Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  25

  The Last Gun

  Father Reid kept an eye on the gunman. He had agreed to serve as a witness to the decommissioning of the IRA’s weapons, along with a Methodist minister, Harold Good. The process had unfolded in phases, and the precise technique that the IRA used to render its weaponry ‘beyond use’ was a closely held secret, but it was said to involve sealing the weapons in concrete. Now, in 2005, the two clergymen had been summoned to oversee the destruction of the final batch. As they watched the process, Reid was distracted by the presence of one Provo official who stood nearby, holding an AK-47. ‘Everywhere we went, this Kalashnikov was there, and I could see it was loaded,’ Reid said later. The gun was on display, he concluded, not because of any fear about what the clergymen might do, but because the Provos needed to guard against an ambush by dissident paramilitaries who were not quite ready to give up fighting and might endeavour to repossess the arsenal.

  The destruction proceeded without incident, however, and once the clattering assortment of assault rifles, flamethrowers, mortars and shoulder-fired missiles had been disposed of, the only weapon that remained was the Kalashnikov in the gunman’s hand. Father Reid watched the man as he solemnly handed it over, and noticed that he had become emotional. The man seemed very aware, Reid thought, that this was ‘the last gun’.

  While the IRA was decommissioning, Brendan Hughes was fulfilling a lifelong dream. With his brother Terry, he flew to Cuba. The two greying Irishmen visited the Che Guevara memorial in Santa Clara and paid their respects at the mausoleum. They met some ageing veterans of Cuba’s revolution and bonded with the men. They posed for photos where Che fought. Brendan was delighted.

  When he got back to Belfast, Hughes grew increasingly ill, struggling with a range of infirmities that dated back to his hunger strike twenty-five years earlier. One day in 2008, he fell into a coma. His family surrounded him at the hospital, and veterans of D Company began to appear, knowing that their former commander was close to death, to pay their respects. One night, Gerry Adams slipped into the hospital. This caused some discomfort among Brendan’s siblings, who knew that if he were awake, he might not welcome Adams. Hughes had taken to telling people, ‘There was a time in my life when I would have taken a bullet for Gerry Adams. Now, I’d put one in him.’ But the family chose not to intervene, and Adams went into the hospital room alone and sat in silence by Brendan’s bed. Hughes died the next day. He was fifty-nine.

  The funeral, on a frigid day in February, was a massive affair. Dolours Price attended, as did Mackers, along with his wife, Carrie. At one point, Price looked over and saw a familiar figure cutting through the crowd. It was Adams. For the Sinn Féin leader to show up at all was awkward. When Adams travelled the world now, he was embraced. He was a government minister, a peacemaker. People would queue just to shake his hand. They would reach out to touch his sleeve. But not here. Surrounded by men and women who had once taken his orders, at the funeral of a man who had been one of his closest friends, Adams was an outsider. In the judgement of Terry Hughes, Brendan’s brother, Adams had little choice but to make an appearance. Brendan was a republican icon. In the symbolic calculus of IRA politics, in which every funeral is a stage, Adams could afford to disassociate himself from Hughes in life, but not in death.

  Watching Adams, Price felt something unexpected: a pang of sympathy. He looked so uneasy in this crowd, she thought. He looked lonely. Still, he was nothing if not determined. Adams plunged into the cortège, manoeuvring across the throng. Then he shouldered his way into the clutch of men carrying the coffin. ‘We were there in grief, not for photo opportunities,’ Price complained afterwards. But it was a bit late to be accusing Adams of a single-minded fixation on politics. After the burial, Adams told the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht that although Hughes had ‘disagreed with the direction taken in recent years’, he was still held ‘in high esteem’ by all who knew him. ‘He was my friend,’ Adams remarked, before concluding with a Gaelic aphorism that translates roughly as ‘He is on the way of truth.’ It was a sentiment that would soon prove to be more apt than Adams could possibly imagine.

  At the time Hughes died, the existence of the Belfast Project was still a closely guarded secret. But there were already indications that Sinn Féin’s complete control of the narrative of IRA history during the Troubles was beginning to fray. When Ricky O’Rawe did his oral history with Mackers, he waited until the final session to reveal his long-held secret about how the Adams leadership had spurned an offer by the British government that might have ended the 1981 hunger strike before the last six strikers died. But O’Rawe found the experience of unburdening himself so invigorating that as soon as he finished the interview, he resolved not to wait until his own death in order to release the story to the world. O’Rawe had a big, round face, close-cropped grey hair, and a jovial sensibility. He was still relatively young and in good health. It could be decades before he died. Besides, he didn’t want to restrict his story to the future students of Boston College. He wanted to tell it to the world.

  What O’Rawe really wanted to do was write a book. The idea sounded slightly outlandish, and potentially dangerous. When Ed Moloney, the director of the Belfast Project, learned of O’Rawe’s plan, he tried to warn him. The allegation that O’Rawe aimed to make public – that Gerry Adams had knowingly sacrificed the lives of six hunger strikers in order to advance the electoral prospects of Sinn Féin – was simply too explosive. ‘If you publish this, you’ll be nailed to the cross,’ Moloney said.

  But O’Rawe was undeterred. ‘If I die before this comes out, all these geezers will be off the hook,’ he said. In 2005, he published the book. It was called Blanketmen, and it portrayed Adams as a coolheaded visionary, but also a slippery operator. ‘No matter how history chooses to judge Adams’ in relation to the strike itself, O’Rawe wrote, ‘without him and the hunger strikers, there would be no semblance of peace in Ireland today’.

  This sort of nuance did nothing to placate those who perceived the publication of Blanketmen as a weaponised personal history aimed squarely at Gerry Adams. The Sinn Féin president did not respond to O’Rawe directly, preferring to remain aloof. Instead, as O’Rawe put it, he ‘unleashed his Dobermans’: an assortment of proxies and allies took to the press to hammer the book. Bik McFarlane, who had worked closely with O’Rawe during the hunger strikes, derided the book as ‘totally fictitious’, claiming that no deal had ever been offered by the British, so Adams couldn’t have sent a message directing the prisoners not to accept it. (Several years later, McFarlane changed his story and acknowledged that a secret offer had been made, but he insisted that it was the hunger strikers themselves, rather than the leadership, who deemed the offer unworthy and opted to continue the strike.)

  If the attacks on Blanketmen were intended to silence O’Rawe, they had the opposite effect. He never missed an opportunity to publicly debate with anyone who might question the particulars of his story, and he decided that he would now write a second book about the strike and its aftermath. He also found that his willingness to tell a story that was at odds with republican orthodoxy won him supporters. In a review in The Blanket, Dolours Price praised O’Rawe, thanking him for providing ‘access to this vital piece in the jigsaw’.

  Brendan Hughes had admired Blanketmen as well, and he came to its defence before he died. ‘I am a former prisoner whom O’Rawe talked to on a number of occasions about the things that concerned him and which eventually appeared in his book,’ Hughes wrote, in a letter to the Irish News. In his final years, Hughes had got together with O’Rawe from time to time, to share memories of their years in prison. ‘Dark, you should write all this down,’ O’Rawe would tell him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Hughes said. ‘I’ve made tapes.’

  One day in 2009, Dolours Price was arrested and charged with trying to steal a bottle of vodka from a Sainsbury’s supermarket. Price maintained that she had not intended to steal the bottle. The shop had automated checko
ut counters, with electronic scanners, and she simply got confused about the mechanism. Price elaborated that it was not in her ‘temperament or breeding to take things from shops without paying for them’. She was subsequently acquitted of shoplifting, but the truth was that Price had been struggling for some time with alcohol and drug addiction, and with PTSD. In 2001, she was caught with stolen pharmaceutical prescriptions and was found guilty of theft. A few years later, she was thrown out of Maghaberry Prison, where she had gone to visit a dissident republican prisoner. Officials at the prison said that she was drunk, though she denied it. Friends were concerned. Price still spoke once a week to Eamonn McCann, her old friend from Derry. She often wanted to talk about the past, but McCann would endeavour to steer her to other subjects. ‘Don’t,’ he would say. ‘I don’t want to know.’ Like Ricky O’Rawe, Price wanted to write about her days in the IRA. But McCann cautioned her against it. ‘Write about your childhood,’ he said. ‘Don’t write about the IRA.’

  Speaking out still invited fierce censure. In 2009, another IRA veteran, Gerry Bradley, wrote a memoir. Like Price, Bradley had contempt for ‘the Shinners’, as people often called members of Sinn Féin. Many of them, he felt, were ‘free-loading on the IRA’s achievements’. Bradley told his co-author, a respected scholar of the Troubles named Brian Feeney, ‘The only thing I know is that I’m not an informer.’ Yet as soon as the book was published, Bradley’s North Belfast neighbourhood was tagged with graffiti identifying him as a tout. ‘I’m just telling my story,’ he protested, insisting that he only wanted to ‘put on record the truth of life in the IRA’. Eventually Bradley was forced to flee Belfast, seeking exile in Dublin. Ostracised and in poor health, he drove one day to a car park beside a Norman castle on Belfast Lough and took his own life.

  ‘Are they the only ones allowed to write books?’ Ricky O’Rawe asked indignantly after Bradley’s death. ‘Is history never to be recorded properly?’

  As it happened, Brendan Hughes had made arrangements before he died. He asked Mackers and Ed Moloney to promise him that his own recollections would be published in book form. When the time came, Moloney volunteered to write the book. Using the Boston College transcript of Hughes, and that of another participant in the project, the loyalist politician and former UVF paramilitary David Ervine, who had also recently died, Moloney wrote a book called Voices from the Grave. It was published in 2010. In a preface, Bob O’Neill and Tom Hachey, from Boston College, described it as ‘the inaugural volume of a planned series of publications drawn from the Boston College Oral History Archive on the Troubles’.

  The secret of the archive was officially out. The book would quote Hughes by name not just asserting that Gerry Adams had been an IRA commander, but describing how Adams had personally ordered murders. Here was Hughes, saying in his own words that it was Adams who sent him to America to procure Armalites. It was Adams who sent Dolours Price to bomb London. It was Adams who ordered the killing of Jean McConville. The publisher, Faber & Faber, promised that Voices from the Grave would ‘make it impossible for certain forms of historical denial to continue in public life’.

  The publication generated enormous attention – and a swift and lacerating backlash. ‘I knew Brendan Hughes well,’ Adams said when he was asked about the book. ‘He wasn’t well and hadn’t been for a very long time, including during the time he did these interviews. Brendan also opposed the IRA cessations and the peace process.’ Adams, who would soon be elected to a seat in the Dáil Éireann, the legislature of the Republic of Ireland, rejected ‘absolutely’ any suggestion that he had played a part in the Jean McConville case, ‘or in any of the other allegations that are being promoted by Ed Moloney’. Sinn Féin issued a blanket pronouncement that anyone who participated in the Belfast Project had ‘a malign agenda’.

  Attention soon turned to Anthony McIntyre, who was identified in the book as the person who had interviewed Hughes. Mackers had long since fallen out with people in the circle around Adams, but now he began receiving threats. One night, someone smeared the house of one of his neighbours with excrement – wrong address, apparently – a gesture whose combination of vindictiveness and clumsiness had all the hallmarks of the IRA. In one press report, an unnamed republican said that Mackers would ‘go the same way as Eamon Collins’, a Newry man who was stabbed to death in 1999, not long after publishing his own memoir about life in the IRA.

  But Voices from the Grave received strong reviews, and Ed Moloney went on a book tour. He had plans to launch a documentary on Irish television that would include audio from Hughes’s oral history. Then, one day in the summer of 2010, Danny Morrison, the longtime friend and ally of Gerry Adams, contacted Boston College and requested access to the Hughes tapes.

  During the Troubles, Morrison had been the chief propagandist for the IRA, the man who is credited with coining the phrase ‘the Armalite and the ballot box’. If Hughes delivered the oral history to Boston College with the understanding that it would not be made public until his death, and if Hughes was now dead, then surely Morrison could access not just Ed Moloney’s book but the original tapes themselves? When the college forwarded this request to Moloney and Mackers, they panicked. Under no circumstances should Morrison be granted access, Moloney said. In an email to Tom Hachey at Boston College, Mackers wrote, ‘Danny Morrison has no intellectual interest in the tapes. He is not an academic or investigative writer but a propagandist.’

  It may simply have been the flush of euphoria when the Belfast Project was originally conceived, in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, but at no point had any of the project’s architects contemplated a scenario like this. In fact, there were quite a few fairly important points upon which their original conception of the project had been ambiguous. For instance, Wilson McArthur, Anthony McIntyre’s counterpart, who conducted all the interviews in the loyalist community, had been under the impression, as he was gathering the oral histories, that none of the interviews would be made public until all the participants had died. He was caught off guard by the news that Moloney intended to publish Voices from the Grave just a few years after the last of the interviews had concluded, thereby revealing the existence of the archive when the first participants had died, rather than waiting decades until the last ones had.

  The men had also never decided just who would be allowed to access the interviews. The conversations had always been about ‘the future students of Boston College’. But the history department at the college had not known, until the publication of Moloney’s book, that the project was happening at all. In fact, the archive had been so secret that almost nobody at Boston College, apart from Hachey and O’Neill, knew that it existed. One history professor, when he learned about the project, sent a PhD student he was supervising to the Burns Library to consult the Hughes and Ervine interviews for her thesis. But when he found out about this arrangement, Ed Moloney objected. ‘I would strongly urge you now to close the archives to any and all further access,’ Moloney wrote to Hachey. There should be a strict protocol, he proposed. Anyone could apply to access the interviews, but the list of applicants should be sent to Moloney for ‘vetting’.

  In an email to Mackers, Hachey expressed his indignation. If the perception had been from the outset that the project would be ‘mothballed for a lengthy time’, Boston College might not have been so supportive, he pointed out. ‘We never got as much as a hint that there was any expected fallout,’ he complained. The university could not be expected to close the archive ‘to the entire scholarly and/or journalistic world – other than to Ed Moloney’.

  From the beginning, the two Irishmen and the two Americans – Moloney, McIntyre, Hachey and O’Neill – had enshrouded the Belfast Project in secrecy, because they recognised just how sensitive and potentially dangerous an undertaking it was. Out of this concern for operational security, they kept the circle of people who knew anything about the project extremely small, and, for the better part of a decade, until the publication of Moloney’s boo
k, they scrupulously preserved this need-to-know ethos. But the very smallness of the circle may have led them to take certain things for granted and prevented them from asking important questions about how to manage the process if the whole thing unravelled and their most paranoid, worst-case-scenario fears came true.

  Just prior to the publication of Voices from the Grave, in February 2010, Gerry Adams gave a long interview to the Irish News, in which he was asked about Joe Lynskey, the ‘Mad Monk’ of the IRA, who was the first person to be disappeared in the Troubles after he was court-martialled for ordering a hit on his love rival, which led to the shooting at the Cracked Cup. When the IRA acknowledged, in 1999, that it had disappeared people, and released a list of names, including the informants Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, as well as Jean McConville, Lynskey was not on the list. In fact, it had been Ed Moloney who first informed the Lynskey family, before publishing the story in Voices from the Grave, that Joe had been disappeared by the IRA. When the Irish News interviewer questioned Adams about Lynskey, he said, casually, ‘He was a neighbour of mine.’ Asked if he had been friends with Lynskey, Adams said, ‘Oh, yeah. I knew him and he disappeared.’ He added that he would encourage anyone who might have information about Lynskey’s disappearance to come forward now.

  At her home outside Dublin, Dolours Price read the interview, and it made her furious. She might not have spoken to Adams for years, but she maintained a conversation, of sorts, with him through her articles in The Blanket. ‘I knew you way back when,’ she reminded Adams in one column. Was it the ‘interfering cleric’ who had diverted Adams from the cause, she wondered, in a possible reference to Father Alec Reid. Or was it ‘the flattery of the Americans’? Did it ‘go to your head’, she asked him, ‘did the ego soar and at last did you see the possibility that you might be somebody?’ Again and again, she came back to her feeling of personal and political betrayal. ‘You didn’t do it for a couple of houses and a good suit on your back, surely?’ she asked. ‘I’m all curiosity.’