Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (20 page)
Years later, this Sinn Fein activist was told the truth about Patrick Crawford’s death by a former IRA prisoner: ‘I must have been the only one in West Belfast who didn’t know,’ the source now says.
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Inquests on victims of the Troubles have often been the occasion for controversy and further conflict. Juries are limited in the verdicts they can deliver, something Nationalists have long believed is intended to spare the police and military authorities deserved scrutiny. They cannot make a finding such as ‘unlawful killing’, while inquests into some high-profile victims, such as people killed in disputed circumstances by the police or Army or where security-force collusion with paramilitaries has been alleged, have still to be held years after the deaths occurred. The inquest on Paddy Joe Crawford happened with remarkable speed. On Friday, 15 June 1973, just twelve days after his lifeless body had been discovered in Cage 5, a jury sitting in Hillsborough courthouse, a few miles from Long Kesh, delivered a verdict in the Coroner’s Court saying that Crawford had ‘died by his own act’, echoing the prison service’s statement hours after his hanging. His inquest file, provided to the author on foot of a Freedom of Information request, contains no evidence that the authorities harboured suspicions about the way he died or that anything approaching a vigorous investigation of the death had taken place.
Crawford was, his autopsy report said, a young man of ‘strong, muscular build’ and was six feet tall and healthy. He was wearing a blue T-shirt, a green V-necked pullover and a pair of denims, in the back pocket of which was a plastic comb. An RUC Inspector called
James Black said that his body was hanging by a linen rope, apparently torn from a mattress cover lying on the floor near by, fixed to an iron strut which was attached to the wall of the hut, some ten feet from the floor. Directly underneath the strut were two plastic chairs with boot marks on one of them and near by a steel locker lying on its side. Inspector Black surmised that Crawford had placed one of the chairs on top of the locker and climbed up to secure the linen rope to the strut. A pair of boots, thought to be Crawford’s, were sitting in the centre of the floor and his coat was draped over one of the chairs. There is nothing in the policeman’s deposition to suggest that any check was made on the boots to determine if they were Crawford’s or if they matched the marks on one of the plastic chairs. Nor were any of Crawford’s fellow prisoners questioned.
The IRA Commander of Cage 5, whose name has been redacted in the released documents, refused to give evidence at the inquest but on the evening of the hanging he provided a handwritten statement to a senior prison officer which purported to explain why Crawford might have taken his own life. Along with this, the IRA leader handed over a note found in Crawford’s personal belongings which could be read as a suicide letter. The IRA Commander’s account is peppered with anecdotes that reinforced the view that Crawford was behaving irrationally before his death, including a suggestion that he might have killed himself to put a spotlight on conditions in Long Kesh. There is no evidence in the inquest documents, however, that the police attempted to interview the IRA Commander about his statement or any of the inmates mentioned by him, while the question of why the IRA had possession of Crawford’s personal effects instead of the detectives investigating the death was left unasked.
The IRA Commander’s statement read:
The day before his death he made a number of gestures to his friends in Hut 28 that he might be leaving them soon. The first gesture he made was when he gave his pipe to a friend and told him to keep it as he would not need it any more. Then in a conversation with his friends he started talking about Long Kesh not getting enough publicity and what it needed was a death to highlight the place. Later on that night he was walking round the cage with a friend and told him that nobody in the cage would talk to him and that they were all against him. This of course is wrong as he got on well with everyone. According to some of the men in Hut 28 he was acting very strange over the past few days, but at no time did anyone think he was about to hang himself. At about 9.00 o’clock that night he went round to the workshop to work on a plaque and he was the last one to leave that night. According to a number of other men he was in the workshop every day for a week before his death and spent long hours in it for reasons unknown. On the morning of his death the Hut O/C woke him up at the normal rising time of 12.00 o’clock and he told the Hut O/C that today would be the last time he would be wakening him. When the O/C asked him what he was talking about, he told him to forget about it. The last time he was seen alive was about 1.55 that day when he was seen walking towards the workshop. At about 2.30 two men went to the workshop to learn music and they found him hanging by a rope from the first heater on the left when you enter the workshop. They then informed me and I ran round and found him hanging there. I then ran to the gate and told the Officer to get a Doctor as a man had hanged himself. When I got back the men and the Officers in the cage had him cut down and tried to help him but it was to [sic] late as he was dead. In his personal belongings he left a note that read, ‘When I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep and if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless everybody. P.J.A. Crawford’. This is all the information I can find. Signed —— O/C Cage 5.
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In the context of all that was said in the IRA statement, the two-page note found in Patrick Crawford’s belongings could be regarded as the last words of someone who is about to kill himself.
Except that the part quoted by the IRA Commander, which has the word ‘
POET
’ written beside it, is actually a well-known bedtime prayer said by Catholics, something that he would almost certainly have been taught by the nuns in Nazareth House, and evidence only of a Catholic upbringing, certainly not of suicidal tendencies. It is written at the top of the first page, which is headlined ‘Notes’, and underneath the prayer is listed the sort of information that might be given out during a geography or general studies class: a list of the counties of Ireland, its provinces, the two capital cities and some historical sites in Dublin. On the second page Crawford had made a list of precious stones and the countries whose soccer teams played in the 1970 World Cup tournament. All this prompts a question: why would Crawford add all this to a suicide note? It is of course the signature that makes it look as if self-destruction was on Paddy Joe Crawford’s mind when the poem cum prayer was written. After all, suicide notes are always signed, or at least that is what many people believe. But there are problems with this as well. The signature is written at the side of the prayer, not directly underneath, which is where it should have been placed. The line immediately underneath the prayer is where the list of Irish counties begins and the signature seems to have been written by a different pen, as if it was added later. The question is by whom: Paddy Joe Crawford or one of those who hanged him?
It has proved impossible to answer that question and the authenticity or otherwise of Paddy Joe Crawford’s signature remains undecided. To determine properly whether the same or a different hand wrote his name, the original note would have to be examined and the signature expertly compared to other writing on the paper. The inquest file released by the Northern Ireland Court Service is a photocopy and, according to one forensic expert consulted by the author, is useless for this purpose. Only the original copy, which lies in the Court Service’s archive, can tell the full story and permission to release the document to the NI Forensic Laboratory in Carrickfergus was denied. For the moment, the truth remains locked away in the file.
The real story of Patrick Crawford’s sad and miserable death was for decades an open but never admitted secret among many in the Provo community. His hanging was witnessed by several prisoners and, through them, Paddy Joe Crawford’s murder was known about widely, albeit only by Republican activists. Yet for some thirty-five years they kept it hidden from the rest of the world. Now, thanks to Brendan Hughes, a member of the Belfast leadership when the order to kill him was sent into the jail, the truth about Patrick Crawford’s harrowing end can be told.
Patrick Crawford was, well, I don’t even believe he was a tout. He
broke during interrogation and then gave intelligence and information
to his interrogators. He was then interned and he was put in
Cage 5. He was executed by the IRA in the prison; he was hanged.
And the order was given by Gerry Adams … I believed for a long
time that it was Ivor [Bell] but it wasn’t … There was no purpose
to it. The only reason that you execute someone is [to make] an
example and [create] a deterrent to others. To hang someone who
broke and then deny it and say he hanged himself was brutal, brutal
murder. [During] that period I remember so many … going into
the cages, kids who had broken … When other people broke they
were just sent to Coventry. No one spoke to them. They were put in
a small hut of their own. It was a brutal regime. And that’s the sort
of mentality that brought about the death of Crawford. [If he had
lived] Pat Crawford probably would have been on the blanket
**
as
well. I mean, I know so many of them who are grown men now.
They were brought into the IRA, they were given a weapon, they
were given a bomb, they went out and they did the job well. When
they were arrested by the RUC, the Special Branch, or whatever,
[and] brought into a room, beaten, interrogated and tortured …
some of them broke. What do you expect? You don’t hang someone
who is going through a war. I mean, if every American soldier or
British soldier was hanged for breaking during interrogation by the
Japanese or by the Nazis, there’d [have been] an awful lot of deaths.
I had this understanding because I recruited so many of these young
lads. They went out and they did what they were told to do, but they
were never trained in anti-interrogation [techniques] or how not to
break when they were caught. So I had a lot of sympathy for people
like Pat Crawford, and others. And I know so many others, like
—— and so forth, who was ostracised in the jail, who was recruited
into the IRA when he was fourteen, and was very, very good at
operations. There were loads of others, young ones, and some of
them broke
.
Two people, both of them close to Paddy Joe Crawford, have for years harboured doubts and suspicions about his death. One of them is Father Matt Wallace, who told the author, ‘I remember going to the inquest and it was a routine thing, that he died by his own hand. I was so young and stupid I didn’t even question it at that time but I was never satisfied that Paddy Joe did take his own life. I argued that he was in an institution all his life so Long Kesh would have been easier for him than for other young men at the time because he … knew nothing else except institutional life.’
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The other is Gerry McCann, a fellow orphan and resident at the same time in both the Nazareth and De La Salle homes, although McCann was six years younger: ‘Paddy Joe was one of the older boys and he would be like a protector for me. If you were being bullied as a five-year-old Paddy Joe would have been there for me and I always got on well with him. He was a bubbly, outgoing person, out for a bit of craic but a soft, gentle person. His very presence would lift the atmosphere, full of spontaneous laughter and a teller of jokes. He was a tower of strength to those who knew him well.’ Gerry McCann had suspicions ‘from day one’ that Paddy Joe had been killed in Long Kesh: ‘My gut feeling was that he had been taken out,’ he told the author. But for over thirty years he kept his doubts to himself: ‘I was afraid of going into something that would burn my hands. I was a wee bit gullible [back in 1973] and only later did I realise that this was a minefield.’ McCann made a success of his life
and now manages a golf club in Belfast. He got married and had a son and as his boy approached his thirtieth year, Gerry McCann felt the need to tell his life story and so he began writing a book which he hopes one day will be published. It was then that he decided to try to find out what really happened to Paddy Joe Crawford, a mission that would send him knocking at Sinn Fein’s door.
In January 2008, Gerry McCann contacted Gerry Adams via the Sinn Fein website to ask for a meeting and, on 7 March, he and the Sinn Fein President got together at the party’s offices on the Falls Road to discuss Paddy Joe Crawford’s untimely death. While Adams’s role in ordering Crawford’s killing is open to question, there seems little doubt that the Belfast Brigade staff, of which Adams was the leading member, did play a central part in the events. But like Jean McConville’s family before him, Gerry McCann met a wall of denial from Gerry Adams. ‘The meeting was very cordial,’ recalled Gerry McCann. ‘I gave him a working document with questions. Was Paddy Joe an IRA Volunteer, which I knew he was, and Adams said he wasn’t. I didn’t believe he took his own life at the time and I still believe that he didn’t take his own life and I told Gerry that. His reply was that under no circumstances was he killed by his own people.’ Adams told McCann that he wasn’t in Long Kesh at that time and had no personal experience of the event but he would try to contact people who were and they might be able to tell him more.
The matter rested there but nothing happened for five months until McCann contacted Sinn Fein to ask when Adams would deliver on his promise. After that he got his second meeting, not with Gerry Adams but with Bobby Storey, who was a seventeen-year-old internee in Cage 6, next door to Paddy Joe Crawford’s cage in June 1973. Bobby Storey is, as Gerry McCann put it, ‘Gerry Adams’s right-hand man’, named in the House of Commons by the former Unionist MP David Burnside as the then Director of IRA Intelligence and the alleged moving force behind some of the IRA’s more spectacular operations in the last years of the peace process.
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Among the many tasks Storey has undertaken for the Sinn Fein
leadership was handling the delicate issue of the disappeared, in particular the potentially explosive case of Jean McConville. As Adams had done, Bobby Storey denied any IRA hand in Crawford’s death: ‘I asked him’, recalled McCann, ‘was Paddy Joe taken out by his own people and Bobby’s response was decisive and direct: “Under no circumstances could this tragedy be attached to the movement or any inmates.”’ Gerry Adams had told Gerry McCann that Paddy Joe Crawford wasn’t an IRA Volunteer but the Sinn Fein President’s right-hand man had a different answer: ‘Storey said he was,’ Gerry McCann recalled, ‘which raises the question why there were no Republican trappings at his funeral if he had committed suicide. It beggars belief.’
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