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

by Ed Moloney

  Twomey ordered me, Jim Bryson* and Tommy Tolan† to Lenadoon … and gave me specific instructions that when he raised his hand we were to open fire. We were supposed to be on the roof (of local flats) but it was too dodgy, so we were inside a flat looking down over this confrontation. We had a Lewis gun and two Armalites. Twomey wanted to end the ceasefire … but the situation got out of control so much that we couldn’t; we’d have shot civilians. The Brits were all lined up and when Twomey raised his arm, I think the crowd thought that was the sign to move forward. We held back and held back until we could get the crowd out of the way. We fired a couple of shots in the air to get the crowd back. But when the crowd pulled back, the Brits pulled back as well. Gerry’s role [in all this] was passive … I was taking my orders from Twomey … and it was normally Gerry who would give me instructions … The talk between Gerry and Ivor [about the Whitelaw meeting], and it was mostly Ivor, was that ‘This isn’t serious, they’re not serious, the Brits are not serious.’ I don’t think Gerry wanted the ceasefire broken. I think Twomey did. Ivor did. But not Gerry.

  If 1972 was the year that saw the IRA bring down Stormont and force the British to the negotiating table, albeit briefly and to little effect, it was also the year in which the IRA proved that it was every bit as capable as the British Army of self-inflicted military disasters. Civilian casualties, particularly killings, were not supposed to be part of the IRA’s stock-in-trade. Not only did the organisation claim to be a non-sectarian army which fought by the rules of civilised warfare, but in practical terms the IRA operated within well-understood boundaries set largely by its own community. One of the limits of acceptability was killing civilians, especially when it looked deliberate or casually careless. It was not that the Catholic community was especially tender-hearted about the issue but rather that they knew the inevitable Loyalist retribution would be directed randomly, like scatter shot, against them. It is one of the reasons why causing civilian casualties has consistently cost Republicans politically down through the years of the Troubles, right up to the carnage at Omagh in August 1998. The IRA had come close to causing large-scale civilian slaughter a few times in 1971, but got away relatively lightly. But in the spring of 1972 that changed utterly.

  In early March, a small bomb, thought to have consisted of around five pounds of gelignite, exploded without warning in the Abercorn restaurant in downtown Belfast. It was late on a Saturday afternoon and the restaurant was packed with shoppers, mostly women and children, taking some refreshment before heading home. Two women were killed in the blast and 130 were terribly injured, some losing one or more limbs. The televised scenes of the aftermath were so shocking that the IRA chose to deny responsibility then and ever since, although IRA sources have confirmed unofficially that the Abercorn blast was its work. The bomb, which eyewitness accounts suggest was placed by two young girls, caused a public backlash against the IRA even in Republican areas of West Belfast, not least because the Abercorn was a popular venue for Catholics and the two female fatalities, a twenty-one-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old, were both Catholics. The IRA supposedly had guidelines for commercial bombings which said there had to be phone warnings both to the target or nearby, as well as either to the Samaritans or to the RUC. These were also supposed to be given in sufficient time to clear the area but in the case of the Abercorn there was no evidence that any of this had been followed. A phone warning was made but it actually came seven minutes after the blast and to many, not least the maimed survivors, it looked as if it was a deliberate atrocity. The second bombing disaster came just two weeks later and this time there were warnings but conflicting, contradictory ones that ensured the death and mayhem that followed. On 20 March, a North Belfast unit of the IRA, from the Third Battalion, drove a 200-pound car bomb into Donegall Street, just a few streets away from the Abercorn restaurant, and left it there. The first warning gave an inaccurate location for the car, as did two or three subsequent calls, and when the police cleared people away from the area, they inadvertently moved them in the direction of the real car bomb, which exploded killing seven people, three of them binmen working in the area. This time the IRA did admit responsibility but gave an explanation for the bloodshed that would form a familiar script in the years to come: proper and adequate warnings had been given but the information had been ‘changed and confused’ by British security forces. In other words the Brits were to blame. A statement issued the next day said the IRA regretted the civilian casualties but claimed the British carried ultimate blame for all the bloodshed in Ireland. Despite the words of bravado, the Abercorn and Donegall Street bombs were disasters for the IRA. They turned some Catholics against the IRA and emboldened others to speak out. Nationalist opinion had been fairly united up to then in opposition to the Unionist government and the British military and even though many had qualms about IRA violence they found it easier to stay silent as long as the British continued to behave as they had done in Derry on ‘Bloody Sunday’. That started to change in the spring of 1972 and then in July, in a way that ensured the reverberations would be profound and long-lasting.

  The Abercorn and Donegall Street bombings would be dwarfed by what happened just two weeks after the ceasefire collapsed. On the afternoon of Friday, 21 July, between nineteen and twenty-two car bombs – the exact number varies in the different accounts – exploded throughout Belfast in the space of just over an hour; nine of them in an eighteen-minute period, six within three minutes. Nine people were killed and a hundred and thirty injured, some very badly. The greatest loss of life occurred at the Oxford Street bus station in the city centre where the car bomb exploded as the security forces were clearing the area, killing two soldiers and four employees of the Ulsterbus company. On the Cavehill Road in North Belfast a car bomb exploded outside a row of shops, killing two women and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. No warning had been received in that case. As television news programmes that night showed horrifying images of policemen shovelling the mutilated remains of torsos into plastic bags, the day was already being called ‘Bloody Friday’, the IRA’s answer to ‘Bloody Sunday’.

  ‘Bloody Friday’ was the Belfast Brigade’s response to the ceasefire breakdown, a message to the British government that the IRA could and would make a commercial desert of the city unless its demands were met. But the IRA leaders had miscalculated terribly and had badly overestimated the ability of the police, the British military and the emergency services to respond to so many warnings and devices in such a short space of time. The consequences for the IRA were devastating. Politically, ‘Bloody Friday’ placed the IRA ‘outside the pale of political negotiation’, as one account put it, and turned moderate Nationalist opinion on both sides of the border firmly against the Provos.26 It widened the gulf between constitutional Nationalism and those who favoured the ways of physical force, and set a pattern of mutual hostility that would last until the peace process, two decades later. The IRA’s difficulty was also Britain’s opportunity, militarily speaking. Ten days later thousands of British troops moved into ‘Free Derry’ and dismantled the barricades behind which the IRA had, since 1969, been able to move and organise freely while in Belfast soldiers constructed imposing military forts deep inside the IRA’s strongest areas from where they could launch patrols and conduct surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations against the Provos more or less at will. Operation Motorman, as the exercise was called, was the largest deployment of British military since the Suez crisis of 1956 and it marked the point at which the IRA lost the initiative in its war against the British and was forced on the defensive.

  Brendan Hughes commanded the ‘Bloody Friday’ operation on behalf of the Belfast Brigade and had assembled the bombing teams from all over Belfast. But almost as soon as the first bombs exploded, he knew a disaster was in the making. There were too many bombs for the British to cope with and casualties were inevitable.

  Well, I was one of the key figures involved in organising ‘Bloody Friday’. It wasn’t di
rectly my decision to do it but I was the person who organised it from the First, Second and Third Battalions. I was the operational commander of the ‘Bloody Friday’ operation. I remember when the bombs started to go off, I was in Leeson Street, and I thought, ‘There’s too much here.’ The boom, boom, boom, boom, boom of the explosions! A lot of the Volunteers – remember at that time we practically controlled the Lower Falls – were cheering, —— and others like him. I remember his face in particular cheering and cheering and I got angry at them and shouted at them to get off the streets. I sort of knew that there were going to be casualties, either the Brits could not handle so many bombs or they would allow some to go off because it suited them to have casualties … And I knew … that there were going to be casualties. It was a major, major operation, but we never intended to kill people. I feel a bit guilty about it because as I say there was no intention to kill anyone that day. I think we were over-zealous … I mean, if I could reverse the situation I would … it was a major undertaking to put so many bombs like that into the town. I wouldn’t do it again … the risks were far too high, and even if there wasn’t any collusion or deceit on the part of the British, I don’t believe they were capable of handling so many bombs at one time. I was responsible for a fair number of the bombs that had gone into the town up to then and never once was a bomb put into that town [deliberately] to kill civilians. There were bombs put out, booby traps placed to kill military targets. And I have no guilt about them whatsoever [but] I have a fair deal of regret that ‘Bloody Friday’ took place … a great deal of regret … As I say, if I could do it over again I wouldn’t do it. [But] I don’t accept full responsibility for what took place. It was an organisational decision. But the fact of the matter is [that] I was the person on the ground and if I had … said, ‘No’, the operation wouldn’t have gone ahead … I don’t believe I have any more responsibility for what happened than Twomey, Adams or Bell. [But] the point I’m trying to make is that I was the person who sent … these bombs in that day. I was standing at the corner of Leeson Street with an Armalite to give cover to the men coming back. Now, it’s all right for others to moralise over it; the fact of the matter is that I was the person on the ground, I was the person who went into Ardoyne, the New Lodge, Beechmount, and the Lower Falls, and everywhere else, to organise ‘Bloody Friday’. I don’t hold myself personally responsible for all that took place there … but certainly I take some of the responsibility.

  ‘Bloody Friday’ was not, as he told Boston College, solely the work of Brendan Hughes. The bombings were planned and approved by the then entire Belfast Brigade staff, including Seamus Twomey, the Brigade Commander; Gerry Adams, his Adjutant, and Ivor Bell, the Brigade Operations Officer. Since 1983, around the time he was first elected as the MP for West Belfast, Gerry Adams has had a policy of denying that he was ever a member of the IRA. By so doing he is also denying that he shares any responsibility for operations such as ‘Bloody Friday’, implying that whatever blood was shed on that or other days stained only the hands of others. IRA members would usually never admit the truth of their status for a good reason: it could lead to a jail term. But neither would they deny membership in any explicit way. The customary response would be either an evasive one, or a straight ‘no comment’. Adams’s outright denial has infuriated very many of his colleagues from those and later days and Brendan Hughes was no exception. His view of the events of ‘Bloody Friday’ was that the entire Belfast Brigade staff was responsible, including Gerry Adams, not just because of his rank in the Brigade but because he was, in Hughes’s eyes, the de facto Belfast Commander by virtue of the fact that Seamus Twomey invariably deferred to his strategic judgements.

  Gerry Adams was largely responsible and has to accept responsibility for a lot of these things … Gerry was the [real] O/C. Twomey was practically out of it by that stage, to the extent that eventually we sent him down to Dublin. Gerry was always the O/C. Even if he was not the O/C in name, Gerry was the man who made the decisions. [Adams and Bell] could have stopped everything; they could have stopped every bullet being fired. If they had wanted to they could have stopped ‘Bloody Friday’ … [When Adams denies IRA membership] it means that people like myself and Ivor have to carry the responsibility for all those deaths, for sending men out to die and sending women out to die, and Gerry was sitting there … trying to stop us from doing it? … I’m disgusted by it because it’s so untrue and everybody knows it. The British know it, the people … know it, the dogs in the street know it. And yet he’s standing there denying it [all] … The fact of the matter is that we fought a war for thirty years; we [even] brought the war to England. Many Volunteers died in carrying out this war. Gerry was a major, major player in the war, not just in Ireland, but in the decision to send Volunteers and bombs to England. I’m totally disgusted. I mean, there are things that you can say and things you can’t say. I’m not going to stand up on a platform and say I was involved in the shooting of a soldier or involved in the planning of operations in England. But I’m certainly not going to stand up and deny it. And to hear people who I would have died for – and almost did on a few occasions – stand up and deny the part in history that he has played, the part in the war that he has played, the part in the war that he directed, and deny it, is totally disgusting and a disgrace to all the people who have died.

  It wouldn’t be long before Gerry Adams was the de jure IRA Commander in Belfast. Seamus Twomey was persuaded to move to Dublin where initially he had a job on GHQ staff. In March 1973 he succeeded Joe Cahill as Chief of Staff when Cahill was arrested on board the Claudia, a 300-tonne cargo vessel intercepted off the County Waterford coast as it ferried some five tonnes of weapons in from Libya, a gift from that country’s unpredictable leader, Colonel Gaddafi. Twomey’s departure was the moment Adams and Bell had been waiting for as the Belfast IRA, the cockpit of the armed struggle, fell into their hands. Adams was made Commander; Bell became Adams’s deputy, the Brigade Adjutant, and Hughes was the new Brigade Operations Officer, the ‘double O’. His recollection of the changeover suggests that the new leadership was full of contempt for Twomey and the brand of old-style Republicanism that he and his generation represented.

  People like Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey, that sort of leadership were all … taken off the scene or demoted to GHQ. That was an old saying: ‘Demote them to GHQ.’ In Twomey’s case that’s the remark that was made. Twomey was seen as one of the old brigade, someone with the old traditional Republican ideals. And so the whole Belfast leadership changed and people like myself, Ivor Bell, Gerry Adams, Tom Cahill took control of the Belfast situation.

  Twomey is the only Provisional IRA leader to have served twice as Chief of Staff. His first stint ended with his arrest in Dublin in October 1973 but at the end of that month he and two other prominent IRA figures, both veterans of previous IRA campaigns, J. B. O’Hagan from County Armagh and Kevin Mallon from County Tyrone, made one of the most famous prison escapes of the Troubles when a helicopter hijacked by the IRA landed in the exercise yard of Mountjoy prison and whisked them to freedom. Twomey resumed his tenure as Chief of Staff and lasted until December 1977, when the Irish police, the Gardai Siochana, discovered his hideout in south Dublin. Gerry Adams replaced him as Chief of Staff and Hughes claims that Twomey’s removal and that of other Army Council figures who were regarded as obstacles was deliberately planned by Adams and his allies. Hughes had a complicated relationship with Seamus Twomey. On one of the very first times they met, he threatened to get Twomey court-martialled for ‘loose talk’ as it was called, drunkenly discussing IRA operations in a bar, but afterwards they reconciled. In later years, when his own disillusionment with the IRA was setting in, Hughes befriended Twomey and grew angry at the way he had been discarded – ‘thrown on the scrap heap’ – by the Adams leadership. Twomey died in Dublin in September 1989.

  In 1970 I had become Quarter Master of D Company and QMs at that period were not supposed to operate, but I did. Their only role wa
s to procure weapons, secure them and supply them. I broke all the rules and that’s how I came to the attention of people like Charlie Hughes and Seamus Twomey. My reputation was made the day I put Seamus Twomey on a charge for loose talking. I was trying in my capacity as a QM to get more and better weapons, so I went up to Casement Park [a social and drinking club attached to a Gaelic Athletic Association club] to talk about this with Twomey, the O/C of the Belfast Brigade at the time. What I wanted was to go to Scotland. I had a contact in Scotland who could get me gelignite but I couldn’t get talking to Twomey about this so I got up and walked out – he was half cut! And he treated me almost with contempt: ‘Who was this wee shit?’ And they were talking away and his wife was sitting there, a whole crowd of them all sitting there talking about weapons and operations and so forth. I got annoyed and I said to him, ‘I’m charging you with loose talk’ … He went totally quiet and I walked out. Brian Keenan actually was there that night … and walked out behind me [and] encouraged me to carry on with the charge. That was my first contact with Keenan. He was Quarter Master with GHQ at that time … he’d an old uncle, Yank Campbell, who lived facing one of my call houses and he used to appear in Belfast every now and again. I can’t remember if Keenan ever fired a shot; I’m sure he did, round the border … but never in Belfast … anyway, the next morning, Twomey came to me … apologised and promised that it would not happen again. Now here was the Belfast Brigade O/C coming down to me, the QM in D Company, to apologise … his nickname was Thumper because he always thumped the table when making a point. But he never ever did that with me. He knew my father, he was in jail with my father, and he knew my da was a real upfront man and I think … when Twomey found out who I was he gave me respect … I had great time for Seamus Twomey afterwards. First of all he was man enough to come and apologise to me and promise it wouldn’t happen again, if I dropped the charges, which I did. And remember this, I was only a young man, while Twomey was a contemporary of my father in the 1940s and 1950s IRA – and here’s me putting him on a charge.