Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Brendan Hughes’s story of his experiences with Seamus Loughran and Jimmy Drumm during his brief bout of freedom had clinched the matter as far as Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell were concerned. This was damning evidence that the leadership had
conspired behind their backs to produce the ceasefire and that steeled the three in their determination to oppose David Morley. But there were other factors at work. The trio regarded themselves as much more politically radical than the older generation which currently led the IRA. But in one respect Hughes and Bell differed from Adams and that was in their attitude towards Catholicism; in that respect Adams had more in common with the leadership.
…
these people [the McKee–O Bradaigh–O Connail leadership]
were still living in the 1940s. They still had the mentality of the
1940s generation. People like Billy were about protecting the
Catholic people whereas we were developing into … a revolutionary
organisation that wanted much more than that. I mean, who gave
a fuck if Loyalists blew up a Catholic church … we weren’t there to
protect the Catholic church, we were there to bring about a united
Ireland. The old Brigade attitude was: ‘We must protect the Catholic
religion; we must protect our faith.’ We were developing into an
organisation that really didn’t care about such things. Certainly I
was, and so was Ivor. Ivor was anti-religion. Gerry was still very
much in the religious mould, but a modernised religious mould.
And to this day I’m not sure exactly where his thoughts were. I
mean, I shared a cubicle with him, and when I was reading Che
Guevara and Fidel Castro speeches, he was saying his rosary. There
was always that sort of contradiction: here he was a revolutionary
socialist, yet he was very much involved in his religion and his
Catholicism which conflicted [with] what we were trying to achieve.
But I think because of the friendship and the comradeship that had
built up [between us] during the early 1970s most of these apparent
contradictions were put aside because we were fighting a war. And
the main thing was to fight the war
.
Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams and Tom Cahill were by mid1975 living in the smaller hut, the so-called half-hut, in Cage 11. Many internees and sentenced men such as Bobby Sands had been released but had gone back into the IRA, been arrested – in Sands’s
case during an attempted bombing – and were now back in Long Kesh, some in Cage 11, as sentenced prisoners. Opposition to David Morley’s leadership of the camp, and to the Army Council outside, was expressed in three ways. Adams gave lectures and held debates about the ceasefire strategy and other political topics; Ivor Bell stood against Morley in the election for Camp Commander and Adams wrote heavily coded critiques of the leadership strategy for
Republican News
under the ‘Brownie’ byline. The ‘Brownie’ articles allowed Adams to make veiled criticism of the ceasefire via comparisons to other, similar phases in the history of Irish Republicanism when a cessation was a prelude to defeat or decline. He also introduced concepts that would later define the era of his leadership, among them the idea of a long war, the espousal of left-wing ideas, and the need for a fusion of the IRA’s military and political strategies which implied a much higher profile for Sinn Fein. He also introduced the idea of ‘active abstentionism’, which was a clever way of both defending and subverting abstentionism by advocating IRA involvement in creating alternative governing structures at community level. In this and the emphasis Adams gave the need to relate to the political and economic needs of the community from which the IRA sprang can be seen traces of the subsequent political and electoral strategy of Sinn Fein. In later years, during the peace process, Adams would deny, through spokesmen, that he was the sole author of the ‘Brownie’ articles, claiming that others in Long Kesh had shared the byline. The reason was that in one article ‘Brownie’ had spoken of his membership of the IRA, something that in the era of the peace process Adams was eager to deny. But Brendan Hughes told Boston College that there was only one author of the ‘Brownie’ articles during this time: they ‘were totally his baby, totally Gerry’s baby’:
What was important about [standing in] the election [for Camp
Commander] was that if you did not get into some sort of position
in the prison then you didn’t have a voice on the outside – you had
to go through army communication lines. There was no such thing
as allowing an ordinary Volunteer … to write to the leadership
straight from prison. You had to go through the lines. So if you had
something to say, it had to be sent first to the leadership within the
prison and they … would send it out. You could not do it yourself.
There was one way around that and Gerry was able to find it … by
writing the Brownie articles. His name was never on the articles but
the Brownie articles being published in Republican News at the
time provided a way around that. And there were people on the
outside who … still had enough influence to get these articles
printed in Republican News, people like Ted Howell
¶¶
…
We began to have debates. At this time the biggest issue was the
Middle East conflict … the Israeli and the Palestinian situation and
you actually had people like Cleaky Clarke
||||
advocating the Israeli
position, a Zionist position at this period. That was the level of
debate that was going on, the level of intellectual awareness … there
wasn’t a great deal of it. Certainly in Cage 10 there was absolutely
none. Actually in one period, in 1974, all the Marxist books were
burnt in Cage 10 and James Connolly was thrown at the top of the
pile. All communist material was burnt, and it happened in Cage 10
…
Morley had so much control over these people that I used to joke
about the Morley pill. You had guys who you thought were politically
astute and aware who all of a sudden would go along with the
Morley line. Perhaps it was something to do with [being in] prison.
Morley was telling people that if they behaved it wouldn’t be long
till they were out of prison. Now he was getting this, obviously, from
the outside and … he was pushing the line that the war was over,
that everybody would be released. We were pushing the line that
the war was not over. The British were trying what they had done
in 1972, to get us involved in a long-
drawn-out ceasefire. A long-
drawn-out ceasefire destroys an army, and we were pushing that
line that the leadership was wrong
.
Adams’s point of view, all the time, was that we must turn out
a politically active, politically educated rank and file. That was the
key phrase, a politically educated rank and file so that control is
taken off the leadership [and put] into the hands of the fighting men
…
Gerry was constantly pushing [the need for] an educated rank
and file, that the reason why we’re in the position that we were in,
being involved in sectarian killings, was because the IRA was
leadership-led and the Volunteers were not politically educated.
The whole emphasis from 1976 on … was to bring about a situation
where you had such people being released from the prison to go back
into the IRA. That was the aim and objective of all
…
The election was held; Ivor was put up as a candidate for Camp
O/C … Ivor had won the election for O/C of Cage 9. They’d done a
pretty good job down there in Cage 9 and that made him eligible to
stand for Camp O/C … And I can’t remember the exact result but
Ivor lost … everybody had a right to vote – all Volunteers had a
right to vote [but] suspended Volunteers were not allowed to vote.
So up until the election, people were getting suspended for silly
things … anything they could do to sabotage our campaign they
did. People were suspended; they pulled me in and threatened me
with court martial; people like Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney were
suspended for canvassing on behalf of Ivor. Gerry and Hugh were in
the same cage as Ivor. Threats of court martial were made; anybody
caught undermining the leadership would be immediately court-martialled
and would lose their status as Volunteers. Every other
day men were ordered [to] parade: ‘Parad anois’; ‘Everybody out.’
All but the suspended men lined up in the big hut and we had to
suffer the humiliation of these statements being read out to us. And
one that I can remember most clearly was a communication from
the Commander of Republican Prisoners, Long Kesh, which said:
‘This group of conspirators, the niggers in the woodpile, the anti-
IRA people in this camp will not be tolerated. This conspiracy will
be crushed.’ Statements like that and we would be standing there
biting our lips. But while the election [result] did have a slight
demoralising effect … what gave me great inspiration was … that
people were beginning to listen, people like Bik McFarlane. Gerry
was absolutely good in organising Cage 11. Not so much openly, but
going round talking to … people like Bobby [Sands], Jim Gibney,
not Jim Gibney that’s the Sinn Fein face now, but the other wee Jim
Gibney from Short Strand. But the more this went on, the more
debate took place and we would organise major debates in Cage 11
…
…
by that time I was I/O of Cage 11. We had lectures; we were …
debating the whole situation and people were beginning to listen.
And I used to dander in to what we called the ‘intellectual hut’, the
end hut. You had … people like Bobby, like Rooney, a bunch of
other guys who were studying, learning Irish, reading books. And
then you had the other crowd like the Big Juice McMullans and the
Big Cleakys … who just wanted to do their time and do it as well
as they could. There was a gap between those two types that began
to break down. As discussions took place … the barriers began to
fall, certainly in Cage 11. It had already happened in Cage 9 under
Ivor and Martin McAllister.
***
And we began to have debates about
what was happening on the outside, about the sectarianism, about
the 1972 truce, and international politics. Gerry used to do a lot of
these debates, and he was impressive … the type of person he is, he
could walk into the so-called intellectual hut and sit down with the
people there and debate with them. People like Gerry Rooney and
Bobby Sands would have opposed myself and Gerry; we were saying
that what was going on was a ploy by the British to get us involved
in a long-drawn-out ceasefire. But he began to impress them
.
I was also into giving lectures and … talks and having debate
about the political situation, how it had gone wrong on the outside;
how we [had] allowed people to get into positions of power and
allowed the leadership to dictate where we were going and what
tactics were allowed, with men not being allowed to think for themselves.
What we were trying to do was to bring about a situation in
which Volunteers could think for themselves and could work themselves
into leadership level
.
Well, by late 1976/1977 the situation had developed and there was
growing opposition to the Morley regime, to the ceasefire. It had
largely built up in Cage 9
and Cage 11. And people began transferring
out of Cage 12 and Cage 10 into Cage 9 and Cage 11 … So
Cage 9 and Cage 11 became the focus of opposition to the Morley
regime … and to the leadership outside. We intensified the lectures
and training in those two cages to the extent that special internal
camps were set up. For a whole weekend, eight or nine men would
go into the half-hut – usually in Cage 9 – and stay there for the
whole weekend, studying, training, debating, weapons training,
explosives training, all taking place over the weekend. They would
move out on the Monday and another six or seven men would
move into the half-hut again. There was a lot of concentration on
explaining the cell system that would come in … that the old
Brigade, Battalion, Company structure was not going to survive
[and] a different structure would take their place
.
Weapons training was sometimes very realistic and the authorities were not beyond exaggerating this to strengthen the case that special-category status served only to validate the IRA’s authority over the inmates. This was when Long Kesh began to be described in briefings to the media as the ‘University of Terror’, the implication being that a normal, criminal-type regime would change this for the better. At one point, following the discovery of a realistic mortar in 1976, Cage 11 was briefly closed down and the inmates moved elsewhere.