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

by Ed Moloney

  Q. Is there a possibility that the leadership wanted to keep it going for the purpose of building a political party?

  A. I believe so … that’s the point I’m trying to make. I believe that was the reason why the leadership on the outside did not intervene, because of the street protests that were taking place, because of the political party that Sinn Fein was building. I think that was [the] outside’s foremost priority – it wasn’t the five demands, I don’t believe it was the five demands. As I say … the five demands wasn’t worth one death.

  Q. Have you ever discussed the issue with Gerry since release?

  A. Not in any, any depth. I mean, I talked to him obviously because when I got released from prison I stayed with the man, I stayed in his house … but it’s been something that I have constantly avoided confronting … It’s only lately that, that you can get me to even talk about the hunger strikes, never mind analyse … to try and come up with a reason why it went on for so long. And so if ever I talked to Gerry about it, it was sentimental, it was not investigative, it was not questioning. It happened; I mean, that was the attitude I took because I was a good Republican and … as the old cliché goes, ‘Stay within the army lines, stay within the army lines, don’t dissent, don’t dissent, stay within the army lines’ – I was still of that calibre when I got released from prison. So I didn’t question …

  Q. Did Ivor ever give you any indication of any tension between him and Gerry on it or are you surmising from general conversations with Ivor that he was the sole voice of opposition?

  A. No, I’m not surmising, I know Ivor was opposed to it because I’ve spoken to him about it and I know he was opposed to it. He was opposed to the whole direction that this leadership was going, to the point where Ivor was actually sentenced to death by the same leadership for his dissent and for his so-called attempt to dislodge the leadership … I’m not suggesting that Ivor’s [subsequent] opposition to the leadership was over the hunger strike, no. [But] I know for a fact Ivor was opposed to the hunger strike and he was advocating that the leadership must intervene to end it …

  Notes – 7

  60 Kevin Kelley, The Longest War: Northern Ireland and the IRA, p. 265.

  61 An Phoblacht–Republican News, 11 May 2000.

  62 Padraig O’Malley, Biting at the Grave, p. 21.

  63 An Phoblacht–Republican News, 11 May 2000.

  64 David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike.

  65 ‘Scenario for establishing a socialist republic’, An Phoblacht– Republican News, 19 April 1980.

  * See p. 168.

  † A criminal solicitor and former internee; Oliver Kelly’s family included founders of the Provisional IRA. He died in 2009.

  ‡ From Dungiven in County Derry, Tom McFeely was one of the seven prisoners who went on the first hunger strike, in October 1980. He is now the owner of a successful construction business.

  § Former Sinn Fein councillor and Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast who died in 2009.

  ¶ Announced the 1980, the five demands were: the right to wear their own clothes; the right to abstain from penal labour; the right to free association; the right to educational and recreational facilities; restoration of lost remission as a result of the protest.

  || Former Prisons Minister Don Concannon died in December 2003, three years before Brendan Hughes.

  ** ‘Squeaky-boot’ was prison slang for coming off the protest. Prisoners who agreed to conform were first given a new prison uniform, including boots. The distinctive sound made by new rubber heels making contact with shiny tile floors as the prisoners walked out of the wing told those still on the protest that their number had just been reduced by one.

  †† A member of IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade from Cappagh. He died on hunger strike, 13 July 1981.

  ‡‡ Principal Officer Patrick Kerr was shot dead by the IRA as he left St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh.

  §§ Former head of MI6, the British foreign espionage service and reputedly the model for John Le Carré’s Smiley. Margaret Thatcher made him Security Co-ordinator in 1979 with a brief to improve relations between the British Army and the RUC.

  ¶¶ An uncle on Gerry Adams’s mother’s side, Liam Hannaway was a founding member of the Provisional IRA. His son, Kevin Hannaway, Gerry’s cousin, was IRA Adjutant-General at one point.

  |||| The regime in Portlaoise jail, the prison used to house Republicans in the South, allowed inmates to wear their own clothes, to associate at times, defined prison work in broad terms and gave implicit recognition to the command structure of Republican groups.

  *** A Redemptorist colleague of Father Alex Reid.

  ††† Sean McKenna died in December 2008.

  ‡‡‡ Richard O’Rawe’s controversial and revealing memoir of the hunger strike, Blanketmen, was published in 2005, some four years after this interview.

  §§§ The fifth hunger striker to die, on 8 July 1981 after sixty-one days without food.

  ¶¶¶ The second hunger striker to die, on 12 May 1981 after fifty-nine days.

  |||||| Ivor Bell was on the Army Council at this time and succeeded Martin McGuinness as Chief of Staff the following year.

  8

  The last hunger striker to die was Michael Devine, a twenty-seven-year old member of the Irish National Liberation Army from Derry whose death on 20 August 1981 after sixty days without food came on the same day that Owen Carron won the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election to replace Bobby Sands as the constituency’s MP. While more prisoners joined the protest in subsequent days, others were taken off by their families as they neared death. One of the prison’s Catholic chaplains, Father Denis Faul, had come to the same conclusion as Brendan Hughes, that the Provo leadership was keeping the hunger strike going for political gain, and he persuaded more and more families to intervene to save the lives of their loved ones. Finally, on 3 October 1981, nearly seven months to the day since Bobby Sands had started his fast, the hunger strike was called off and, three days later, the new Northern Ireland Secretary, James Prior, announced a number of changes in the prison regime. Prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes; there would be a measure of free association within the H-blocks; extra visits were granted, and half of the lost remission caused by the protest would be restored. The prisoners had secured the bulk of their demands* but the more lasting consequence came at the end of that month when Sinn Fein’s annual ard-fheis at the Mansion House in Dublin backed the idea that all future elections, North and South, should be contested, albeit on an abstentionist basis.

  It was a moment of huge change for the Provisionals whose real significance was not properly understood at the time, even internally. While sold to the rank and file as a way of expressing and building support for the armed struggle, the effect, and possibly the intention was actually the opposite. Adopting electoralism was the first tentative step in the move away from armed struggle towards politics. Danny Morrison, Brendan Hughes’s contact with Gerry Adams and the Provo leadership during the first hunger strike, helped swing the vote by asking delegates at the October 1981 ard-fheis two questions that also gave the new strategy a name: ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’66 But within a few years pressure would grow to drop abstentionism, at first as it affected the Dublin parliament, the Dail, and then to restrain IRA violence for fear of the damage it was causing to Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. The Provos had emerged in 1969 partly in protest at the then IRA leadership’s intention to ‘go political’ but the wheel had turned full circle. From now on, Sinn Fein would stand for election at every opportunity in their own right and not in the guise of hunger strikers or protesting prisoners. The ballot box and Armalite strategy had arrived.

  Thanks to Britain’s new direct ruler, Sinn Fein did not have long to wait. James Prior was a leading ‘wet’, or economic centrist, in
the British Conservative cabinet, an opponent of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher who, in 1981, was attempting to sell her government on the buccaneering free-market policies of Milton Fried-man and Friedrich Hayek. Prior’s dissent brought him exile to Belfast but the demotion spurred his determination to make his mark there. So he launched his own political initiative, a modest attempt to create a power-sharing administration that might have a better chance of survival than Sunningdale. Under Prior’s plan for so-called ‘rolling devolution’, power would be transferred to local politicians gradually, in a piecemeal fashion as they demonstrated their readiness and ability to share it with opponents. His plan also called for a new elected assembly based at Stormont and elections were duly held in November 1982. This was Sinn Fein’s first electoral outing under the party’s own flag and the result shocked the Irish and British political establishments. The party won five seats, 10 per cent of the overall poll and over 40 per cent of the Nationalist vote, a result that demolished the conventional view that the Provisionals’ popular support was minimal. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Danny Morrison, all current or soon-to-be members of the Army Council, were transformed overnight into elected politicians. A year later Gerry Adams won the Westminster seat of West Belfast and the journey towards the peace process was under way. That year the last of the old guard was seen off when Adams succeeded Ruairi O Bradaigh as Sinn Fein President. Two years later, the growing rift over the Provos’ political and military direction between Adams and his old friend Ivor Bell spilled into open conflict and Bell was court-martialled and dismissed from the IRA. In 1986, Sinn Fein and the IRA both supported an Adams-led proposal to end the party’s refusal to take seats in Dail Eireann. That same year, Father Alex Reid began overtures to the Fianna Fail leader and soon-to-be Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, to discuss ideas he and Gerry Adams had developed to end the IRA’s armed struggle. Three-way talks between them opened up the next year and soon after, with both the British government and the SDLP leader, John Hume. Gerry Adams had parted company with Brendan Hughes in Long Kesh in 1977, vowing that he was leaving to rebuild support for the Provisionals. That he had certainly done, but not quite in the way Hughes had anticipated.

  While all this was happening, Brendan Hughes was still in prison, attempting to come to terms with the new circumstances created by the ending of the protest. Although Prior had given prisoners the right to wear their own clothes, the outside leadership ordered the blanket protest to continue. Faced with the prospect of staying on an increasingly futile protest, Hughes decided to leave the nonconforming H-blocks. He had long advocated joining the prison system in order to undermine it and this was his chance.

  By early 1982, a new leadership had taken command of the IRA prisoners from Bik McFarlane. First Sid Walsh, better known as Seanna Walsh, followed by the team of Bobby Storey and Martin Lynch. The three men represented a new generation of activists who would become known for their utter devotion to the Adams–McGuinness leadership outside the jail. Seanna Walsh would be chosen to read out the IRA’s valedictory message in July 2005, announcing the end of armed struggle against Britain. Bobby Storey would become Adams’s spymaster and fixer, trusted to carry out sensitive missions such as piecing together the story of the ‘disappeared’. He has also been accused, in the British parliament and elsewhere, of having organised some of the IRA’s more spectacular operations during the years of the peace process, notably the £26.5 million robbery of the Northern Bank in central Belfast in December 2004.† Lynch, known as ‘Duckser’, preceded Storey as the IRA’s Intelligence Chief and helped Gerry Adams survive a concerted challenge to his leadership by anti-peace-process dissidents a year before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was signed. Storey and Lynch came into the Maze a year or so after the prison protests had ended and had little in common with prisoners such as Hughes who had gone through years of the blanket and dirty protests. Their leadership style, Hughes complained in his interviews with Boston College, was dictatorial, in sharp contrast to his own: he led by example, he insisted, never asking those under his command to do things he wouldn’t do himself.

  Hughes and the new prison leadership clashed early on. While the Prior reforms had granted the bulk of the prisoners’ demands, the authorities were still planning to integrate Republican and Loyalist prisoners in the H-blocks. Achieving segregation – separation from Loyalists – became the next battleground for IRA inmates. One proposal put forward by the new leadership was to single out elderly Protestant prisoners and give them a beating in an attempt to force the prison authorities to separate the two sets of inmates. When a Protestant inmate was singled out for a beating, Hughes threatened to intervene physically to defend him; the targeted prisoner had served time in H6 at the same time Hughes was on the blanket protest.

  … there was one person in particular, Maxi Maxwell, who [had] actually helped us during the blanket protest. He was a Protestant but he wasn’t a bigot, he wasn’t a Loyalist, he was [just] a Protestant prisoner. I had concern about people like that being abused just … because they were Protestants. Not all Protestants are Loyalists and not all Protestants are involved in sectarian activity. Maxi was not involved in any sectarian activity. He was just a hood. There were people during the blanket protest, Catholics from Republican families, who abused us more than people like Maxi did. There was one guy in particular from the Falls Road, whose brother, an IRA Volunteer, was killed in a premature explosion, who actually went out of his way to abuse us. And, so there was no clear line … There was Protestants who helped, and people from Republican families who abused us.

  The very real threat of violence between Republican and Loyalists prisoners eventually persuaded the prison authorities to separate them but before that happened, Hughes struck up an extraordinary relationship with one Loyalist prisoner. Robert ‘Basher’ Bates was a leading member of one of the most bloodthirsty and violent gangs spawned by the Troubles. Known as ‘the Shankill Butchers’, the UVF gang terrorised Catholic Belfast in the mid-1970s. Their speciality was to snatch victims from the streets in Catholic districts, take them to garages and the back rooms of bars in Loyalist areas and then torture them for hours, cutting and mutilating them with knives. Others they beat to death in back alleys. Hughes found himself in the same H-block as Bates and discovered they had domestic problems in common. They became so close that Bates actually saved Hughes’s life, stopping a UVF plot to kill him.

  Basher Bates … was not the leader of the Shankill Butchers, but he was certainly one of them. The Shankill Butchers cut people up, cut women’s breasts off, cut men’s testicles off and shoved them in their mouths. After I came off the blanket, they put us into a wing with people like that. I wanted to understand what made people [kill like] that because I have no recollection of any Republican ever engaging in that sort of bestiality or brutality … We were in a wing together and I was a well-known IRA man. Basher Bates was going through a bad period with his wife, as a lot of prisoners do, you know, jealousy or loneliness or whatever. I happened to bump into him in the wing one day and he mentioned something to me about his wife and at that period I had gone through the same; my wife left me when I was in prison so I had an idea what he was going through. And you have to remember this as well: I mean, I was never sectarian, I was never a bigot. All my life I was brought up and lived with Protestants and ran about with Protestants; I had very few Catholic friends. So I was never a bigot. He mentioned this to me and I said, ‘Right, come on, talk about it.’ And we had periods at that stage where you could associate freely. We had a conflict going on between Republicans and Loyalists – we wanted segregation but at one time I actually suggested that we shouldn’t push for segregation, if we were the organisation that we claimed to be, nonsectarian and trying to bring about a united Ireland that involved everybody. I saw a certain contradiction there. If that’s what we stand for, if we’re fighting for a united Ireland, Gaelic and free and for Protestant and dissenter, why are we pushing for segregation? Th
is was the frame of mind I was in when I talked to Basher Bates … [There was] total opposition [from fellow IRA prisoners] to it. I can’t remember any person in favour. As I say I wasn’t 100 per cent in favour of it myself. And it may well have been just a weakness in me. But I believed, and I believe to this day … that we could have made big differences within the prison; we could have made big differences within Ireland if that idea had been pushed and nurtured … And so that was my frame of mind … when I talked to Basher Bates … I asked him to come to my cell, and he sat and told me about his marriage problems, that he was losing touch with his young daughter. And I remember asking him during the many conversations I had with him, trying to find out where the hatred was coming from and how they could cut people up, how they could butcher people. And he told me that he was not by nature a bigot, he was not by nature a butcher, he was not by nature someone who hated people. And I believed him, listening to the guy talking about his family, talking about his background, talking about growing up, and I asked specifically this question: ‘How the hell can you cut people up and how the hell can you take some innocent Catholic off the street and kill him?’ And he answered: ‘Drink, drugs and company.’ And he specifically mentioned Lenny Murphy,‡ who was the leader of the Shankill Butchers … He actually said to me that he wished he had met me years ago. I was just talking about Repub licanism and where we came from and how much we had in common and so forth. I wasn’t preaching hatred, but hatred had been preached to him all his life. And it’s an example to me of how you can turn a human being into a monster. Basher Bates turned into a monster because that was the environment he was brought up in. He wasn’t a natural-born killer. I think there were people there who were natural-born killers; Lenny Murphy was one of them … at one period the Loyalist leadership in the jail were planning an attempt on my life. And I’m sitting in the cell talking to Basher Bates and his mates are sitting in a cell across from me planning my assassination. Basher Bates heard that they were going to put a home-made bomb under the bed in my cell. I remember the day that it happened, when Basher Bates walked into the middle of the wing in the H-block and shouted to every Loyalist in the wing that if anybody attempted to kill me, they would have to kill him first … that’s the point I’m trying to make here; I was able to build a bond with one of the Shankill Butchers to the point where he was ready to put his life on the line for me …§