Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (23 page)

Hughes had escaped on 8 December 1973 and by Christmas he was back in West Belfast and had teamed up with Adams’s replacement as Belfast Commander, Ivor Bell, as his Operations Officer. When Bell was arrested in February 1974, Hughes became Commander in his place until his arrest in May. Gerry Adams had urged Hughes to escape in a bid to counter the negative consequences of their arrest, which along with other setbacks had demoralised both the rank and file and the Provo supporters throughout the city. Hughes had been a skilled Operations Officer and Adams made his return to the fight a priority.

A day after Brendan Hughes escaped from Long Kesh, at around 8 p.m., 9 December, a ten-page communiqué was issued by the British and Irish governments announcing that a four-day-long political conference at the Civil Service Staff College at Sunningdale, in Berkshire, England, had reached agreement on how relations between the two parts of Ireland would be conducted in a new power-sharing settlement that had been in the making for almost all of 1973. The British government and three major parties, the Unionists, the SDLP and the Alliance party, had already agreed to set up a power-sharing executive but before the new government could take office there had to be agreement on cross-border arrangements.

In March that year, the British had outlined the essential ingredients for any new settlement. The first, power-sharing, had been agreed. In May, elections had been held to a new Stormont
assembly and they had produced what seemed to be a solid 52-to-26-vote majority in favour of the new arrangement. The second precondition was a loosely defined ‘Irish dimension’, which would be there to cater for Nationalist aspirations. The Sunningdale Conference, chaired by British Prime Minister Edward Heath, had been convened to hammer out the details of what it would mean. The centrepiece of the cross-border deal was a Council of Ireland, which would have harmonising and executive functions on a range of issues that affected both states. When agreement was announced, hardline Unionists and Loyalists, of whom there was no shortage, immediately denounced Sunningdale as a sell-out, and a prelude to a united Ireland. Which meant, by the iron rule of Northern Ireland politics, that most Nationalists were pleased with it.

Although Republicans then and now would argue that Sunningdale was achieved on the back of IRA violence, the deal was constitutional Nationalism’s answer to the tactic of armed struggle. By this stage the SDLP had established itself as the sole and unchallenged political voice of Nationalism by dint of its success in two Northern Ireland-wide elections. The IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, was an illegal party at this time but that hardly made a difference. It produced policies, acted as cheerleader for the IRA and was a convenient front for some of its leaders, but otherwise Sinn Fein was really a small solidarity group that showed no inclination to participate in Northern politics in the ways a normal party would, least of all by taking part in elections. Sunningdale thus reinforced the SDLP’s domination of Nationalist politics and made the Provos that bit less relevant, if not to the conflict then to its ending. When Hugh Logue, a rising SDLP star, told a student debate at Trinity College, Dublin, that the Council of Ireland was ‘the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland’, he was really declaring ideological victory over the Provos’ violent ways. The howl of outrage from Loyalists that met Logue’s claim served only to reinforce the point.

But Sunningdale was too heady a brew for Northern Unionists. They could live with power-sharing, perhaps, but not something
that looked like, and was claimed to be, a slow but sure mono directional walkway towards an all-Ireland republic. A February 1974 Westminster election brought a stunning victory for anti-Sunningdale Unionists in Northern Ireland and suddenly the prosettlement majority in the Stormont assembly looked vulnerable. In mid-May, leading Unionist political opponents of Sunningdale, people such as Ian Paisley and Bill Craig, and their counterparts in the Loyalist paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, joined forces in the Ulster Workers’ Council and declared a general strike aimed at bringing down Sunningdale. The strike was supported widely and the disruptive effects were significant. During the strike, Ireland also saw what was then the single worst day for violence in the Troubles. In an effort to diminish enthusiasm for Sunningdale in the South, Loyalists bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing thirty-three people. Two weeks after it started, on 28 May, the strikers won. The power-sharing government collapsed when its Chief Executive, former Unionist Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, resigned. It was back to the drawing board and to Direct Rule.

Britain’s principal political strategy had failed but it soon became evident that ministers and officials had a separate initiative under way, on which they had been working equally hard, which could transform the situation on the ground and improve the chances that another effort to reach a political deal might have a better chance. Alongside Sunningdale, the British had begun an ambitious attempt to draw the IRA into a long, enervating ceasefire, whose aim was to weaken the IRA in a significant way and even defeat it. Or at least, thanks to what Brendan Hughes learned during his five months of freedom, that is what Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell concluded the British were up to when Hughes told them his story. Secret meetings between senior Republicans and the British were taking place, Hughes learned, and there was evidence of duplicity on the part of Dublin-based IRA leaders. These were some of the secret manifestations of the ceasefire initiative but things were happening in public as well to back up Hughes’s suspicions. The new Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn
Rees, had announced on 24 April 1974 that the legal prohibition on Sinn Fein would be lifted and the party would be able to function openly. Three days later the IRA leadership told the German magazine
Der Spiegel
that it was ready for negotiations with the British at any time and would call a ceasefire if the British Army withdrew to barracks pending withdrawal. On the same day an interview with Sinn Fein President, Ruairi O Bradaigh, was screened by the influential current affairs TV programme
Weekend World
, in which he warned against a precipitous British withdrawal in case the violence that had devastated the Congo after Belgium’s hasty withdrawal was repeated in Northern Ireland. He would prefer, he told the programme, ‘some kind of phased and orderly and planned getting-out of British forces’. Between this and the secret diplomacy, it was evident that conversations had taken place between the IRA and the British.

What Hughes had to say about all of this planted the seeds of conflict in the IRA, between the Adams camp and those associated with Ruairi O Bradaigh and Daithi O Connail, and created the conditions for Adams’s later takeover of the IRA leadership. Alongside these secret machinatons, the Belfast IRA was beginning to experience life on the back foot by the time Hughes assumed command. He had escaped to a situation that had, since he last walked its streets, become distinctly more difficult for the IRA and dangerous for people such as him who were well known. Even so, when Hughes took over as Brigade Commander, the tempo of IRA activity in the city noticeably quickened. Five days after Bell had been picked up, the Belfast IRA set off twelve bombs in the city, six of them substantial car bombs, and followed these up with two large bombs, one in a van and the other in a lorry, exploding outside the British Army’s Belfast HQ, at the former Grand Central Hotel on Royal Avenue, causing entensive damage to surrounding shops. These bombs had to be smuggled through the security cordon of fencing and armed checkpoints that now surrounded the city centre. The IRA’s violent ingenuity was again demonstrated later in March 1974 when two bombs badly damaged the Europa Hotel in downtown
Belfast, one of them planted near a water tank on the fourteenth floor. Despite these successes, the reality for the IRA in Belfast was that the British had vastly improved their know ledge of the organisation and the net was tightening. Well-placed informers had been recruited and their intelligence had become so good, and their penetration of the IRA sufficiently deep, that the British were not just arresting key players and scooping up arms caches; they had begun to manipulate and play mind games with its members.