by Ed Moloney
The Brigade’s operational capacity had been diminished by the arrests, very much so. There was a big demoralising factor in it. I mean, it was all over the newspapers, the Brits built it up like hell; here was the Belfast Brigade wiped out. Morale did suffer. There was myself, Gerry and Tom [Cahill] scooped but it wasn’t just us. There was another major operation that day, almost the whole of the Third Battalion was wiped out, Ardoyne, New Lodge and so forth … Many men were lost that day; it was a major coup for the Brits. And this escape of mine was meant to be a major morale booster to the rank and file. That was part of the reason. The thinking behind choosing me was simple: operations, operations, operations. I had been Operations Officer before I was arrested and that was the reason for getting me out, to build up and intensify the operational capacity of Belfast Brigade, that was my job … Gerry, to me, was the key factor in the war and he was the key strategist, yes, he was … And I had great, great respect for him at that time. If Gerry had told me that tomorrow was Sunday when I knew it was Monday I would have thought twice, that maybe it was Sunday, because he said it. Now, if he told me today was Friday, even though it was Friday … I’d call him a fucking liar, you know. But Gerry wouldn’t have had the ability to put operations together in the manner that I could. He could maybe devise a strategy but in terms of getting it done, it required a person like myself. I came from D Company, and I was an operative, so I’d been in every tight corner, every operation, and one of the main things I always pushed was that I wouldn’t ever ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself. And the people on the ground knew that. They didn’t know that about Gerry, because Gerry was never regarded as an operator. Gerry was seen as a strategist, right, not an operator. So, therefore, I had much more weight than Gerry would have had on the ground. I was much more capable of organising and putting operations together. So, from that point of view, it was the right move to make, to get someone like me out first. The point was that strategy could be devised from inside the jail but implementing it was another matter … the reason for getting me out was to enhance and intensify the war.
A day after Brendan Hughes escaped from Long Kesh, at around 8 p.m., 9 December, a ten-page communiqué was issued by the British and Irish governments announcing that a four-day-long political conference at the Civil Service Staff College at Sunningdale, in Berkshire, England, had reached agreement on how relations between the two parts of Ireland would be conducted in a new power-sharing settlement that had been in the making for almost all of 1973. The British government and three major parties, the Unionists, the SDLP and the Alliance party, had already agreed to set up a power-sharing executive but before the new government could take office there had to be agreement on cross-border arrangements.
In March that year, the British had outlined the essential ingredients for any new settlement. The first, power-sharing, had been agreed. In May, elections had been held to a new Stormont assembly and they had produced what seemed to be a solid 52-to-26-vote majority in favour of the new arrangement. The second precondition was a loosely defined ‘Irish dimension’, which would be there to cater for Nationalist aspirations. The Sunningdale Conference, chaired by British Prime Minister Edward Heath, had been convened to hammer out the details of what it would mean. The centrepiece of the cross-border deal was a Council of Ireland, which would have harmonising and executive functions on a range of issues that affected both states. When agreement was announced, hardline Unionists and Loyalists, of whom there was no shortage, immediately denounced Sunningdale as a sell-out, and a prelude to a united Ireland. Which meant, by the iron rule of Northern Ireland politics, that most Nationalists were pleased with it.
Although Republicans then and now would argue that Sunningdale was achieved on the back of IRA violence, the deal was constitutional Nationalism’s answer to the tactic of armed struggle. By this stage the SDLP had established itself as the sole and unchallenged political voice of Nationalism by dint of its success in two Northern Ireland-wide elections. The IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, was an illegal party at this time but that hardly made a difference. It produced policies, acted as cheerleader for the IRA and was a convenient front for some of its leaders, but otherwise Sinn Fein was really a small solidarity group that showed no inclination to participate in Northern politics in the ways a normal party would, least of all by taking part in elections. Sunningdale thus reinforced the SDLP’s domination of Nationalist politics and made the Provos that bit less relevant, if not to the conflict then to its ending. When Hugh Logue, a rising SDLP star, told a student debate at Trinity College, Dublin, that the Council of Ireland was ‘the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland’, he was really declaring ideological victory over the Provos’ violent ways. The howl of outrage from Loyalists that met Logue’s claim served only to reinforce the point.
But Sunningdale was too heady a brew for Northern Unionists. They could live with power-sharing, perhaps, but not something that looked like, and was claimed to be, a slow but sure mono directional walkway towards an all-Ireland republic. A February 1974 Westminster election brought a stunning victory for anti-Sunningdale Unionists in Northern Ireland and suddenly the prosettlement majority in the Stormont assembly looked vulnerable. In mid-May, leading Unionist political opponents of Sunningdale, people such as Ian Paisley and Bill Craig, and their counterparts in the Loyalist paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, joined forces in the Ulster Workers’ Council and declared a general strike aimed at bringing down Sunningdale. The strike was supported widely and the disruptive effects were significant. During the strike, Ireland also saw what was then the single worst day for violence in the Troubles. In an effort to diminish enthusiasm for Sunningdale in the South, Loyalists bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing thirty-three people. Two weeks after it started, on 28 May, the strikers won. The power-sharing government collapsed when its Chief Executive, former Unionist Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, resigned. It was back to the drawing board and to Direct Rule.
Britain’s principal political strategy had failed but it soon became evident that ministers and officials had a separate initiative under way, on which they had been working equally hard, which could transform the situation on the ground and improve the chances that another effort to reach a political deal might have a better chance. Alongside Sunningdale, the British had begun an ambitious attempt to draw the IRA into a long, enervating ceasefire, whose aim was to weaken the IRA in a significant way and even defeat it. Or at least, thanks to what Brendan Hughes learned during his five months of freedom, that is what Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell concluded the British were up to when Hughes told them his story. Secret meetings between senior Republicans and the British were taking place, Hughes learned, and there was evidence of duplicity on the part of Dublin-based IRA leaders. These were some of the secret manifestations of the ceasefire initiative but things were happening in public as well to back up Hughes’s suspicions. The new Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, had announced on 24 April 1974 that the legal prohibition on Sinn Fein would be lifted and the party would be able to function openly. Three days later the IRA leadership told the German magazine Der Spiegel that it was ready for negotiations with the British at any time and would call a ceasefire if the British Army withdrew to barracks pending withdrawal. On the same day an interview with Sinn Fein President, Ruairi O Bradaigh, was screened by the influential current affairs TV programme Weekend World, in which he warned against a precipitous British withdrawal in case the violence that had devastated the Congo after Belgium’s hasty withdrawal was repeated in Northern Ireland. He would prefer, he told the programme, ‘some kind of phased and orderly and planned getting-out of British forces’. Between this and the secret diplomacy, it was evident that conversations had taken place between the IRA and the British.
What Hughes had to say about all of this planted the seeds of conflict in the IRA, between the Adams camp and those associated with Ruairi O Bradaigh and Daithi O Connail, and
created the conditions for Adams’s later takeover of the IRA leadership. Alongside these secret machinatons, the Belfast IRA was beginning to experience life on the back foot by the time Hughes assumed command. He had escaped to a situation that had, since he last walked its streets, become distinctly more difficult for the IRA and dangerous for people such as him who were well known. Even so, when Hughes took over as Brigade Commander, the tempo of IRA activity in the city noticeably quickened. Five days after Bell had been picked up, the Belfast IRA set off twelve bombs in the city, six of them substantial car bombs, and followed these up with two large bombs, one in a van and the other in a lorry, exploding outside the British Army’s Belfast HQ, at the former Grand Central Hotel on Royal Avenue, causing entensive damage to surrounding shops. These bombs had to be smuggled through the security cordon of fencing and armed checkpoints that now surrounded the city centre. The IRA’s violent ingenuity was again demonstrated later in March 1974 when two bombs badly damaged the Europa Hotel in downtown Belfast, one of them planted near a water tank on the fourteenth floor. Despite these successes, the reality for the IRA in Belfast was that the British had vastly improved their know ledge of the organisation and the net was tightening. Well-placed informers had been recruited and their intelligence had become so good, and their penetration of the IRA sufficiently deep, that the British were not just arresting key players and scooping up arms caches; they had begun to manipulate and play mind games with its members.
I escaped from Long Kesh to operate in the areas that I was used to, over yard walls and through back doors and so forth. But there came a point in 1973 and 1974 when that was no longer feasible for people like me. For operators on the ground, yes, but not people like me who were on the run, who were wanted. So we had to move into middle-class areas, to acquire property, garages, houses, flats and so on, to operate from. And we had to take on new identities. Until I was arrested in 1973, I was ‘Darkie’ Hughes on the street. Everybody knew who I was. Every time I saw a Brit, I was over a yard wall and through someone’s hall. After my escape in 1974, the situation had changed and we acquired property like the house I was eventually arrested in, Myrtlefield Park.† I moved in there and operated around that area, around the Malone area, around the Ormeau Road area, and I would go into our own areas as well because, you know, it was important that someone like myself who was well known be seen by the Volunteers on the ground. And so, I had to go into our areas every day. I took on the identity of Arthur McAllister, a travelling salesman, I had my hair dyed and I dressed like a businessman and carried a briefcase, but I still travelled in and out of all the areas.
… Belfast Brigade was under massive pressure. Dumps were being caught and people were being arrested and the whole thing looked like it was falling apart, [but] still people were being released from internment. One of those released was a man called Seamus Loughran.‡ The first I heard he had been released was when I walked into a room in Dublin with Daithi O Connail and Ruairi O Bradaigh and the whole Army Council was sitting there, including Seamus Loughran, and I immediately said, ‘What the fuck is he doing here? He didn’t report back to me in Belfast.’ And they said that he was on a special mission for GHQ. I went back to Belfast after that, very, very suspicious that something was going on. My Intelligence Officer, Belfast Brigade Intelligence Officer, wee John Kelly, then told me that Jimmy Drumm§ was having meetings with the British … I immediately sent for Jimmy Drumm. He was arrested by the Intelligence Squad and brought to a house in the Holy Land [a section of South Belfast]. He was shitting himself. I interrogated Drumm, who informed me that he wasn’t meeting the British, but he was meeting some professor or surgeon from the Royal Victoria Hospital. And I asked, ‘In what capacity?’ ‘Just as a Republican,’ he replied … That’s what he said. I didn’t believe him. I believed there were other people involved, British reps or … the surgeon obviously was not doing it on his own bat. He obviously had other people involved … He wasn’t talking with a surgeon about medical problems, obviously not.
I was very, very angry at what was going on; Seamus Loughran had reported directly to GHQ and Jimmy Drumm was meeting people over my head … This is why Jimmy Drumm was chosen to read the keynote speech at Bodenstown in 1977 which was critical of the ceasefire. That was purposely done. Jimmy Drumm was not happy about doing that, but he did it. But you’ve got to understand my position here as well. So much was happening around me. I was on the run; I could see the whole thing falling around me. I didn’t know who was friend and who was foe. I suspected when I first met Seamus Loughran in Dublin that something was going on, that what happened with Jimmy Drumm meant something big was happening … I knew there was a conspiracy but I just couldn’t pin it down because I was trying to keep the war going; that was my main objective. And here I was coming across people who were … conspiring behind my back. Obviously if Seamus Loughran was in Dublin with GHQ personnel then someone in GHQ was involved as well. I don’t know who it was – all I know was that Seamus Loughran was involved and Jimmy Drumm was involved. Internment was ending at this time; people were getting out, but they were hand-picked people. The British had complete control of who they let out and who they kept in and they kept in the ones they saw as a danger and allowed out those who they thought they could deal with. It was shortly after this that I was arrested …
Brendan Hughes had come across evidence of the opening moves towards what would evolve into an IRA ceasefire by the end of 1974 and early weeks of 1975, a ceasefire that he, Adams and Bell would come to regard, and decry, as a plot to enfeeble and possibly destroy the IRA. The plan, they believed, might have been hatched by the British but it was made possible by their own leader ship in Dublin. When the ceasefire began their doubts grew. The British promise of withdrawal never came, while the cessation was endlessly extended, eroding the IRA’s military capabilities with every day that it lasted. The British could not be blamed for furthering their own interests but what the Dublin leadership had done, they averred, was unforgivable in its stupidity and naïveté. The three became convinced that the British had taken advantage of their improved intelligence on the IRA to remove people such as themselves who would be obstacles in the way of this plan, and replace them, via internee releases, with more pliable leadership candidates. Seamus Loughran and Jimmy Drumm were examples and so was Billy McKee who was freed from Long Kesh in 1974. But there was more to the British strategy than that. The British Secret Service MI6 and the IRA had maintained contact after the 1972 ceasefire. A ‘pipeline’, as it was called, had been created to assist communication and, occasionally, to sort out misunderstandings. Well-intentioned individuals, trusted by both sides, would from time to time carry messages or signals from one to the other. After the collapse of Sunningdale, Republicans detected ‘vibrations’ from the British, as Ruairi O Bradaigh’s biographer put it, that they were now inclined to consider withdrawing from Northern Ireland.56 Withdrawal sentiment had also become more evident in public-opinion polls carried out in Britain and, in this context, a ceasefire began to look like a good idea.
Against this background and with an intensified bombing campaign in England that included one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, the death of twenty-one people in two Birmingham pub bombs, the IRA and Sinn Fein leadership met a group of Protestant clergymen near the County Clare village of Feakle on 10 December 1974. The meeting was at the request of the clerics to discuss whether a basis existed for an IRA ceasefire. The Republican delegation consisted of Ruairi O Bradaigh; Daithi O Connail; Seamus Twomey, the Chief of Staff; Billy McKee, who had also been made Chairman of the Army Council by this stage; J.B. O’Hagan from Lurgan, County Armagh; Kevin Mallon from Tyrone; Maire Drumm, the head of the women’s IRA, Cumman na mBan, and wife of the evasive Jimmy Drumm; and Seamus Loughran, by now the new Belfast IRA Commander. Brendan Hughes’s suspicion that Drumm and Loughran were up to something was well founded. Although the meeting was interrupted by the Garda Special Branch and had to be dramatically
curtailed, the clerics were suitably impressed by the people they had met. The Army Council drafted a formal response to the clerics’ ceasefire proposal – talks were possible as long as they led to a British declaration of intent to withdraw, the details of which were negotiable – and the clerics showed the document to the new Labour Secretary of State in Belfast, Merlyn Rees. Ruairi O Bradaigh was at his home in Roscommon on Christmas Day 1974 when he spotted one of the ‘pipeline’ intermediaries, a Derry businessman called Brendan Duddy, walking up the pathway to his front door. Duddy carried a message, a letter written in the handwriting of Michael Oatley, MI6’s man, seeking a meeting to ‘establish structures for British withdrawal’ from Northern Ireland.57
What Michael Oatley and his political masters meant by withdrawal was then, and still is, a matter of considerable controversy and debate. The IRA leadership of 1974 and 1975 became convinced it meant political and physical withdrawal of British sovereignty – even if the British could not admit as much publicly – whereas the British, now if not then, insisted the dialogue was merely about withdrawing troops from the North, not Britain’s political authority. The language and the contacts were sufficiently ambiguous to accommodate both meanings, but the proof was in the outcome. A first ceasefire petered out in January 1975 but was renewed in February. It lasted, if such a word could be used to describe what happened, for nearly a year but in reality it had petered out by August or September 1975 as one by one IRA units went back to war. Incident centres were set up so Sinn Fein could monitor the ceasefire and smooth any wrinkles that developed with the British but that was about the most concrete result of the truce. Of British withdrawal there was no convincing evidence nor any sign it was on the horizon.