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

by Ed Moloney

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  During that time in Belfast, you were either Protestant or Catholic and the alternatives weren’t great. That’s how my father finished up voting for the Labour Party. But the breakdown of the six-county state at that time meant that Catholics were largely discriminated against. The old adage of ‘a Protestant country for a Protestant people’ was very much in vogue and I remember the job adverts in the Belfast Telegraph at night were quite blatant: ‘Catholics need not apply.’ And if you went for a job interview you were asked what school you went to. Catholics were identified by what school they went to and by their names. I mean, you never heard of a Protestant in the North of Ireland called Brendan or Kevin, Barry or Seamus, so you were identified by your name and your school and, Belfast at that time, as it is today, was made up of ghettos, Catholic ghettos, Protestant ghettos, and the Protestant people at that time were made to feel superior. They weren’t any better off than most working-class Catholics; they lived in the same type of accommodation, terraced houses … the better jobs, certainly, went to the Protestant people. And there was an exclusive Protestant middle class, and, by 1969–70, a developing Catholic middle class. But, I was brought up in a Protestant area. My father – my grandmother was pretty well off, she and my grandfather had been dealers, and my grandmother actually owned the house that I was born in, Blackwater Street on the Grosvenor Road, which was exclusively Protestant. When we moved in my father was constantly fighting. The neighbours used to put an Orange arch up, celebrating the Twelfth of July and my father was in constant fights with the Orange Order who would insist every year on putting the arch up outside our house, the only Catholic house in the street, and on one occasion my father actually pulled the whole thing down and we were all evacuated out of the house over to the other side of the road which was the Catholic enclave. Over the years, we kids were in constant fights with our Protestant neighbours. Eventually we were accepted, until the marching season would come round, the July period. I never had any friends during that period, no Protestant friends. They would all go off to beat the Orange drums and so forth. So reluctantly we were accepted, but, it wasn’t easy. I remember one particular day having to fight this person three times on the one day – he was the local Protestant hard man and his mother just could not accept the fact that he was beaten by a Taig and kept sending him back. There was one old woman, she was in her nineties, Mrs McKissick, and every time I walked past her door she would spit on me; every Sunday she would shout – this is a woman sitting outside her front door, bigoted old woman – ‘Did you bless yourself with the Pope’s piss this morning?’ But around the July period that got worse. There was always a real tension, not so much in the lead-up to it – actually, I used to collect wood for the bonfire on the Eleventh night – they would celebrate the victory of King William over King James and put an effigy of the Pope on top of the bonfire … But the next morning that was it. The Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, all my Protestant friends disappeared; the bigotry really got bad, but up until the Eleventh night, it was OK.

  I remember my father, after a hard day’s work; carrying tiles on his head was very hard work, and … I remember him at night putting us all to bed and we only had an old tiled floor. My father was a very proud man; if he had wanted to, he could have asked [for] money from my grandmother, or my grandfather or my Uncle Joe, but he never did. The only thing he ever asked my Uncle Joe for were caps, because carrying tiles on your head meant the caps wore out pretty quickly. My father used to get down on his knees twice a week and scrub the floor with the scrubbing brush and a bucket of soapy water. We didn’t have much furniture, there was one soft chair in the house which was my father’s chair. Because my mother died we had to take our turns at household work. One week it would be my turn to light the fire and make the dinner when my father was at work. The next week it was my turn to make the beds and someone else’s turn to light the fire and make the dinner … we had a rota system. We had two bedrooms, a sitting room downstairs and what we called the parlour, where my mother actually died. But we had the most basic of facilities, the most basic. I remember my father every Friday night, he would come in and put the wage packet on the mantelpiece and it was £11 and my job every Friday night was to go round and get what we called the ‘rations’. I remember it as well, three-quarter pound of tea, three pound of butter, a pound and a half of margarine, a bottle of HP sauce, six pound of sugar, and two shillings’ worth of broken biscuits, and that was my job every Friday. Every Friday we had our choice of what to eat for supper. In the summer we always got a bit of fruit, or fish out of Fusco’s,* but during the week, you took what was going. I remember one midweek, we had no money whatsoever; we hadn’t even a loaf of bread. We had an outside toilet with a lead pipe coming from the cistern and my father got a hacksaw and went out and sawed the lead pipe off the cistern in the toilet and sent me over to the scrapyard and we got enough money for two shillings’ worth of chips, a loaf and a block of margarine, and we had chips and bread for our tea that night. I had an uncle who worked in the slaughterhouse, and every Friday, he used to leave us meat from the butcher’s; there would be a liver, an oxtail, sometimes sweetbreads and bits and pieces of other meats, what you called ‘skirting’, which you made stew with. But even if you were starving on a Friday, you weren’t allowed to eat that meat, because my father was a practising Catholic and Friday was a fast day. No matter how hungry you were, you did not eat meat on a Friday! But, most of that meat my father would give away, and one of my chores on a Friday night was to bring some of this meat to other people in the street who were just as bad off as us. There was actually one family at the bottom of the street, it was a mixed family, the father was a Protestant and the mother a Catholic, and the kids were never practising Catholics. But there were twenty-one people in that house, a two-bedroom house – twenty-one people living in it at the one time, twenty-one people. Often the meat would have gone down to them. It was unbelievable, I mean, when I think back on it now … there were three of us in one bed, four of us sometimes. My father had his own room, and my young sister was in a cot. She was only a child, eighteen months old when my mother died. Initially she slept in my father’s room, in the cot. Looking back on it now, I mean, one soft chair! All the rest were bamboo chairs or just wooden chairs. But – now this is the major contradiction – my grandmother was pretty well off; she was one of the few people I knew on the Falls Road who had an indoor toilet, an indoor bathroom, with a bath. For us to get a bath we went to the Falls Road public baths, sometimes once a week, maybe once a fortnight, where we could have a bath. But my grandmother had all the facilities, she had a bath, a shower, everything indoors, and she owned the house that we lived in. As I say, we had the most basic of furniture. My grandmother decided one time that the outside of the house needed done up and she employed this builder to put in French doors and French windows. They were the ‘in thing’ at the time. We were the only house on the street with French doors and French windows! That was an image thing. It didn’t matter what was going on inside the house, it was the appearance from the outside that mattered. She’s putting French doors and French windows in and we’re cutting the drainpipe off the toilet to get food. When she died most of her money went to the Catholic Church. She went to Lourdes every year, religiously every year, and I don’t know to this day just how much money was left to the Catholic Church. But certainly none of it was left to my father … my father and his mother did not get on very well together.

  I think all my life, my father has been my hero … if you look at the life that my father had after my mother died. He was only a young man himself, and yet he gave up everything. He devoted his whole life to bringing his children up as best he could. And I believe he did a pretty good job. When we all began to leave, for instance to England or Australia, I had a great desire to do something to pay back all the years that my father spent in bringing us up. He never had another woman in his life. He could easily have sorted us out, or separated us, whic
h was suggested at one time by an aunt of mine and my father threw her out of the house! … So, there was a great strength there, a great love, a bond there with his kids. And right up until the day he died. I remember when I was on hunger strike, my father and Tim Pat Coogan† came to me [on a prison visit] and Tim Pat Coogan asked the question, as a journalist would, a direct question to me: did I think I was going to die? And I felt the tension in the visiting box at that moment. My father just froze and it seemed like an eternity before I could answer, and by that time my father had broken down, had got up and walked out of the visiting box, crying. Crying! I think it was the first time in my life I ever saw my father crying except for the time when my mother died. It must have been like a knife piercing his heart and I felt it for him. I remember thinking, during the hunger strike, the love I had for my father was great, and the love he had for me was great. I remember feeling totally confused at one period [during the hunger strike] when I feared for my father’s life and I remember thinking that ‘I hope I die before my father does’, because I couldn’t bear to see him die. And then the thought occurred to me that ‘I hope that does not happen, I hope my father dies before I do’, because if I died before my father did then it would break his heart.

  Both of Brendan Hughes’s parents and one set of grandparents had been involved in the IRA. He grew up hearing all the stories of the terror Belfast Catholics had experienced in the 1920s and how sometimes the IRA could strike back, although such incidents would pale in comparison to the activities of the IRA units of 1972 that he would lead. One famous action, ‘The Raglan Street Ambush’, took place in West Belfast on 10 July 1921, just a day before a truce between the British and the IRA was to come into effect, and two days before the annual Orange ‘Twelfth’ celebrations when Protestant emotions usually ran high. The timing was unfortunate. A large force of policemen, known then as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and Specials – an exclusively Protestant auxiliary police force established by the new Northern Ireland government – were on a mission to raid homes in the Lower Falls Road area when they were ambushed by the local IRA. One policeman was killed and two were wounded in the fierce gun battle that followed. Already angered by the truce with the IRA, which proved to be a prelude to the Treaty negotiations, lorry loads of Specials went on the rampage in Catholic parts of Belfast shooting wildly. In the following few days twenty people were killed, scores wounded and over a hundred and fifty Catholic homes were torched.8

  Four months before, in March 1921, a great-uncle, Eoin Hughes, was taken off a tram in the York Street area of North Belfast and shot dead. His killer is believed to have been a notorious Loyalist gunman known as ‘Buck Alec’ Robinson, a petty criminal who had been inducted, despite his lengthy criminal record, into the Specials. ‘Buck Alec’ was a member of one of several murder gangs made up of RIC officers and Specials that carried out unofficial reprisals during these turbulent years, activity that in his case did not deter the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord French, commending him ‘for his good police work’.9 Hughes’s father, Kevin Hughes, better known as ‘Kevie’, was active again in the 1930s and in the early 1940s he was interned, ending up in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail alongside Gerry Adams’s father. Growing up, Brendan Hughes rubbed shoulders with men who were IRA heroes in the local community, none more celebrated than Billy McKee, later a founder member of the Provisional IRA in 1969 and its first Belfast Commander. Ironically Hughes and McKee would eventually find themselves on opposite sides during Gerry Adams’s bid to gain control of the IRA.

  … my mother was involved in the 1930s, my grandmother was involved, my grandfather was involved … my father, as I say, was an old Republican; he did time in prison but very seldom would he tell us any stories about his involvement. He never ever talked about any operation that he was on, even though I know he was on operations. He was interned in 1942, during the war years. My father’s great friend was a man called Billy McKee; my father would have spoken more about Billy McKee than about himself. And Billy was a person that I admired and looked up to even though I didn’t know him. He lived in McDonnell Street just across the street from where I lived. We’re talking about the 1960s. My father would bring us all to Mass and we’d walk past Billy McKee’s house on McDonnell Street and we almost felt like genuflecting because my father thought so much of him. Billy McKee was one of those people who spent his whole life in the Republican movement, in and out of jail, hunger strikes, being shot, and I remember picturing Billy McKee with a .45 stuck on his belt … one of my memories of him was in a house in the Falls Road, Belgrade Street – a friend of my father’s, John O’Rawe, his mother had died, and we were all in the back room, in the scullery where the tea was being made, and Billy was there. And I remember purposely bumping up against Billy to find out if he had a .45 stuck in his belt and, yes, he did, he had a .45 automatic stuck in his belt, and I remember asking him could I look at it. I don’t know what age I was; I was young. But later on, in years to come, I saw Billy with more than a .45 in his hand. I was so enchanted by him, and admired him so much, and my father was there as well. I was so sort of romantically involved with the IRA, even before I joined it. It was just something that I believe I was destined to be, and I don’t think my father actually directed me towards this, consciously directed me towards this, [but] he probably unconsciously directed me towards the movement. Well, it was not so much the IRA as the resistance to what was going on; a resistance to, and a resentfulness towards, the way life in the six-county state that I lived in, the way that it was treating my family, treating my father. The stories of the B Specials, of the shootings and of the oppression and of all that was all consciously ingrained. I remember the story of my uncle, my uncle Eoin Hughes. He was on a tram in the 1920s going down to York Street and he was taken off the tram and shot dead in the middle of the street. One of the names mentioned at the time [as being responsible] was a famous Loyalist from down there, ‘Buck Alec’. It was hard to differentiate a B Special from a Loyalist assassin; they were one and the same. And, I mean, we heard all the stories – my grandmother used to tell me stories about the 1920s and of the shootings and the murders and so forth, and I remember being really scared about the B Specials … stories about my Uncle Eoin and of my great-grandfather during the War of Independence, losing his arm, throwing a hand grenade at an armoured car somewhere in County Louth. The grenade went off and blew his arm off. I believe my [grand] father was involved in Raglan Street, even though he never told me that, but I know he was there and abouts. It was one of the famous ambushes in the Falls area, and, I mean, Raglan Street has drifted into oblivion because of all the other gun battles that have taken place since. The Raglan Street Ambush was small fry compared to some of the stuff that happened afterwards.

  These were the influences that shaped Brendan Hughes as he reached adulthood, and in that regard he was not very different from hundreds of other young working-class Catholics in Belfast at that time whose parents and grandparents could tell equally chilling stories about the violence of the 1920s and 1930s. In his and their lives the IRA was an organic part of their community, even if not all would approve or adopt their methods. The IRA was made up of neighbours, friends and even relatives, people they knew and respected and to whom they would naturally turn for protection from the worst excesses of Orange extremists. Distrust and dislike of the police, a feature of working-class life the world over, was so much more intense in such communities because, for Republicans and Nationalists, the RUC was seen as the political enemy, the force that imposed their second-class status and upheld Unionist rule and with whom co-operation was frowned upon.

  … we never had money to buy bikes when we were growing up so we would go to the scrapyard and buy scrap pieces and so forth to build an old bike and ride about the place. Four or five times I was arrested, for not having brakes, for not having lights, for playing football on the street … We used to play cards at the bottom of the street which was illegal as well … we�
��d have people out watching for the cops coming. But, as a Catholic family in the area, we were constantly singled out for special attention. I mean, I was arrested, God knows how many times, taken to court and fined five shillings or ten shillings for not having lights on the bike, for not having brakes on the bike, for playing cards on the street, for playing football on the street. But there was one time, we were playing cards on the street and the cops came and everybody bolted, but I was caught, and I was taken to the barracks and I was interrogated. I think I must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen. And I gave the names of the people who were in the card school with me and the cops brought me back to the house and left me there. They then came back and gave me a summons to go to court. My father asked me what did I say, and I told him and I got a powerful smack on the face, not for playing cards but for giving the names of the other people who were involved with me … Right through my early years, I had plenty of run-ins with the RUC, over petty little things, but I can’t remember anyone else, any of my other Protestant friends, being arrested as often as I was. And I think there was a great understanding there with my father, that he knew that there was a certain amount of discrimination going on here and that I was being picked on.