Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (37 page)

The last hunger striker to die was Michael Devine, a twenty-seven-year old member of the Irish National Liberation Army from Derry whose death on 20 August 1981 after sixty days without food came on the same day that Owen Carron won the Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election to replace Bobby Sands as the constituency’s MP. While more prisoners joined the protest in subsequent days, others were taken off by their families as they neared death. One of the prison’s Catholic chaplains, Father Denis Faul, had come to the same conclusion as Brendan Hughes, that the Provo leadership was keeping the hunger strike going for political gain, and he persuaded more and more families to intervene to save the lives of their loved ones. Finally, on 3 October 1981, nearly seven months to the day since Bobby Sands had started his fast, the hunger strike was called off and, three days later, the new Northern Ireland Secretary, James Prior, announced a number of changes in the prison regime. Prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes; there would be a measure of free association within the H-blocks; extra visits were granted, and half of the lost remission caused by the protest would be restored. The prisoners had secured the bulk of their demands
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but the more lasting consequence came at the end of that month when Sinn Fein’s annual ard-fheis at the Mansion House in Dublin backed the idea that all future elections, North and South, should be contested, albeit on an abstentionist basis.

It was a moment of huge change for the Provisionals whose real significance was not properly understood at the time, even internally.
While sold to the rank and file as a way of expressing and building support for the armed struggle, the effect, and possibly the intention was actually the opposite. Adopting electoralism was the first tentative step in the move away from armed struggle towards politics. Danny Morrison, Brendan Hughes’s contact with Gerry Adams and the Provo leadership during the first hunger strike, helped swing the vote by asking delegates at the October 1981 ard-fheis two questions that also gave the new strategy a name: ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’
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But within a few years pressure would grow to drop abstentionism, at first as it affected the Dublin parliament, the Dail, and then to restrain IRA violence for fear of the damage it was causing to Sinn Fein’s electoral prospects. The Provos had emerged in 1969 partly in protest at the then IRA leadership’s intention to ‘go political’ but the wheel had turned full circle. From now on, Sinn Fein would stand for election at every opportunity in their own right and not in the guise of hunger strikers or protesting prisoners. The ballot box and Armalite strategy had arrived.

Thanks to Britain’s new direct ruler, Sinn Fein did not have long to wait. James Prior was a leading ‘wet’, or economic centrist, in the British Conservative cabinet, an opponent of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher who, in 1981, was attempting to sell her government on the buccaneering free-market policies of Milton Fried-man and Friedrich Hayek. Prior’s dissent brought him exile to Belfast but the demotion spurred his determination to make his mark there. So he launched his own political initiative, a modest attempt to create a power-sharing administration that might have a better chance of survival than Sunningdale. Under Prior’s plan for so-called ‘rolling devolution’, power would be transferred to local politicians gradually, in a piecemeal fashion as they demonstrated their readiness and ability to share it with opponents. His plan also called for a new elected assembly based at Stormont and elections were duly held in November 1982. This was Sinn Fein’s
first electoral outing under the party’s own flag and the result shocked the Irish and British political establishments. The party won five seats, 10 per cent of the overall poll and over 40 per cent of the Nationalist vote, a result that demolished the conventional view that the Provisionals’ popular support was minimal. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Danny Morrison, all current or soon-to-be members of the Army Council, were transformed overnight into elected politicians. A year later Gerry Adams won the Westminster seat of West Belfast and the journey towards the peace process was under way. That year the last of the old guard was seen off when Adams succeeded Ruairi O Bradaigh as Sinn Fein President. Two years later, the growing rift over the Provos’ political and military direction between Adams and his old friend Ivor Bell spilled into open conflict and Bell was court-martialled and dismissed from the IRA. In 1986, Sinn Fein and the IRA both supported an Adams-led proposal to end the party’s refusal to take seats in Dail Eireann. That same year, Father Alex Reid began overtures to the Fianna Fail leader and soon-to-be Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, to discuss ideas he and Gerry Adams had developed to end the IRA’s armed struggle. Three-way talks between them opened up the next year and soon after, with both the British government and the SDLP leader, John Hume. Gerry Adams had parted company with Brendan Hughes in Long Kesh in 1977, vowing that he was leaving to rebuild support for the Provisionals. That he had certainly done, but not quite in the way Hughes had anticipated.

While all this was happening, Brendan Hughes was still in prison, attempting to come to terms with the new circumstances created by the ending of the protest. Although Prior had given prisoners the right to wear their own clothes, the outside leadership ordered the blanket protest to continue. Faced with the prospect of staying on an increasingly futile protest, Hughes decided to leave the nonconforming H-blocks. He had long advocated joining the prison system in order to undermine it and this was his chance.

By early 1982, a new leadership had taken command of the IRA prisoners from Bik McFarlane. First Sid Walsh, better known as
Seanna Walsh, followed by the team of Bobby Storey and Martin Lynch. The three men represented a new generation of activists who would become known for their utter devotion to the Adams–McGuinness leadership outside the jail. Seanna Walsh would be chosen to read out the IRA’s valedictory message in July 2005, announcing the end of armed struggle against Britain. Bobby Storey would become Adams’s spymaster and fixer, trusted to carry out sensitive missions such as piecing together the story of the ‘disappeared’. He has also been accused, in the British parliament and elsewhere, of having organised some of the IRA’s more spectacular operations during the years of the peace process, notably the £26.5 million robbery of the Northern Bank in central Belfast in December 2004.
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Lynch, known as ‘Duckser’, preceded Storey as the IRA’s Intelligence Chief and helped Gerry Adams survive a concerted challenge to his leadership by anti-peace-process dissidents a year before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was signed. Storey and Lynch came into the Maze a year or so after the prison protests had ended and had little in common with prisoners such as Hughes who had gone through years of the blanket and dirty protests. Their leadership style, Hughes complained in his interviews with Boston College, was dictatorial, in sharp contrast to his own: he led by example, he insisted, never asking those under his command to do things he wouldn’t do himself.

Hughes and the new prison leadership clashed early on. While the Prior reforms had granted the bulk of the prisoners’ demands, the authorities were still planning to integrate Republican and Loyalist prisoners in the H-blocks. Achieving segregation – separation from Loyalists – became the next battleground for IRA inmates. One proposal put forward by the new leadership was to single out elderly Protestant prisoners and give them a beating in an attempt to force the prison authorities to separate the two sets of inmates. When a Protestant inmate was singled out for a beating,
Hughes threatened to intervene physically to defend him; the targeted prisoner had served time in H6 at the same time Hughes was on the blanket protest.

The very real threat of violence between Republican and Loyalists prisoners eventually persuaded the prison authorities to separate them but before that happened, Hughes struck up an extraordinary relationship with one Loyalist prisoner. Robert ‘Basher’ Bates was a leading member of one of the most bloodthirsty and violent gangs spawned by the Troubles. Known as ‘the Shankill Butchers’, the UVF gang terrorised Catholic Belfast in the mid-1970s. Their speciality was to snatch victims from the streets in Catholic districts, take them to garages and the back rooms of bars in Loyalist areas and then torture them for hours, cutting and mutilating them with knives. Others they beat to death in back alleys. Hughes found himself in the same H-block as Bates and discovered they had domestic problems in common. They became so close that Bates actually saved Hughes’s life, stopping a UVF plot to kill him.