Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
When I joined, the Official IRA was still the largest of the organisations.
But, in saying that, we began training with whatever weapons
there were, [mostly] Second World War weapons. A lot of these were
old and rusted but they were sufficient to be trained on. We would
be sent to a house, a secret location where someone, a training
officer, would come along with a particular type of weapon, be it a
Thompson sub-machine gun or a Garrand rifle, a .303, .45 automatics,
.45 revolvers, that type of small-calibre weapon. And an
hour or so of training, of getting the feel of the weapon, being able to
strip the weapon blindfolded … the whole idea was to know the ins
and outs of a weapon. These lectures would have taken place in
kitchen houses and families would have left the house free for a
couple of hours. Within a short period I became the Training Officer
of D Company and … began giving these lectures myself. Occasionally,
camps were organised where weapons could be fired [and]
explosives set off. Most, in fact all, of these training camps were in
the South, in the twenty-six counties … We would be picked up at
a rendezvous, taken away in a minibus or [in] cars and met at a
central point in Dublin. We were then escorted at night time to a
location, usually a farm … and never did we know where we were,
not even which part of the country we were in. We would stay there
for maybe three days, possibly a week, sometimes ten days, and we
were trained on revolvers, semi-automatics, rifles, explosives. Most
of it was indoors initially, and then you were taken outdoors to the
firing range. But very seldom was there much firing … You were
restricted in the amount of ammunition that could be used because
at that time it was very, very scarce. A lot of the ammunition and
weapons … were not reliable … you would have misfires, or you
would have damp ammunition or it was just burnt out, too rusty …
But this [was] early 1970, and there wasn’t a great deal of operational
activity
.
…
the barricades were still up around where I lived, round the
Grosvenor Road. When I say the barricades, the whole [of] what
was known as the Lower Falls was sealed off by barricades, built by
the people themselves to keep the British forces out and to protect
ordinary Catholics from attacks by the B Specials and the RUC
…
the barricades were ten foot high, with ramps so we could walk
across them … they were pretty extensive, solid structures. And in
behind this particular barricade where I was stationed, there was
an old paint factory, Garvey’s paint factory, which became almost
the headquarters [of D Company, and was] known as the ‘Dirty
Dozen area’, because there was twelve men in D Company at that
period. In 1970–71, a lot of time was spent on standby, which meant
that you were armed, you were sent to a particular house and told
to wait there for further instructions – either an operation was going
to take place or you were to patrol the streets with weapons to let the
people of the area know that there was protection
…
The Provisional IRA was slow to get into gear. The strategy formulated by Chief of Staff Sean MacStiofain was a three-stage one. In the first phase, the emphasis was on recruiting new units, training them and providing them with weapons, so that the IRA in Belfast would be strong enough to defend Catholic areas. The second stage was to be a mixture of defensive and retaliatory actions, to strike back against the Loyalists or the RUC when the circumstances seemed to demand it. When the IRA was strong enough, the third part of the strategy would be launched, an offensive campaign against the British Army and other security forces with the aim of forcing the British to negotiate their withdrawal from Northern Ireland. It was an unsophisticated strategy, rather like its authors, with little evidence of any consideration, or concern, about Protestant and Unionist reaction to all this. In D Company’s area, the first attacks were not against the British Army but were aimed at the area’s many RUC stations, or barracks as they were more properly called in Belfast. In those early days, IRA activists such as Brendan Hughes still socialised and mixed with British soldiers, and even drank with them in bars. The first troops to arrive in West Belfast had been welcomed as knights in shining armour by Catholics who fêted them with pots of tea, sandwiches and plates of food. IRA old-timers knew, or hoped, that eventually this amity would wither, that the IRA would wage war against the
military, and new recruits such as Hughes were eager for that fight. But in the meantime, the infant Provisional IRA’s real enemy was the RUC, which in the view of Nationalists had allowed, or even assisted, the Loyalist mobs in burning down places such as Bombay Street. That would change though, very dramatically, in July 1970 during Belfast’s most violent week since the arrival of British troops, when the entire D-Company area would be placed under a British military curfew. From the time of the Falls curfew onwards, the war would be between the IRA and the British. During this phoney-war period, as far as British troops were concerned, the IRA was astonishingly open and public about many of its activities, in a way that would be unthinkable just a few months later.
…
the headquarters of the Belfast IRA was in Kane Street [in]
MacAirt’s house. Everything happened around that house and
everybody knew it – to the point that when the British Army moved
in, they had a searchlight constantly [shining] on the house and
we would [have to] use the back door. But it was always a hub of
activity. There was always a group of people in the house. Old
Jimmy Roe, Billy McKee, MacAirt, Liam Hannaway, all the old-
timers, they were all there. And all the instructions came from that
house … and everybody’s movements were watched
.
The
Republican News
was centred around that house as well –
and one of the first jobs that we were given was to sell
Republican News …
There was nothing in Derry at the time, no [Provisional
IRA] structure in Derry, so we would travel up to Derry going door
to door. I remember the hills in Derry, selling
Republican News
round the doors was frustrating; it was something that had to be
done, but after being trained in weaponry, trained in explosives, we
were busting to start taking action
.
McKee always said, ‘This is our opportunity, the Brits are here,
the Brits are on the streets’, and the whole objective was [eventually]
to take on the British Army … I saw myself as a soldier not a politician,
naively so. And most of us did … we had been trained to be
soldiers, we were trained to fight, and I wasn’t really concerned
about ideology, about where we were going [politically]. As far as I
was concerned, the Brits were on the streets and we were going to go
to war with them … at that time the soldiers would have been coming
into pubs, sitting in pubs, and I remember in Dan Lane’s pub,
off Stanley Street, sitting in the pub and getting the British soldiers
to give us a weapons lecture … how the SLR [self
-
loading rifle]
worked, which they were quite happy to do … we mixed with them
and it was quite normal to stand talking to a British soldier in the
street, and here [we were] being told that we were going to go to war
with them … They didn’t know this, but we knew that we would be
shooting each other within a short period … And there wasn’t a
great desire on our behalf to be shooting British soldiers. There was
[for] people like McKee and MacAirt who had already fought a war
with the British [and] the six-county state
.
…
the war, when it started in 1970, was geared towards bringing
down Stormont and taking on the RUC and the B Specials. Military
activity was aimed at the RUC initially … there was an RUC
station on the Springfield Road, one on Cullingtree Road, and one
on Roden Street. The first operations that were carried out were
against these stations. These [usually] consisted of a five-pound
charge of gelignite strapped onto a butcher’s hook and four or five
men, two men to give cover and two men to go to the barrack door
with the charge; it was like a long sausage with cardboard wrapped
around it and we’d walk up to the barrack door, which always had a
big knocker; you rapped the door, hung the charge on the door, light
the fuse and run like fuck! It was usually a ten-second fuse, so, you
had that to get away. Roden Street was blown up maybe five, six
times, in this way. Sometimes you’d walk round to the back of the
station and throw the charge over the wall. One time there was a bit
of a gun battle – we ran into an RUC man … he began to fire and
[we’re] only ten, fifteen feet apart … the charge went off and there
was a massive bang! Most of the houses in Roden Street had their
windows smashed, the slates blown off or whatever. But the gun
battle between two of us and the RUC man resulted in no casualties
whatsoever. We both missed. No one was caught; we got away and
the RUC man got away as well … It got to the point where they
closed Roden Street RUC station and they closed Cullingtree RUC
station. My father was involved in the 1940s, blowing up Cullingtree
Road RUC station. When the troops moved in they took over an old
mill on Drew Street, on the Grosvenor Road, and they took over
another mill on Albert Street. So, when the RUC stations were
closed down you had this massive military presence still in the area.
We continued by targeting the [RUC] Special Branch. Some of the
Special Branch men who had been there in the 1950s were still there
in the 1970s. One famous cop was called Harry Taylor who was
responsible for the round-up in the 1950s when internment was
brought in – he was still there in the 1970s. He became a major
target. Cecil Patterson,
*
who was shot, was another one of the old
school.
12
These people mixed freely during the 1950s and 1960s in
Nationalist areas … for instance, Harry Taylor was into boxing in
a big way and he used to drink on the Falls Road. A friend of mine
who finished up in jail with me – Fra McCullough – his name
was on a cup that Harry Taylor had won in the 1950s and Fra
McCullough had won in the 1960s. So you had Fra McCullough
who finished up being interned by Harry Taylor, their names on the
same cup for boxing
.
In retrospect, 1970 was the year of the Provos, the year when they became a key player in the Troubles. Events played into their hands without them really having to try very hard. In late 1969, a British-appointed Commission, headed by Baron John Hunt, who had led the team that first conquered Mount Everest in 1953, recommended that the RUC should be disarmed and the B Specials disbanded. Unionist reaction at these measures, especially to the loss of the Specials, was violent. The ‘B men’ were regarded as the last and most reliable line of defence against Irish Republicanism; their disbandment was a disturbing portent. On the night that Hunt’s
report was published Loyalist gunmen took on the British Army in the Shankill area of Belfast, losing two of their own but killing the first policeman of the Troubles. The political fallout was devastating. Terence O’Neill had been forced to resign earlier that year and was succeeded by his cousin, James Chichester-Clark, whose family, on both his and his wife’s side, could trace their lineage back to the plantation aristocracy. Chichester-Clark faced a grassroots Unionist revolt in the wake of the Specials’ disbandment. All this was grist to the mill of Ian Paisley, who had made it his speciality to sniff out the slightest odour of appeasement by the mainstream Unionist leadership. Desperate to fend off the Paisleyite challenge, which was echoed in his own party’s ranks, Chichester-Clark won British Army support for forcing Orange marchers through sensitive Catholic districts in Belfast and elsewhere during the early months of 1970. Common sense suggested these marches should have been banned to avoid serious trouble but Chichester-Clark’s political insecurity dictated otherwise. The result was major rioting, particularly in the mixed, but predominantly Catholic, Ballymurphy housing estate in West Belfast. None of this did Chichester-Clark much good, however. Ian Paisley romped home in a by-election to the Stormont parliament caused by Terence O’Neill’s retirement from politics. Rattled by Paisley’s victory, the Unionist government piled more and more pressure on the British Army to confront the IRA in its own backyard.