The transfer was not immediate. Instead of being shipped back to Ireland, Dolours and Marian were relocated to the women’s wing at Durham Prison. But one day in March 1975, at lunchtime, all the prisoners at Durham were ordered into their cells. Something in Dolours’s heart told her that this might be the day. She went to her cell and started packing. She put on her coat, gathering her few belongings. Then the governor walked in and announced that they were going home. ‘Or – not home. You’re going to Armagh.’
‘That’s near enough for me,’ she said.
Marian ran into her cell and they hugged each other so tightly they could hardly breathe. They shovelled the last of their belongings into bags, and the screws rushed them out into the hall. Dolours was so drunk with excitement that she hugged the prison governor.
The sisters were taken to an air force base. The flight took off, and England receded into the distance. On board the plane, a man in uniform made coffee. They had been flying over water for some time when Dolours looked out of the window and suddenly glimpsed green land below. She burst into tears.
‘That’s not Ireland yet,’ Marian said. ‘That’s the Isle of Man.’
They flew some more. Then Dolours looked out and saw green in the distance again. ‘Is that it, Marian?’ she asked.
‘I think that’s it,’ Marian said.
As the Price sisters disembarked, British Army photographers took their picture, the flashbulbs lighting up the early evening sky. The two women were overjoyed to be home, but distressed about the timing of their arrival. In February, Bridie Dolan, their aunt, had died. As a minor republican icon, she was treated to a big funeral; the authorities sent photographers to snap surveillance shots of the mourners. Four days after the funeral, Chrissie Price died of pancreatic cancer. Until very recently, it had looked as though the mother would outlive her daughters, not the other way round, and Dolours and Marian were distraught. They petitioned for compassionate leave to attend Chrissie’s funeral, but the request was denied. Instead they sent a wreath of Easter lilies. Four hundred people joined the slow-moving cortège from Slievegallion Drive to Milltown Cemetery. Albert walked alongside the coffin, his head bowed. The whole solemn procession was led by a young girl playing bagpipes. She wore the black beret and dark glasses of the IRA.
15
Captives
For weeks after their mother disappeared, the McConville children clung together, trying to hold on to the family home. They had to be there, in the event that Jean returned. But eventually the social welfare authorities intervened, and two cars arrived at Divis Flats to take the children into care. Helen McConville loaded her younger siblings into the vehicles, promising that they were going away only ‘’til Mummy comes back’. As the children piled into the seats, Helen looked up and saw their neighbours from Divis gathered on the concrete balconies, watching silently. ‘Fuck youse all,’ she muttered. Then they drove away.
The oldest child, Anne, was still in the hospital. Robert was still interned, Archie was old enough to work and take care of himself, and Agnes remained with Granny McConville. But Helen, Michael, Tucker, Susan, Billy and Jim were brought to South Belfast and up a long, curving drive to an imposing four-storey redbrick orphanage called Nazareth Lodge. It proved to be a wretched environment. Many of the children living there had been wards of the state since infancy and seemed numbly accustomed to institutional living. But the McConville kids had grown up in a home. They were haunted by their mother’s disappearance, and by their father’s death before that, and they had now been living wild for several months. The orphanage was run by an order of stern nuns who were legendary for their sadism. One former resident described the facility as ‘something out of Dickens’, a bleak, pinched place where beatings and harsh punishment were routine.
It was around this time that Michael McConville became a master of escape. From the moment he was removed from the flat at Divis, he would contrive ways to sneak out and run back to West Belfast. He was a restive, streetwise child – a child of the Troubles – and he was angry. At one point when he was dealing with the welfare authority, an official suggested that his mother had ‘abandoned’ the children. ‘That’s lies!’ Michael shouted.
In March 1973, the same month that Dolours Price was bombing London, Michael and Tucker were summoned to court in Belfast on a shoplifting charge, and a decision was made to move them out of Nazareth Lodge – out of Belfast altogether, in fact, to the De La Salle Boys’ Home, twenty-two miles away in County Down, near the village of Kircubbin. The drive to their new home did not take long, but as far as Michael was concerned, it could have been a hundred miles. The institution occupied a converted Victorian mansion nestled in the deep-green countryside, as well as a series of newer cottages where the children were housed. The property was vast – 250 acres – and it felt wide and wild and open after a lifetime spent in the brick-and-concrete confines of Belfast. The grounds included a school, a swimming pool, tennis courts and a football pitch. They even had a billiard table.
Kircubbin was, in the words of one person who resided there in those years, ‘a pure nightmare’. A subsequent government investigation revealed that a ‘culture of physical force’ had pervaded the establishment, and both monks and lay employees would resort to violence on the merest of pretexts. Children were pummelled with fists, strapped with belts, and lashed across the knuckles with a thin wooden cane that snapped down with such ferocity it felt as if it might sever their fingertips.
For all his grit and savvy, Michael was still just eleven years old. Tucker was nine. There were older children there, in whom this culture of abuse had already been well ingrained. They bullied the McConville boys without mercy. The Christian Brothers who ran the orphanage purchased clothing for their charges in bulk, so the children walked around in garments that did not fit – shirtsleeves that rode up past the elbow, capacious adult trousers that needed to be held up with a belt, urchin ensembles that compounded the sense that this was a storybook purgatory for Belfast’s misbegotten. The adults at Kircubbin put the children to work. Sometimes the staff would hire them out to neighbouring farms, as labour, to pick potatoes.
In the evenings, as everyone watched a programme in the darkened TV room, monks in their long robes would instruct certain children to come and sit on their laps. Sexual abuse was rampant at the home. Michael was never molested himself, but at night he would watch from under the covers as shadowy adults entered the dormitory with a torch and plucked sleeping boys from their beds.
Michael and Tucker ran away. They felt a duty to be back in Belfast in the event that their mother reappeared. But each time the boys ran off, they were returned, and each time they came back, they were beaten. The McConville boys ran away so frequently that eventually the staff at Kircubbin took their shoes away, on the theory that even if they managed to get off the grounds and as far as the country road where they might thumb a ride back to Belfast, it would slow them down if they were barefoot.
The authorities may simply not have realised at the time the kind of predatory behaviour that was happening inside the walls of Kircubbin, but if they did get any inkling of the environment at the home, it did not stop them from sending other children there. Eventually the twins, Billy and Jim, were reassigned from Nazareth Lodge to Kircubbin. As the car made its way from Belfast down the coast of Strangford Lough in the direction of the orphanage, the boys sat in the back, consumed by apprehension. They were seven years old. They became the youngest children at Kircubbin, and it was as if they had been fed to the wolves. They were physically assaulted by the older kids and Billy was sexually abused by the grown-ups. The boys could not turn to any of the adults for help, because so many of the staff were molesting children that the behaviour was silently tolerated. All the Christian Brothers, one former resident explained, ‘were in it together’. Some of the McConville children were so scarred by their experiences in the Catholic institutions of Northern Ireland that they developed a fear of priests in general
. Even as adults, the mere sight of a man of the cloth could fill them with anxiety. (The De La Salle Brothers later admitted that widespread sexual abuse took place at Kircubbin during this period. The Sisters of Nazareth, who administered Nazareth Lodge, have also acknowledged a pattern of physical abuse at that home.)
Helen McConville was too old to be kept in care against her will but still too young to be legal guardian to her siblings, so she struck out on her own, staying with Archie or with friends. She found work at a company that made funeral shrouds, and as a waitress. During her stay at Nazareth, she had briefly met a boy her age named Seamus McKendry, who was working as an apprentice carpenter at the orphanage. After that initial encounter, they fell out of touch, but two years later, when Helen was waitressing, they crossed paths again – and fell in love. They married when she was eighteen.
There were times when it seemed that there was no home that could hold Michael McConville. Eventually, after escaping on one too many occasions, he was moved once again, sent this time to a ‘training’ school not far from the town of Newtownards. Known as Lisnevin, this school had recently been established, in spite of protest from the surrounding community, as a ‘secure’ residential facility for boys. Even calling the place a school was a bit of a euphemism: Lisnevin was a juvenile detention facility for kids who were too rough or too wilful for places like Kircubbin. Michael’s new housemates included serial escapees like him, along with a rogues’ gallery of misfit adolescents who had been arrested for burglary, assault and paramilitary activity. The main building was a converted mansion, the centrepiece of some once grand country seat. It now featured ‘isolation rooms’ – cells stripped of furniture, with bars on the windows, in which errant children could be locked in solitary confinement. The property was surrounded by a tall perimeter fence, which was electrified and equipped with an alarm that would sound if anyone should try to escape.
Lisnevin might have seemed like a gulag, but Michael loved it. He would later joke, wryly, that Lisnevin was the best home he ever had. The staff liked to say that the fences were for keeping people out, not keeping people in, and it may be that by sealing out some of the tragedy and mania of the Troubles, Lisnevin created a space in which a victim like Michael McConville could finally settle down and begin to heal. The facility was nondenominational, and there were regular sectarian skirmishes between Catholic and Protestant residents. But Michael steered clear of trouble. He got to know a kindly nun, Sister Frances, who looked out for him. She befriended his siblings as well, and for years afterwards, even after she moved away to America, she would send them cards every Christmas, with a dollar bill folded inside. It was a minor gesture, but to the motherless McConvilles, it meant the world.
Michael was eligible for weekend leave, like a furlough from prison, so he would go back to visit Belfast, staying with Archie or Helen. When they were together, the children never spoke about what had happened to their mother. It was too painful. But their sense of the family as a unit had begun to erode. Increasingly, they were each alone, fending for themselves in unforgiving territory. As soon as Michael turned sixteen, he left Lisnevin and set out in search of a job and a place to live – in search of a life. He had been living in institutions for nearly a third of his years. But this was how it worked: when you reached sixteen, they simply opened the door. They did very little to prepare you for this abrupt emancipation. Nobody taught you how to rent a flat or find a job or boil an egg. They simply let you go.
When Brendan Hughes returned to Long Kesh after being apprehended in his guise as a toy salesman, Gerry Adams was still there, doing time. Adams had tried, twice, to escape. But he was not the tactician that Hughes was, and he had been caught and given a sentence for his efforts. Adams had settled into life in Long Kesh. Compared with life on the outside – on the run, sleeping in a different bed every night, fearing the knock on the door, never knowing if you might be recognised on the street and shot on sight – he found the predictable routine of prison life relaxing. The wire enclosures surrounding the Nissen huts where the prisoners lived were known as ‘cages’, and each had a number. Hughes and Adams shared Cage 11. The two revolutionaries had been close before this stint in confinement, but now their bond grew tighter as they cohabited in the intimate confines of a cell. The hut was draughty and Spartan, and chill winds whipped through the camp. In the winter, they wore socks over their hands, like gloves, to keep warm.
They nurtured themselves on endless conversation. Adams, who had always had a scholarly bent, encouraged the men around him to harden their minds. The prisoners organised lectures and discussion sessions. They would meet at ‘the wire’ – the fences separating the different enclosures – and discuss politics, history, and the latest news from the war outside. A fresh-faced, headstrong young IRA prisoner organised cultural classes. He wrote poetry and would become the official press officer for the republican prisoners. His name was Bobby Sands. The place came to feel, Adams later remarked, like ‘our barbed wire ivory tower’. Adams was a witty, engaging interlocutor with a piercing mind. But for all his gregariousness, there were aspects of his personality that he kept to himself. Whereas Hughes had come to regard himself not just as unreligious but anti-religious, Adams was quietly immersed in Catholicism. At night, Hughes read speeches by Fidel Castro; Adams recited the rosary.
By the mid-1970s, Adams was confronting a dilemma. From the moment the Provisionals emerged in 1969 and began to bring the fight directly to the unionist establishment, there had been a sense that it might take just one final, furious push to drive the British into the sea. It was this strategic thesis that accounted both for the frantic pace of operations during the early years of the Troubles and for the high morale that drove recruitment and galvanised the lads. As the conflict entered its sixth year, however, it appeared that matters might not be so simple. After years of violence, the brunt of which was often felt by the very citizenry the IRA claimed to represent, public support for the Provos had tapered. The British, meanwhile, seemed to be settling in for a conflict of indefinite duration. When Adams and Hughes met their subordinates for conversations at the wire, they could see a new set of installations being built at the prison – the so-called H Blocks, which, once they were completed, would have the capacity to house many more paramilitary detainees.
Adams’s father, Gerry Sr., had been an IRA man as well, and had taken part in a campaign during the 1940s that fitted squarely into the long republican history of noble failure. When Adams was growing up, he would see veterans of earlier conflicts hanging out at the Felons Club, a social club that his father had helped to found, where men like Albert Price would drink and tell war stories and ruminate about what could have been. It was almost as if ‘defeat suited them better than victory’, in the words of one historian, ‘for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it’. During the early 1970s, it had become commonplace for the Provos to declare, every January, that this was the year they would eject the British once and for all. For people of Adams’s generation, who had beheld the fall of Saigon, the sudden toppling of regimes seemed like something that was readily achievable. But after a few years and a great abundance of spilled blood, those January resolutions were beginning to seem delusional. To be sure, there was a doomed romance in the notion of republican failure, a poetry in those archetypes of futility. But Gerry Adams was not a romantic.
This time, he told his men, the struggle must come to something. This generation of Irish republicans would not simply pass the baton to the next one; they must force change within their own lifetimes. Even as he made this case, however, Adams began to argue that it would be naive to expect immediate results. What the republican movement should do, instead, was hunker down for what would come to be known as the ‘long war’. Stop telling people victory is just a year away. Better to marshal your resources and plan for a fight that could take much longer.
This was not an easy argument
to make. The foot soldiers of the Provos had been beaten by loyalists, shot at by the army, and tortured by the police. They had abandoned their families to go on the run, and now they found themselves locked up alongside Adams and Hughes at Long Kesh. They could readily embrace a message that said, ‘If you just fight a little harder right now, this will all be over soon.’ But it was quite another thing to tell them, ‘Get used to this, because the fight won’t end after our next big offensive. It could take years. Even decades.’
Adams also began to subtly modulate the language in which he talked about what victory itself might mean. It was important to fight the long war, but also to recognise that the end of the conflict would probably result not merely from a military triumph, but from some variety of political settlement. The armed struggle is simply a means to an end, Adams would tell the young IRA men at the wire. It is not the end itself.
‘Youse are politicians,’ he told them.
‘We’re not, really. We’re army,’ they replied.
‘No, you have to develop your consciousness in here,’ Adams insisted. ‘Politics is important.’
Adams commanded respect and loyalty inside the walls of Long Kesh, but he wanted to get his message to the volunteers fighting the war in Belfast and Derry. So in 1975, he began writing a series of articles for Republican News, the movement’s propaganda newspaper. Because it was illegal to be a member of the IRA, writing such articles under his own name might be risky, so Adams adopted a pseudonym, ‘Brownie’. After composing each fresh column, he would smuggle it out of the camp. Secret documents – or ‘comms’, as they were known – regularly made their way in and out of Long Kesh. These memos and letters would be etched in tiny handwriting on cigarette paper, then palmed to a visiting friend or spouse. In this manner, the IRA’s command structure inside the prison remained in near constant contact with their counterparts on the outside.
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