Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Heatherington and McGrogan were spirited out of A Wing one night and held in the security annexe in D Wing, used in the early 1980s to house paramilitary ‘supergrasses’. They were not heard of again until the IRA caught up with them just a few years later. Vincent Heatherington’s body was found in West Belfast, in July 1976, dumped beside a wire fence on the Glen Road. He was blindfolded and his hands had been tied behind his back. A single shot to the head had killed him. He was twenty-one at the time of his death, nineteen when he messed with the minds of the IRA in Crumlin Road jail. On 9 April 1977, Myles McGrogan was found dead on the far outskirts of West Belfast. Like Heatherington, he had been shot once in the head, the classic hallmark of an IRA execution. He was twenty-two years old. A third alleged member of the group, James Green, also twenty-two, a taxi driver from the Divis Flats area and a former soldier in the Royal Irish Rangers, a British regiment, was shot dead in his cab on 5 May 1977.
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Heatherington was shot dead in Belfast. McGrogan was shot dead
in Belfast. Green was shot dead. There were other people involved in
this. It finished up, I think, that there were eight people in the group,
all shot dead in Belfast. I believe that all we got were the small fry. I
believe the large fry got away
.
††
As the IRA moved, furtively but steadily, towards a ceasefire in the autumn of 1974, the British were starting a fundamental
reassessment of the way they dealt with paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland. In January 1975, a committee headed by British judge Lord Gardiner recommended the phasing out of special-category status for paramilitary prisoners and the ending of internment as soon as conditions allowed. A week later, Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees announced that a new, supposedly temporary, prison would be built at Long Kesh, next door to the special-category prisoner and internee compounds. On 4 November, he announced that internment would be ended by Christmas and on 1 March 1976 special-category status, or political status as the IRA had called it, formally ended. Also that month, Rees announced that the RUC would resume prime responsibility for security in Northern Ireland with the British Army in a supportive but secondary role. The changes signalled an intention to deal with the IRA in the same way criminals were treated: the police would arrest and question them; they would be convicted in a court and they would be held in a jail firmly under the control of the authorities. Except that in Northern Ireland,
circa
1975 to 1978, the courts had no juries, hearings were tried in front of a single judge and convictions were invariably secured via confessions made in police interrogation centres and often surrounded by allegations of brutality.
The policy adjustments made by the British very nearly did the trick and the years immediately following the second ceasefire saw the near defeat of the IRA. But it survived thanks to two factors. The first was the combined effort of Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes to put in place organisational and political changes to rescue and rejuvenate the IRA, specifically to make the organisation more difficult for the British to penetrate. The IRA was reorganised into cells and the Company system scrapped, replaced by small Active Service Units (ASUs). The creation of Northern Command was another major change, intended to make the IRA more efficient and place it more firmly under the control of the Northerners, the people who were fighting the war. The group around Gerry Adams also set out to capture the national IRA
leadership away from those who had given the British, in their eyes, the time and opportunity to make such a damaging assault on the IRA. Three men were singled out: Ruairi O Bradaigh, Daithi O Connail and Billy McKee, who became the symbols of a failed IRA leadership. The second factor that helped rescue the IRA derived, ironically, from the very regime changes that the British had made to the prison system. The ending of special-category status sparked a five-year-long protest by IRA prisoners to restore their lost standing and that had two consequences. The protest gave the IRA’s political leadership a cause to mobilise and build around outside the jail, while inside the prison it produced two hunger strikes, the last of which would usher in changes that would eventually transform and end the conflict. Brendan Hughes, as he always seemed to be, was in the thick of it.
Although these prison-regime adjustments were not detailed by government ministers until 1975, there were, in hindsight, unmistakable signals of a new toughness and willingness to confront IRA prisoners on the part of the British some time before. Coincidentally or not, they became apparent not long after Heatherington and McGrogan appeared in Crumlin Road jail in late 1974 and it is possible to see what happened as an attempt to soften up the prisoners for what was to come. The authorities in Crumlin Road began to chip away at privileges while in Long Kesh they took an increasingly unyielding approach to demands from Republican and Loyalist prisoners for better conditions in the jail. If anything, there was more overcrowding, dampness and vermin in the camp than ever. On 15 October 1974 the tension in the jail exploded. There was a confrontation with warders and soon the British Army was deployed to end it. First the huts in one cage and then in another were set on fire by the prisoners. Troops charged them with batons swinging while CR gas, a rarely used and controversial anti-riot weapon, was fired into their ranks along with rubber bullets. Scores of prisoners were badly beaten. With much of the camp a smouldering ruin, the prisoners erected improvised shelters which became their homes for two-and-a-half months. Similar scenes were enacted in Crumlin Road jail.
…
at that time in Crumlin Road jail, I was dealing with a guy
called Gibson who was second in command to Hilditch, the Governor.
He was the man really making the decisions. They began to cut
away at certain privileges we had. For instance, they limited the
amount of food we were allowed in. They limited the amount of
tobacco we were allowed in. They tried to introduce plastic forks
and spoons into the jail; they limited the amount of time we were
allowed out of our cells every day. There was something every day.
It was constant. The same thing was happening in Long Kesh where
they were cutting back on the privileges there … The order was
given in Long Kesh to burn the camp. I was really reluctant to do
anything in Crumlin Road jail because I knew there was little we
could do. But, because Long Kesh had gone, I sent word out that
[if the IRA leadership wanted] we would riot that day. I remember
getting the order back, now, to riot, to wreck the jail. And the jail
was duly wrecked; cell doors were taken off … it was quite easy to
take a cell door off, you just put a heavy book between the two
hinges – we used Bibles – and you pushed the door the opposite way
and it just fell off. We made petrol bombs. We threw all the furniture
down onto the main wing; ripped the whole place apart. And that
was it. There wasn’t a great deal more we could do except wait to
see what they were going to do. We didn’t have long to wait. They
gassed us and sent the riot squad in. There were hundreds of screws
…
with batons. They savagely beat every fucking body they could
find. A group of us were able to fight our way back up to the top
landing and barricaded ourselves in the canteen. They didn’t even
try to get into the canteen; they just fired tear gas in. There was total
pandemonium. We finished up pulling the barricades away because
we were smothered and we couldn’t get air [and] … we bolted out.
The first thing we saw was a line of screws with batons … and we
had to run the gauntlet, along the top floor, down the second floor
onto the bottom floor. They lined us up against the wall and there
was one screw there called McConnell who was in total hysterics and
he was running about with a gun in his hand. He’d a weapon in his
hand and he was, he was crazed, totally crazed. Bill McConnell
,
Assistant Governor. He was shot dead by the IRA in 1984 … the
beating continued, they beat the crap out of us. Then they lined us
up, threw us in cells and put the hoses in as well. We had busted
eyes, busted heads, busted ribs … five or six of us were piled into a
cell and they left us there for, I think, a couple of days. All visits were
stopped, so there was no communication with the outside … after
that they began to change the whole system in the jail. We had
actually played into their hands, I believe. We had brought forward
the inevitable – they were attempting to take away political status,
they were attempting to control us. We’d lost it
…
When Brendan Hughes eventually made it to Long Kesh the evidence of the recent fire was everywhere and prisoners were still living in makeshift shelters. Gerry Adams was still in jail, now as a sentenced prisoner thanks to his unsuccessful escape bids, and so was Ivor Bell. Adams was in Cage 11 and Bell in Cage 9. The Long Kesh prisoners were organised in the same fashion as the IRA outside. The prison was regarded as a separate Battalion and each cage as a Company. The cages had their own staffs, from O/C downwards, and there was a Battalion staff above them, whose O/C was the equivalent of the Battalion Commander. And the IRA ran itself in the jail according to the rules of military discipline, the paramount aspect of which was the requirement to obey orders from a superior officer. The most senior officer in Long Kesh when Brendan Hughes returned there was a former British soldier from Newry, David Morley, a martinet who modelled his management style on the military code most familiar to him; the IRA cages in Long Kesh during Morley’s command, Hughes complained, were run like a British military barracks.
Morley was also a leadership man, loyal to Billy McKee whom he had succeeded as Camp Commander. McKee had been released from internment in September 1974, and rejoined the Army Council to become its Chairman, its senior diplomat in effect who represented the Army Council in discussions with outside parties, such as the British. It was from this position that McKee helped
steer the IRA to the 1975 ceasefire. When Hughes told Adams and Bell about his experiences with Seamus Loughran and Jimmy Drumm, the Feakle meeting was about to take place and they did not have to wait long for confirmation that what Hughes had seen and heard during his stint of freedom were signs of the impending cessation. Led primarily by Gerry Adams, as Hughes told Boston College, they spearheaded the opposition to the leadership and fashioned policies and strategies to correct the IRA’s decline. In the jail, taking on the IRA leadership meant taking on David Morley.
When I was brought to Long Kesh I had just ended a hunger strike
[in protest over conditions in Crumlin Road] and the camp had
just been burned … there were makeshift huts … and people were
cooking on small gas stoves and fires. A guy called Bobby Campbell
…
looked after me and … made me beans on toast and said that
was the best thing I could eat after coming off the hunger strike,
which I believe is true … I settled into Cage 10, in one of the big
huts. Davy Morley was in the small hut [of Cage 10] which was
called the ‘Generals’ hut’. I asked to meet Morley to try and compare
notes over what had happened in Long Kesh and in Crumlin Road
jail … but my request was denied. The following day I made
another request to see him and eventually he agreed. I was brought
into the small hut, what’s called the ‘half-hut’ and Davy Morley was
sitting on the bed in a posing position and one of the prisoners was
painting his portrait. I asked could we have some sort of sit-down to
discuss what exactly happened and what the consequences of it were
and about the interrogations that were taking place because I had
heard in Crumlin Road jail about the torture happening in Long
Kesh. Republican prisoners were being tortured by other Republican
prisoners to try and force confessions that they were involved in
MRF/UFF [Military Reaction Force/Ulster Freedom Fighters]
activities. He had sent stuff to me about this being British counter-insurgency;
he was the expert in counter-insurgency and … that
he had it all in hand; I was a Volunteer and I should fall into line
which of course I was quite happy to do
.
…
over the next few weeks there were attempts by Morley to
undermine me. Not that he had any need to because I didn’t want
any position on the camp staff. My experience in Crumlin Road jail
had given me enough of leadership … I remember one particular
instance in Cage 10: drilling was taking place, which was normal,
and we marched around the yard … I was put in the front row of
two ranks of men, and we marched round and round the cage to
orders … All of a sudden I found myself marching on my own and
everybody else was … laughing. [This was done] to undermine me
…
and to try and make a laughing stock out of me; this was part
of Morley’s tactics. I had never heard of David Morley before but
…
my first impression was that [Long Kesh] was being run like a
British Army camp … where recruits were treated with disdain
and degraded and put down, especially anyone with any sort of
potential. It was the most uncomfortable few months that I’ve
ever spent in prison. Morley ran the jail with an iron fist, which I
resented right from the word go. I resented the fact that Morley had
refused to meet me and then, when he did, he was sitting having a
portrait done of himself. After the fire people lost everything and so
clothes were sent in. There were these monkey hats amongst it all
and there was only one white one – and Morley was wearing it …
He made himself just like Gusty Spence
‡‡
who had done the same,
wearing water boots and distinctive caps or hats. I could see this
quite clearly. We were using British Army manuals for training.
It reminded me of my time in sea school in Sharpness in England,
training for the Merchant Navy; it was the same type of regime as
that, where you fell into line, you took orders, you didn’t question
it, you did what you were told. If you didn’t do what you were told
you finished up in the glasshouse. What I walked into at Long Kesh
was very similar to that regime. The only thing that was missing
were uniforms. Here we all had different berets on except the
Commander-
in-Chief who wore a white one; everybody else wore
blue ones or brown ones or purple ones or whatever but there was
only one white one and that was for Morley. It was a frightening,
degrading and demoralising experience for me during that period
in Cage 10 of Long Kesh
.
…
Two people from Cage 11 were opposing Davy Morley. One of
them was the person who helped me when I first got there, Bobby
Campbell, and the other was a guy called Jimmy Dempsey. Morley
gave an order that Campbell and Dempsey be beaten and thrown
out of Cage 10. And this is exactly what happened: Jimmy Dempsey
and Bobby Campbell were severely beaten and left at the gate of
Cage 10. And the prison regime was informed that they were no
longer acceptable as Republican prisoners of war. They were taken
in a prison van, brought to what was called ‘the cells’ or ‘the boards’,
put into a cell and kept there; they were totally isolated from the rest
of the Republican prisoners in Long Kesh
.
When I was arrested along with Gerry and Tom Cahill, I was
caught with some money stolen in a robbery from Hughes tool
factory and all the notes had been marked. I didn’t expect to be
charged but all of a sudden, in 1974, I was brought down from Cage
10 to court, given two-
and-
a-half years for handling stolen money.
That was me now a sentenced prisoner. Cage 10 was used to house
remand prisoners who they wanted out of Crumlin Road so they
put me back in Cage 11 instead … I wanted to get into Cage 11
[anyway] because I knew a lot of the boys [there] like Big Juice
McMullan, Wee Danny Lennon, Tom Boy Louden, Bobby Sands,
people I had been interned with. There was a much more down-to-
earth sort of atmosphere in Cage 11, something similar to what
internment was like. It was a relief when I was arrested the first time
and interned. It was the same sort of relief getting from Cage 10 to
Cage 11 where I felt much more comfortable among people I’d spent
time with before. By this time it was late 1974, early 1975 … Gerry
Adams was taken out and sentenced to eighteen months for an
attempted escape and returned to Cage 11 along with Tom Cahill
.