Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
In his interviews with Boston College, Brendan Hughes touched upon some of the most controversial, sensitive yet recurring questions that arise out of the 1981 hunger strikes. Why did they last so long? Were any of the deaths needless? Why didn’t the IRA leadership step in and stop the conveyor belt when it became clear that the campaign for political status could not be advanced by further loss of life? Was there an ulterior motive for keeping the protest alive? At the start of it all, the IRA leadership, including Gerry Adams, had made their attitude crystal clear. Fearing a devastating
defeat, they had declared against the tactic of hunger striking, while Adams had gone so far as to describe plans for the first fast as ‘suicidal’. The second hunger strike risked being a bigger setback than the first, if only because failure would see the Republican struggle staggering from the second of two knockout blows delivered within months of each other. Victory or defeat hung in the balance. Shouldn’t the leadership therefore have intervened to alleviate the damage? And if not, why not? Hughes’s answer is a controversial one: the hunger strike was kept going for political advantage, he claimed, specifically to help build up Sinn Fein as a political and electoral force.
I know for a fact that there were people on the outside, people like
Ivor Bell
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who were totally opposed to the second hunger strike and
I know people like Ivor … pushed from his own position to stop the
hunger strike taking place. So if the leadership – and I believe they
had a responsibility even though we have this old tradition of not
interfering with … the prisoners’ decisions … I believe in this
particular position where men were dying off … I think, morally,
that the leadership on the outside should have intervened … This
is an army; we were all volunteers in this army; the leadership had
direct responsibility over these men. And I think they betrayed to a
large extent the comradeship that was there and they eventually
allowed people like Father Faul and families to make their own
decisions of ending or stopping their sons, husbands from dying.
I remember talking to my sister afterwards and she informed me
that if I had gone into a coma, she would not have let me die. So the
pressure that was put on the relatives, like Bobby Sands’s mother
and all the rest of the sisters and wives, I believe was totally unfair
and unjust and a total disregarding of the responsibility that the
leadership had. [It was] cowardly in many ways as well to allow
mothers and sisters and fathers to make these decisions … allowing
that to happen was a total disregard of the responsibility that they
had to these people
.
Q.
Would the prisoners have ended the hunger strike, in your view,
had the leadership ordered them to?
A.
Yes. Yes
.
Q.
You do not think that the prisoners would have rebelled?
A.
I don’t believe so, I don’t believe so. Maybe at an early stage of
the hunger strike the prisoners might have … rebelled. But I think
the prisoners had enough responsibility and enough dedication …
to the leadership and to the Army [IRA] that I believe the order
would have been taken … just like there were people during the
blanket [protest] who refused to leave their cells even to go to Mass,
or for a visit, certainly there would have been people who would
have [protested] … but I think as time went on and more men
died, I think the order from outside would have been accepted, I do
believe it. I mean I was certainly advocating that the hunger strike
be called off and I … would have stood up and accepted that
.
Q.
In your conversations with Ivor Bell, who was a senior figure in
the IRA leadership at the time on the outside, in your later conversations
with him in relation to the hunger strike, did he give you
any indication of the type of opposition that he met within the leadership
to his suggestion that the leadership should in fact intervene
and call it to an end, bring it to a halt?
A.
As far as I can make out, Ivor was a lone voice in his opposition
to it. I mean, Gerry Adams is a powerful figure within the Republican
leadership and what Gerry says normally goes. And possibly at that
time Ivor Bell would have been the only person that would have
been strong enough to stand up against Gerry
…
Q.
Do you think Gerry himself had any particular reason for not
wanting to intervene?
A.
I’ve always suspected that … there were more reasons than
would appear for allowing the hunger strike to go on for so long,
political reasons, ambitious reasons … And I have heard some
stories which I cannot confirm … where people were ignored,
parents were ignored, mothers were ignored when they went to the
leadership and asked the leadership to order an end to the hunger
strike. I have heard stories that the leadership ignored these requests,
which leads you to suspect that there were other reasons rather than
the five demands … The five demands were no big deal. We could
have survived without the five demands; we could have continued
resisting the prison regime without the five demands. The five
demands were something that were developed on the outside, they
didn’t come from the prisoners … So there was always that suspicion
that there was a lot more to this than just prisoners’ demands. I
mean, not one death was worth those five demands, not one death,
never mind ten deaths. The regime and the conditions that the
prisoners had come through over the years did not deserve one
death. So I believe that … from outside’s point of view [there were]
purely … political reasons to keep the thing going
.
Q.
Is there a possibility that the leadership wanted to keep it going
for the purpose of building a political party?
A.
I believe so … that’s the point I’m trying to make. I believe that
was the reason why the leadership on the outside did not intervene,
because of the street protests that were taking place, because of the
political party that Sinn Fein was building. I think that was [the]
outside’s foremost priority – it wasn’t the five demands, I don’t
believe it was the five demands. As I say … the five demands wasn’t
worth one death
.
Q.
Have you ever discussed the issue with Gerry since release?
A.
Not in any, any depth. I mean, I talked to him obviously because
when I got released from prison I stayed with the man, I stayed in
his house … but it’s been something that I have constantly avoided
confronting … It’s only lately that, that you can get me to even talk
about the hunger strikes, never mind analyse … to try and come up
with a reason why it went on for so long. And so if ever I talked to
Gerry about it, it was sentimental, it was not investigative, it was
not questioning. It happened; I mean, that was the attitude I took
because I was a good Republican and … as the old cliché goes, ‘Stay
within the army lines, stay within the army lines, don’t dissent,
don’t dissent, stay within the army lines’ – I was still of that calibre
when I got released from prison. So I didn’t question
…
Q.
Did Ivor ever give you any indication of any tension between
him and Gerry on it or are you surmising from general conversations
with Ivor that he was the sole voice of opposition?
A.
No, I’m not surmising, I know Ivor was opposed to it because
I’ve spoken to him about it and I know he was opposed to it. He was
opposed to the whole direction that this leadership was going, to the
point where Ivor was actually sentenced to death by the same leadership
for his dissent and for his so-called attempt to dislodge the
leadership … I’m not suggesting that Ivor’s [subsequent] opposition
to the leadership was over the hunger strike, no. [But] I know for a
fact Ivor was opposed to the hunger strike and he was advocating
that the leadership must intervene to end it
…
60
Kevin Kelley,
The Longest War: Northern Ireland and the IRA
, p. 265.
61
An Phoblacht–Republican News
, 11 May 2000.
62
Padraig O’Malley,
Biting at the Grave
, p. 21.
63
An Phoblacht–Republican News
, 11 May 2000.
64
David Beresford,
Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981
Irish Hunger Strike
.
65
‘Scenario for establishing a socialist republic’,
An Phoblacht–
Republican News
, 19 April 1980.
*
See p. 168.
†
A criminal solicitor and former internee; Oliver Kelly’s family included founders of the Provisional IRA. He died in 2009.
‡
From Dungiven in County Derry, Tom McFeely was one of the seven prisoners who went on the first hunger strike, in October 1980. He is now the owner of a successful construction business.
§
Former Sinn Fein councillor and Deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast who died in 2009.
¶
Announced the 1980, the five demands were: the right to wear their own clothes; the right to abstain from penal labour; the right to free association; the right to educational and recreational facilities; restoration of lost remission as a result of the protest.
||
Former Prisons Minister Don Concannon died in December 2003, three years before Brendan Hughes.
**
‘Squeaky-boot’ was prison slang for coming off the protest. Prisoners who agreed to conform were first given a new prison uniform, including boots. The distinctive sound made by new rubber heels making contact with shiny tile floors as the prisoners walked out of the wing told those still on the protest that their number had just been reduced by one.
††
A member of IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade from Cappagh. He died on hunger strike, 13 July 1981.
‡‡
Principal Officer Patrick Kerr was shot dead by the IRA as he left St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh.
§§
Former head of MI6, the British foreign espionage service and reputedly the model for John Le Carré’s Smiley. Margaret Thatcher made him Security Co-ordinator in 1979 with a brief to improve relations between the British Army and the RUC.
¶¶
An uncle on Gerry Adams’s mother’s side, Liam Hannaway was a founding member of the Provisional IRA. His son, Kevin Hannaway, Gerry’s cousin, was IRA Adjutant-General at one point.
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The regime in Portlaoise jail, the prison used to house Republicans in the South, allowed inmates to wear their own clothes, to associate at times, defined prison work in broad terms and gave implicit recognition to the command structure of Republican groups.
***
A Redemptorist colleague of Father Alex Reid.
†††
Sean McKenna died in December 2008.
‡‡‡
Richard O’Rawe’s controversial and revealing memoir of the hunger strike,
Blanketmen
, was published in 2005, some four years after this interview.
§§§
The fifth hunger striker to die, on 8 July 1981 after sixty-one days without food.
¶¶¶
The second hunger striker to die, on 12 May 1981 after fifty-nine days.
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Ivor Bell was on the Army Council at this time and succeeded Martin McGuinness as Chief of Staff the following year.