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

by Ed Moloney

  … during that whole day there was a continual gun battle, blast bombs being thrown at the British, petrol bombs and, later on that afternoon, a helicopter arrived and announced over loud hailers that the Lower Falls was under curfew and anyone found on the streets would be shot. Charlie Hughes was the O/C at that time and he assembled the whole of D Company at his house in Servia Street. The Falls had been surrounded by British troops and Charlie’s house was right on the corner of Servia Street. At the other end was Albert Street … there was eleven of us at that time in D Company and we were informed that we were going to break the curfew, so we had to get out of the house. The first man out ran across Servia Street to the corner of Bosnia Street, with a .303 rifle. He was called John Joe Magee and he was an ex-British marine who was good with a rifle. He ran across and took up a firing position to give us cover … he fired up Servia Street towards Albert Street at the British. They obviously returned fire. One by one, we came out of Servia Street, out of Charlie’s house, and made our way along as a foot patrol. John Joe continued firing at the Brits; they had not moved into the area at this time. They’d surrounded the whole area [but] they hadn’t actually moved into it. So we moved along and, I mean, the weapons we had were old and there wasn’t a great firepower there. The .303 was probably the best rifle we had. By this time the whole area had been cleared, we were the only ones on the street, people took the warning from the British seriously and got off the streets. We made our way to Cyprus Street and split up into two groups, one group went to the one side of Cyprus Street. I finished up on the right-hand side, four of us, but before we got to the top of Cyprus Street, the British had moved into the area and they opened up. We took cover in houses in Cyprus Street and continued to fire at the British who were in the corner of Varna Gap. The gun battle lasted five, maybe six, minutes. I had run out of ammunition and found myself in a house [owned by] a man called Giuseppe Conlon whose son was later convicted for bombing Guildford.† That was Gerry Conlon; he and Paul Hill were convicted but they were not guilty. They were in England because of me … Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill were two young criminals. It was actually me who ordered the two of them out of the country. They were breaking into people’s houses; they were totally uncontrollable. Actually, at one period both of them had spent a short time in the Fianna Eireann, the young IRA. But … when they were put out [of the Fianna] they were breaking into people’s houses, breaking their [gas] meters open and stealing the money. So they were both ordered out of the country or they would be shot. And that was the last I heard of them until they were arrested for the bombings … Giuseppe would not have been a Republican; he was just a nice, typical practising Catholic man … He went over to visit his son, Gerry, was arrested and charged in connection with the Guildford bombs which was … totally untrue; the man was not involved in anything. But [on] the night of the curfew, 99 per cent of the people on the Falls Road would have been sympathetic to us. I mean the whole area had been saturated by British troops; they began to kick in doors … the person next door … was firing at the British as well … that was Hatchet Kerr‡ who was one of the well-known Official IRA men of the area at the time and was later killed by the IPLO [Irish People’s Liberation Organisation].14 So I settled down in Giuseppe’s. I had two hand grenades left and I asked Giuseppe was there anywhere I could hide them because all we could do now was sit and wait on the door getting kicked in. Giuseppe brought me out to the back and I hid the two hand grenades, two blast bombs they were, on the roof of Giuseppe’s shed, came back in and we sat down. We worked out a plan and this is ironic … Giuseppe would claim to be my father and I would be Gerry Conlon. That was in the event of the Brits coming in. So, I took my coat off, washed my hands, cleaned up a bit and Giuseppe made tea. There was this eerie silence; the whole area was totally quiet, the only noise was a helicopter hovering overhead. Then we heard the doors getting kicked in. —— was in the house directly facing me and his door was kicked in. Coincidence again. —— was the man with the Thompson sub-machine gun that night on the roof of St Comgall’s school. His house was picked out because that’s where the machine gun was being fired from, so they had pinpointed the house, kicked in the door, and I could see the Brits trailing —— up the street, on his back. A few other doors were kicked in and I was just sitting waiting my turn. Fortunately for me, it didn’t come. We sat up the whole night, myself and Giuseppe waiting and waiting. Then it went quiet again and we settled in for the night. We sat up the whole night and the next morning the curfew continued. But we didn’t know what was going on. We couldn’t communicate with anyone, there was no telephone in the house, so we just had to wait and listen to the radio … I think it lasted three days. On the third day, there was this total silence except I could hear the sound of people talking, an awful lot of people, and it got closer and closer and I could distinctly hear people shouting, ‘The curfew’s over, come out, the curfew’s over.’ I looked out the window and I saw hundreds of people passing the window with prams and children and there was this great sense of … ‘it’s over’. So I went out the back and recovered my weapon and two grenades and joined in with the crowd and there were women I knew with prams and the weapons were handed over and put in the prams … we just mingled … there were five of us left in Cyprus Street who were not arrested that night. We made our way out of the area, and up into Andersonstown … we were picked up in cars and brought to a location, a school where there was a debriefing, what weapons we had lost and what weapons we had gained and what casualties and so forth. The Chief of Staff was there … he assembled us all, lined us up and congratulated us for our stand. I did not expect Sean MacStiofain to be there, but obviously he had made his way into Belfast, during the curfew … Actually afterwards, when the weapons were counted, we had five or six weapons more than we went into the curfew with because the Officials had left their weapons and we were able to recover them. So I think we had four or five extra short arms and we lost a Thompson sub-machine gun.

  The year 1970 continued in the same vein. The British Army responded to the growing street clashes in working-class Catholic districts with a promise to shoot petrol-bombers dead, a promise made good three weeks after the Falls curfew when a nineteen-year-old youth was killed during a riot in North Belfast. The British move caused the IRA problems. The rioting between the military and Catholic youths had several benefits for the IRA. It invariably alienated and radicalised communities and for many young people was often the spur to join the IRA. It also gave a chance to blood Fianna members and very often it was they who made and threw the petrol bombs. But the prospect of being shot dead was clearly a serious deterrent. How they solved that problem revealed a feature of the IRA that would become the organisation’s hallmark, an ability to improvise, invent and manufacture its own weaponry and explosives.

  … at that period they were shooting petrol-bombers. Anybody, I mean. They used to warn you during riots. A Brit would come out with a big loud hailer: ‘Petrol-bombers will be shot!’ And they were quite easy to identify, petrol-bombers, because you had to light the petrol bomb before throwing it. One of our E/Os, Explosive Officers, came up with this torch paper. It was a chemical mixture … sodium chlorate was one [ingredient], sugar and something else and you just got an Irish News, our daily newspaper, tore it into strips, soaked it in this stuff and then hang the strips on the washing line to dry … you then wrapped it round the bottle of petrol, and tied it. You could throw it and once the liquid hit the torch paper it ignited … which meant there was no need to light the thing … many a time we’d have made torch paper and hung it out to dry. I’m sure people were wondering, ‘What the fuck are they doing drying paper?’

  In September 1970, Northern Ireland had its hundredth bombing since August 1969; a month later the first killing was carried out by a Loyalist paramilitary group called the Ulster Defence Association (UDA); in January 1971, the IRA started policing Catholic areas, tarring and feathering four men accused of criminal behaviour. Ear
ly February saw the first British Army fatality of the Troubles, Gunner Robert Curtis, who was shot dead by the IRA in North Belfast, not far from where the Catholic petrol-bomber had been killed, and the following day Unionist leader Chichester-Clark declared, somewhat clumsily, that ‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army, Provisionals.’15

  By early 1971, hostility to the British Army in Belfast’s working-class Catholic communities was rising. The days when soldiers were fêted with tea and biscuits were a distant memory and the Provisional IRA was reaping the benefit. It offered angry Catholic youths an opportunity to hit back at the soldiers who harassed them on the streets and fought with them during riots. Recruitment was up and the Provos were beginning to establish a presence in Derry and in some rural areas. But in the Lower Falls Road area, the Officials were still the largest Republican group. This was an important matter, for the Lower Falls was the historic and psychological heart of West Belfast and thus of all Catholic Belfast. Whichever group held the Lower Falls, held it all and unless and until the Provos wrested domination of the Lower Falls from the Officials, their ambition to bring the war to the British could not be realised. For their part, the Official IRA was determined that would never happen. The split in the IRA had come over weapons, or rather the lack of them, in the summer of 1969, and the first clashes between the Officials and the Provisionals were also about guns.

  When the Provisional IRA was formed, D Company only had twelve members so we became known as the Dirty Dozen … we had a few houses we could use, in Getty Street, Servia Street, my Aunt Bella’s house and my cousin Charlie Hughes’s house … the main street in the Lower Falls at that time was Leeson Street, the main Republican street and there were two pubs in it. One was the Bush Bar which the Official IRA owned and the other was the Long Bar, also with the Official IRA. We did not have any bases. The Officials also had a drinking club in Leeson Street called the Cracked Cup; they also had one in Servia Street, directly facing my cousin’s house, called the Burning Embers. So, they had five [sic] drinking establishments under their control … every night we had to have people on standby to protect ourselves from the Official IRA, not from the RUC, not from the British Army, but from the Official IRA. We began to sell the Republican News round the areas [but] we were constantly put against the wall, the papers taken off us and burned. The Official IRA made an attempt to kill the Provisional IRA at birth. It happened pretty regularly that people like me would be put against the wall and searched for weapons. And soon there was conflict. Paddy McDermott was the QM [Quarter Master] of D Company before the split and Paddy went with the Provisional IRA. The Official IRA arrested Paddy, looking for their weapons dumps which only he knew about, and he was viciously beaten by them. But the dump that Paddy had control of was lifted by the Provisional IRA. That resulted in Tom Cahill being shot. Tom was a brother of Joe Cahill and he was a milkman in Ballymurphy. They just blew him away. He survived, was hit five or six times but survived. So you had this sort of conflict going on, the Official IRA trying to hold onto the weapons that they had, the Provisional IRA trying to get hold of them. So there was this constant tension all the time. Before most people had to go on the run, the D Company volunteers were all issued with handguns and a hand grenade, that is anybody who was staying in the [billet] house, and … if the Official IRA attacked or tried to get into the house, you were to throw the blast bomb, and when I say ‘blast bomb’ it was gelignite, strapped up with black tape with a four-second fuse, and if you believed that you were being attacked or the Official IRA were coming to arrest you, the blast bomb had to be thrown out the top window and you had to fight your way out of the house with whatever weapon you had, usually an old .45 Webley or a .45 automatic.

  The Official IRA were negotiating with the British at the time. Almost every night a British colonel would be sitting in the Bush Bar talking to them. And as far as I was concerned, that was collusion. The Officials, that is the IRA pre-1969, had got rid of all the weapons and had adopted a non-military line. People felt let down by them because they did not protect them in 1969. Most of the people I’m talking about who were Official IRA were seen as drunken, ‘bar IRA men’. The Provisional IRA was seen as a clean military organisation, not centred around drinking clubs and pubs. They [the Officials] were seen to be co-operating with the British. For instance when the barricades came down, they came down with the co-operation of the Official IRA. The Officials and the British negotiated that and I remember most of us being really angry; it was almost like a defeat – the IRA had surrendered. They tried to kill us at birth. That was the intention, to kill us at birth. And I don’t know of any evidence that this was done with the encouragement of the British Army – it would not surprise me one bit if it was.

  [The Officials] arrested a man called Alec Crowe from the Bally-murphy area and they brought him to the drinking club in Leeson Street. He was brought to the Cracked Cup and I was in a house directly facing, in Eileen Hickey’s house, and saw Alec being taken out of a car and trailed in. I left the house, went round to Charlie’s house, my cousin, told him what I’d seen. Charlie ordered me then to mobilise the rest of the Volunteers, open up the dump and be on standby in his house. I got them together, got the weapons out, a couple of .303s, two m1 carbines, three revolvers, and a few hand grenades. Charlie went up to Kane Street, up to Frank Card’s house, MacAirt as we called him, and I sat awaiting instructions … an hour, hour and a half later, Charlie came back and we were mobilised into one group. A squad was sent down from Andersonstown. They moved into a house in Balkan Street and we were under orders to burn down the two clubs. By this stage, Alec Crowe had been released by the Sticks§ [but he] had been badly beaten, pistol-whipped, and thrown out. After that – a silly, silly, silly operation it was – we moved out of Charlie’s house, straight across the street, no more than thirty yards and took over the Burning Embers. Charlie sent me upstairs to empty the room. I went up and produced my weapon, a .45, and told them to get out but they wouldn’t move, so I fired a couple of shots into the air. At the time there was a party in the bar for Paddy Devlin who was an MP at Stormont.¶ They were celebrating and he was sitting at the bar with Jimmy Sullivan. So I went down and told Charlie that they wouldn’t move. We had cans of petrol and Charlie gave the order ‘burn it’. So the petrol was laid and the match put to it. And only then did they start moving out. Paddy Devlin was one of the first out; his car was sitting outside, and he drove off. He arrived back in Leeson Street later, I believe, with weapons. So, the Burning Embers was burning. We then assembled outside and moved round along Balkan Street to the Cracked Cup to burn that as well. A group of us went up Cyprus Street, through Varna Gap, heading down into Leeson Street. Another group came along McDonnell Street in a pincer movement. As soon as we got to McDonnell Street we were opened up on. Two men [were] shot: Frank Gillen and Dipper Dempsey. A gun battle ensued [and] went on for twenty, twenty-five minutes, us firing at the Cracked Cup. We never got burning the Cracked Cup, but I remember lying at the corner of McDonnell Street firing up at the Cracked Cup and … the British Army driving past the bottom of Leeson Street. They never came into the area; they let us just shoot it out. Eventually we were ordered to pull back. Orders came from Kane Street for us to pull back into billets. I took my group over to a street off the Grosvenor Road into a safe house and we sat awaiting further orders. By one o’clock in the morning we’d had no communication whatsoever, and I left the house to find out what the situation was. I was QM at this time, which meant I was in charge of the weapons. So I walked up to Grosvenor Road and to Kane Street. And Kane Street was empty. I came back down and I was stopped by someone who told me that Charlie had been shot – in Cyprus Street. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I went back to the house and by the time I got back we got instructions to stand down. I told everyone to stay and I went out again and by this stage people had arrived at Kane Street and I discovered what had happened. A ceasefire had been called and a meeting was a
rranged in a house in Cyprus Street, Squire Maguire’s house. It was decided that all weapons would be put away that night and talks would be resumed the next morning. On leaving the house after this agreement was made, Charlie went across the street to a lamp-post to give cover to McKee and MacAirt coming out of the house. —— was there as well with a Thompson. As McKee and MacAirt were coming out a shot was fired and Charlie was shot. —— opened up with the Thompson. Nothing – no shots returned. There was speculation going round at that time that it was Joe McCann, that it was Hatchet Kerr. But to this day I really don’t know who shot him.

  The next day there was another meeting held; obviously we were busting to go to town on these people but we were ordered not to. Charlie was brought home. And I remember well – sitting in the house at the wake, and there was a guard of honour [for him]. The day of the funeral, the British Army sealed the whole area off. We wanted to give Charlie a military funeral with the full regalia, the combat gear, berets and a firing party outside the house. It proved to be impossible. The British Army moved in, held up the funeral. They moved in heavy-handed and we were in a house two doors below Charlie’s house with our combat gear on, our weapons and so forth, and McKee came down. I remember having my first fight with McKee, with Billy. The British Army Commander at that time said to McKee, ‘If there’s any military appearance of men’, that he would move in. So McKee came to a compromise with the British that if we wore black Dexters [overcoats], would that be acceptable? It proved to be. And we did the guard of honour in black Dexters but no berets. I wanted to face them down; there was thousands of people there – we would have gone out in military uniform, firing the volley of shots over the coffin and saying to the British, ‘Do what you want.’ But that did not happen … it probably was the right decision that Billy made. He was thinking of a dignified funeral without loss of life. Anyway, it turned out to be one of the biggest funerals that Belfast had seen in many a year … The British soldiers saluted Charlie’s cortège, British soldiers saluting another soldier, a gesture that we all respected … After Charlie’s death, the Official IRA got a bad press. Charlie was well respected, a pioneer – he didn’t drink, went to Mass, and was seen as a good Catholic. They took a hammering, publicly, and a lot of people withdrew their support for the Official IRA and threw their weight behind us. Things started to change. Before Charlie’s death we were under heavy, heavy pressure from the Official IRA, but after Charlie’s death, the Sticks knew they had made a mistake, and we got stronger. D Company began to get stronger. We began to get more weapons in.