1999 (33 page)

Gerry Adams had worked his way up through the ranks, serving Irish republicanism ably in a number of ways. He had the trust of the Army Council—for as long as he could maintain it—which was the vital key to the process.

Belfast-born Adams came from a large republican family, and had fought hard to overcome a youthful stammer. He had started attending Sinn Féin educational classes when he was seventeen—the year he left school to help out the family by bringing home a pay packet. He found employment as a bartender in a Belfast bar owned by a Catholic but frequented by Protestants. Adams mingled easily with people from both religions. Belfast was not yet as savagely divided along sectarian lines as it was about to become.

Like most young men Adams was more interested in girls than politics—until 1964, when Ian Paisley's temper tantrum about the Irish flag flying at the Sinn Féin office in Belfast caused the RUC to break into the office and tear down the tricolour. Within a matter of days Gerry Adams had joined the Sinn Féin Party.

On the party's behalf he organised a summer camp south of the border in County Leitrim to give boys in the area something to do and keep them out of trouble. As a republican activist he also was increasingly involved in the expanding conflict that would be known as the Troubles. Catholics became targets simply because of their religion. Friends of his were shot and killed. Over fifteen hundred northern Catholics fled across the border into the Republic in July of 1970, becoming refugees in their own land.

In August of 1971 British soldiers had thrown Gerry Adams' father down the stairs of his house and dragged him off to jail. His family lost their home when it was occupied by paratroopers. Theirs was a common story in Northern Ireland; one more pebble thrown onto the waste ground of injustice.

In October of 1971 Gerry Adams' young wife miscarried after two of their close female friends were shot dead by British soldiers.

Enough pebbles can build a mountain.

Gerry Adams' republican activities had put him high on the arrest list. After months on the run, in March of 1972 he was seized and taken to a British interrogation centre. While one soldier shouted questions at him others kept kicking the chair out from under him. He was repeatedly punched in the head. Various methods, such as suddenly hurling heavy metal food trays onto the floor behind him, were employed to unnerve him. He was new to this sort of intimidation and did not know what to expect, but he soon found out. He could hear men in other cubicles being reduced to a state of terror by the attacks against them.

In Adams' case this included having an apparent madman threaten him with a bloodstained hatchet, and being forced to stand spread-eagled against a wall while he was systematically beaten. The worst of the damage was inflicted on the kidneys and between the legs.
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Afterwards Adams was interned on the
Maidstone,
one of Britain's notorious prison ships. The cramped, rusting hulk was filthy and dangerous but well guarded. Being moored at a dock in the heart of loyalist East Belfast provided an additional deterrent to republican prisoners hoping to jump ship.

They had found another route to escape. By organising a well-publicised food strike at the exact moment when the old Stormont regime was being replaced by an English cabinet minister, they had brought attention to the dreadful conditions of the
Maidstone
and forced her closure. The prisoners, including Adams, had been transferred to Long Kesh. Where he began thinking about the situation in new ways, and writing the “Brownie” articles.

 

On the thirtieth of June Garret FitzGerald, the anti-republican leader of Fine Gael, became
taoiseach
of the Republic of Ireland. Charles Haughey found himself leader of the opposition.

Martin Hurson of the East Tyrone Brigade did not have a lot to say for himself aside from making jokes; he was a happy-go-lucky sort of fellow who never seemed to take anything seriously. But there was one thing he took seriously. Commitment.

On the thirteenth of July, Hurson, aged twenty-four, died in the Maze after forty-six days on hunger strike.

 

Five days later the Gardai in Dublin narrowly prevented another large and angry H-Block protest from reaching the British Embassy. There were violent clashes between police and protestors.

At the end of July Pat Quinn's family took him off hunger strike—against his wishes. Barry sought and gained permission to take a few informal photographs of his relieved family. They were filled with praise for Father Denis Faul, and his efforts to intervene in the strike. “He's a great man for helping a lame dog over a stile.”

The other strikers continued, though there was a sense that something vital had been damaged. “It's a breach in the dam,” said a veteran Volunteer whom Barry interviewed in a republican pub on the Falls Road. “Some of the families just don't understand.”

“Can you blame them? Suppose Pat was your son.”

“Suppose he was yours.”

The first eight days of August brought three more deaths: Kevin Lynch of the INLA, Kieran Doherty, who had been elected in the Republic as TD
^*
for Cavan/Monaghan, and Thomas McElwee.

The British media claimed the hunger strikers were being manipulated “by outside control” for publicity purposes. The Church worried that it would be blamed.

Barry Halloran understood the mentality of the strikers better than either the British media or the Catholic Church. He knew no one could manipulate them.

He was intensely proud of them.

 

Breandan MacCionnaith, an Irish Catholic, attempted to blow up the British Legion Hall in Portadown.
⁴
Fortunately no one was killed.

 

Barry was told there would be no difficulty about meeting Gerry Adams—except Adams' life had become a marathon of meeting people; talking, listening, explaining, negotiating, starting over again. “He'll have to be caught on the hop,” said Billy Keane.

In West Belfast Barry was staying with Billy Keane and his family, which included Billy's wife Carmel, their five children under the age of nine, Carmel's widowed mother Anne, and Billy's younger brother Eddie, a gangly youth who spent his days hanging around street corners, hurling stones and profanity at the soldiers. There were few jobs in Northern Ireland for young men like Eddie. The future presented two possibilities: getting arrested or being shot by the security forces for some real or imagined infraction of the law. Eddie had one advantage. His brother had signed him up for Sinn Féin classes, which meant he would get an education.

Barry knew the Keane family through Séamus McCoy. Carmel was the aunt of one of McCoy's friends from Long Kesh. Everyone in the tightly knit West Belfast community was related to everyone else in some way. Every grief, every death, was shared.

It was Billy Keane who finally was able to arrange for Barry to meet Gerry Adams.

The meeting took place in an anonymous kitchen in a safe house. Leaning across a table spread with a patterned oilcloth, two tall men shook hands. Both were casually dressed, with open collars. Elsewhere in the house children were playing. Street noises came through the thin walls. The woman of the house provided tea and biscuits before saying, “I'll leave you to it then, shall I?”

Not all women would leave the men to it. Those like Marie Drumm and Bernadette McAliskey took part in policy-making decisions and manned barricades.

And got shot.

Across the table Barry surveyed Gerry Adams. He had seen a couple of photographs taken in Long Kesh, showing a tall, slim, dark-haired man with a heavy beard and aviator-style glasses. The beard was neatly trimmed now. It suited Adams' long face; a keen, intelligent face that looked younger than its thirty-three years until one noticed the lines around the eyes. Watchful eyes.

“I'm surprised we didn't meet before now, Barry,” Adams said. He had a distinctive Belfast accent, sharper than Séamus McCoy's. Thanks to government censorship people in the south had never heard that voice. “I know all about you through our mutual friend Séamus.”

Barry laughed. “Not
all
about me, I hope.”

“Enough. You're something of a legend among republicans.”

“You're fast becoming one yourself.”

This time Gerry Adams laughed. “Jaysus, I hope not.”

Time was limited; Adams was supposed to be somewhere else in an hour, but he did not rush the interview. He listened as much as he talked, questioning Barry about his own ideas for bringing a resolution to the problems in Northern Ireland and paying close attention to the answers. Adams was articulate but careful in his choice of words, with a dry, self-deprecating wit and an impressive knowledge of Irish history—uncommon in Northern Ireland, where only English history was taught in the schools. “You have time to do a lot of reading in prison,” he explained.

Barry liked him.

By the time the two men stood up again, and shook hands again, he had taken several good photographs of Gerry Adams and begun to think that just maybe there was hope for the future.

 

Recognising the influence Gerry Adams had with other republicans, members of the clergy began pressuring him to go into the H-Blocks and tell the hunger strikers to give up. He refused. The pressure increased; became a form of psychological torture. He still refused. “What you are asking me to do is go to a lifelong friend on his deathbed and tell him I'm not with him. My answer is no.”

The last man to die was Michael Devine, better known as Micky, who was the leader of the INLA in the prison. From his cell in the H-Blocks he had written a letter to Cardinal Basil Hume. The English cardinal had dismissed the hunger strikes by characterising them as violence against one's own body for the sake of publicity.

In part, Devine's letter read: “Have you ever been dragged from a dirt-infested cell to have your head forcibly shaved? Have you had metal tongs inserted into your back passage searching for something that never existed in the first place? I'm prepared to bet this torn smelly blanket I'm wearing that you can't remember the last time you were beaten unconscious…or the last time you were forced to eat your own vomit. I would suggest you investigate the violence of your fellow countrymen who are responsible for driving their victims into near-insanity. The H-Block hunger strike is not a publicity stunt; it is a last desperate cry for help.”
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Devine received the last sacraments on Tuesday, the eighteenth of August. He lived until Thursday morning.

Ten young men had died agonising deaths, and it was obvious that Margaret Thatcher would let as many more die as cared to sacrifice themselves. Those who tried to appeal to her in private described her as being as stony-hearted as she appeared in public.

On the third of October the six remaining hunger strikers ended their protest. Their families had announced they would intervene to save their lives. A statement issued by the prisoners blamed “Mounting pressure and cleric-inspired demoralisation,” and concluded that “it is a physical and psychological impossibility to recommence a hunger strike after intervention.”
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Barry Halloran photographed each of the ten graves individually, then arranged them in a collage forming a stark landscape. His accompanying text read: “These young men desperately wanted to live but believed something else was more important. They died for a dream of freedom—and trying to protect others from what they had undergone.”

The pictorial statement was not published anywhere in the Republic.

However the hunger strike had soured the Republic's “special relationship” with Margaret Thatcher. Ever since the Arms Trial Charles Haughey's political career had been the subject of controversy. Now he put it at risk again by sending out feelers to the IRA about the possibilities for developing a peace process.

 

In the Bleeding Horse the Usual Suspects gathered to hear Barry tell about the hunger strike. He had returned to Dublin sick at heart and did not want to talk about it, but they insisted.

“You were right there on the front lines, Seventeen,” McCoy said to open the conversation. “You know what it was really like.”

“No one knows what it was really like, and I wasn't on the front lines. I was no more than a hurler on the ditch.”

“You'd've gone on the blanket if you were in the Kesh. You'd've been on hunger strike.”

“I probably would have,” Barry acknowledged. “For all the good it did.”

Brendan said, “More good than you may realise. Until the first striker died and the story hit the headlines around the world Ireland was just a dot on the map to most people. Now we're real to them. Our struggle is real. And Margaret Thatcher has perfectly demonstrated the arrogance and cruelty of the imperial mentality. She's alienated friends her government could ill afford to lose.”

Danny spoke up. “You think so? She didn't alienate Garret FitzGerald. He did fuck-all to save those lads.”

“Not for the first time,” Patsy interjected. “Jack Lynch sat on his backside after Bloody Sunday, remember?”

Remember, remember,
Barry thought, staring down at the water rings on the table in front of him.
How many times do we have the same conversation? We endlessly replough the ground we've ploughed to death already.

“I don't understand people like that,” said Luke. “Still sucking up to the British after all they've done to us…”

Séamus McCoy set down his drink. “Let me tell you something. When I was a wee lad in Belfast we lived in a very tough neighbourhood on the edge of Tiger's Bay. The people across the road dug with the other foot, if you take my meaning. Their lads were a lot bigger than our crowd too. After a few hard thumpings we learned to stay out of their way and just go on about our business. We even began to think they'd got it right, so we tried to walk like they did and talk like they did.