None Shall Divide Us

by Michael Stone

  The Irish News photographer, Hugh Russell, had found himself a good place to take pictures. He was sitting on a gatepost snapping away. I kept my head down and walked on. The world’s press had gathered to try to capture the atmosphere and emotion of the day. I didn’t want to be in any of those pictures. I needed to stay anonymous. I mistakenly thought the funeral would be packed with men, but there were a lot of ordinary people and young girls. One came striding up to me and said, ‘I know you. You’re Flinto. You drink in the upstairs lounge of the Beaten Docket. I didn’t know you were one of us.’ I had been recognised by a waitress. I smiled at her and kept walking. By now there were more than five thousand in the immediate area around the church. The coffins of Sean Savage and Danny McCann were lined up at the bottom of the church steps. I saw Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams arrive. Businesslike, they shook the hands of people I assume were family, surrounding the coffins.

  On the road branching away from the Andersontown Road and leading to the M1 motorway, I could see a wall of Land Rovers and cops with Ruger rifles. I was faced with a dilemma. I had a perfect opportunity to assassinate both men as they stood at the coffins, but I had no getaway car. To get away, I would have to run straight into that wall of cops, who would think I was a Provo who’d taken a ‘head stagger’ – gone nuts – and shoot me on sight. The opportunity was there. There were hundreds of opportunities. At the entrance to the church, Danny Morrison was organising young girls into columns. McGuinness and Adams disappeared into the church and I followed them. I remember clearly the water well at the back of the chapel, where Catholics dip and bless themselves. I did a bluff ‘bless myself’ to cover my tracks.

  The chapel was packed. It was standing room only. I positioned myself three rows from the back of the church, standing at the inner end of a pew. I watched the pre-funeral activities and the church staff making last-minute preparations on the altar. There was a strong smell of incense. I mentally searched for a place to open fire. I could clearly see the back of McGuinness’s and Adams’s heads. I wanted to pull a grenade out and blast the two of them to smithereens.

  But the families were beginning to arrive. There was a blonde teenage girl, Danny McCann’s sister. She was crying and a woman had an arm around her shoulder, supporting her, while another woman held her hand. I saw her tears and her grief and I felt sad for her. Until you witness a family’s grief as their loved one is buried, you don’t understand the human aspect of killing someone. When you are on active service you refuse to acknowledge that the target has people who love him and will miss him when he’s gone. You try not to acknowledge the human cost. The target is a soldier, and in wars soldiers die. As I watched two families mourn a husband, father and son, I thought of my own wife and mother, who would mourn just like these people if I were killed in action.

  I learnt a lesson in St Agnes’s church. Republicans weep and mourn, just like Loyalists. I stored the image of the weeping blonde girl and I thought about her throughout the day but, as I watched her take a seat behind her dead relative, the soldier in me took over and I knew it was time. It wasn’t part of the original plan to execute McGuinness, Adams and Morrison in their place of worship. It seemed too barbaric to do that in the confines of a church. But I wanted to do it because the INLA did it in the County Armagh village of Darkley in 1983, when they murdered three civilians as they gathered to pray.

  I forward-ran the sequence of events in my head. I saw myself marching up the middle aisle, opening fire and making my escape. I saw myself throwing a grenade up the aisle for good measure. I kept staring at the backs of their heads and thought it would be so easy if only I could find a way through the sea of people. The crowds were packed five, ten and fifteen deep at the back of the church and there were thousands more outside. I knew that if I pulled the pins and lobbed the grenades into a confined space, the body count would be big. I couldn’t do it. I thought of McCann’s crying relative. These families were just like my family. Perhaps they didn’t know their loved ones were in the IRA and had dedicated themselves to a war. My family didn’t know about my life as a Loyalist volunteer, so why should these people be any different?

  The blonde girl saved Adams and McGuinness in the chapel. I saw my own family reflected in her face. It was a missed chance.

  The church unnerved me and I left before the funeral service started. I wondered why people were staring at me. Outside, as I made my way towards the cemetery, it dawned on me. I had left my cap on inside the church. It is a tradition that men remove their hats when they are attending a place of worship, and this is especially important when attending a funeral because it shows respect for the person who has died. It was ironic. The cap was my disguise but my bloody disguise made me stand out in the church. That meant people were now aware of me. Years later, when I was in prison, a Jesuit priest wrote to me. He was in the congregation that day and noticed me. He said he wondered why I didn’t take my hat off, and did I realise that I stood out like a sore thumb? It was because I kept the hat on, he said, that he had never forgotten my face.

  Outside, the remains of Mairead Farrell were approaching and a sea of people walked behind her coffin. I stood at the strip of shops and watched as she came to rest at the bottom of the steps. McCann’s and Savage’s coffins had already left the church and the three comrades were reunited for the final journey. McGuinness and Adams were also outside, getting into position for the slow walk to Milltown cemetery. The massive crowd, estimated by the RUC to be around ten thousand, was beginning to move. I had to be in position before the cortège and the sea of people arrived.

  I walked faster than the rest of the mourners, who kept a snail’s pace to accompany the remains of the three. As I approached the gates of Milltown I recognised someone. It was Tim, a former member of the Hole in the Wall Gang and the angry young Catholic who set fire to my friend’s house when we were teenagers. He was with another man and they were both wearing the trademark armbands of Sinn Fein. As I passed him he said to one, ‘I know that man, he’s a Prod.’ I reached into my coat and flicked the safety catch of the Browning but kept walking. He shouted after me, ‘Hey, fella, I know you, you’re Stoner.’ I ignored him and kept walking at a slow pace. Directly in front of me was another man wearing an armband, and he was pointing at me and gesturing to the two behind me. He opened his mouth and spoke.

  ‘Where you going, mate?

  ‘I’m going to the funeral. Do you have a problem with that?’

  I looked in the direction of the sangar and knew the Army was photographing everything that was happening. I knew that if I shot this guy, the soldier in the sangar was going to shoot me. I quietly laughed to myself at the irony of being killed on active service by the British Army after years of defending my community, defending them by chasing Republicans all over the country. I continued walking. The man with the armband made no further attempt to stop me.

  Milltown looked different today. Nearby, ordinary people were tending the graves of loved ones. I stood at the Roll of Honour and looked at it again. I reread the names. I was moved. These were the names of soldiers and volunteers who fought and died for a cause they believed in. Soon the names of another three would be added: the three who had died for Ireland on the streets of Gibraltar. I was astounded by the formality and the glory the Republican movement afforded their dead, and the personal sacrifice each volunteer had made was acknowledged. The people tending the nearby graves started to leave. That’s when I learnt another lesson, that not all Catholics supported the IRA. It was obvious these people did not want to be around when the IRA funeral began.

  I took a mental note of my position and had a walk around the immediate area. I knew I had about twenty minutes before the cortège arrived. Judging from the crowds gathered outside the church, it would be unlikely the cortège could move faster than a crawl. I was aware of six men, with walkie-talkies, hovering around the Republican Plot. I looked towards the motorway. By now my getaway car and two associates would be on the
move and could even be speeding past Milltown at that very second. The two had been given their instructions and were to carry them out exactly to the letter. I trusted both of them. They were good Loyalists.

  As I watched the traffic whizzing by, another vehicle caught my eye. It was a white Ford Transit and was parked on the hard shoulder of the city-bound carriageway of the motorway. I found it very odd, just sitting there. What was a van doing in the exact place I had picked as my pick-up point, and why was it there given a triple Republican funeral was about to start? It was about six hundred metres away. I had seen the vehicle, so surely the occupants had seen me. For a brief second I thought it was abandoned and soon to be turned into a bomb scare by Loyalists, but if that was the case I would have known about it.

  The dirty old Transit made me feel uneasy. I had no idea what it was doing there or who was in it, but I definitely knew something was up. Was it the Provos with their own in-house security? Was there a gang of men in the back getting ready to mingle among mourners and keeping an eye out for trouble? I didn’t think the IRA would be so obvious as to plant a surveillance unit on a busy motorway.

  I tried to forget it, telling myself it was a driver in difficulty and he would soon be gone. It would be three young men in boiler suits who would provide the answer. I watched in disbelief as they ran across both the city-and country-bound lanes of the motorway. To my surprise, out of the van jumped two policemen wearing black jumpsuits and bullet-proof vests, with their trousers tucked into their boots. They were not wearing headgear, had closely cropped hair and were carrying rifles. They were not ordinary RUC officers. They looked like a SWAT team. I could see them quizzing the young men, who were pointing across the carriageway. I later discovered the young lads were enrolled in the industrial training school on the Boucher Road but had taken the morning off to go to the funeral.

  I now knew who was in the van. It was an elite unit of the RUC and they were keeping a discreet eye on the IRA funeral and spying on mourners, despite having made a public commitment to stay away. The white Transit changed everything. I hadn’t a chance of making an escape with a police van parked on the hard shoulder. My associates would never pull in with that parked there. They would just keep driving, as I had warned them to do, and I would be left stranded without back-up or an escape vehicle. I ran each possible scenario through my head: I do the hit, I make my escape, they hear the shooting, see a man with guns running towards them – what are they going to do? Open fire. Armed with rifles, they would shoot me on the spot. If the Transit didn’t move within the next fifteen minutes, my getaway car would not be able to pull in and pick me up. For the third time today I had an overwhelming feeling the operation was a complete mess-up.

  I walked slowly back, passing the Roll of Honour, to the Republican Plot, and stood with small groups of people as the cortège and its wall of supporters drifted in. The coffins wound their way down the narrow path towards the plot. Two men tried to engage me in conversation, speaking about ‘bloody Brits’ and ‘shoot-to-kill’. I knew they were IRA, but I didn’t want to start something I couldn’t finish. One had a weapon. He kept touching his chest, patting the barrel of his gun, which was disguised under a thick coat. To shut them up I spoke the only Irish I knew, the famous IRA freedom slogan Tiocfaidh Ar La, or Our Day Will Come. It seemed to keep them happy because they didn’t persist in talking to me but carried on their own conversation.

  I was now in position. The cortège was quite near and the young girls who formed the colour party led the way. It was an astonishing sight. It was stage-managed by the Republican movement, with kids bearing wreaths leading the way before Adams and McGuinness, who walked proudly as if they were gods among men. Adams and McGuinness were close. I had my chance, a golden opportunity to take both men out, but those bloody kids distracted me. Where did they come from and why were they not at school? I felt a surge of anger for their parents who allowed their children to carry flowers and wreaths for three Republican killers.

  Adams and McGuinness were just three or four feet away from me as they followed the coffins, but I was locked in. I was swallowed up by the huge crowds of people and I couldn’t move for photographers and cameramen pushing and shoving mourners out of the way. The moment was lost among a tide of people. I was seconds away from priming a grenade, dropping it into the crowd and making a run for it, but there were so many mourners following the coffins from all sides that I found all my exits blocked. I would have enjoyed the irony of Adams and McGuinness dying at their most sacred place, at their own cenotaph, but I couldn’t make it happen. Mourners had surrounded the plot on all sides. There was a cordoned-off area for senior Republicans and the families of the deceased. I started to move back a little, searching for a better position.

  It was then I noticed another van. It was a small white one and parked a short distance from the Republican Plot. It wasn’t there five minutes ago. A small group of people, one a woman, got out of the van and made their way towards the plot. I could see them carrying equipment and assumed they were media, but I wondered why they were casually strolling when they should have been running for their lives. They had missed the arrival of the coffins. I reckoned their bosses would not be happy.

  The driver was a fat man. He continued to sit in the van and didn’t get out. He didn’t seem particularly interested in watching the funeral. A young man with dark hair and a moustache approached the van and its driver. He got into the passenger seat. The Transit was still parked on the hard shoulder. The moustachioed man pointed to it in a way that suggested ‘What’s that?’ or ‘We need to keep an eye on that.’

  Behind me I could hear the priest begin his service. His words rang out among the headstones. I stood at one, studying the name inscribed on it. The marble Mary looked like it was crying. Over time the eyes had been worn away and there were gullies that held rain water, which spilled down the statue’s face. It was a surreal sight. I listened to the funeral service for a while before moving towards the Republican Plot. I had to pass the small van and its two occupants. I put my hand inside my coat and fingered the Browning, getting ready to pull it out. Both men looked at me as I passed them and continued their conversation.

  Then suddenly there was a child beside me. I have no idea where she came from. She looked like she was only ten and she stood in the grave, kicking and scuffing the gravel. She piped, ‘How’ya, mister’, and I told her to behave herself and not to play on the graves.

  ‘Why, mister?

  ‘Because there’s someone down there.’

  ‘Really, mister? Hey, mister, I’m tired. I want to go home.’

  I gave her fifty pence and told her to go back to her mother. Her mother was mad dragging a youngster to a Republican funeral. She should have been in school. I saw the child point in my direction and the mother look at me before turning her attention back to the service.

  It was time for me to make my move. I stood on one of the grave surrounds and calculated that I was about fifty metres away from both of my targets. The Browning was no good. It could only reach forty metres before kicking dirt, and both men were just out of range. I needed to be closer, but closer was riddled with problems. I had the size of the crowd to contend with, plus the IRA’s armed men, who were mingling with mourners. Behind me was the small van with the two men in it. The Transit was still on the hard shoulder.

  I knew I was going to have to go into the Republican Plot to get Adams and McGuinness, and I knew I was going to have to shoot all round me to get in and out of there alive. There were women and children everywhere. There were pensioners and disabled people. I didn’t want to be responsible for another Enniskillen. I didn’t want to stoop to the IRA’s indiscriminate tactics. There was also the risk to my own life. I didn’t want to die among these people. I considered aborting the operation, but I couldn’t leave by the front gates because by now I was sure Tim and his Provo pals were looking for me. There was still no sign of my getaway car. They had obviously realised the
Transit was the security forces and were unable to pull up and get into position.

  I remembered La Mon, Darkley, Kingsmills, the Abercorn and Enniskillen. It was time.

  The priest was finishing his service. I could hear a woman wailing. Protestant women had cried like this too, saying goodbye to a husband, lover and friend. A woman volunteer began the oration and again I held back. They were soldiers and they deserved a soldier’s farewell. Once she had finished her oration, three masked and uniformed volunteers would fire a volley of shots over the coffins in honour of their fallen comrades, but I was getting restless. The bodies should be in the ground by now. The ceremony and the tradition were becoming tiresome.

  I wanted to panic the crowd. I needed to confuse them. I wanted them to start running in fear.

  The grenades would do that. I moved towards the Republican Plot and took out two grenades with five-second fuses. I pulled the split pins and lobbed both grenades over the heads of mourners, straight at Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, who were fifty metres away. I was proficient in the use of grenades, and knew I could land them on the target. They flew through the air and the fly-off levers came away, causing two short cracks. I had announced myself.

  I took out the Browning and fired three shots directly into the air. I was aware of a clapping in the middle distance. People turned to look at me and some began to applaud, thinking it was the start of the volley of shots. Then I saw shock on their faces as they realised I was unmasked and not the firing party. The applause trailed off and then a male voice addressed me. ‘Hey, boy.’ I turned around. The ignition cracks from the grenades had alerted the man with the moustache sitting in the small van. He confronted me. He had one foot out of the van, his body facing me. I lifted the Browning out of its holster, fired one shot and he fell backwards into the passenger seat. He was just twenty metres away. The driver of the van – a man named Jordan, I learnt later – was still in the driver’s seat. His face was frozen in terror, but he never moved and he never spoke.