Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (15 page)
Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
‘Bloody Friday’ was not, as he told Boston College, solely the work of Brendan Hughes. The bombings were planned and approved by the then entire Belfast Brigade staff, including Seamus Twomey, the Brigade Commander; Gerry Adams, his Adjutant, and Ivor Bell, the Brigade Operations Officer. Since 1983, around the time he was first elected as the MP for West Belfast, Gerry Adams has had a policy of denying that he was ever a member of the IRA. By so doing he is also denying that he shares any responsibility for operations such as ‘Bloody Friday’, implying that whatever blood was shed on that or other days stained only the hands of others. IRA members would usually never admit the truth of their status for a good reason: it could lead to a jail term. But neither would they deny membership in any explicit way. The customary response would be either an evasive one, or a straight ‘no comment’. Adams’s outright denial has infuriated very many of his colleagues from those and later days and Brendan Hughes was no exception. His view of the events of ‘Bloody Friday’ was that the entire Belfast Brigade staff was responsible, including Gerry Adams, not just because of his rank in the Brigade but because he was, in Hughes’s eyes, the de facto Belfast Commander by virtue of the fact that Seamus Twomey invariably deferred to his strategic judgements.
Gerry Adams was largely responsible and has to accept responsibility
for a lot of these things … Gerry was the [real] O/C. Twomey was
practically out of it by that stage, to the extent that eventually we
sent him down to Dublin. Gerry was always the O/C. Even if he was
not the O/C in name, Gerry was the man who made the decisions
.
[Adams and Bell] could have stopped everything; they could have
stopped every bullet being fired. If they had wanted to they could
have stopped ‘Bloody Friday’ … [When Adams denies IRA membership]
it means that people like myself and Ivor have to carry the
responsibility for all those deaths, for sending men out to die and
sending women out to die, and Gerry was sitting there … trying to
stop us from doing it? … I’m disgusted by it because it’s so untrue
and everybody knows it. The British know it, the people … know it,
the dogs in the street know it. And yet he’s standing there denying it
[all] … The fact of the matter is that we fought a war for thirty
years; we [even] brought the war to England. Many Volunteers died
in carrying out this war. Gerry was a major, major player in the
war, not just in Ireland, but in the decision to send Volunteers and
bombs to England. I’m totally disgusted. I mean, there are things
that you can say and things you can’t say. I’m not going to stand up
on a platform and say I was involved in the shooting of a soldier or
involved in the planning of operations in England. But I’m certainly
not going to stand up and deny it. And to hear people who I would
have died for – and almost did on a few occasions – stand up and
deny the part in history that he has played, the part in the war that
he has played, the part in the war that he directed, and deny it, is
totally disgusting and a disgrace to all the people who have died
.
It wouldn’t be long before Gerry Adams was the
de
jure
IRA Commander in Belfast. Seamus Twomey was persuaded to move to Dublin where initially he had a job on GHQ staff. In March 1973 he succeeded Joe Cahill as Chief of Staff when Cahill was arrested on board the
Claudia
, a 300-tonne cargo vessel intercepted off the County Waterford coast as it ferried some five tonnes of weapons in from Libya, a gift from that country’s unpredictable leader, Colonel Gaddafi. Twomey’s departure was the moment Adams and Bell had been waiting for as the Belfast IRA, the cockpit of the armed struggle, fell into their hands. Adams was made Commander; Bell became Adams’s deputy, the Brigade Adjutant, and Hughes was the new Brigade Operations Officer, the ‘double O’.
His recollection of the changeover suggests that the new leadership was full of contempt for Twomey and the brand of old-style Republicanism that he and his generation represented.
People like Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey, that sort of leadership
were all … taken off the scene or demoted to GHQ. That was an old
saying: ‘Demote them to GHQ.’ In Twomey’s case that’s the remark
that was made. Twomey was seen as one of the old brigade, someone
with the old traditional Republican ideals. And so the whole Belfast
leadership changed and people like myself, Ivor Bell, Gerry Adams,
Tom Cahill took control of the Belfast situation
.
Twomey is the only Provisional IRA leader to have served twice as Chief of Staff. His first stint ended with his arrest in Dublin in October 1973 but at the end of that month he and two other prominent IRA figures, both veterans of previous IRA campaigns, J. B. O’Hagan from County Armagh and Kevin Mallon from County Tyrone, made one of the most famous prison escapes of the Troubles when a helicopter hijacked by the IRA landed in the exercise yard of Mountjoy prison and whisked them to freedom. Twomey resumed his tenure as Chief of Staff and lasted until December 1977, when the Irish police, the Gardai Siochana, discovered his hideout in south Dublin. Gerry Adams replaced him as Chief of Staff and Hughes claims that Twomey’s removal and that of other Army Council figures who were regarded as obstacles was deliberately planned by Adams and his allies. Hughes had a complicated relationship with Seamus Twomey. On one of the very first times they met, he threatened to get Twomey court-martialled for ‘loose talk’ as it was called, drunkenly discussing IRA operations in a bar, but afterwards they reconciled. In later years, when his own disillusionment with the IRA was setting in, Hughes befriended Twomey and grew angry at the way he had been discarded – ‘thrown on the scrap heap’ – by the Adams leadership. Twomey died in Dublin in September 1989.
In 1970
I had become Quarter Master of D Company and QMs at
that period were not supposed to operate, but I did. Their only role
was to procure weapons, secure them and supply them. I broke all
the rules and that’s how I came to the attention of people like
Charlie Hughes and Seamus Twomey. My reputation was made the
day I put Seamus Twomey on a charge for loose talking. I was trying
in my capacity as a QM to get more and better weapons, so I went
up to Casement Park [a social and drinking club attached to a
Gaelic Athletic Association club] to talk about this with Twomey,
the O/C of the Belfast Brigade at the time. What I wanted was to go
to Scotland. I had a contact in Scotland who could get me gelignite
but I couldn’t get talking to Twomey about this so I got up and
walked out – he was half cut! And he treated me almost with contempt:
‘Who was this wee shit?’ And they were talking away and his
wife was sitting there, a whole crowd of them all sitting there talking
about weapons and operations and so forth. I got annoyed and I
said to him, ‘I’m charging you with loose talk’ … He went totally
quiet and I walked out. Brian Keenan actually was there that night
…
and walked out behind me [and] encouraged me to carry on
with the charge. That was my first contact with Keenan. He was
Quarter Master with GHQ at that time … he’d an old uncle, Yank
Campbell, who lived facing one of my call houses and he used to
appear in Belfast every now and again. I can’t remember if Keenan
ever fired a shot; I’m sure he did, round the border … but never in
Belfast … anyway, the next morning, Twomey came to me …
apologised and promised that it would not happen again. Now here
was the Belfast Brigade O/C coming down to me, the QM in D
Company, to apologise … his nickname was Thumper because he
always thumped the table when making a point. But he never ever
did that with me. He knew my father, he was in jail with my father,
and he knew my da was a real upfront man and I think … when
Twomey found out who I was he gave me respect … I had great
time for Seamus Twomey afterwards. First of all he was man
enough to come and apologise to me and promise it wouldn’t
happen again, if I dropped the charges, which I did. And remember
this, I was only a young man, while Twomey was a contemporary of
my father in the 1940s and 1950s IRA – and here’s me putting him
on a charge
.
After we brought the Armalites in we had two call houses, one in
9 Gibson Street and one directly facing it. One day we were all
called over to get something to eat; Mrs Maguire had made us something
…
and … three or four of us went over and Twomey arrived
at the house to find the weapons and no sign of us … he could have
court-martialled me, but he didn’t. He shouted at me, for leaving
the weapons unattended, which was an offence … he could have
done me that time but he didn’t. Me and Twomey had a funny
relationship
.
[Eventually] there was a takeover [of the IRA leadership], directed,
controlled, manipulated and achieved by Gerry Adams. He was the
person who removed the old Army Council. Now at that time I
agreed [with all this] … I saw them as conservative, as right-wing
and as people who were not going anywhere. So I was in agreement.
I didn’t oppose what Adams was doing. I was part of it – I was one
of the tools used by Gerry to remove that Army Council … [But
later] I started to get concerns at the way Seamus Twomey was
treated and at that stage my concerns were more humanitarian …
When I got out of prison in 1986, he had been thrown on the scrap
heap. I remember going in and out of Parnell Square in Dublin,
Sinn Fein headquarters, and Twomey would be sitting there, down
and out; he would sit in a chair in Parnell Square all day. Joe Cahill
was downstairs counting his money and Twomey didn’t have
enough for a pint. He had a small flat in Dublin which was really
run down. This is a man who had spent his whole life in the IRA.
And then he took bad, and I would visit him in hospital … he died
a sad, lonely man. I remember bringing his coffin back to Belfast
and when we got to his house after driving the whole way from
Dublin there was nobody there, only his wife. It was so sad, so sad.
And even … when he lay in hospital, he got very few visitors
.
While the military setbacks the IRA would suffer would not really be evident for some time, the political isolation caused by ‘Bloody Friday’ would quickly become apparent. By the end of 1972, the British had outlined the parameters of any future settlement, limits that would never change in the years that followed. Executive power would have to be shared between Unionists and Nationalists and a mechanism created to accommodate the cross-border relationship with Dublin, something to give expression to the so-called Irish dimension. On the security front, the British made the first moves to ‘criminalise’ the IRA’s armed struggle and to make it easier to obtain convictions in court. A government commission recommended the creation of no-jury trials, with the power to accept confession evidence, to deal with terrorist-type offences. The noose was tightening around the IRA. Meanwhile the violence that year would be the worst of the entire Troubles: 496 deaths, nearly three people killed every two days. The IRA was responsible for almost half of the deaths and for most of the 151 soldiers and policemen who perished. But Northern Ireland would never see as violent a year again.
In later years, not long after the formal beginning of the peace process, 1972 would be remembered for a more notorious reason. This was the year in which the IRA began ‘disappearing’ people it had killed. By the standards of Chile, Argentina or Peru, the IRA’s use of this practice was mild, but many would argue that it is not the scale of the practice that matters as much as the fact that it happens at all. The IRA has admitted killing nine people and burying them in secret graves between 1972 and 1978, a tiny number compared to the hundreds disappeared by General Pinochet or the Argentinian junta. Most of those killed in Ireland were allegedly spies or informers working for the British. The IRA regards itself as an army at war, and during wartime spies are shot dead when they are caught – so it believes such killings are permissible. But letting the world know what had happened was usually seen by the IRA as a vital part of the process, generally by leaving the body in a public place along with a press release explaining the reasons for the
killing. Spies and informers were dealt with in this way as a warning to others and to discourage anyone tempted to follow their example, an especially important factor for the IRA since most informers would be recruited either from within its own ranks or from the community within which it operated. So killing and then secretly burying the victim runs counter to the IRA’s stated traditions, values and interests and the practice has left the organisation, or at least those who ordered such disappearances, open to the charge that it was done only to avoid embarrassment or shame. That the only other known example of the IRA disappearing people was the cause of huge controversy at the time confirms the point. In April 1922, after the Treaty but before the civil war, the IRA in West Cork allegedly disappeared three local Protestants who had been accused of spying for the British. The killings brought accusations of sectarian bigotry in their wake and both sides in the Treaty debate, those for and those against, united to condemn the deaths and to distance themselves from the perpetrators. A measure of the scale of the controversy is that those far-off events in County Cork continue to reverberate to this day in often bitter exchanges between rival historians about what really happened.
