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 (39 page)
Hughes’s doubts, however, grew slowly and in the months that followed his release from jail his confidence in Gerry Adams remained undimmed and unaffected, as was Adams’s support for Hughes. In 1987, he was brought into the inner circle and given a seat on the Army Council, the ultimate expression of the leadership’s confidence in him. In retrospect it was the high-water mark in the renewed Adams–Hughes friendship, but from thereon it was mostly downhill.
…
I was on the Council, but I wasn’t happy being there. I was asked
to go to America by Adams because of my profile, because of who I
was – ‘Darkie’ Hughes, ex-hunger striker and all the rest. And I was
sent to America … and met the Noraid people, who supplied the
money. There was one group of people I met in a hotel outside New
York and they had a suitcase full of money … I had already met
small groups of people in New York, in the Bronx area, who were
unhappy with the type of people giving the money. They were basically
socialists. There was one guy called Kilroy who was a lawyer,
who fought cases for Mexican immigrants … he was arrested,
badly beaten, tortured and dumped across the border. He was one
of the people I tied in with in New York, and other younger radical-
type people. Kilroy was seen as a socialist, so he was disliked by these
people with the briefcase and [they were] suspicious of people like
me. I argued Kilroy’s case, that the guy was a Republican, he was an
Irish Republican, [but] it finished up in an argument in the hotel
room. And this particular person who … had the briefcase full of
money, he said he was taking the money away, and I said, ‘OK, go, I
don’t want your fucking money.’ I was there as an Irish Republican.
I was there to try and build support among ordinary working-class
people. This particular person was not prepared for that and he
upped and left with his briefcase full of money … I’ll give you an
example of the type of person that he was. He reckoned that we were
not fighting the war properly, that we should be shooting the Queen,
anybody who wears a crown on his helmet or anybody that’s associated
at all with the British regime. And I said to him, ‘Do you mean
postmen; we shoot postmen?’ He says, ‘Yes.’ I says, ‘Right, I’m going
back to Belfast in a couple of days, and we’ll get another ticket and
you come back with me and you shoot the fucking postmen.’ That’s
when he walked out of the room … I don’t even think he’d ever
been in Ireland, never mind Belfast, but he had the money and he
was trying to dictate to me how to fight the war. But he held a pretty
high position in Noraid. So he came back into the room and I eventually
got the money … I eventually raised something like a hundred
thousand pounds; I’m not sure exactly what the amount was. But I
was staying with a group of young people, practising lawyers, sympathetic
to the Irish cause. And I used these people; one would have
brought ten thousand pounds, another fifteen thousand pounds,
whatever, back in, into Ireland
…
Q.
Well, what was the money for? Was it for Sinn Fein or was it for
the Army [the IRA]?
A.
Absolutely not for Sinn Fein. I raised this money; I went to
meetings with people. I met one particular person in New York who
was a millionaire, a Tyrone man [in the pub trade], and I met him
in one of his pubs, or one of his restaurants, and I was asking for
donations and … he asked me was the money going to politics or
was it going to the Army. I says, ‘Going to the Army; it’s for weapons;
it’s for keeping IRA Volunteers on the streets or in the fields.’ And
that was the only condition. He gave me the ten thousand dollars
.
Q.
But did the leadership who sent you out agree with this, that it
was going to the Army, and it wasn’t going to the party?
A.
Well I never thought for a minute that it was going to the political
organisation. I went to America to raise money to buy weapons, to
buy explosives, to continue the war
.
Q.
You weren’t sent out on a Sinn Fein brief; you were sent out on
an Army brief?
A.
I was sent out on an Army brief. Obviously other people had
different ideas, but the money that was sent back, I did not think for
one minute that it wasn’t going anywhere except towards the Army.
I raised the money in America, to prosecute the war, not to prosecute
political objectives
.
* * *
Sinn Fein’s entry into electoral politics after the 1981 hunger strikes was accompanied by persistent allegations from across the political spectrum that Sinn Fein’s impressive performance was due in no small measure to an extensive vote-stealing effort. Personation, as the practice is called, has always been and still is a regular feature of elections in Ireland (and wherever the Irish have migrated) and nowhere was it practised with more skill and enthusiasm than in Northern Ireland. While personation was present long before the Troubles, there were unwritten rules that ensured that it never really got out of hand. That all changed, or so it was said, when Sinn Fein started fighting elections in the 1980s and brought a degree of military planning, magnitude and discipline to the effort, which badly tipped the scales.
At first, personation was clearly visible to the electoral authorities, as a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee report on electoral malpractice in 1998 noted: ‘The Chief Electoral Officer was shocked by the organised personation which he saw during his visits to polling stations during the two 1981 by-elections in Fermanagh–South Tyrone. Afterwards, he reported his concern to the Secretary of State.’
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The British then pushed through a legal requirement on the part of voters to provide some form of identification at the polling station. Medical cards turned out to be the most popular document used by voters and soon there were allegations that a
small industry existed devoted to forging them. After that, though, the evidence of personation became much harder to find, as that same Westminster Committee admitted: ‘ … the allegations have not always been precise. Much of the evidence of fraud is anecdotal and circumstantial. Gossip has not translated into hard evidence. In particular, there is a notable lack of concrete information on the prevalence of voting fraud. As a result, the extent of the problem is hard to define.’
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The Provos indignantly denied the charge and countered that the allegations came from rivals and elements opposed to everything Sinn Fein did. On one occasion Gerry Adams was confronted by reporters who had seen what looked like a batch of medical cards in a Sinn Fein caravan parked outside a polling station, but he denied that forged cards were being used to steal votes: ‘The allegations are not true. The electoral office has asked the SDLP on numerous occasions to produce evidence and they have not been able to do so. It’s the worst sort of negative campaigning.’
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While one former Sinn Fein official, Willie Carlin, had publicly claimed that a huge voting fraud in Derry had got Martin McGuinness elected to the 1982 Assembly, the value of his claim was devalued by the fact that he had been working secretly for the British at the time.
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There was a lot of smoke, to be sure, but not much sign of flames.
All of which makes Brendan Hughes’s account of his role in Sinn Fein’s personation efforts all the more significant. He ran, he told Boston College, the personation campaign for Gerry Adams’s first re-election bid to the House of Commons in 1987 and did the same in the 1989 council poll, each time stealing ‘massive’ numbers of votes. Adams held on to his seat and his success might well have been due to Hughes’s efforts since the gap between Adams and his SDLP rival, Joe Hendron, was around the two-thousand-vote mark, close enough to mean that personation could have influenced the outcome. As the years went by the conviction that something needed to be done to clean up elections in Northern Ireland grew and in 2002 legislation was passed obliging voters to produce
photographic identification. But by that time, as Hughes noted wryly, the Sinn Fein boat was sailing the high seas, leaving him and others like him behind.
…
I worked on the elections out of Connolly House.
**
I was the main
person in charge of personation. I organised busloads, carloads; I’d
a fleet of taxis at my disposal to bring people to the polling booths …
I did this right after I got out of prison, during the council elections
and the [Westminster] election … I hear Unionists complaining
about it all the time, [and] they’re right, it was massive … I was
the impersonation master. I did it from my house, from Connolly
House, I did it from the Sinn Fein centre on the Falls Road; I had
loads of dead people, I had babies’ names, I had babies who weren’t
born, babies who were in the graveyard; they all voted. And that’s
how we got to the position that we’re in now. It was like getting a
hundred people to push this boat out; a boat that is stuck in the
sand … and then the boat sails off, leaving the hundred people
behind. That’s the way I feel; the boat is away, sailing on the high
seas … and the poor people that launched the boat [are] left behind
sitting in the muck and the dirt and the sand
.
* * *
Hughes began to develop concerns, as he put it, about the direction the Provisionals were taking when he saw how Seamus Twomey had been thrown onto the scrap heap by his successors and had died lonely and mostly unvisited in a Dublin hospital despite his lengthy service with the IRA and the career boosts he had given years before to people like Gerry Adams.
††
The other influence on him was a legendary IRA figure from the 1940s, Harry White, who was a leading participant in the so-called ‘Northern’ campaign between 1942 and 1944 led by the semi-autonomous Northern Command. When Tom Williams was due to be hanged in Sept ember 1942 for killing an RUC officer, White took part in a raid on a British Army base near
Crossmaglen in South Armagh, hoping to capture a British officer and hang him if Williams was executed. The plan failed when an RUC patrol came upon the IRA unit and a gun battle ensued. White and another IRA man, Maurice O’Neill, moved to Donacloney in Dublin, where they were pursued by the Irish Special Branch. A detective was shot dead during a raid on their hideout and O’Neill was captured and later executed, while White escaped but was subsequently arrested and sentenced to death. Sean MacBride, the lawyer son of the 1916 leader and a former IRA Chief of Staff, managed to get the death sentence commuted to a lengthy jail term. When the Provisionals were formed, White was an early and enthusiastic member and, as a devotee of physical-force politics, he later became something of a sounding board for criticism of the Adams strategy.
I started to have concerns when Seamus Twomey was treated the
way he was. People like Harry White began to have doubts. Harry
actually threw Danny Morrison out of his house and Harry White
is his uncle. Harry was a 1940s man. People like Harry began to
become disillusioned. I was going in and out of Harry’s house and
Harry was putting up objections to the direction that the war was
taking. Harry was one of the hard men in the IRA. There was one
time at the funeral of Jack McCabe,
‡‡
the Gardai tried to stop a
firing party and Harry pulled a weapon and put it to a policeman’s
head. So that, that’s the sort of person that Harry was. Now, I was
involved, as I say, largely naively involved in the Army structure and
I missed a lot of the things that were going on, politically … Harry
didn’t. Harry realised what was going on
.
Brendan Hughes’s concerns about the IRA’s political direction might have been growing but they were dwarfed by his realisation that the organisation had been heavily infiltrated by British Intelligence. He had been appointed to one of the IRA’s most
important posts, heading up the Security Department, and was charged with running its counter-intelligence operations, designed to uncover and remove British double agents.
There was a major problem with informants. And one of the jobs
that I had taken on was to try and find informers. The Army, the
IRA, always had a problem with informers; there were always
informers around – low-level informants, high-level informants –
but by that stage, by the late 1980s, there was an awful sense of mistrust.
Certainly the South Armagh men believed the major problem
was in Belfast. I was one of those trusted by the South Armagh
people … and the South Armagh people did not trust Belfast. They
believed there was a major problem in Belfast with informants and
what I believe now, looking back, was [that this was about getting
to] where we are today … people like Gerry Adams, who I had 100
per cent trust in, Martin McGuinness, people of that calibre, were
actually directing the movement towards the position they’re in now
where they’ve become part of the Establishment. I believe people in
places like South Armagh, Kerry, Cork, saw this long before I did;
they mistrusted the people at leadership level; they were physical-
force people, but they were not stupid people … I believe they had
detected what was taking place within the movement and that was
to establish … a constitutional political party
.
