NORTHERN IRELAND: RICHARD ENGLISHreviews Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in IrelandBy Ed Moloney Faber and Faber, 512pp. £14.99
IN OCTOBER 2001 Brendan Hughes came to a lecture I gave on the IRA at Queen’s University, Belfast. At the drinks reception afterwards – he was one of the last to leave - he told me that on this rare visit to the south of the city, he had decided to wear the suit he had used when, in the early 1970s as an IRA man, he had been living in south Belfast, posing as a businessman while carrying out his part in the Provos’ bloody armed struggle.
As we spoke, his famously swarthy face was mischievous, ironic and sad. He was extremely likeable and cheekily witty. When I left, and fumbled to open the now locked door to leave the room, he commented, “Sure, you’d never have escaped from the Kesh”.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Hughes himself had done just that. After escaping, he returned to IRA active service, posing as a briefcase-carrying businessman in his grey suit, and based in Myrtlefield Park off Belfast’s middle-class Malone Road.
It was here that he was arrested in May 1974, subsequently sentenced to 15 years in jail. During that period he led the first republican hunger strike for political status, in late 1980 in the Maze: “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”.
The first and more gripping half of this fascinating, important book by Ed Moloney recreates Hughes's IRA career through his later reflections on it. Voices from the Graveis the first publication from Boston College's IRA/UVF project, an oral history archive based on interviews with veterans of those paramilitary organisations.
The Hughes section is really the story of two men (Hughes and his comrade-turned-enemy Gerry Adams) as told through extensive quotation from interviews with Hughes during 2001-2, and interspersed with lightly-written narrative history of the relevant period.
Adams and Hughes were both born in Belfast in 1948 into republican families. Both became IRA men young, and both played a major part in the Provos’ bloodstained campaign of violence – Adams more as strategist, Hughes as on-the-ground operator.
As he recalls it here, Hughes’s 1970s agenda was “to fight the war, to plant as many bombs as I could, to rob as many banks as I could, to kill as many Brits and RUC as I could”. But by the end of his life (he died in 2008 after a long period of ill-health) he had become convinced that Adams had betrayed their earlier struggle through his latter-day politics of peace-process compromise: “this man has turned his back on everything that we ever did”.
So whereas the Sinn Féin leader presented the Provos’ war as having been a necessary stage towards the new politics of the North, Hughes felt that the damage done and endured had been futile if the current deal was to be its eventual outcome.
For Hughes, Adams was no longer trustworthy. In the past, “If Gerry had told me that tomorrow was Sunday when I knew it was Monday I would have thought twice, that maybe it was Sunday, because he said it. Now, if he told me today was Friday, even though it was Friday . . . I’d call him a fucking liar.”
Hughes’s case against the Sinn Féin leader involves different levels of accusation. There is the broad one that Adams deceived his republican comrades for years, undermining and scaling down the Provos’ violence on the disingenuous, long-planned road to Sinn Féinish politics.
And then there are the grisly specifics. Headlines about this book have focused, in particular, on Hughes’s assertion that it was Adams who ordered the killing of Jean McConville in 1972. Accused by the IRA of having been an informer, McConville – a widow, and mother of 10 children – was abducted and killed by the Provisionals, her body secretly buried, with the IRA then denying that they had murdered her. For 31 years her body lay undiscovered – her family thus denied the opportunity even to bury and grieve – before her remains were finally found in 2003 at a beach in Co Louth.
There is little doubt that, despite his denials, Adams had a significant career in the IRA during years when the Provos killed and maimed very many people. This includes his leading position in the Belfast IRA during 1971-73, and his shared responsibility for the Provos’ actions during those murderous days.
Nor is there much doubt, however, about his latter-day contribution towards ending the vicious violence which people like himself and Hughes had done so much to produce. Hughes himself is very clear on this point: “There’s no one else in the Republican movement with the intelligence, the shrewdness and the ruthlessness that was needed to bring the movement to the position that it’s in today. Gerry was the only person . . . who would have been capable of doing that”.
That latter-day process towards compromise might have involved deceit, and a rejection of millenarian republican ambition. But it surely also saved many lives, and the aspect of Adams’s career perhaps most lamented here by Hughes will be that in which many others see his most positive contribution.
Hughes’s own main contribution to Irish history was to organise operations such as Bloody Friday in July 1972, when a series of callous IRA bombings killed nine people and injured many more. One unwitting effect of that atrocity was to propel 19-year-old David Ervine into the UVF in response. He was keen to hit back: “The following Sunday I joined the UVF. I made a judgement that the UVF were more likely to do the business”.
The second half of Voices from the Graveis based on intriguing interviews in 2004 with the UVF-man turned PUP politician and, again, the material provides some insights into militant activism, its goals and motivations and trajectory. Ervine had thought (wrongly) that "the best means of defence is attack", though he famously shifted ground in later years and became one of the bravest voices within loyalism to argue on behalf of peace-process politics.
For this, he deserved and won much respect, though Moloney’s description of his having earlier been “an enthusiastic UVF man” should caution against hagiography. Ervine’s sadly premature death in 2007 removed from Northern Ireland one of its more refreshingly honest figures.
Some telling details of republican and loyalist experience emerge from these evocative interviews, and all those involved in the project deserve great credit for making such rich material available.
The book is not flawless. The historical narrative is at times very simplistic, and far more could have been done to test the claims of Ervine and Hughes against sources reflecting very different perspectives. Ervine’s presentation of loyalist insight and integrity as against mainstream unionist ineptitude and deceit, for example, requires very serious interrogation and far more sceptical analysis than it receives here. And, although the book does contain important new claims, much of what we have here reinforces what we already know well (that the 1970 Falls Curfew accelerated the conflict between the IRA and the British state, for example).
The book also compels reflection on those who made choices utterly different from Hughes’s and Ervine’s. Thankfully, most working-class Protestants did not respond to IRA atrocity by joining the UVF, any more than most young Catholics reacted to the undoubted failures of Northern Ireland by planting IRA bombs and destroying hundreds of people’s lives.
And perhaps the most valuable effect of this vivid book might be to encourage us to think again about the victims of Ervine’s and Hughes’s violent organisations. People such as Daniel Carson, murdered by the UVF in 1973 as he left work in Belfast, his wife seven months pregnant at the time of his killing. Or Margaret O’Hare, a mother of seven, killed by Hughes’s Bloody Friday bombings and buried on her 12th wedding anniversary.
People who – unlike Brendan Hughes and David Ervine – do not enjoy the dignity of having their own voices extensively heard now from the grave.
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Belfast. His books include Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland(which won the 2007 Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize) and Terrorism: How to Respond, published by Oxford University Press last year
