Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
The increasingly violent battles between the prisoners and the warders drew the IRA outside the jail into the conflict, especially as the dirty protest spread and intensified during 1979. Brendan Hughes put pressure on the IRA to target the warders and names were sent out, with prison officers regarded as the most brutal or bigoted at the top of the lists. Warders who were, in the prisoners’ words, ‘decent’ were spared. One prison officer, a Principal Officer called Paddy Joe Kerr, a Catholic warder who was in charge of one of the first H-blocks to go on the protest, was so hated by the prisoners that even four years after the protest ended the IRA singled him out for assassination. Between early 1978, when Brendan Hughes began organising and co-ordinating the blanket protest and December 1980, thirteen prison warders were killed by the IRA, nearly half of all prison officers killed in the Troubles. The most senior was Albert Miles, a Governor at the Maze who was shot dead in his home in North Belfast.
A Principal Officer called Kevin Lappin was in charge of
H5. Paddy
Joe Kerr – actually they were two Catholics – was in charge of H3
.
Paddy Joe Kerr was a bully, but Lappin was … not as aggressive or
as brutal. After saying that, Kevin Lappin was not always there.
People like Paddy Joe Kerr took great enjoyment in beating prisoners
and [he] was quite proud of the fact – he was a major target. The
IRA eventually caught up with him coming out of Mass on a Sunday
morning and he was shot dead.
‡‡
We took great satisfaction out
of that … there was one less brutal screw who was going to brutalise
anybody … the type of prison officer that went into the H-blocks at
that time were mostly … bigots and hated everything that Repub licans
stood for; not just Republicans, hated everything Catholics
stood for. Once the protest was stepped up, I certainly put pressure
on the outside to take some action … And that entailed the shooting
of screws and specifically the shooting of administrators, governors,
chief screws – screws who were particularly brutal towards the
prisoners. Names were sent out … names of the prison governors
were sent out … people like Kevin Lappin, who were not a bit
brutal and found themselves in a situation that they had no control
over, I would have tried to protect. I remember sending his name
out [so that he wouldn’t be harmed]. He came into my cell one time
…
and told me that he was warned by the prison administration to
check his car when leaving work, not because of the IRA but because
of his own colleagues. People like him were under threat, not from
the IRA, but from his own. I don’t know how effective it was, but
certainly when we got news of [a shooting] we were quite pleased …
that the people on the outside were taking action on our behalf.
[After the shootings began] the half-decent prison officers [were]
pulled out of the blocks and you … were left with the hard core of
bigots and the Catholic and Republican haters
…
In early 1979, the prison authorities changed tack. They moved all the senior figures in each wing and block to a separate block, H6, separating them from the rank-and-file IRA prisoners. A tough
prison officer was put in charge and it seemed the authorities hoped to break the protest by breaking the leaders. They would stay in H6 until September 1979 when they were moved back. During their time there, not long after the move, Hughes and Bobby Sands decided that it was time to use the ultimate weapon, the hunger strike. Hughes sent a ‘comm.’ out to Gerry Adams telling him of the decision and an alarmed Adams wrote back saying a hunger strike would be suicidal, that Margaret Thatcher would let the prisoners die.
Well, the time they moved us to H6, the intention was to break up
the leadership. They took most of the O/Cs of the wings and of the
blocks themselves and transferred them all … I think there were
twenty, twenty-three, twenty-four people in all. They put what they
believed to be one of their strong-arm prison officers, a man called
Davy Long, in charge of the block. It was an … attempt to break
the leadership … That was the first time that myself and Bobby …
spoke about the possibility of a hunger strike … The decision for the
hunger strike was taken in H6 … A communication was sent to the
leadership on the outside. A few days later I received a communication
back advising us against [it] … from Gerry to me [saying] that
Thatcher would allow us all to die. [His] recommendation was that
we should not go on hunger strike; [it] was a personal letter from
Gerry advising me that it would be ‘suicidal’ – that was the word.
It was left to us – we were not ordered not to go on hunger strike,
we were not ordered onto it – but strongly advised not to partake in
hunger strike at that time. So we took the advice of the leadership …
You see, no one was arguing for a hunger strike and no one was
arguing against a hunger strike … There wasn’t a great debate
amongst us in H6; by and large it was left with myself and Bobby.
I can’t recall any great arguments against hunger strike apart from
Gerry ‘Bloot’ McDonnell. Bloot was opposed to any form of hunger
strike. Obviously there were other people there who would have
been opposed … but I can’t recall anyone voicing that to any great
degree. There were obviously other people there with an input into
suggestions … but it was by and large down to myself and Bobby.
Brendan McFarlane, or Bik, at that time was going through a bad
time. He was … in and out of depressions. There were times when
he never spoke to anyone at all. So he didn’t have a great input at
that stage. It wasn’t until later on that Bik came into his own at any
sort of leadership level. It became clear that the [prison authorities’]
tactic of moving the leadership away from the bulk of the prisoners
had not worked and we were reintegrated with the rest of the
prisoners … The talk of hunger strike intensified. We began to
discuss it again after we got back into the blocks, where the level of
brutality had been stepped up
…
When Hughes and Sands were moved back to the H3, a number of issues were clearer to them: the regime in the blocks had not softened, quite the reverse; the protesting IRA prisoners were edging closer to a hunger strike and without a resolution, the protest was certainly going to end in disaster. The Provisional IRA and constitutional Nationalists were divided on many matters but on this there was accord: no one wanted to see a hunger strike. The Provos were terrified it might fail, while the fear that deaths would inflame Republican sentiment to the IRA’s benefit alarmed the Irish government, the SDLP and the Catholic Church. The growing possibility of a hunger strike was enough to activate Ireland’s senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal O Fiaich, and with Bishop Eddie Daly beside him, he was soon talking to Mrs Thatcher and Humphrey Atkins, her Northern Ireland Secretary, about a settlement that would bring peace to the jail.
The exercise on the Nationalist side was an early preview of a central feature of the later peace process: pan-nationalism in action. Bishop Daly represented the SDLP’s view of the world, and therefore Dublin’s [the SDLP leader John Hume was a good friend] while Cardinal O Fiaich was the voice of mainstream Republicanism, albeit of the non-violent sort. To demonstrate its desire for a negotiated settlement, the IRA agreed to suspend the campaign against prison officers while the talking went on. Graham Cox, a
thirty-five-year-old prison officer stationed at Magilligan prison in County Derry, who was shot dead on 18 January 1980 as he drove home from work, was the last warder or prison official killed by the IRA during the blanket and dirty protests. O Fiaich and Hughes arranged to keep in touch and the channel they used was a Redempterist priest from Clonard monastery in the heart of West Belfast, Father Alex Reid, a friend and confidant of Gerry Adams and a long-time mediator in intra-Republican disputes.
There was one person [who] was a line of communication from me
and the leadership on the outside, actually me and Gerry, and that
was Father Alex Reid. I had a line of communication through him,
a straight communication to Gerry. Cardinal O Fiaich visited me
in my cell … He was deeply affected by what he had seen in the
H-blocks – I know that. He was very emotional about the whole
thing and very angry … but that was the only time we met in the
jail … my contact with him after that was through Father Reid.
He [Reid] would visit me in the cell, I would speak to him after
Mass every Sunday and he would visit me on normal clerical visits
…
for a long period the O Fiaich thing looked promising … a way
for us to get the five demands. I was pretty hopeful through this contact
and through Father Reid. Reid would build our hopes up, not
for a devious reason, but he would keep trying to persuade me not
to go on hunger strike. After the experience in H6 the hunger-strike
option was discussed quite openly and I talked about it to Reid.
He would tell me, ‘There are things happening behind the scenes.’
Thus his nickname, ‘Behind The Scenes
’.
Hughes had used Father Reid as a courier before this, to carry messages to Gerry Adams and to bring his replies back into the jail. As a result he would sometimes be searched by prison staff. Not all priests were so obliging. Father Denis Faul would smuggle in tobacco and writing materials but drew the line at carrying messages. One of a small group of priests who were regarded by the authorities as pro-IRA, Father Faul would turn against the IRA
leadership, and Adams in particular, before the prison protest was over. Father Reid went on to play a crucial enabling role in the later peace process, a role made possible by his relationship with Gerry Adams.
With Father Faul, initially the relationship was pretty good and I
had a fair bit of time for him. He was not involved in any way with
O Fiaich except in an advisory way. Obviously he would have met
O Fiaich but he was not involved in the contact between myself,
Father Reid, the Cardinal and the [IRA] leadership. Faul was very
supportive of the blanket protest, right up until the hunger strike
and he would bring in pens, sometimes tobacco and news and
everybody liked going to the Mass when Faul was there … But
other than that most of the contact I had with O Fiaich, after the
the initial visit, was through Father Reid. He was always trying to
give some hope and encouragement. There was a naïveté about him
though. I remember him coming into me with his story about the
American Embassy [actually Consulate]. Father Reid came in and
said to me that he was making progress, that he was at the American
Embassy in Queen Street in Belfast and he had met these
British and American politicians. He came out of that meeting with
great hope; he was bubbling actually when he came to visit me in
the cell … But when I asked Father Reid who were these people,
he told me one of them was the American Consulate [Consul] but
he didn’t know who the other Americans were. And the British one,
I asked him what was his name, and he replied, ‘Maurice something’
…
I said, ‘Maurice Oldfield?’ He says, ‘Yeah, that’s him,
that’s him’, Maurice Oldfield being the Head of British Intelligence.
§§
Thatcher’s man. That was him, the same man. It shows his naïveté
…
and I asked Reid, ‘What, what did he ask you? Did he ask you
any questions?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, he asked me about … you
[Hughes], Kevin Hannaway, Gerry Adams.’ And what actually was
happening was that Reid was getting debriefed by British Intelligence;
he was giving background information on us to British
Intelligence and he hadn’t a clue what he was doing. I’ve also no
doubt that Gerry was informed by Reid of exactly what took place
in the American Consulate, because as far back as 1970, Father Reid
has been a close associate of Gerry. Anything that was going on at
that time [like that], I’ve no doubt that Gerry knew about it and
was informed … by Father Reid, even though I was not informed
by the leadership, by Gerry or anyone else
…
…
the Adamses were very involved in Clonard monastery.
Gerry’s uncle, Liam Hannaway
¶¶
and another Adams, Gerry’s
father’s brother, were pillars of Clonard monastery. There was a
group of priests in Clonard, headed by Father Reid, who were
involved in settling disputes between the Official IRA and the Provisional
IRA. If a feud broke out, Clonard monastery would mediate
between the two groups. So there was always a connection there
between Clonard monastery and the Republican movement … and
contact between Reid and the leadership of the movement. When
Gerry became the leader of Belfast [in 1972] that communication
with Clonard monastery was stepped up obviously. Reid was there
from a very early stage. He knew every member of the leadership in
the movement. So it would have been quite intelligent and proper
for British Intelligence to get hold of someone like Reid who knew so
much. But I also believe that at any given time, if the leadership had
wanted Reid out of the way, he would have been stopped. This could
not have happened without the OK of the leadership of the movement,
specifically Gerry at that time. He’s been there right from the
start; he has a great deal of information and knows most of the
individuals in the leadership of the movement, and he would be
under the sway, I believe, of Gerry
.