Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (24 page)

Brendan Hughes had come across evidence of the opening moves towards what would evolve into an IRA ceasefire by the end of 1974 and early weeks of 1975, a ceasefire that he, Adams and Bell would come to regard, and decry, as a plot to enfeeble and possibly destroy the IRA. The plan, they believed, might have been hatched by the British but it was made possible by their own leader ship in Dublin. When the ceasefire began their doubts grew. The British promise of withdrawal never came, while the cessation was endlessly extended, eroding the IRA’s military capabilities with every day that it lasted. The British could not be blamed for furthering their own interests but what the Dublin leadership had done, they averred, was unforgivable in its stupidity and
naïveté
. The three became convinced that the British had taken advantage of their improved intelligence on the IRA to remove people such as themselves who would be obstacles in the way of this plan, and replace them, via internee releases, with more pliable leadership candidates. Seamus Loughran and Jimmy Drumm were examples and so was Billy McKee who was freed from Long Kesh in 1974. But there was more to the British strategy than that. The British Secret Service MI6 and the IRA had maintained contact after the 1972 ceasefire. A ‘pipeline’, as it was called, had been created to assist communication and, occasionally, to sort out misunderstandings. Well-intentioned
individuals, trusted by both sides, would from time to time carry messages or signals from one to the other. After the collapse of Sunningdale, Republicans detected ‘vibrations’ from the British, as Ruairi O Bradaigh’s biographer put it, that they were now inclined to consider withdrawing from Northern Ireland.
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Withdrawal sentiment had also become more evident in public-opinion polls carried out in Britain and, in this context, a ceasefire began to look like a good idea.

Against this background and with an intensified bombing campaign in England that included one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, the death of twenty-one people in two Birmingham pub bombs, the IRA and Sinn Fein leadership met a group of Protestant clergymen near the County Clare village of Feakle on 10 December 1974. The meeting was at the request of the clerics to discuss whether a basis existed for an IRA ceasefire. The Republican delegation consisted of Ruairi O Bradaigh; Daithi O Connail; Seamus Twomey, the Chief of Staff; Billy McKee, who had also been made Chairman of the Army Council by this stage; J.B. O’Hagan from Lurgan, County Armagh; Kevin Mallon from Tyrone; Maire Drumm, the head of the women’s IRA, Cumman na mBan, and wife of the evasive Jimmy Drumm; and Seamus Loughran, by now the new Belfast IRA Commander. Brendan Hughes’s suspicion that Drumm and Loughran were up to something was well founded. Although the meeting was interrupted by the Garda Special Branch and had to be dramatically curtailed, the clerics were suitably impressed by the people they had met. The Army Council drafted a formal response to the clerics’ ceasefire proposal – talks were possible as long as they led to a British declaration of intent to withdraw, the details of which were negotiable – and the clerics showed the document to the new Labour Secretary of State in Belfast, Merlyn Rees. Ruairi O Bradaigh was at his home in Roscommon on Christmas Day 1974 when he spotted one of the ‘pipeline’ intermediaries, a Derry businessman called Brendan Duddy, walking up the pathway to his front door. Duddy carried a message, a letter written in the handwriting of Michael Oatley,
MI6’s man, seeking a meeting to ‘establish structures for British withdrawal’ from Northern Ireland.
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What Michael Oatley and his political masters meant by withdrawal was then, and still is, a matter of considerable controversy and debate. The IRA leadership of 1974 and 1975 became convinced it meant political and physical withdrawal of British sovereignty – even if the British could not admit as much publicly – whereas the British, now if not then, insisted the dialogue was merely about withdrawing troops from the North, not Britain’s political authority. The language and the contacts were sufficiently ambiguous to accommodate both meanings, but the proof was in the outcome. A first ceasefire petered out in January 1975 but was renewed in February. It lasted, if such a word could be used to describe what happened, for nearly a year but in reality it had petered out by August or September 1975 as one by one IRA units went back to war. Incident centres were set up so Sinn Fein could monitor the ceasefire and smooth any wrinkles that developed with the British but that was about the most concrete result of the truce. Of British withdrawal there was no convincing evidence nor any sign it was on the horizon.

In the first week of February 1975, just before the ceasefire was renewed, Merlyn Rees announced that new H-blocks would be built at Long Kesh as an interim measure. It was the first manifestation of a change of gear by the British in their war against the IRA. Within a year the special-category status given to IRA prisoners in 1972 would be phased out and newly convicted IRA men would be sent to the H-blocks, not to the huts and cages of Long Kesh. To symbolise the change the prison was renamed ‘The Maze’. Within a year the British Army would gradually be replaced on the front line of the struggle against the IRA by the RUC. IRA suspects would be arrested and questioned in new police holding centres where a remarkably high number would sign confessions sufficiently credible for them to be convicted in new single-judge, juryless courts. The IRA’s struggle against the British was being criminalised.

The charge levelled by Adams, Bell and Hughes against the IRA leadership of that time is that their foolishness gave the British a breathing space within which to develop and implement their new security approach. The ceasefire also encouraged the IRA on the ground to drop its guard – as ceasefires invariably do – and allowed the British further to improve their intelligence in preparation for processing suspects through the holding centres. Their alleged crime, in other words, was at worst to create the conditions for the IRA’s defeat and at best to allow the British to redefine the struggle in their own terms. The ceasefire had meanwhile set alarm bells ringing in the world of Loyalist paramilitarism and the response of the UDA and especially the UVF in 1975 and 1976 was an unprecedented surge in killings. Gangs of Loyalist killers scoured the streets of North and West Belfast at night to abduct, torture and kill any Catholic unfortunate enough to fall into their hands, while during the day no-warning bombs would be tossed into Catholic bars. The IRA’s response, particularly in Belfast, was to retaliate by killing Protestants, sometimes on the pretext of targeting Loyalist activists but often on the same indiscriminate basis as the Loyalists chose their victims. The IRA in some areas of Belfast, notably Ardoyne, were notorious for their sectarianism and this period allowed them to indulge their prejudices virtually unchallenged. Adams, Bell and Hughes were incensed by this, not just because the IRA claimed to operate by much higher standards but because in their view the IRA was helping to legitimise Britain’s claim that it was involved in Northern Ireland only to keep the irrational, murderous Irish from each other’s throats, that they were playing the part of ‘piggy in the middle’ in a ferocious sectarian war. The IRA presented the war in a very different way, as a fight to eject a neo-colonial power whose meddling in Ireland over the centuries was the major cause of sectarian conflict and division. Those who led the IRA in 1975 and 1976, who sent out Volunteers to take Protestant lives in this way, were, the trio angrily charged, playing straight into the hands of the British.

This, in essence, was the case developed by the deposed Belfast leadership confined inside Long Kesh against the 1975 IRA leadership. It was the start of a rift that would fuel the later Adams–Bell takeover of the IRA and pave the way, ultimately, for the Adams–McGuinness partnership, which brought Republicans to the peace process. The internal IRA conflict has often been inaccurately depicted as another example of the North–South rivalry that was otherwise pervasive in the IRA. Nothing could be further from the truth, although it sometimes suited the Adams camp to portray things that way. Of the eight-strong delegation at Feakle only O Bradaigh and O Connail were Southerners. The divisions were really based on other factors, such as age, politics, outlook and ambition.

On 10 May 1974 Brendan Hughes’s luck ran out. An informer – a strong candidate is the Belfast QM, Eamon Molloy – told the British about Hughes’s hideout in Myrtlefield Park and he was arrested. A search of the house revealed a cache of weapons – a sub-machine gun, four rifles, two pistols and several thousand rounds – as well as a sum of stolen money. For this and because of his escape in December 1973, Hughes would receive a fifteen-year jail term. During Brendan Hughes’s five months of freedom the IRA was pushed increasingly on the defensive, although there were some notable successes. IRA engineers had been able to tap the phone used by the British Army’s Commander, the GoC, in Thiepval barracks, its Lisburn headquarters, and to acquire the technology to unscramble the recordings. But the story otherwise was of a seemingly endless series of arms seizures and arrests, many the result, it seems, of Molloy’s treachery. When first Bell was arrested, escaped and then re-arrested and then Hughes was caught in Myrtlefield Park, the Belfast IRA’s best years were at an end. When the ceasefire came it was at a point of great IRA weakness.

Hughes was dispatched to Crumlin Road prison, to the remand wing to await trial. But the British were not far behind. The IRA was about to be edged into a long and debilitating ceasefire and British Intelligence had plans to sow distrust and conflict in the
ranks of the IRA’s prison community. It might have been the British intention to distract, confuse and possibly dilute opposition to the planned cessation from inside the jails or it might have been an attempt just to cause as much damage and turmoil as possible. Either way it demonstrated that the British had recovered well from the Four Square Laundry setback. The extraordinary story of the Heatherington–McGrogan psy-op affair began not long after Brendan Hughes fell back into the hands of the British.