Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (3 page)

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.

Winston Churchill’s famous observation that not even the Great War of 1914–18 could diminish the integrity of Ireland’s quarrel, much less make ‘the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ less intrusive, could have been applied just as easily to Ireland in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War and, especially, to the city of Belfast where, in June 1948, Brendan Hughes was born.

Superficially, Ireland seemed to be more at peace, North and South, than for many years; but appearances were deceptive. It was a peace born more of exhaustion and defeat than anything else. For the Nationalist minority in the North and a rump of uncompromising Republicans – the detritus of two traumatic and violent splits in the IRA’s ranks – there had been no rapprochement with the dispensation imposed after the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21. Rather, each had, in their different ways, been suppressed and contained: the Nationalists both corralled and confined by the Unionist government of Northern Ireland and seemingly abandoned by their Southern compatriots, and the IRA’s irreconcilables undone by their own incompetence and fiercely put down by successive Dublin governments.

In the Southern state – known first as the Free State but since Eamon de Valera’s first term in government as ‘Eire’ – acceptance of the institutions created by the 1921 Treaty was at a wider level than ever. In Ireland’s long search for independence the favoured approach had always swung back and forth between politics and violence and by the mid-1940s, the pendulum had moved decisively away from the gun, marking the end of a turbulent chapter in Ireland’s stormy history. The Easter Rising of 1916 had been put down with such force by the British that its defeat became merely
the prelude to another bloodstained effort to end Britain’s control of Ireland’s affairs, just as its authors had intended. The subsequent war between the British and the new Irish Republican Army had been brutal but, by the standards of what was to happen during Brendan Hughes’s life, mercifully short. It began in 1919, not long after Sinn Fein’s demand for an independent Irish Republic had been endorsed by the Irish electorate, and ended in 1921, first with a truce and then in negotiations in London, the Irish side led by the IRA’s military genius, Michael Collins, and the British by the wily and deceitful Welshman, David Lloyd George. The result was a treaty that gave Ireland dominion-style independence within the Commonwealth but retained the British monarch as head of state. One aspect stuck in Republican throats: an oath of loyalty to the Crown that the Irish government and members of the new parliament in Dublin would have to swear. Prodded by military hardliners, de Valera reluctantly led a substantial section of the IRA and Sinn Fein in opposition to the Treaty and a vicious civil war followed. But after less than a year of fighting, the anti-Treaty IRA was defeated. De Valera led the rump, ‘The Legion of the Rearguard’, into a new, non-violent party, Fianna Fail, and eventually, by 1936, into government.

What was left of the IRA on the eve of the Second World War regarded both states in Ireland as illegal entities, imposed by British and ‘Free State’ violence in defiance of the democratic will of the people of Ireland, expressed twice, in the elections of 1918 and in 1921. But by the outbreak of European hostilities in 1939, the IRA had begun to turn its guns away from the Southern state towards the other entity spawned by the Treaty, Northern Ireland. Partition was already a de-facto reality by the time the Treaty negotiations commenced. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act had created two partitioned states in Ireland and the Treaty had given the North the choice of opting out of the new Irish state and choosing instead the version of local Home Rule envisaged in the 1920 Act, which it had done instantly. The pill had been sweetened for the Irish side by a promise given by Lloyd George to the Irish delegation. A Boundary
Commission set up to draw Northern Ireland’s borders would, the Irish were led to believe, so dismember the new state that it could not be viable and would eventually fall, no matter what the Unionist leaders tried to do, like a ripe apple into the arms of the South. The Commission was supposed to take into account the feelings of local communities when drawing lines on the map and this surely would mean, Nationalists believed, the exclusion of large slices of Catholic Ulster from the Northern state. Partition thus barely figured in the quarrel between Republicans in the wake of the Treaty or the ensuing civil war.

But Lloyd George had spoken weasel words and the Boundary Commission did nothing of the sort. Its report was never published but the contents were leaked. Northern Ireland would consist of six of the nine counties of Ulster: Antrim, Down, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh – but the prize offered to the Unionists came at a price. Tyrone and Fermanagh, as well as Derry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, had substantial Catholic majorities, while Londonderry and Armagh had significant Catholic minorities. Catholics would constitute at least a third of Northern Ireland’s population; in Unionist eyes, a serpent had been placed within the bosom of the new state. The Protestants of Ulster had initially opposed partition, preferring to remain an integral, undevolved part of the United Kingdom. Their leader, Edward Carson, had rejected partition a decade earlier, declaring that there could be ‘no permanent resting place between total union and total separation’ from Britain. But a separate parliament had been proposed for Belfast as a compromise between the Unionist and Republican positions, in the belief, or even hope, that one day Irish reunification would be eased.

There was, however, only one way that Unionists could hope to ensure that such a day would never dawn and that was to maintain their political, economic and demographic domination over their Catholic, Nationalist neighbours. To do this, the Unionists resorted to the most readily available and trusted ways of doing so: by encouraging discrimination in jobs and public housing, the
gerrymandering of electoral boundaries in places such as Derry, restricting the franchise at council level and by putting in place a harsh system of law and order, complete with heavily armed Protestant militias, with ready access to a panoply of draconian laws, which ranged from internment without trial and floggings through to the banning of political parties, meetings and demonstrations. The seeds of future conflict were sown at the outset and the soil in which they had been planted was fertile and rarely left unwatered.

For their part, the North’s Catholic and Nationalist population felt trapped in this new state, abandoned by their Southern compatriots and surrounded by a hostile Protestant and Unionist community whose attitude towards them was never better expressed than by Sir Basil Brooke, a Unionist cabinet minister at the time, but prime minister of Northern Ireland when Brendan Hughes first gazed upon the world. Addressing Orangemen on the Twelfth in 1933, he chose as his subject the vexed matter of Catholic employment: ‘Many in this audience employ Catholics’, he preached, ‘but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster … If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms we are traitors to Ulster … I would appeal to Loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ good Protestant lads and lassies.’
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When the North’s then prime minister, Lord Craigavon, was asked to dissociate himself from these and subsequent similar remarks, he responded, ‘There is not one of my colleagues who does not entirely agree with him …’
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Bigotry and discrimination of this sort worsened the economic plight of Catholics as the world depression intensified in the 1930s, and to the poverty and misery of life in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast were added regular and terrifying bouts of murder and destruction. Anti-Catholic, sectarian violence had been a recurring feature of life in the North throughout much of the nineteenth century and it continued unabated into the next one. During the Anglo-Irish War, IRA activity was often the occasion for murderous reprisals against vulnerable Catholics carried out by Loyalist mobs, at times assisted by RUC officers or members of full-and
part-time Protestant militias such as the Ulster Special Constabulary, the B Specials. The burning of Catholic homes and mass expulsions from workplaces such as the Belfast shipyard became commonplace. The declaration by the IRA of a truce in July 1920 was the prelude to an especially grisly carnival of death; in the following three days, twenty people were shot dead as Loyalist gunmen and police rampaged through Catholic districts in the York Street area of North Belfast. Such violent outbursts continued even into the 1930s, sometimes spreading far out of Belfast to rural towns and villages and often without the excuse of IRA activity as justification.

In a possible reflection of their vulnerable state, Northern Catholics had in large measure eschewed the Republicanism of Sinn Fein at the polling booths, preferring instead to vote for the Nationalists, a conservative and moderate party, closely aligned to the Catholic hierarchy, whose origins lay in the pro-Home Rule, Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond. After partition, the Nationalists vacillated between boycotting and participating in the Stormont parliament. But they were never made welcome; Craigavon, after all, had defined the prevailing ethos in 1934: ‘We are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state.’
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The IRA, however, was in little doubt as to what had to be done. A flirtation with de Valera’s Fianna Fail ended abruptly in 1936 and three years later, as Europe prepared for war, the IRA launched a brief but ill-fated bombing campaign in England, with partition the declared
casus
belli
. It was an important juncture in the development of physical-force Irish Republicanism, signalling that from thereon the IRA’s guns would be ranged against the Northern state, not the Southern one. The English bombing campaign was a catastrophe for the IRA; frightened that the organisation’s flirtations with Nazi Germany might threaten Eire’s neutrality in the European war, de Valera cracked down on the organisation, while in Britain police activity kept the IRA on the run. The campaign petered out in 1940 but in 1942 Northern units, now organised in a separate Northern Command, launched their own assault on the Unionist state.

Disaster overtook the Northern IRA almost immediately. A diversionary attack on the RUC, intended to draw them away from a banned Easter commemoration march in West Belfast, ended with the death of a policeman and the arrest of the entire IRA unit. All six members of the team were tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to hang in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail. The episode would feature IRA figures who would play parts, some incidental, some seminal, in Hughes’s own IRA career and provide evidence of just how small and essentially incestuous the pre-Provisional Republican movement in Belfast really was.

In the face of an international campaign to commute the death sentences, the Unionist Government reprieved five of the unit but hanged Tom Williams, their Commander, who offered to take responsibility for the attack. Although he claimed otherwise, Williams had not fired the fatal shot but one of those spared, twenty-two-year-old Joe Cahill, was reputed in some Republican circles to be the real culprit. Two decades later Cahill would swear Brendan Hughes into the IRA. When Tom Williams was hanged, the IRA decided on a series of retaliatory attacks and in one of them a sixteen-year-old Volunteer, a member of the IRA’s famed D Company in West Belfast by the name of Gerry Adams, was shot and wounded by the police. Sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, Gerry Adams was released in 1946. A year later he married Annie Hannaway, one of whose brothers, Alfie, had recruited Tom Williams into the IRA, and in October 1948 she gave birth to the couple’s first son, whom they christened Gerry after his father.
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Four months younger than Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams junior would arguably become the most important and influential figure in Hughes’s life.

By 1948 the IRA was virtually defunct but the mission it had come into being to carry out, the business of securing a thirty-two-county Irish Republic, remained unfinished. And in the North the Catholic minority still laboured under the Unionist whip, as it were, discriminated against and deprived of social, economic and political equality. These two elements of Irish society – one a dream of
what could be, the other more a nightmare of what was – had given birth to Irish Republicanism a century and a half before and the same forces were still in place. Mixed together in the right way they could combine to produce political gunpowder. A mere spark could cause the concoction to explode.

The roots of Irish separatism can be traced to a flowering of radical, democratic ideas at the end of the eighteenth century that had been shaped in large measure by the French and American Revolutions. The Society of United Irishmen, founded and led by the likes of Wolfe Tone, was the first to promulgate the notion of independence from England, but when the time came to assert these ideas on the battlefield, it was the Northern Catholics, organised in a secret agrarian society called the Defenders, created to resist Protestant land aggression in the 1780s and 1790s, who provided the manpower and the muscle to make the rebellion of 1798 possible.

As the twentieth century approached its halfway mark, these two component parts of Republicanism appeared in retreat: the IRA was quiescent and the Northern Catholics had been cowed into passivity – but all that would change. Events in Britain, not in Ireland, would see to that. The democratisation of secondary education, the provision of free health care and a massive expansion of the welfare state by the post-war Labour government in London would slowly but surely transform the lives of many Northern Catholics as nothing before, and create an educated, aware generation whose expectations and impatience would shake all of Ireland.

Brendan Hughes, however, was to share in few of those gains. The benefits of the British welfare state would eventually filter down to those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder but for him and many others in the poorer parts of West Belfast, it would not happen soon enough and life would be much the same as it had been for their parents: minimal schooling up to the age of fifteen, followed by a search for whatever work was available.