Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (35 page)
The IRA and Sinn Fein leadership outside the prison pretended that the hunger strike had ended in victory while faux negotiations took place between the prison authorities and Bobby Sands, Hughes’s replacement as Prison Commander, aimed at implementing the British document brought to Brendan Hughes after he had ended the protest. The authorised version of the first hunger strike, the version put forward by Sinn Fein then and ever since, has the British reneging on the document during these talks. The hunger strikers won, in other words, but perfidious Albion lied and deceived, as she always did. In his interviews with Boston College, Hughes called the Sinn Fein version a ‘lie’; the hunger strike, he declared, was a failure. Most Provo supporters at the time seemed to side with Hughes. When the Sinn Fein leadership in Belfast announced a victory parade through West Belfast to celebrate the hunger strikers’ triumph, so few people turned out it was an embarrassment.
I remember feeling embarrassed at the whole thing taking place
outside … I had no control over anything any more. People on the
outside and Bobby were … dictating the line. It was largely taken
out of my hands … I mean, the first hunger strike was a failure. We
did not win our demands and the lie was perpetrated. It’s happened
twice in my life. I remember when the [1994] ceasefire was called
the procession of cars going round West Belfast, bumping horns,
‘Victory, victory, victory’, and I knew damn well there was no
victory there … So, as I say, that was the end of my leadership in
the prison. [Ending the hunger strike] was the last decision I had to
make. At that stage I had come out of the prison hospital … back to
the prison cell that I had left, and I was totally and utterly demoralised,
full of feelings of guilt, and thinking, ‘Should I have let Sean
die? It was murderous. I remember one time tensing myself up,
pushing to try and stop my heart; I was suicidal. I had a constant
clear image of having a gun and just blowing my head off. That
went on for a long, long time after the hunger strike, and especially
during the second hunger strike when men began to die. I mean, it
was the worst period of my life; it was even worse than the hunger
strike itself. It took me years and years to get over it. I still have feelings
about it and it’s very difficult for me to talk about this. It brings
it all back. I have a clear image now of the prison hospital. I’ve a
clear image now of people dying … There is a smell when you die;
there’s a death smell, and it hung over the hospital the whole period
during the hunger strike … I can smell it sometimes, that stale
death smell. I couldn’t have spoken like this a few years ago. I wasn’t
able to do it. I put it out of my head. Even when the book
Ten Men Dead
was written,
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I couldn’t read it. I started it, and read one
chapter, I think, and put it down. I still haven’t read it. And I’m told
that it’s probably the most authoritative book that’s been written on
the hunger strikes
.
Brendan Hughes had ended the hunger strike when he was told that Sean McKenna was about to fall into a coma from which he might never recover. The advice came from Dr Ross, a senior prison medical officer, who would himself play a tragic, and until now untold, part in the story of the H-blocks during the terrible summer that followed the first, failed hunger strike. Hughes regarded Ross as the eleventh person to die on the protest.
…
a footnote to all this is that myself and Bobby had disagreements
about the doctor who was in charge at the time of the hunger strikes.
Bobby believed Dr Ross to be a mind-manipulator. I didn’t believe
that. I believed him to be OK. But it’s important to remember that
after the second hunger strike, Dr Ross blew himself away with a
double-barrelled shotgun. He shot himself in the stomach and then
blew his head off. I don’t know if it was to do with the hunger strikes
[but] I believe it was. And I would sometimes refer to Dr Ross as the
eleventh hunger striker, the eleventh victim of the hunger strike. I
mean, anybody who could stand by and watch ten men die and not
be affected … is a very, very ruthless man indeed … and I don’t
believe that Ross was as ruthless as that. Bobby had no time for him,
did not trust him, believed him to be, as I say, a mind-wrestler
,
trying to get inside people’s minds. But he used to sit on my bed for
so long sometimes I would wish he’d go, [but] he would talk to me
about fishing, about the mountains, the rivers and the streams. And
for a man to bring in spring water every morning for the hunger
strikers because he believed it to be much richer and would help the
prisoners was not a ruthless man. That’s what he did, every morning
he brought spring water in instead of the tap water that we had.
And you know during a hunger strike it’s awful to drink salt and
water. And I remember throwing it up, many’s a time throwing it
up. But you had to try … the memory of that salt water and the
sickness and … and the smell and watching your flesh. I mean, the
body is a fantastic machine – it’ll eat off all the fat tissue first and
then it starts eating away at the muscle to keep your brain alive.
When that goes, all that’s left is your brain, and it starts to go as
well. And that’s when the brain damage sets in. Your body needs
glucose, and the last supply of glucose is in your brain
.
The British document handed to Father Meagher at Belfast airport by a mysterious courier from the British government and then rushed to the hospital wing of the Maze prison may well have contained, within its carefully constructed ambiguity, the seeds of a Portlaoise-type settlement – but if it was there, it didn’t exactly jump out of the page. The narrative of what happened next is disputed to this day: did the British renege on a good deal or did Bobby Sands realise that Brendan Hughes and his men had failed and that another hunger strike was inevitable? If it was the latter, as Hughes himself believed, then the days and weeks following 18 December 1980 were spent by Sands and his fellow inmates creating the conditions in which a second hunger strike would seem like a justifiable response to British double-dealing.
Whatever the truth, the second hunger strike commenced on 1 March 1981 with Bobby Sands leading it alone. The first hunger strike suffered from a structural weakness that proved disastrous and that mistake would not be repeated the second time round. The flaw in the first protest was that the seven prisoners had all
started their fast on the same day but since they would not deteriorate at the same rate, one of their number would approach death before the others. The healthier hunger strikers would then have to decide whether their failing comrade should live or die, and the likelihood that they would intervene was always going to be high.
The second hunger strike, by contrast, was a staggered and weighted affair. First Bobby Sands began fasting, then some time later Francis Hughes, followed after another short interval by Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara, and so on. Not only was the sense of interdependence undermined by this arrangement but very soon the pressure would all be the other way, not to end the protest but to stay on it, even to death. The die had been cast with Sands’s decision to lead the fast alone. No other prisoner would hold Sands’s life in his hands as he approached the end, while the pressure on Sands to expiate the failure of the first hunger strike by sacrificing his own life was huge. Only a concession by Margaret Thatcher could stop that happening, and it didn’t come. Those following Sands carried the weight of his dead body on their shoulders. To end their own protest would be a betrayal of his death and as the toll in the Maze increased, that burden grew exponentially heavier. Sands’s death was virtually unavoidable once the hunger strike began, as he himself must have known. It is this very Republican and Catholic quality of self-sacrifice that made Bobby Sands’s death so special and transformed him into such an iconic figure for the Provos.
Sands died on 5 May 1981 after sixty-six days without food. Between then and the last week of August 1981, nine more prisoners followed him to an early grave. Outside the jail, sixty-two people, civilians, policemen and British soldiers, died in the riots and violence that accompanied the procession of coffins from the Maze. All this would have been enough to mark out the hunger strikes as a seminal moment in the history of the Troubles. But the protest was significant for another reason. It represented the fork in the road for the Provisional movement, a moment when its leaders
were presented with a political alternative to the IRA’s violence – and it happened entirely fortuitously. The Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone, ex-IRA man Frank Maguire, died suddenly, leaving the seat open. After some tense toing and froing, the way was cleared for Bobby Sands to stand as the sole Nationalist candidate in the resulting by-election and he won quite easily, against conventional expectation.
Sands’s election to the British House of Commons transformed the IRA hunger strikes into an international media event and greatly intensified the pressure on Margaret Thatcher to end the protest peacefully and without further loss of life. But his victory in Fermanagh–South Tyrone had greater consequences for Sinn Fein and its soon-to-be leader, Gerry Adams. The Provo leadership had been mulling over the idea of standing for elections for some time, weighing up the likely opposition there might be internally. Sands’s triumph in Fermanagh–South Tyrone provided a risk-free opportunity to adopt the strategy. An article in
Republican News
under the Adams byline, ‘Brownie’, in April 1980, long before even the first hunger strike, gave a glimpse of the thinking at the time. Under the cover of challenging conventional and simplistic IRA notions about how British withdrawal would happen, the author – whose famous Long Kesh nom de plume gave the article huge authority – argued for ‘a strong political movement’ to supplement the IRA’s armed struggle and said that the aim of establishing a socialist republic ‘is only viable from a Republican position if those representing such a radical Republican Movement … secure majority support in government’.
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If the desire to enter the electoral arena and to develop into a more conventional political party was at this stage embryonic, then the hunger strikes functioned as a fast-acting growth hormone. Sands’s election had broken the taboo against standing in elections, which had been a defining part of who the Provos were since 1969. In June 1981, the Irish general election was held and H-block candidates won two seats in the Dublin parliament, causing a change in government. A month later, in August, Sands’s election agent, Owen Carron, won the second
Fermanagh–South Tyrone by-election and by that November, Sinn Fein had formally embraced electoral politics as part of its overall strategy. The era of the Armalite and ballot box had dawned but rather than the two working in harmony, it was not long before the IRA violence was getting in the way of electoral success. This fundamental contradiction could be resolved only by either the Armalite or the ballot box prevailing. The rest is history.
Brendan Hughes’s memory of the weeks and months after the first hunger strike ended, as he admitted to Boston College’s interviewer, are hazy and indistinct, a possible reflection of the emotional turmoil he went through at that time. Of one thing, however, he was absolutely clear and that was his opposition to the second hunger strike. As the protest continued and more bodies were carried out of the jail, his opposition intensified in proportion to the guilt he felt for not having died himself on the first fast. He argued with the new Prison Commander, Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, urging him to end it, but to no avail. In the end Hughes concluded that McFarlane kept the hunger strike going because the IRA leadership wished it so.
…
the first hunger strike ended with the situation … unresolved.
Myself and Bobby had meetings afterwards and Bobby indicated to
me that he was going to go on another hunger strike. I opposed him,
I disagreed with him at the time, agreeing with him [only] that the
first hunger strike had not resolved the situation; that we were still
in a rather severe situation within the H-blocks. But Bobby was the
person in charge. I know for a fact that my memory was messed up
…
I don’t know why … but certainly my recollections of that
period are a bit fuzzy. I have a slight memory of John Hume [the
SDLP leader] visiting me in the prison hospital, and I don’t know if
that actually happened … I went back to H6 and I had this vision
about [being] back to square one … I remember feeling a lot worse
then than I did even on the hunger strike because I was back into
the situation that I had left months before, hoping to come back to
a resolved situation and here we were going back onto the treadmill
again – only this time me being a passenger or an observer and Bobby taking the lead role
.
I had advocated … from a very early stage … and I advocated it
again to Bobby in the prison hospital, that if the situation was not
resolved then … we could go into the system and bring about the
destruction … of the structure that they were imposing on us by
participating in the prison regime, which we had done before. We
had done it in Crumlin Road jail … A hunger strike was always
seen to be the very, very last resort. Now after the first hunger strike,
that, that’s what I was advocating, that we go into the prison, into
the system, and sabotage as much as possible and bring about a
situation where the screws could not control us, which eventually is
what we did. We went into the prison system and just sabotaged all
round us. This is after ten men had died, but … I was advocating at
the end of the first hunger strike that we should go in even without
our own clothes, that we should go in and wear the prison uniform
…
I was advocating that rather than embark upon another hunger
strike … We had something like three hundred men … and no
prison can operate without the co-operation of the prisoners. The
prison regime has to find some ways of keeping the prisoners content.
If three hundred men went into a system refusing to co-operate with
that system, that system will inevitably fall apart. We had tried the
hunger strike and it failed. Bobby was insistent … And after Bobby
died, I openly opposed the continuation of the hunger strike. When
Brendan McFarlane was in charge, I remember standing in the
canteen beside the hotplate, advocating to Bik to call the thing off,
that enough people had died. And I remember Bik being in turmoil.
He was the person in charge, he was the person that had to make the
decisions. I met him at Mass on Sundays … There was no shouting
out the doors about ending the hunger strikes or anything like that,
it was done privately, I did it privately … Richard O’Rawe, who
now tells me that he is writing a book about the period,
‡‡‡
also
advocated ending it. At least he tells me that. But outside of that
I don’t know of anyone else who was … as well. I was an observer.
I was just another number, whereas up until this period I was the
person who was … in some sort of position of influence. This time
I was totally out of my depth in that I had no … input into the
decisions that were being taken
.
I disagreed with the continuation of the hunger strike. I did not
know what was going on in the minds of the people who were allowing
this to go on. And yet I was still a passenger on this moving train
that was slowly killing people. I sensed that … one person in particular
was pushing Bik (and that) was ——. I always thought that
this man was in the background, stirring the pot … but not prepared
to step into the pot … And remember this, that Bik was, during the
whole blanket period, going through periods of depression and here
we had Bik in the position where he could have ended … the hunger
strike there and then. I do believe that Bik felt really restrained by
the powers that be on the outside, by the IRA leadership … I
believed the IRA leadership … should have and could have done
a lot more to ensure that people did not die … And I think Bik felt
that outside did not want him to do that. I can’t speak for Bik or
what was going through Bik’s mind at the period, but I believe he
felt really restricted on what decisions he could make. And no one
on the outside was giving him any sort of advice to call the thing off,
even though most of the prisoners by this stage were getting disillusioned.
Even though there were still plenty of volunteers prepared
to go on the hunger strike, I think most men were getting to the
position where they felt enough was enough
.
The feeling of utter futility that I had came after Bobby died. I
mean, you had to remember that I disagreed with the second hunger
strike in the first place and I had been quietly advocating the calling
off of the hunger strike after Bobby died. By the time it got to Joe
McDonnell
§§§
dying, I was openly opposed to the continuation of the
hunger strike and I think it became clear to most prisoners in the
jail. I remember feeling really, really guilty … talking to Francis
Hughes
¶¶¶
before he went on hunger strike. Francis came over and
gave me a hug and told me that I shouldn’t feel bad about it [the
way the first hunger strike ended], and that he had no reservations,
no objections to me … He was obviously quite prepared to do what
he was doing. And I felt … ‘What can I say here?’ And I didn’t say
anything to him … You don’t say to a person who is just about to
embark on a hunger strike, ‘I think you’re wrong’ … I sometimes
regret … my not saying that even though I did say it to Bik. But
you don’t say it to a man who is walking to his death. And besides
that … I was disillusioned and embarrassed … Here I was alive,
and here was another man … walking onto the treadmill I had just
left … The job was only half done and here were these people like
Francis Hughes and Bobby going on to finish the job that I had
failed to do. So there were these feelings of being like an outsider.
Here were men I’d been with for years, you know, on the blanket
and coming through things like that and I felt like an outsider
among them … I never finished off the job that I set out to achieve
and these people were going to finish it for me. So … it was as
simple as that, I felt guilty. And I continued feeling that way for
many, many years afterwards … I found it very, very hard to live
with myself because I felt that possibly I should have been dead
rather than the other ten men
.