate had the ingredients of priceless propaganda. The sisters, who had already been the subject of widespread press coverage during the trial, now became the stars of a different sort of serialised tabloid drama, with breathless daily updates in newspapers and on the radio about their steadily deteriorating condition. They were the ‘bomb girls’, and the coverage tended to play not on the fortitude with which they continued to swear off nourishment, but on their youth and gender, their frail femininity. (Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, who also continued their strike, received much less attention and were never referred to as ‘boys’.)

  ‘Soup, turkey, ham, potatoes, Christmas pudding and brandy sauce,’ a newspaper ad from the Provisional Republican Movement read over the holidays. ‘Merry Christmas everyone. Dolours Price is dying.’ The brinksmanship between the Price sisters and the British was described in language that recalled not just MacSwiney, but the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, in which a million people in Ireland were allowed to die of disease and starvation, and another million or more were forced to migrate. Even as
the Irish starved during the famine, ships laden with food were leaving Irish harbours – for export to the English. Many in Ireland and elsewhere had taken the view that the British bore a responsibility for the famine, one that exceeded callous neglect and began to look more like deliberate murder. One of the first widely circulated tracts about the famine described it as ‘The Last Conquest of Ireland’.

  If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them. Dolours Price had always felt that prison was where an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause was truly tested. Now, she told anyone who would listen, she stood more than ready to die. ‘Volunteers died on the streets of Belfast for our cause and our deaths will be no different from theirs,’ she pointed out in a letter. ‘We’ll be the first women, I think, and are very proud to be so. If we are left to die in Brixton, we’ll feel honoured to die in the same prison as Terence MacSwiney, over 50 years later.’ Such an outcome, she felt, would be proof that the empire never learned from its mistakes. The British had always outmanned and outspent and outgunned the Irish, but the ‘ultimate weapon’, Dolours believed, was ‘one’s own body’.

  Confronted with this peculiar form of defiance, the leaders of the British government were under no illusions: if any of the hunger strikers died, it would be a disaster. If such a thing should happen, officials feared ‘massive retaliatory violence’. But rather than bend to the sisters’ demands, the government imposed a blunt alternative solution. On 3 December, when the strike had been going on for two and a half weeks, a group of doctors and nurses marched into Dolours’s cell. They took her to a room where they forced her into a chair that was bolted to the floor and began tying her up with bedsheets, to secure her. She tried to struggle, but she was weak; she hadn’t eaten in more than two weeks. Once they had restrained her, she watched in terror as a pair of hands prised open her jaws. An object was shoved roughly into her open mouth. It was a wooden bit with a hole in the centre of it. Another pair of hands produced a thin length of rubber hose, then inserted the tip through the hole in the bit and began to slide this tube down her throat. She could not catch her breath as the tube snaked past her tonsils, and she gagged, nearly suffocating. She tried to bite the tube, but the wooden contraption prevented it. Several officials held her body back, and then she felt liquid coursing down the rubber coil and into her belly.