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

  Editing the many thousands of words in the transcripts of the two men’s interviews was not an easy task. The spoken word rarely transcribes perfectly or follows the rules of grammar with exactitude and is, believe me, much more prone to repetition. Oral-history purists will again object but in places the editing has been heavy when necessary but non-existent when not. Occasionally sentences have been rewritten to restore the intended meaning more elegantly but great care has been taken to ensure fidelity to the thoughts being expressed. Ultimately, though, this book was written to be read and enjoyed.

  David Ervine was interviewed between May and October 2004; Brendan Hughes between March 2001 and August 2002. The interviews were recorded on broadcast-quality digital tape and were patiently and painstakingly transcribed by Michelle Millar in Crumlin, County Antrim. The interviews were then sent by encrypted email to the author and, after editing and indexing, the tapes and transcripts were shipped by the researchers to the Burns Library in Boston for storage.

  In addition to Tom Hachey, Bob O’Neill, Patrick Keating, Anthony McIntyre and Wilson McArthur, I would like to thank and credit a number of other people for their help in making this book possible: Jonathan Williams, my agent in Dublin, who once again produced the goods; my editor, Neil Belton, who was shrewd enough to recognise the value of this book, and his endlessly helpful assistant, Katherine Armstrong of Faber and Faber; Professor, now Lord, Bew, whose support at the very outset of the project was crucial; Resham Naqvi and Kate Murray-Browne of Faber and Faber; former Boston College Librarian, Jerome Yavarkovsky; Francis, Colette and Giselle Keenan for their hospitality in Belfast; Stephen Maxwell, Forensic Handwriting Expert, Northern Ireland; David McKittrick for his advice on the UVF; the Hughes and Ervine families in Belfast; Gerry McCann and Father Matt Wallace; the family of Joe Linskey; Frank Costello in Belfast for his encouragement; the Poor Sisters of Nazareth; Paddy Joe Rice; Alastair Gordon of the Linenhall Library; Professor Bob White of Indiana University who began the work of collecting the IRA’s oral history and was generous with his advice; Ciaran and Stephanie for their love and support, and finally my wife, Joan, whose summer in the Catskills was again dominated by events from another existence and who carried the burden with patience, love and understanding.

  Ed Moloney

  Deer Lake, New York

  August 2009

  BRENDAN HUGHES

  1

  Brendan Hughes was there at the very beginning, at one of the places where the Provisional IRA first saw the light of day. Republican mythology has it that there was only one birthplace, Bombay Street on 15 August 1969, a narrow terrace of small mill-workers’ homes crouched, as if for protection, under the tower of a Redemptorist monastery set right in the heart of the Clonard district of West Belfast. There is a lot of truth to that, but what happened in Bombay Street on that late summer afternoon some forty years ago is only part of the story, only a partial explanation of what the Provisional IRA was and why it came into being.

  Bombay Street was at the very borderline between the Catholic–Nationalist Falls Road and the Protestant–Loyalist Shankill Road, two of the largest of Belfast’s many divided ghettos and the scene over the previous century or so of intermittent and often vicious sectarian violence. The date, 15 August, was the Feast of the Assumption in the Catholic Church’s calendar, the equivalent in the Northern Nationalist community of the Orangemen’s ‘Twelfth of July’, and the growing tension and violence that had spread like wildfire from Derry to Belfast in the previous few days spilled once more onto the streets of Clonard.

  In the afternoon, a mob of angry Protestants from the Shankill area surged through the district determined to burn down the monastery and much of the surrounding area. There was a widely held conviction among the Loyalists that IRA gunmen in the past had used the monastery’s spires as a sniper’s platform from where they could pick off people in the Shankill at will. There was hand-to-hand fighting, many petrol bombs were tossed into Catholic homes and some of the Protestants were armed. Shots rang out and a fifteen-year-old boy, Gerald McAuley, fell fatally wounded. A member of the IRA’s youth wing, the Fianna, he was the first Republican activist to be killed in what would soon become known as the Troubles.1 There was minimal resistance though from Clonard’s traditional defenders, the IRA. For some time now in the hands of a largely Marxist leadership in far-off Dublin, the IRA high command favoured political methods over the gun and the military side of the organisation had been run down. It was widely believed, for instance, that much of the IRA’s weaponry had been sold to the Free Wales Army and while this explanation was probably apocryphal, it was beyond doubt that the IRA had next to no guns to defend areas such as Clonard. The Protestant mob had virtually a free hand and soon Bombay Street was on fire from one end to the other. By the next morning all that was left was a series of charred, blackened shells.

  Within a few months the IRA would split into an Official and a Provisional IRA, names that were more the invention of the media than the choice of their leaders, and while there were significant political and ideological differences between the two factions – Republicans in the rural West and South of Ireland as well as many in the North were far more conservative than the Dublin Marxists – there was little doubt that the IRA’s failure to defend Catholic areas such as Bombay Street had been the catalyst to bring long simmering internal discord to the surface. The militant Provisional wing that emerged from the split chose as its icon a phoenix rising from the ashes of Bombay Street, picked deliberately to symbolise a determination that such a thing would never happen again.

  While the burning of Bombay Street embodied the vulnerability of many Catholics in places such as West Belfast and was a symbol of victimhood that made marvellous propaganda for the new Provisional IRA, it was not true to say that the IRA in Belfast had been entirely inoperative during those turbulent and violent days. A day or so before Loyalist petrol bombs had razed Bombay Street, in an incident that Lord Scarman, the British judge chosen to probe the violent events of August 1969, would call, ‘the only clear evidence of IRA participation’2 in the events, a shooting took place that would herald another, more central characteristic of the new Provisional IRA: its determination to repay Unionist, and later British, violence in the same coinage or more. And Brendan Hughes helped make it happen.

  Hughes was not a member of the IRA at the time, although in his interviews with Boston College he talked almost as if he were, possibly because the incident would be long remembered in Republican lore as one of the few examples of IRA defiance during those unsettled and brutal days. A seaman in the Merchant Navy, Hughes was back in his native West Belfast on a break between voyages when the trouble began – and what would happen in the following days meant he would never go back to sea. His return to his native city came at one of those moments when history turns.

  A year or so of civil rights agitation by Catholic Nationalists seeking an end to Unionist-imposed discrimination in jobs and housing, the scrapping of gerrymandering and the restoration of equal voting rights had galvanised hardline Protestant and Loyalist opposition, much of it mobilised by a young, fiery preacher by the name of Ian Paisley. In the eyes of Paisley and his followers the civil rights campaign was merely cunning camouflage for an IRA plot to take Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into a Catholic-dominated all-Ireland state and they were pledged to oppose it at every opportunity. Throughout 1969, clashes between civil rights marchers and the North’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) on the one hand, and on the other between civil rights marchers and the Paisleyites, had grown in number and violent intensity. By the time the Orange marching season reached its height, in July and August 1969, Northern Ireland was on the edge of a dangerous precipice. On 12 August, during the annual parade of the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry, the tinderbox exploded into flames. Serious rioting between the Loyalist marchers and Nationalists from the Bogside, a Catholic slum that lay like a besieging army encamped un
der the walls of Derry, soon turned into a vicious clash between the Bogsiders and the RUC.

  As the skies of Derry were darkened by volleys of stones and petrol bombs tossed at the RUC, and CS gas fired by the police enveloped the Bogside in a toxic fog, civil rights leaders acted to relieve the pressure on the Bogsiders. Orders went out to mobilise their followers in Belfast, Dungannon, Coalisland, Dungiven, Newry and Armagh, where protests and pickets were staged outside police stations. The decision to deploy civil rights supporters outside Derry was intended to draw the RUC away from the Bogside, to relieve pressure on the exhausted rioters, but its effect was like pouring petrol on a bonfire, and the consequences were predictable – the flames spread wildly.

  The violence that followed was worst in West Belfast on the night of 14 August. Earlier that day, a company of the British Army, the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment, had replaced the RUC on the streets of Derry, an admission that the police there had lost control of the situation. The arrival of the troops brought scenes rarely witnessed in Irish history: Catholics welcomed the British soldiers as their saviours and celebrated the withdrawal of the RUC as a famous victory over Unionist rule. But the decision unnerved Protestants and that night in Belfast the guns came out. Protestant mobs surged onto the streets, their anger at events in Derry fuelled by alcohol. One of Ian Paisley’s lieutenants, John McKeague, a Loyalist zealot, had formed the Shankill Defence Association, an early forerunner of the Protestant paramilitaries that would soon sprout everywhere, and he was active mobilising the mobs.

  There were clashes in Ardoyne, in North Belfast and on the Falls Road where, in the Conway Street area, Catholic homes were petrol-bombed by Loyalist mobs as the police stood by, either powerless or unwilling to intervene. At one stage a huge Loyalist crowd advanced down Dover Street, at the point where the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill Road are closest, at a place called Divis Street, and shots were fired from the Catholic side killing a Protestant rioter. Assuming the IRA was responsible, the RUC opened fire, using heavy-calibre Browning machine guns mounted atop Shorland armoured vehicles. Rounds the officers fired bounced off the tarmac outside Donegall Pass RUC station two miles away, adding to a police perception of a wide-scale Republican attack. Almost immediately a nine-year-old Catholic schoolboy, Patrick Rooney, was killed by a police tracer round which pierced his bedroom wall in Divis Tower, the tallest building in a large public-housing complex, and hit him in the head as he lay in bed.3 When the violence finally subsided, four Catholics had been killed by police fire and one Protestant had been shot dead by someone on the Catholic side. The following day, 15 August, saw the Protestant assault on Clonard and the firebombing of Bombay Street and, by that evening, the British Army was on the streets of West Belfast, as well as in Derry. The Troubles were under way.

  The extent of IRA involvement in all this was far from clear. The identity or allegiance of the gunman who fired the shot that killed the Protestant rioter in Dover Street is not known. But the IRA had very few weapons, and it is possible an armed civilian was responsible: ‘There was a couple of .303s,* a couple of revolvers, and one Thompson sub-machine gun’ in the IRA’s arsenal that night, Hughes would later recall, hardly enough to protect Catholic Belfast from the rampaging Loyalist mobs. But the IRA’s one Thompson machine gun, a veteran of a previous age, was put to use that night in Divis Street, as Hughes recalled:

  … when the Loyalist mobs came down off the Shankill [they] were attacking St Comgall’s school with petrol bombs, stones and everything. I mean, they just wrecked the whole front of the school. I knew the school, I had gone there as a child and I showed ——, the IRA guy who had the Thompson, how to go through the school, through the classrooms [and] up onto the roof. I remember that McKeague, I think it was McKeague† … was leading [the crowds]. I was on top of the roof with —— [and the Protestants] were firing petrol bombs, a massive mob of people, right onto the Falls Road. I was trying to encourage —— to shoot into the crowd [but] he was under orders from Jimmy Sullivan, the O/C [Officer Commanding] of the IRA at that time in the Falls area, not to shoot into the crowd, [but] to fire over their heads. So, he emptied a magazine over their heads which did break the crowd up. They retreated back into the Shankill and we retreated off the roof.

  Those were the first authorised shots fired by the IRA in the Troubles, or at least the first that can be authenticated, and the incident at St Comgall’s school illustrated key features of the soon-to-be-born Provisional IRA. In the eyes of its founders, the Provisional IRA was first and foremost a defensive force, created to protect working-class Catholic streets from Unionist assaults, whether these be the work of drunken Loyalist mobs or of official forces, either the police or the part-time Protestant militia, the B Specials. From the orgy of anti-Catholic violence that accompanied the birth of Northern Ireland in 1921 onwards that, much more than fighting to ‘free’ Ireland, was what the IRA in Belfast was primarily supposed to be about. The second feature of the new IRA was a distinct readiness on the part of its early members to meet Loyalist violence on equal terms. The IRA man who refrained from firing ‘into the crowd’ of Protestants from the roof of St Comgall’s school was a role model to few of the new recruits, not least among them Brendan Hughes himself. In August 1969, sectarian fevers were raging and Hughes, somewhat shamefacedly, discovered that the virus had infected his bloodstream:

  [In] 1969, when whole streets were burnt out, I found myself in a sort of a conflict … Most of my friends were Protestants. And here Protestants were burning out Catholics. I mean, at one period, one of my friends – a guy called Eddie Dawson – would go to Gaelic football matches with me in Casement Park and would stand for ‘The Soldier’s Song’ which was a big thing for me; he was able to do it and found no problem with it. So, in 1969, when the rioting started on the Grosvenor Road where I lived and homes were attacked, I was conflicted. Protestant homes were attacked around Malt Street and so forth. Now, the [IRA] split had not taken place [at that point]. The Official IRA were on the ground around the Leeson Street area, trying to contain the riots. And I remember coming off the Falls Road and [joining] a gang [that was] headed along Culling tree Road towards Malt Street which was seen as the centre of Loyalism at that period. People’s blood was up; they were angry and it was decided that Protestant homes should be attacked. Around a hundred to a hundred and fifty men were heading towards Malt Street, when we were stopped by the IRA – the Official IRA at the time – and stopped from going in to burn the houses out. But there was a conflict within me at that time – I was with the mob, OK, [but] I was sort of relieved when we were stopped because I knew all the families there and in Little Grosvenor Street near by, although [it would be] true to say there were bigots there who would have cheered the burning of Bombay Street and the other burnings that were taking place. But, as the days passed, a lot of the Protestants in that area began to move out … and within a week or ten days, the whole of the area that I grew up in was totally desolated. I mean whole streets, rows of houses were lying empty, wrecked. And what houses were not wrecked Catholics began to move into … Almost all of the Protestants had moved out.

  These were the impulses, sectarian and Defenderist, that helped propel the IRA of 1969 to the most serious schism in the organisation’s recent history. The split took several months to develop, beginning in Belfast where the city’s IRA Brigade assumed a semi-autonomous status, and then spreading southwards as rural and conservative Southern Republicans who had long been bitterly opposed to the left-wing, mostly Dublin leadership, rallied around the disgruntled Belfast men to make common cause. That December, an IRA Army Convention met to discuss the organisation’s political future and when the leadership’s critics were defeated they walked out to form the Provisional IRA. The new leaders had been quietly recruiting in Belfast for weeks, anticipating the coming division, and Brendan Hughes had been talent-spotted early on. Around the time the rift became formal, he decided to join the new group.


  … by this stage I had a bit of a reputation of being a hard nut; I was able to fight. The split was about to take place and I was approached by John Joe Magee,‡ who was an ex-paratrooper [in the British Army], about joining … Then my cousin, Charlie Hughes, who I didn’t know was in the IRA, set in motion the procedure of joining up … there was a probation period before you were accepted … I think there was twelve of us at the time [and] we all went to this house on the other side of the Grosvenor Road – it was actually close to where Gusty Spence§ had once lived, and we were brought in, sat down and Joe Cahill¶ came in and advised us of what the whole process of joining the IRA meant, the dangers we would [face] … It was a hard, hard session, and there was an obvious attempt to frighten away the people who could not – or Joe Cahill believed could not – hold the line. So he was pretty hard on the options of what was going to happen and basically it boiled down to: ‘Either you’re going to jail or you’re going to die; that’s what you can look forward to.’ Now, there were two or three of these sessions … and constantly that was the message that was pumped across. By the end of all this, after the third session, there were just five left out of the twelve and we then went through the procedure of being sworn in and we took the oath, your right hand up to God, and you swore to abide by the rules and regulations of the Irish Republican Army. So, then, I then became a Volunteer in D Company, Second Battalion, Belfast Brigade.

  Notes – 1

  1 David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives, pp. 38–9.

  2 Scarman Report, paragraph 1.23.