Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (9 page)

When the Provisional IRA was formed, D Company only had twelve
members so we became known as the Dirty Dozen … we had a few
houses we could use, in Getty Street, Servia Street, my Aunt Bella’s
house and my cousin Charlie Hughes’s house … the main street in
the Lower Falls at that time was Leeson Street, the main Republican
street and there were two pubs in it. One was the Bush Bar which
the Official IRA owned and the other was the Long Bar, also with
the Official IRA. We did not have any bases. The Officials also had
a drinking club in Leeson Street called the Cracked Cup; they also
had one in Servia Street, directly facing my cousin’s house, called the
Burning Embers. So, they had five [sic] drinking establishments
under their control … every night we had to have people on standby
to protect ourselves from the Official IRA, not from the RUC, not
from the British Army, but from the Official IRA. We began to sell
the Republican News round the areas [but] we were constantly put
against the wall, the papers taken off us and burned. The Official
IRA made an attempt to kill the Provisional IRA at birth. It happened
pretty regularly that people like me would be put against the
wall and searched for weapons. And soon there was conflict. Paddy
McDermott was the QM [Quarter Master] of D Company before
the split and Paddy went with the Provisional IRA. The Official IRA
arrested Paddy, looking for their weapons dumps which only he
knew about, and he was viciously beaten by them. But the dump
that Paddy had control of was lifted by the Provisional IRA. That
resulted in Tom Cahill being shot. Tom was a brother of Joe Cahill
and he was a milkman in Ballymurphy. They just blew him away.
He survived, was hit five or six times but survived. So you had this
sort of conflict going on, the Official IRA trying to hold onto the
weapons that they had, the Provisional IRA trying to get hold of
them. So there was this constant tension all the time. Before most
people had to go on the run, the D Company volunteers were all
issued with handguns and a hand grenade, that is anybody who was
staying in the [billet] house, and … if the Official IRA attacked or
tried to get into the house, you were to throw the blast bomb, and
when I say ‘blast bomb’ it was gelignite, strapped up with black tape
with a four-second fuse, and if you believed that you were being
attacked or the Official IRA were coming to arrest you, the blast
bomb had to be thrown out the top window and you had to fight
your way out of the house with whatever weapon you had, usually
an old .45 Webley or a .45 automatic
.

The Official IRA were negotiating with the British at the time.
Almost every night a British colonel would be sitting in the Bush
Bar talking to them. And as far as I was concerned, that was collusion.
The Officials, that is the IRA pre-1969, had got rid of all the
weapons and had adopted a non-military line. People felt let down
by them because they did not protect them in 1969. Most of the
people I’m talking about who were Official IRA were seen as
drunken, ‘bar IRA men’. The Provisional IRA was seen as a clean
military organisation, not centred around drinking clubs and pubs.
They [the Officials] were seen to be co-operating with the British.
For instance when the barricades came down, they came down with
the co-operation of the Official IRA. The Officials and the British
negotiated that and I remember most of us being really angry; it was
almost like a defeat – the IRA had surrendered. They tried to kill us
at birth. That was the intention, to kill us at birth. And I don’t know
of any evidence that this was done with the encouragement of the
British Army – it would not surprise me one bit if it was
.

[The Officials] arrested a man called Alec Crowe from the Bally-murphy
area and they brought him to the drinking club in Leeson
Street. He was brought to the Cracked Cup and I was in a house
directly facing, in Eileen Hickey’s house, and saw Alec being taken
out of a car and trailed in. I left the house, went round to Charlie’s
house, my cousin, told him what I’d seen. Charlie ordered me then
to mobilise the rest of the Volunteers, open up the dump and be on
standby in his house. I got them together, got the weapons out, a
couple of .303s, two m1 carbines, three revolvers, and a few hand
grenades. Charlie went up to Kane Street, up to Frank Card’s house,
MacAirt as we called him, and I sat awaiting instructions … an
hour, hour and a half later, Charlie came back and we were
mobilised into one group. A squad was sent down from Andersonstown.
They moved into a house in Balkan Street and we were under
orders to burn down the two clubs. By this stage, Alec Crowe had
been released by the Sticks
§
[but he] had been badly beaten, pistol-
whipped, and thrown out. After that – a silly, silly, silly operation it
was – we moved out of Charlie’s house, straight across the street, no
more than thirty yards and took over the Burning Embers. Charlie
sent me upstairs to empty the room. I went up and produced my
weapon, a .45, and told them to get out but they wouldn’t move, so I
fired a couple of shots into the air. At the time there was a party in
the bar for Paddy Devlin who was an MP at Stormont.
¶
They were
celebrating and he was sitting at the bar with Jimmy Sullivan. So I
went down and told Charlie that they wouldn’t move. We had cans
of petrol and Charlie gave the order ‘burn it’. So the petrol was laid
and the match put to it. And only then did they start moving out.
Paddy Devlin was one of the first out; his car was sitting outside,
and he drove off. He arrived back in Leeson Street later, I believe,
with weapons. So, the Burning Embers was burning. We then
assembled outside and moved round along Balkan Street to the
Cracked Cup to burn that as well. A group of us went up Cyprus
Street, through Varna Gap, heading down into Leeson Street.
Another group came along McDonnell Street in a pincer movement
.
As soon as we got to McDonnell Street we were opened up on. Two
men [were] shot: Frank Gillen and Dipper Dempsey. A gun battle
ensued [and] went on for twenty, twenty-five minutes, us firing at
the Cracked Cup. We never got burning the Cracked Cup, but I
remember lying at the corner of McDonnell Street firing up at the
Cracked Cup and … the British Army driving past the bottom of
Leeson Street. They never came into the area; they let us just shoot
it out. Eventually we were ordered to pull back. Orders came from
Kane Street for us to pull back into billets. I took my group over to a
street off the Grosvenor Road into a safe house and we sat awaiting
further orders. By one o’clock in the morning we’d had no communication
whatsoever, and I left the house to find out what the situation
was. I was QM at this time, which meant I was in charge of the
weapons. So I walked up to Grosvenor Road and to Kane Street.
And Kane Street was empty. I came back down and I was stopped by
someone who told me that Charlie had been shot – in Cyprus Street.
I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I went back to the house
and by the time I got back we got instructions to stand down. I told
everyone to stay and I went out again and by this stage people had
arrived at Kane Street and I discovered what had happened. A
ceasefire had been called and a meeting was arranged in a house
in Cyprus Street, Squire Maguire’s house. It was decided that all
weapons would be put away that night and talks would be resumed
the next morning. On leaving the house after this agreement was
made, Charlie went across the street to a lamp-post to give cover to
McKee and MacAirt coming out of the house. —— was there as
well with a Thompson. As McKee and MacAirt were coming out a
shot was fired and Charlie was shot. —— opened up with the
Thompson. Nothing – no shots returned. There was speculation
going round at that time that it was Joe McCann, that it was
Hatchet Kerr. But to this day I really don’t know who shot him
.

The next day there was another meeting held; obviously we were
busting to go to town on these people but we were ordered not to.
Charlie was brought home. And I remember well – sitting in the
house at the wake, and there was a guard of honour [for him]. The
day of the funeral, the British Army sealed the whole area off. We
wanted to give Charlie a military funeral with the full regalia, the
combat gear, berets and a firing party outside the house. It proved
to be impossible. The British Army moved in, held up the funeral.
They moved in heavy-handed and we were in a house two doors
below Charlie’s house with our combat gear on, our weapons and so
forth, and McKee came down. I remember having my first fight with
McKee, with Billy. The British Army Commander at that time said
to McKee, ‘If there’s any military appearance of men’, that he would
move in. So McKee came to a compromise with the British that if we
wore black Dexters [overcoats], would that be acceptable? It proved
to be. And we did the guard of honour in black Dexters but no
berets. I wanted to face them down; there was thousands of people
there – we would have gone out in military uniform, firing the volley
of shots over the coffin and saying to the British, ‘Do what you
want.’ But that did not happen … it probably was the right decision
that Billy made. He was thinking of a dignified funeral without loss
of life. Anyway, it turned out to be one of the biggest funerals that
Belfast had seen in many a year … The British soldiers saluted
Charlie’s cortège, British soldiers saluting another soldier, a gesture
that we all respected … After Charlie’s death, the Official IRA got
a bad press. Charlie was well respected, a pioneer – he didn’t drink,
went to Mass, and was seen as a good Catholic. They took a hammering,
publicly, and a lot of people withdrew their support for the
Official IRA and threw their weight behind us. Things started to
change. Before Charlie’s death we were under heavy, heavy pressure
from the Official IRA, but after Charlie’s death, the Sticks knew they
had made a mistake, and we got stronger. D Company began to get
stronger. We began to get more weapons in
.