Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Brendan Hughes’s assertion that the IRA in the Lower Falls, D Company, exerted such a degree of control over the area during this time seems borne out by the security statistics. Only three IRA members were killed by the British Army in the Lower Falls between February 1971, when the IRA in Belfast took the offensive against the British, until Hughes’s arrest in July 1973. As many were killed by their own bombs, which in those days were crude affairs, unequipped with the safety devices built into bombs in later years. In contrast twenty-two soldiers died in bomb and gun attacks mounted by D Company members during the same time.
Predictably, Hughes was in the thick of it when two of those IRA members were killed. The first was in late September 1972 and, not untypically of the time, one killing sparked many more. The first to die was a forty-eight-year-old Catholic waiter, Daniel McErlean, who was killed in a UVF bombing of a Nationalist social club in North Belfast, a random, no-warning attack which Loyalist paramilitary groups were at the time making their speciality.
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Two days later, McErlean’s funeral cortège was due to travel across North Belfast towards Milltown cemetery in the heart of West Belfast and the route would take it up Divis Street, at the very bottom of the Falls Road, into the heart of D Company’s territory. It was not unusual on such occasions for the Provisional IRA to stake out the area in case of trouble. Loyalist snipers had in the past attacked funerals in this area, which is adjacent to the Shankill Road, and even without that threat funerals in those days were unpredictable
events and often the cue for more violence, as it was that day. As the cortège made its way up the Falls Road, British soldiers opened fire and killed an eighteen-year-old youth, a member of D Company. The troops reported that they had seen him, armed with a rifle on the roof of a chemist’s shop at the junction of Servia and Albert Streets, and shot him dead. Their target was Jimmy Quigley, one of D Company’s youngest members who, local people later claimed, had not opened fire on the troops, although his subsequent inquest was told a Garrand rifle had been found near his body.
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Local eyewitnesses claimed that the troops had tossed his lifeless body from an upstairs window on to the street, and this sent angry D Company members racing for their weapons, eager to avenge their fallen comrade. Soon a major gun battle was raging, as Hughes recalled: ‘We brought the place to a standstill.’ Almost immediately, the IRA drew blood. A member of the Royal Anglian Regiment, Ian Burt from Essex, with eighteen years’ service, was shot dead by one of an estimated twelve IRA gunmen attacking the troops.
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But the soldier was not the last person to die.
…
there was a wee girl, a wee Sticky girl, a member of the Official
IRA, Patricia McKay you called her. She actually had an Armalite
that the Officials had stolen from us, but the wee girl was only a kid.
She was only nineteen and she was nervous. They were firing from
all over the place and I took the Armalite off her. So I had two
Armalites, one over my shoulder and one on my arm, and we were
coming under fire from all over the place … and I ran out, and just
fired like hell and got away but I told Patricia to stay where she was.
Her daddy and mummy have asked me so many times about this. I
just told her to stay, but she was scared, the child was scared. I said,
‘Don’t fucking move from here, stay here where you are.’ And I went
down the street and carried on with the gun battle which went on
for the rest of the day. Obviously the Brits had seen me firing from
the house and they pinpointed it … if only she had listened to what
I had told her … well, anyway, she came out of the house and they
shot her dead. A child. Lovely child. I know her mammy and daddy
.
And, I remember going the next day to her home; I was on the run,
and she lived in Divis Flats, and they put a big military funeral on
for her, the Official IRA did. A Tricolour over her coffin and all the
rest. I remember walking through them all. And it wasn’t easy to do,
you know, [walking] through the Sticks, right? And her mummy
and daddy kept asking me, ‘What happened?’ What do you say?
I took the weapon off the wee girl. And she just came out; they just
pinpointed the house where the firing was coming from. She was
game enough to come out and do it. I mean, I was used to gun
battles at that time but not her … it was like going to work for me,
right, going into a gun battle in the Falls, you know
.
The second D Company loss during Hughes’s days in charge took place seven months later and the account he gave of the death of twenty-seven-year-old Edward O’Rawe, known as ‘Mundo’, is sharply at variance with the official version of events. The British Army’s story was that O’Rawe was shot dead after firing at a patrol that was pursuing him and another man as he was climbing over an entry wall in Garnet Street in the Lower Falls. His inquest was told, however, that no weapons were found at the scene and that there was no forensic evidence to support the claim that he had been using a weapon.
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Hughes’s version is that his death was a cold-blooded execution, a fate he might have missed himself by just a few minutes.
I remember when Mundo was killed, we were in a house off Raglan
Street … It was the same house that we had organised the London
bombs from. There was a whole crowd of us there, Lucas Quigley
and all … he and myself had just left when the Brits hit the house.
Big Mundo O’Rawe was still inside. Mundo tried to get over the
backyard, that was always your escape but they were waiting for
him. And I got out of the house, Lucas and me, just two fucking
minutes before they hit the house. So I went and organised the boys
and we started to hit back with Armalites. I was in Raglan Street
where the 1920s ambush had taken place, and I actually saw Mundo
against the wall, and then I next saw him on the floor in an entry.
I believe he was executed in the entry of Garnet Street … and then
a major gun battle followed. At that time Mundo was QM for
D Company and he had a group of people around him, one in
particular, a girl called Moya. She and Mundo were very close and
after the gun battle had settled down and the British troops had
pulled out, we assembled back in the call house in Sultan Street.
Moya was really upset; she was crying uncontrollably, and I took
her by the shoulder, gave her a rifle – a Garrand rifle it was – and
brought her outside. And there was a helicopter hovering above and
I just ordered her to fire at the helicopter and while she was doing
this she was crying uncontrollably, but she kept firing at the
helicopter. Not that it was going to do any good, she wasn’t going
to bring the helicopter down, but it helped her to control her
emotions
…
While D Company fatalities were relatively few during Brendan Hughes’s time, IRA members were often wounded or injured during attacks, sometimes badly. Taking such casualties to a local hospital such as the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital risked the victims being arrested and so, unless the injuries were life-threatening and required urgent treatment, the IRA preferred to spirit such people across the border to a hospital in the Republic. One early attack on a British Army base in Mulhouse Street Mill in the Grosvenor Road area would set the pattern for the future.
We organised an ambush, throwing blast bombs and nail bombs
over [the walls] trying to pinpoint Brits coming out on patrols. So
five or six nail bombs were thrown. Bang! Bang! And ——, his nail
bomb bounced off the corrugated-iron wall onto the Grosvenor
Road, blew up, and one of the nails went into his spine. He was
lying in the middle of the Grosvenor Road but we had all bolted off.
Big Fra McCullough was driving one of the cars, he did a U-turn,
a handbraker, pulled up in the middle of the Grosvenor Road; the
Brits were firing at us now, and he pulls —— into the passenger
seat and we get him into the call house in Gibson Street. We put him
on a mattress on the floor, under the windowsill; he couldn’t move,
he was in agony. Everything was quiet. The Brits were patrolling the
areas. We could hear their voices over the radio. And ——’s lying
under the windowsill in agony, and we’re trying to keep him quiet.
I went over the yard wall, over to Divis, made contact with his da.
I thought he was going to die and I told him the situation. We kept
him all night. There was a doctor’s surgery at the corner of the street
and the next morning I went in, held a gun to the doctor’s head, and
said, ‘We need you down here’, and the doctor says, ‘There’s no need
for the gun, I’ll come.’ So I put the gun back in my belt and brought
him down to ——. This is only a couple of hundred yards from the
barracks we tried to blow up. The doctor examined him and said, ‘If
you move him, he’s dead; get him to the Royal, phone an ambulance
and get him there.’ I said, ‘What chance has he if we try to move
him?’ He replied, ‘You’re risking his life cause that nail can kill him.’
So I sent for his da and I said to him, ‘We can get him to the Royal,
it’s only across the street, or we can get him across the border. If we
move him we may kill him, but if we send him to the Royal, he’s
going to jail for twenty years’, and his father said he’d leave it up to
me to make the decision. It was the last thing I wanted. So, I decided,
‘Fuck it, I’m not giving the man up’, and I organised a van
with a mattress in the back and a medic out of the St John’s Ambulance
Brigade who was prepared to travel, and fair play to him, he
did. So, the Brits had pulled out of the area by this time and remember
we were only forty yards away at most from the place we tried to
blow up. The van pulled up and we got a stretcher in and got ——
onto the stretcher. I explained to —— what was happening and he
agreed to go along with whatever I said. We’d already made contact
with the South Armagh people, and they arranged a route for us.
And we got him across the border and into Dundalk Hospital. I’d a
contact in the hospital. —— was there for a year. And to this day
he’s in terrible agony most of the time. He lives now with his mother,
he looks after her. It’s only him and his mother in the house together
now. He was only a kid, only a Fianna boy when I got to know him
,
then he came into the IRA. And he was a good Volunteer. He was a
real good kid, a good wee operator
.
The British Army knew about Brendan Hughes from early on, but thanks to his father’s foresight, it would be some time before Military Intelligence was able to acquire his photograph, to put a face on the IRA leader they knew only as ‘Darkie’. They knew he was a leader of D Company, an organiser of many of the attacks that had claimed the lives of their soldiers, and that his elimination would badly hurt the IRA. He was a thorn in the flesh of the British Army and a priority target. One undercover effort mounted by the military very nearly succeeded in removing the thorn. It failed, only just, but it brought Hughes and Gerry Adams closer, helping to cement one of the IRA’s most famous partnerships.
One day, I was standing on the corner of Varna Gap; two or three
other people were with me – we hadn’t arranged a call house that
day – and a van drove down Leeson Street. As the van passed I
noticed there was something wrong with the driver – he was
nervous. He drove past me and down McDonnell Street onto the
Grosvenor Road. I crossed over to the other corner and saw the van
going up the Grosvenor Road away from me. Five minutes later it
came back down. At that time I always carried a weapon, a .45
automatic, but I’d given it to another Volunteer that morning to
go and steal a car we needed, so I sent one of the runners to get a
weapon. As the van approached, my eyes were on the driver the
whole time, and the guy was really shitting himself. He drove about
twenty yards past me, past Varna Gap, and the back doors flew
open. Three guys with rifles jumped out and they immediately
started firing at me. One had two .45s in his hands. They were
wearing baseball boots and tracksuits … The bullets went whizzing
off the wall, all over the place and there was nothing I could do, only
run along Varna Gap, and they came after me firing. I turned round
at Varna Gap into Cyprus Street and then I took a shortcut into
Sultan Street which was where the call house and our weapons were
.
I ran the whole length of that street, and they were running and
firing after me. Later I worked it out that they knew who I was.
There was a derelict house directly facing Varna Gap that the Brits
had been using as an observation post and they had obviously
identified me, whether it was a photograph or description I don’t
know, but they identified me obviously because they were trying
to kill me. There was a baker’s van delivering bread – it was early-
morning time – to Willie Dark’s shop at the corner of Sultan Street
and the van was shot to pieces. I almost ran past the call house I was
going so fast, so I grabbed the door as I was running and the
momentum carried me right through the living-room window. But
the weapons were there, and I grabbed an Armalite and I came out
fucking firing. The next thing Saracens came from all over the place
and the soldiers in the observation post, in the derelict house, were
picked up; it pulled up outside and the two Brits jumped out onto
the roof of the Saracen and into the back of it and the other ones
who had been chasing me were picked up in another Saracen. They
had been there all night. Why the Brits in the derelict house didn’t
fire I do not know. I was a sitting target for them; they didn’t have
to send the van down, I mean, they could have shot me from that
window. The operation was aimed at assassinating me and whoever
else I was with
.
I didn’t realise I was bleeding until afterwards and then I thought I
had been hit but I had been badly cut in the arm by the glass when
I crashed through the living-room window. I was taken to a house,
my cousin’s house, just a couple of hundred yards down the street.
And the next thing Gerry [Adams] came into the district. The artery
had been severed. But it was the ‘Big Effort’, Gerry, who organised
the doctor, brought him into the area, fair play to him. I have to give
that to him. It was ——, the heart surgeon. But he had no equipment
with him so my cousin got a needle and thread and ——
sewed me up. There’s a wee lump still there where he inserted
tweezers, pulled the artery down, tied it in a knot to stop the bleeding,
and then he got a needle and thread and sewed it up. I didn’t
realise how much blood I had lost but it was an awful lot. Gerry
may well have saved my life by bringing the surgeon in because the
blood was pumping out. The Brits were still driving round, and I
remember the doctor sewing it up while the Saracen was passing the
door. You know, Gerry did that but he didn’t have to. We were close
at that time and I think there was a genuine thing there. He didn’t
have to come into the area, he could have sent someone else in, but
he did come in. I didn’t want to leave town – you know, ‘the true
soldier’ – I didn’t want to leave Belfast but Gerry insisted, he
ordered me out. And I went to Dundalk and booked into a bed-and-breakfast
for a week but I just couldn’t wait to get back
.